Glad to hear it! Although I'm thinking it's more mainstream than alternative. Maybe I'm missing an angle or a witticism in your post.
The pompous way to put it (which is I think unavoidable) is that the secular method is really the only method of doing what we call history. When you introduce belief into an academic discipline, it loses its mooring in facts and the theories that depend upon them. A religious interpretation is an alternative approach, but not a very reliable one.
Looked at another way, and not meaning to be gratuitously disrespectful to our religious friends, in many of its parts, the Bible is not a reliable historical source.
In particular, the US literallist religious tradition seems to me a kind of weird backwater in which the world is flat, the sun moves around the earth, creatures fail to evolve to suit conditions, giants and monsters (like Leviathan) exist, contradictions are ignored, morals are primordial, the culture is bronze age, women are incapable of teaching and are rendered impure in childbirth, slavery is a regulated business model, genetic predispositions are confused with moral turpitude and there is a genocidal God on the loose.
So having the world conform to the Word is a difficult thing.
This isn't to say the good book is devoid of wisdom. It certainly isn't. And I understand those who wish to found their beliefs upon it, especially where they contemplate its symbollism, its mythology and its lessons.
But the Biblical accounts of nature and history don't trespass outside the religious space with great success.
So back to the mythology. Dilmun seems to be the original Sumerian form of the Paradise of Eden: "In Dilmun the raven uttered no cry, the kite uttered not the cry of the kite, the lion killed not, the wolf snatched not the lamb ...". Ninti, the lady of the rib and the lady of life seems related to Hawwah (meaning life), aka Eve, the lady made out of a spare-rib. For anyone who knows the story of Dumuzi and Enkidu, Cain and Abel seem somehow familiar. For anyone who knows Ziusudra and Utnapishtim, it is hard to allow Noah a separate existence. For those familiar with the virgin births of Greek, Persian and Near Eastern mythology, the need for divine intervention in the procreation of a man-God has a foundation. etc.
These things are not controversial. Except amongst those people who wish to inhabit a landscape from which the serpent of enquiry is excluded. I claim the mainstream for the curious, orda! Let the folks who must hide behind silence be the alternative path. ;-)
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