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Think of Homer...he and others were trained to recite Illiad-length words and if they got some words wrong they would hear about it.

Yes but nobody expected the Iliad to be taken as, well Gospel. The generalities hold up. Troy existed, but the use of chariots as battle taxis for foot soldiers doesn't. Homer had never seen a chariot fight. Aside from being blind, chariots had been obsolete as a weapon in Greece a century before his time. Think of someone being told about the wooden ships of Nelson era, but never having any experience except with modern navies. He might have accurate description of the ship. But knowing nothing about how they were used describe them sailing in formations with frigates in an anti-aircraft picket outside the ship of the line acting as a carrier at the heart of the task group.

So Homer had heard that there were chariot fights and he invented a way to use them in conjunction with the contemporary, infantry centric, Greek hoplite order of battle. There were gaps in the historical oral tradition, and as a story teller he filled them in.

The armies and fleets Homer describes are far in excess of anything that could have been assembled and dispatched by early bronze age Greece. Nor does the size of Troy, it was much smaller than described by Homer. They were exaggerated, second hand stories from an oral tradition. Sure once it got to Homer with his photographic memory it got locked in. However Homer is telling a story about a war that happened a century before he was born. So before he put it to verse it was a sea story told by a bunch of Greek sailors. It doesn't matter how good Homers memory was, because the story was already retold hundreds of times by the time he got it.

That is the problem with an oral tradition. Get one generation with a bad memory. One disaster, war or plague that kills the poet-scribe before another can be trained up and you are SOL. You have to piece it together from the memories of less gifted individuals. Parts get lost, embellished or modified to fit the politics of the local king. Without a written record there is no way to prove the change ever happened. The person telling you sure as heck isn't going to point it out.

Homer was illiterate but was heir to many centuries of oral poetry on heroic themes. No one could have listened to the Iliad or the Odyssey on a single occasion. There are depictions in Homer of a poet entertaining people at a banquet--a performance would have lasted as long as the people wanted to listen and weren't falling asleep. Each performance would have been a little different even if it was the same plot (the poet could omit inessential details if the audience was growing restless, or elaborate parts of it with extra details if they were in the mood for a longer performance).

The American scholar Milman Parry did groundbreaking work on oral poetry and recorded living oral poets in Yugoslavia in the 1930s (before his accidental death in 1935) to understand how they learned their craft--the recordings show how each performance was a little different.

Later there were people in Greece who memorized the Homeric poems word-for-word--Plato's dialogue Ion depicts a conversation between Socrates and one of these so-called "rhapsodes."

What you say is true about the Iliad.

However, Homer was not primarily an historian, but a poet. He was not so concerned with getting the details right, but evoking the Trojan heroism/pathos regarding events which took place 400 years earlier.

Did Moses have the same intents as Homer? Judging from the text, I think Moses for the most part was much more intent on transmitting historical events rather than pathos.

Homer became the fellow who applied the ancient principles of word structure to create an epic from available materials that would carry the essence of those materials forward in a way that was able to be memorized and then delivered to others.

The Old Testament tells us several ways to create a Memory Palace ~ then gives us the contents of several.

I think I see the essence of the stories and moral lessons in them. Others might not, or be afraid to be open to the idea that someone put those stories together.