Quote Originally Posted by Gilrandir View Post
You are technically right. I was never interested in the exact date of WRITING DOWN the Old Testament and I believe it isn't one date, its constituents might have been written at different dates. I meant not writing it down, but historical tradition and events described in it, which go back several millenia BC. Yet thank you for the correction.
No problem, but I think the traditions, mores and etc. described in these alleged events corresponds much more to the date of the writing than that of the events themselves.

Even when writing a historical romance, the author is likely to insert the ideas of his own era, in a somewhat anachronistic manner. That is true even today, not to mention during the Antiquity, where no concrete memory of old events could survive for long based only on oral tradition.
To give you an example, it has been recognized that almost every Iranian had forgotten about the Achaemenids even since the 2nd century BC.

To sum up, the contents of the Old Testament are relatively much closer ideologically, socially and morally to those of the New book (especially in what concerns the most recent chapters, like the Maccabees), than what the original impression given by the "oldness" of the stories cited suggests.