An excellent essay on BioLogos by Pete Enns. This sort of scholarship helps us understand why various Biblical texts were produced, which in turn helps us understand what they were really designed to communicate. Naivetee about the historical circumstances under which the texts were produced leads to naive exegesis, which in turn leads to bad theology.
Pete’s main point is important: “The Pentateuch as we know it was not authored out of whole cloth by a second millennium Moses, but is the end product of a complex literary process — written, oral, or both — that did not come to a close until sometime after the return from exile.” More specifically, quoting Walter Brueggemann, “the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile.” The redactors of the Pentatuech, after the Babylonian exile, were “bringing the glorious past into their miserable present by means of an official collection of writings.” This suggests that “[t]he Old Testament is not a treatise on Israel’s history for the sake of history, and certainly not a book of scientific interest, but a document of self-definition and persuasion: ‘Do not forget where we’ve been. Do not forget who we are — the people of God.”