Very interesting. I appreciate your patiently replying to my questions. Thanks.

So, would you say that the ancient Israelites didn’t really believe there was a literal Adam and Eve who inhabited a 6-day old Earth or, a Moses and 40 years of wandering after 10 plagues?

Not exactly. I’m saying that the question probably wouldn’t have been that important to them. Probably wouldn’t have even occurred to them to ask. Maybe they thought Adam and Eve existed. Maybe they didn’t. But they would have understood that the point of the story wasn’t just to give historical details about “what happened”. They would have known that the point was to convey something true (in a deeper sense than mere historical truth) about the nature of God, Creation, and the relationship between the two.

Likewise with Moses, though in a slightly different way since Exodus is a different kind of genre from the opening chapters of Genesis. They most likely did think of Moses as a real historical character (as do I) but they would not have been so concerned with whether ever single detail of the Exodus accounts could be verified as completely accurate. They would have known that the story was crafted in such a way as to communicate certain theological truths.

God inspired the biblical authors in such a way that his message was accommodated to the understandings of the people to whom it was written.

This makes sense, and it also ties into another point I read somewhere else about the context of ancient writings being indispensible if one wants to know what was actually meant and not the latest interpretation through the filter of the current paradigms.

So, would you say that the ancient Israelites didn’t really believe there was a literal Adam and Eve who inhabited a 6-day old Earth or, a Moses and 40 years of wandering after 10 plagues?

Wouldn’t we expect something that was inspired by god naturally to be inerrant? He has control over the process, so why allow any kind of errors.
Surely, getting the details right and the stories straight couldn’t possibly detract from the Message?

I think this is why the two concepts get conflated by people like me.

Yes indeed Polly. That is exactly the argument that fundamentalists and evangelicals use to make their case for inerrancy. However, as I alluded to above, I think the problem here is that the term “inerrancy” doesn’t take into account the nature and purposes of ancient texts in their native contexts. To truly understand its meaning, we have to approach the Bible on its own terms – as the kind of literature it actually is – and not expect it to conform to the standards of historical or scientific writing that we impose on our modern day texts.

For instance, to demand that the early chapters of Genesis present us with a scientifically accurate description of the creation of the universe entirely misses the nature and purpose of the Genesis literature. The ancient writers were not writing science (a genre which was not to be invented for several more millenia), they were writing myths (in the literary, not the derogatory sense) and poetry and theological treatises. And even where they were writing actual histories, we shouldn’t assume that they would necessarily follow the conventions or strictures of modern day historians. Instead they wrote in a form and style that was meaningful to their audiences back then. Which is why we must read the Bible contextually, but not always (sometimes, but not always) literally. This idea is known in theology as “accommodation”, which basically states that God inspired the biblical authors in such a way that his message was accommodated to the understandings of the people to whom it was written. It’s a means of reading scripture that goes back at least as far as St. Augustine in the 5th century, lest you accuse my hermeneutics of being too “liberal” or too “modern”.

What was the process?

Keeping in mind that these are wikipedia articles and not necessarily entirely accurate or unbiased, you can find a decent overview at the links below:

Development of the Jewish Canon
Development of the New Testament Canon

My question is:
Wouldn’t we expect something that was inspired by god naturally to be inerrant? He has control over the process, so why allow any kind of errors.
Surely, getting the details right and the stories straight couldn’t possibly detract from the Message?

I think this is why the two concepts get conflated by people like me.