[Conservative til I die]

Somewhat cleared up. My thing is, OK, so you say all you need is the Law, the People, and the People's understanding of what God wanted of them. OK, fine. But all of what we know about them is in the Bible and some other assorted Jewish holy books (I'm assuming that the OT holds a special place in Judaism like the OT/NT does for Christianity). IF that's the case, then there really is no reason to believe any of the OT accounts about Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, etc. Unless one is using faith or has a personal revelation from God, which I am assuming no one here has had.

[malakhi]

My thing is, OK, so you say all you need is the Law, the People, and the People's understanding of what God wanted of them. OK, fine. But all of what we know about them is in the Bible and some other assorted Jewish holy books

Again, I emphasize that this is the minimum for Judaism. If you take a "just the facts" approach, this is what you find. When I say "the People", I mean the Jews from scriptural times up until the present day. One may doubt the veracity of the scripture stories, but Israel and the Jews are an historical reality.

IF that's the case, then there really is no reason to believe any of the OT accounts about Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, etc. Unless one is using faith or has a personal revelation from God, which I am assuming no one here has had.

I would agree that there is no way to prove that any of those accounts are true. As you point out, believing them requires a measure of faith in the truthfulness of the texts and in the testimony of the generations who have passed them down to us.