I have not said that it was.
I have not said that Moses was concerned to establish an age of the earth.
There are all sorts of issues we have to deal with in modern times that were not made explicit in the Bible. Does this mean that all these modern issues must be relegated to unimportance? Should we tell people asking about transgenderism that it’s not important and none of us need to be talking about it because the Bible is not explicit about it? Should we tell people struggling with the morality of commercial third-party reproduction that they’re obsessing over something that the Bible doesn’t think is important? Is the Bible’s omission of any prohibition against same-sex “marriage” God’s way of making sure that people never think that He cares which side they take on the issue?
The reason that the age of the earth is important is not because God - or Moses, for that matter - has said it’s important, but rather because humanity has said it’s important. And I don’t just mean scientists, I mean practically all of pop culture, for it’s practically impossible to escape some allusion or even explicit reference to the age of the earth in the course of a day when exposed for any length of time to mass or social media. Whether it’s a PBS program calling us to join in swooning over Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest riff on how we’re all stardust, or political pundits tut-tutting presidential candidate Scott Walker for being too slow to say he accepts the truth of evolution, modern man has made quite an issue of the age of the earth - insisting that it is billions of years older than anyone whose only exposure to ancient history is the Bible would ever think.
Neither I nor the Bible have made the age of the earth an important issue. The scientific age already did that. I’m just trying to cope with that reality, and, as with any important issue, I look to the Bible for guidance. When I do, what I find staring me in the face is a book that has resisted two hundred years of exegetical effort to either make it agree with billions of years or, if not, shut up. One thing that BioLogos adherents have in common is that they have no common way to interpret the Bible on the subject of origins.
I’ve spent most of my Christian life avoiding the issues of age of the earth and evolution. It’s seeing the importance modern society places on it, and the effect this is having on today’s young people, that has forced me to face it head on. I find the Bible bearing a relatively quiet witness on the subject, but a witness nonetheless.