Genesis: is it to be taken literally?

The Jewish tradition has it as allegory. There are very few (if any )
Jewish people that take Genesis as literal 6 day creation. The biblical
hebrew in which it was written makes that quite plan (for example, term term adem is a generic term for 'mankind', and is related to the word 'red dust', and is also related to the word 'blood'.)

Question.What evidence do you have that the bible is an extremely acccurate chronology?

There is a problem with that understanding.In biblical Hebrew, you also have to look at the verb that follows a plural noun. If the verb is plural, then, indeed the noun is pluralIf the verb is singular, then the noun is singular, but the importance of the noun is magified. For example, Moses was refered to as a plural noun, but a singular verb afterwards. This does not mean that there was more than one Moses, but in that passage, the importance of Moses was magnfied.

It all depends. Are you talking about the priests, or the common man.It took centuries for the priests to eliminate the worship of Ashera as
Yawheh's consort. She was worshiped amoung the commoners until about the 3rd century bc. I think.

Well, and how can you tell that John is truth?