Is there anything in the Bible which is not compatible with it being produced in, and for, an Ancient Near East and Mediterranean culture? Any signs of anachronism? I suggest that if it was an other, product, it was carefully produced to give the impression of being, rather, from the ANE-M. (It isn’t easy to avoid anachronisms!)
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None of which I’m aware, and I don’t think that even the most late-date inclined scholars would push any portions of it more recent than c. 160 BC. There are also some components which are definitely incompatible with the relevant parts of it lacking a relatively early origin–e.g., the covenantal structure in Deuteronomy only matches in detail ones from c. 1400-c. 1200 BC, or a few names of enemy kings in Joshua which are in a language that disappeared from the region by 1100 BC, or words where Hebrew scholars writing the LXX didn’t know their meaning anymore (selah being the most obvious).
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Having read the whole thing in the original, I’d say the opposite is true: there is much of it that cannot actually be understood outside an ANE culture. The few places where the text seems to point to a later fertile crescent culture have so far turned out to be spurious, i.e. alterations (some confirmed so by the Dead Sea Scrolls).
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My first real encounter with that was when a professor called it “a liturgical hiccup” – I’d just mentally ignored it till then.
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Thank you. What I was thinking of was, in particular, the flat Earth, and how that was treated in the ANE. Nobody said that the curvature of the Earth was zero. They didn’t deny that the Earth was round. What they did say was consistent with the idea that we, today, call “belief in a flat Earth”. It might be better, maybe, to say that they didn’t consider the shape of the totality of the Eaerh, or that they didn’t think that the Earth was round. It seems to me that it is somewhat like the number zero. Back then, nobody said that zero was not a number. They just didn’t say anything about zero. (let alone negative numbers!). Maybe also about evolution of species? (Actually, it has been argued that the modern concept of species didn’t exist before about 1500 or so.)
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