The presentation of the forefathers as people who were active within a socio-legal framework that partly contravened the Torah, proves the familiarity of Sefer Bereishit with the world within which its characters functioned. It is also testimony to the authenticity and honesty of the biblical account.
There are many findings that do conform to the biblical narratives from the time of the forefathers, and indicate that these narratives were indeed written with a profound familiarity with the period.
Had the Torah indeed been written during the period of the monarchy, we might reasonably expect to find many names that were more common during that later era, including some that integrated an element of God's name. How could the later authors, as proposed by this approach, have known of the structure and nature of names from the period more than a thousand years earlier?
Many social and legal phenomena described in Sefer Bereishit conform to what we know today about the laws and practices of various peoples in the ancient Near East – even though the Torah, given at a later time, explicitly forbade some of these practices. The presentation of the forefathers as people who were active within a socio-legal framework that partly contravened the Torah, proves the familiarity of Sefer Bereishit with the world within which its characters functioned. It is also testimony to the authenticity and honesty of the biblical account, which makes no pretense of presenting the forefathers as operating in accordance with the laws of the Torah, which came later.
In terms of the geographical reality, too, the descriptions in the stories of the forefathers accord well with archeological findings.
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Edited by the HaTanakh Site team