What is the purpose of Genesis 1-9 according to non-YEC Trinitarians?

Genesis *seems* to say that God created the Earth in six literal days ~4,000 B.C., and that there was a *global* flood ~2,000 years later that destroyed (almost) all life. It also claims that Earth was created before the stars, birds before land animals, and that all animals were vegetarian before The Fall. It "seems" to say this so plainly that for ~4,000 years, this was the prevailing belief among Jews and, later, Christians. Moreover, Christ Himself made statements such as "From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female". Many today believe however that the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, humans are some hundreds of thousands of years old (some tiny fraction of a percent the age of the universe), and death and suffering reigned for millions of years before any humans existed. Clearly this is at odds with a "plain" reading of Genesis; at least the first nine chapters must be pure fantasy, and none of the genealogies can be trusted. Someone made the claim that God's revelation is progressive. That may be, but that puts Genesis firmly in the "lies told to children" category. It also puts Christ in the same boat; why, for example, would He not choose a phrasing that *isn't* factually wrong (e.g. "from the start of history" or some such)? If God lied to his people for thousands of years (and Christ perpetuated the lie), or if Genesis is simply not inspired, how can we trust *anything* about the Bible or Christ? If the origin of Sin and its consequences is a lie, and if death, disease and suffering are Very Good, how do we make sense of Christian theology? Okay, that's a lot of questions, but the one I really want to ask is this: **according to Trinitarians that *deny* a historical reading of Genesis**, what is the purpose of this misleading narrative? Even if "we weren't ready", why include elements that are *factually* wrong but appear to make no difference, such as the wrong order of creation? ---- Some evidence that Christians prior to ~1800 AD believed predominantly that the Earth was created < 10,000ya: - [This article](http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/geohist.html) on talk.origins (note the first sentence). - [This paper](http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/6795/1/How_old_is_the_Earth_really.pdf) . - [This article](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/how-an-archbishop-calculated-the-creation-1.378556) . - There are various YEC resources floating around that give much more comprehensive lists of age-of-the-earth calculations done by Christians which mostly give a Creation date of ~3,500 BC - ~7,000 BC (with a few outliers, but all much less than 100,000 years). - Wikipedia also [discusses the topic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism) , and asserts that "an Earth that was thousands of years old remained the dominant view during the Early Modern Period (1500–1800)". There were other beliefs prior to ~1800 AD, both [Christian](/a/25872/53502) and otherwise, but to the best of my knowledge, belief in a "young" Earth prior to ~1800 AD was *predominant*, at least among Christians and Jews. Moreover, *the Scriptures themselves* (and even Christ, as noted above) generally refer to the Creation and Flood accounts as plain history.