@fredsbend It may be of interest to know that according to Swedenborg, Moses copied the first 11-ish chapters of the Bible from an earlier "Bible" that he (Swedenborg) called the Ancient Word, which, he said, was written in purely symbolic language.

There have been various attempts by Swedenborgians over the years to locate this Ancient Word, which Swedenborg said was preserved in "Great Tartary," which seems to roughly correspond to Mongolia and the surrounding areas of China and Russia. However, so far the Ancient Word seems just as mythical as its mythical, symbolic style carried over into the early chapters of Genesis (according to Swedenborg).

I suspect that the Ancient Word is basically an early collection of myths and hero stories, and that Moses' "copying" of it was more of an adaptation of earlier myths and legends to the Hebrew culture. At any rate, it does lend support, from a Swedenborgian quarter, to the idea that the story of Noah and other stories in the early chapters of Genesis are derived from and correlated with the various myths of the ancient cultures.