You gave a second good reason here:
No, I don't.
. Its by virtue of our ancestors' testimony of of their personal experience at Mt Sinai that was transmitted to us by our tradition, that we believe that the Torah is true - not by virtue of the content of the Torah. That forms the basis of other beliefs including how and when to believe other claimed prophets.
That is, the reason of trust. You trust your own ancestors, and have a reason to conclude therefore that their stories to you as their descendant must be true.
I'm not sure if that's something that can be transmitted to someone whose own ancestors didn't have that experience.
I believe so, in that the medium is trust and it's like that of a relative. Your reason above was that you trust what your parents tell you and pass down for you. One also trusts their close relative like a wife. You could be transmitted truths through a spouse. A transmission based on trust can come not only from parents and spouses but others where there is the same basis of love. This does not have to be literal siblings either. Native Americans have a concept of "blood brothers", even in cases where individuals are not literal brothers from birth. So to answer the question you raise, I do believe that the same kind of transmission can occur that you describe even lacking biological parentage.
Unfortunately, I am not sure of the reliability of this either. One greatly trusts their parents and spouses and, sometimes, closest friends, but I am not sure that this objectively means that the religious traditions that they pass down like actually meeting the Lord and sitting at his feet must be literally and factually true. I notice for example, that some educated Jews today don't take the story on Mount Sinai that way despite being raised in the tradition. In saying this, by the way, I don't mean to dismiss the tradition as a mere legend, either. I am actually looking for good reasons to believe it.
I guess you'll have to decide for yourself whether the Sinaitic event happened and work from there.
My guess, but not my preference or a view I am advocating, might be that it's fiction based on fact. One reason is that you said that the Creation story is allegorical, not fact. That seems to open the door to the Sinai experience being allegorical too, due to the extreme, miraculous nature of both events. Another reason is that I am sympathetic to the rhetoric I have heard in a countermissionary context that the Lord is not a man, doesn't have a body or body parts. But in the story of Sinai, the Lord is described as having body parts like actual feet. So this kind of premise inclines me to think that the Lord's appearance on Mt Sinai, eg. with his feet, the finger with which he wrote the Torah, etc., were allegorical. My preferred view though is that this actually occurred.
This may be attributed to a problem with the Christian tradition. I'm not sure if there are any Rabbinical commentaries that take the Gensis account literally.
The Church fathers also expressed reservations about how literally to take the stories of Creation. Augustine says that no one knows what the first days of Creation were like, since man did not exist yet. My guess would be that in 30 AD to 500 AD there would be some broad resemblances between how literally Christians and Jews took these stories.
I don't feel that Eastern Orthodoxy dictates to me that I must accept a literal Creation in the sense of the "Seven Day Young Earth Theory". But in reading the text for myself, my impression is that it is saying that there was a chronological order in the Creation of the earth, whereby the plants were created on a day preceding the sun. Even if I say that a "day" is a figure of speech and not literal, it's hard for me to understand this passage as intended to mean something
totally different than it's plain meaning. I don't know what allegorical meaning to give the word "day" in Genesis, such that the plants were created on some "day" preceding the sun.
This is a good example of the kind of difficulty I have:
Although our tradition gives us an account quite different than what is literally described, the concept of the flood does exist and as it was miraculous. Jewish sources describe a complete upheaval to nature as we know it. Without knowing the nature of the miraculous conditions during the flood or the way G-d returned nature to its present state, there's no way to know what we should expect to find.
I believe in miracles, but the teaching that nature, geology, and biology were changed temporarily so far beyond my current understanding of it is a challenge for me to accept. "How did bird species travel to New Zealand, become flightless, and severely distinguish themselves from all other species in only a few thousand years or less?" is the kind of question that arises.
I don't mean to put you on the spot, and I don't see this as ruling out the Messianic prophecies as impossible, either.
But I'm not really sure what to tell you.
So far you already gave two reasonable answers- the elders' tests and the transmitting of trust down through loving generations of relatives.
From my perspective, science came around to more closely resemble Jewish tradition on other things and either one day they'll find something new that reinterprets their understanding until that point or they won't. It would be foolish of me to throw out my belief in G-d, because today science says the universe always existed in contradiction to the Torah, when tomorrow they might say that there was a Big Bang. Or that the Flood never happened, when tomorrow they might realize it did.
AFAIK scientists are not unanimous on the big bang theory or on the idea of a constantly existing universe.
Do you want to give an example of how: "science came around to more closely resemble Jewish tradition on other things".
Sure, science can be wrong. They used to treat diseases with bloodletting. It's nuts.
So, I suppose that the plants could be made before the sun, and Noah's ark story could be literally true, but those are the kinds of things hard for me to accept when I try to think about what's most likely to reflect reality.
I'm not really sure what to tell you. You'll have to look to your own Byzantine tradition for answers. I don't think our tradition will help you maintain yours.
You gave decent answers.
I sense that these traditions give some similar explanations on reasons for believing in the Tanakh. Since it's written by the Jewish community and I find Jews to often be quite thoughtful and give a different, fresh (for me) perspective, I wanted to write here about it.
One way the Eastern Orthodox tradition might try to confirm the reliability is to point to examples of people who are like prophets in the centuries after the Bible was written, and to conclude from this that the gift exists. To give an analogy, if famous Jewish rabbis or mystics could be found who made reliable, fulfilled prophecies in the modern era, this would be evidence that a gift of prophetic prediction probably exists. Another way they might try to do this is to look at prophecies from the Bible fulfilled for certain after the Bible was written. So if Daniel predicted that after 50 BC-50 AD the Temple and city would get devastated and then the prophecy was fulfilled, they would see this as further evidence that these kinds of ancient prophecies were real. Maybe some similar logic exists in Jewish tradition to buttress the prophetic claims?
