Besides that, most of the stories that eventually were written down and recorded began life as a oral tradition. Past from person to person verbally.

The problem with relying on oral tradition is that each teller imparts a different version with their telling, and even with each individual telling. So when it finally gets written down, there no telling how many iterations and changes has occurred.

To clarify one point, most of the oral iterations maintain the essence of the story and lesson intended, only small specifics vary which are understood and accepted by the participants of the time. But 2000 years later, the context is not the same and those small idiosyncrasies can take on new meanings as read and understood by the new audience. Many parables and lessons pertain to a specific context and do not always translate correctly going forward.

It is what I have always described as a collection of fables and tales....rather similar in nature to The Arabian Nights...or One Thousand and One Nights as it is more correctly named. They are a collection of fables, folklore and morality stories which were written in Arabic and were collected from all over the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age. Sir Richard Burton is credited in first translating them into English between 1705-16. Some of these tales trace their origins back into Persian, Greek, Indian, Jewish, Turkish, as well as Arabic culture. Not too different from how the Bible was compiled and then later translated I should imagine.

I think of it as literature too, not entirely as literal history, but as figurative. Even though apt scribes could write well, that does not guarantee that the collected 'clippings' from many editors over centuries could achieve a standard that would put the Bible in a literary canon, thereby entitling it to be called great or high literature. I agree some of it is great, for one example, Psalms.