The Epic of Gilgamesh, dated ~1600 bce, is our oldest surviving written document. It is also both historical and physical evidence.
The commentary and the doc may have historical-philological and/or apologetic merit.
If you can make a case for how "not being able to answer questions" is evidence that Noah's flood preceded Gilgamesh, then make it.
If you can make a case for how "oral teaching" is evidence that Noah's flood preceded Gilgamesh, then make it.
en.wikipedia.org
Did Moses exist?
Egyptologist,
Jan Assmann argues that
it cannot be known if Moses ever lived because there are no traces of him outside tradition.
Sorry I don't do Wikipedia. Surely you have gone for more serious primary sources. The Malone documentary on the various world text experts is about how
they cannot answer his counters to the dating of the Hebrew alphabet, not Noah's flood. He shows them the similar Hittite alphabet method, drawn from Greek, and the alignment with the text of Exodus., Most egregious is the German Egyptologist denying Joseph and Israel being in Goshen, but not excavating that additional depth where it was finally located--or concealing it once discovered.
The case for the oral teaching and transmission is that of Cassuto's--that the tribe transmitted all this orally and used the standard recitation practices for generations. The practice and the sections had 4 parts:
1, title (the teacher would call out a title to be recited), like 1:1 or 2:4 or 5:1.
2, pre-existing conditions--because it triggered memory
3, new material
4, summary--because repetition solidifies the memory.
I believe he shows some 30 examples of this method in Genesis. Then when you get to ch 38, Joseph's written account takes over.
We also know that the flood account has an 'iambism' probably also for memory purposes:
A
B
C
D
E
D
C
B
A
This was topical, as I recall from Cassuto, but it might also have had alphabetical patterns that were memory-aids. I don't recall if there was more than one. I don't have the book; it is a theological classic because it exploded JEPD (see above about U Toronto).
But before all that is the logical step that if it was
oral, we are no longer dealing with
documents, we are not comparing dates of docs. Locally, the Quileute tribe has oral tradition that goes back 10K years, they say, which matches a significant amount of geological and archeological information.
Finally, there wouldn't be preceding narratives. The original oral narrative would have been simultaneous. There might be one written narrative showing in recent discovery over another, but the original narrative was most likely oral and contemporaneous, and from various groups as people spread out over the earth and passed down explanations. See the charts of comparisons of cataclysm features and cultures from many sources (Montgomery, ICR, Sanford).
The Australian aborigines know, for ex., that they
started in Africa, needed to
escape the ice, and that when they crossed the last
passages between islands before solid Australian land, the
water level was 400 ft lower during crossing than the final. They also have accounts of
gigantism. Those were all features from several thousand years back but were not written down until Europeans met them because there was no need for writing. If you know the sequence of the busting-up of pangea in the Cataclysm and the related events and features, their reduced narrative matches the others.
