Gryphon:
I make no claim to being a great debater. I usually can be beaten into the ground in a debate. It's because I'm not interested in debating for debating's sake, unlike some of the people who thoroughly wallop me in that venue. I am seeking truth, which, I have found over the years, is a whole lot harder to be sure of than I had believed when younger.
To answer your question, I have never read the Pentateuch straight through from beginning to end, but I have read virtually all of it at different times, and some of it so many times I can't keep count. It's called devotions at dinner or in the morning, readings from the pulpit, what-have-you. I studied the Pentateuch at a Bible College I attended for three years. So yes, I know what I'm talking about.
As to whose leap of faith, anybody's. Either a person simply accepts without question what s/he has been taught to believe, or examines her/is beliefs and is forced to acknowledge that s/he chooses to believe what s/he does because any alternatives are unacceptable for whatever reasons.
As for 'what evidence', I could go into all of that but I don't see the point. It would only become more fodder for debate, endless debate, which is useless, as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes hints for us.
I'll write off your sarcastic tone to the intensity with which you hold your opinions, no harm done or taken.
Estel, Cahill didn't see the Torah as myth and not history. He saw it as oral tradition of a real history passed down over many generations and compiled at a point in the history of the Jewish people when they had become literate. Cahill's main thesis is, in fact, that the Jews changed the way we think and feel from the 'cyclic wheel' where nothing changes (the Hindu understanding of life) to a historic line in which actual people and actual events change the course of peoples' lives, making the most crucial event of history possible for humans to even apprehend and comprehend, that of Jesus' saving humanity from death by his own death and resurrection. So he writes as a believer in Jesus who happens to not accept that the Torah was dictated to Moses by God.
I do not remember the specific instances Cahill remarks on of errors, but they were indeed Reportage errors for the most part. One other thing Cahill mentions is more an error of modern filmmaking misconception: The Sea of Reeds is a better translation than The Red Sea, and the water that was parted was probably not fathoms deep, but perhaps a few inches to a foot or so. Of course, Cahill takes it further and says that the tale probably grew in the minds of the tellers until after so many generations they convinced themselves that water actually did part. That is, of course, surmise on his part, no more or less legitimiate than surmise that it did actually happen.
'compared to most of myth': this particular usage refers to most mythologies, such as Gilgamesh, Achilles, the hindu, the celtic, you name it. Again, these adhere to the cyclic wheel paradigm of human life experience, whereas the 'myth' of the Jews has broken away from that because YHWH caused it to happen by telling Avram to leave Ur of the Sumerians (of the Chaldeans is an error, so there's one for you).
To try and tie this post back into Tolkien, as Gryphon and Estel so aptly do, JRRT takes his cue from the Jews by writing a legendarium thoroughly based in the paradigm of persons and events changing the course of history. The evidence is overwhelming for this. I'm not even going to touch your hypothetical arguments regarding the historicity of Tolkien having written the Tolkien legendarium. Argumentum ad absurdum.
Seeking truth, lmp.
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