In our non-oral culture, the writers are the authors for the most part. In the oral cultures of the ancient world, entire communities participated in the composing, maintaining, passing down, refining, embellishing, re-framing and other “authoring” activities related to their cultural texts before these texts were ever recorded in written form.
I think it is a mistake to assume that the accounts recorded in Genesis were created or authored by the people who first wrote them down. The texts themselves probably had a long history in the culture before they were recorded. And the reasons they were recorded were probably not parallel to our cultural reasons for recording things in writing. In the ancient world, if you put something in writing, it was so it could go in the archives for safekeeping in case something happened to the people who knew and recited the stories. If you wanted to hear the history, you called in the people who told the history, you didn’t consult the scrolls. It was the designated story-tellers who held the authority associated with the text, not the written manuscript.
How you reconcile that reality with inspiration and infallibility is an interesting mental exercise. John Walton and Carlos Bovell have written some lay-person audience stuff on orality and literacy in the ancient world and how it relates to the authority of Scripture (Lost World of Scripture), if it interests you.
They say, “When we talk about the authority of Scripture, we can now see that we cannot construe authority around the idea that each book of the Bible was first constructed as a literary document—a book, by an author. . . . Some community of people, we believe under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, determined that certain individuals, as well as certain traditions unattached to specific individuals, had authority—God’s authority” (63).