Primeval history

The primeval history, the name given by biblical scholars to the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, is a story of the first years of the world's existence.[1]

The six days of creation.

It tells how God creates the world and all its beings and places the first man and woman (Adam and Eve) in his Garden of Eden, how the first couple are expelled from God's presence, of the first murder which follows, and God's decision to destroy the world and save only the righteous Noah and his sons; a new humanity then descends from these sons and spreads throughout the world, but, although the new world is as sinful as the old, God has resolved never again to destroy the world by flood, and the history ends with Terah, the father of Abraham, from whom will descend God's chosen people.[2]

Structure and content

The history contains some of the best-known stories in the Bible plus a number of genealogies, structured around the five-fold repetition of the toledot formula ("These are the generations of..."):[3]

• The toledot of heaven and earth (Genesis 1:1–4:26)
  • The Genesis creation narrative (the combined Hexameron or six-day cosmic creation-story of Genesis 1 and the human-focused creation-story of Genesis 2)
  • The Eden narrative (the story of Adam and Eve and how they came to be expelled from God's presence)
  • Cain and Abel and the first murder
• The book of the toledot of Adam (5:1–6:8) (The Hebrew includes the word "book")
  • the first of two genealogies of Genesis, the Kenites, descendants of Cain, who invent various aspects of civilised life
  • the second genealogy, the descendants of Seth the third son of Adam, whose line leads to Noah and to Abraham
  • the Sons of God who couple with the "daughters of men"; the Nephilim, "men of renown"; God's reasons for destroying the world (first account)
• The toledot of Noah (6–9:28)
  • God's reasons for bringing the Flood (second account), his warning to Noah, and the construction of the Ark
  • the Genesis flood narrative in which the world is destroyed and re-created
  • God's covenant with Noah, in which God promises never again to destroy the world by water
  • Noah the husbandman (the invention of wine), his drunkenness, his three sons, and the Curse of Canaan
• The toledot of the sons of Noah (10:1–11:9)
  • the Table of Nations (the sons of Noah and the origins of the nations of the world) and how they came to be scattered across the Earth through the Tower of Babel)
• The toledot of Shem (11:10–26)
  • the descendants of Noah in the line of Shem to Terah, the father of Abraham

Composition history

Sources in Genesis

Scholars generally agree that the Torah, the collection of five books of which Genesis is the first, achieved something like its current form in the 5th century BCE.[4] Genesis draws on a number of distinct "sources", including the Priestly source, the Yahwist and the Elohist – the last two are often referred to collectively as "non-Priestly", but the Elohist is not present in the primeval history and "non-Priestly" and "Yahwist" can be regarded here as interchangeable terms.[5] The following table is based on Robert Kugler and Patrick Hartin, "An Introduction to the Bible", 2009:[6]

Verses	Priestly	Non-Priestly (Yahwist)
1:1–2:4a	First Creation story
2:4b–4:26		Second Creation story, Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel
5:1–24	Descendants of Adam
6:1–8		Sons of God (Nephilim), reason for the Flood
6:9–13	Reason for the Flood
6:14–8:22	Flood and post-Flood renewal	Flood and post-Flood renewal
9:1–17		Covenant with Noah
9:18–27		Drunkenness of Noah/Noah and his sons (the curse of Canaan)
10:1–32	Table of Nations	Table of Nations
11:1–9		Tower of Babel
11:10–32	Descendants of Noah

Relationship of the primeval history to Genesis 12–50

Genesis 1–11 shows little relationship to the remainder of Genesis.[7] For example, the names of its characters and its geography – Adam (man) and Eve (life), the Land of Nod ("Wandering"), and so on – are symbolic rather than real, and much of the narratives consist of lists of "firsts": the first murder, the first wine, the first empire-builder.[8] Most notably, almost none of the persons, places and stories in it are ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.[8] This has led some scholars to suppose that the history forms a late composition attached to Genesis and the Pentateuch to serve as an introduction.[9] Just how late is a subject for debate: at one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE;[10] on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by some scholars, notably John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period (the 6th century BCE) precisely because the primeval history contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth.[11][Note 1]

Mesopotamian (and Egyptian) myth and the primeval history

Numerous Mesopotamian myths (and one Egyptian myth) are reflected in the primeval history.[12] The myth of Atrahasis, for example, was the first to record a Great Flood, and lies behind the story of Noah's flood[13] The following table sets out the myths behind the various Biblical tropes.[14]

Bible story	Mesopotamian (Egyptian) myth
Genesis creation narrative: Genesis 1	Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, has a very similar opening to Genesis 1, refers to such entities as the "Deep" (Hebrew Tehom), arrives at a cosmology very similar to the one in Genesis 1:6, and shows a similar concern for reckoning time through the creation of heavenly bodies. God's creation of mankind in his image also recalls Mesopotamian myths, as does man's sovereignty over nature. In addition, the way God creates through the spoken word in Genesis 1 mirrors the Egyptian "Memphis Theology" in which the god Ptah creates the world through speech.
Genesis creation narrative: Genesis 2	The Atrahasis epic tells how the gods created mankind from dust
Garden of Eden	The god and goddess Enki and Ninhursag enjoyed a Tree of Life; the serpent in Genesis recalls the god Apsu in the Enuma Elish.
Cain and Abel	Cain and Abel are paralleled by the gods Dumuzi and Enkimdu
Genealogies	The Sumerian King List, like the list of the descendants of Cain, explains the origin of the elements of civilisation. Enoch, seventh in the line of Adam and taken by God, mirrors the king Enmerduranki and the sage Utu'abzu, also seventh in their lines, taken to dwell with the gods
Genesis flood narrative	The great deluge is told in a number of versions beginning in the early 2nd millennium; like the later Genesis myth, they tell how humanity survives through one hero and his family.
Tower of Babel (Genesis 11)	While there is no Mesopotamian myth associated with the Tower of Babel, there is scholarly agreement that Babylonian ziggurats, or tower-temples, lie behind this story.

Themes and theology

Creation, destruction and re-creation

The history tells how God creates a world which is good (each act of the Genesis 1 ends with God marking it as good), and how evil contaminates it through disobedience (the Eden story) and violence (Cain and Abel).[1]

Chronology

The Genesis creation narrative marks the start of the Biblical chronology, the elaborate system of markers, both hidden and overt, marking off a fictive 4000 year history of the world.[15][Note 2] From Creation to Abraham, time is calculated by adding the ages of the Patriarchs when their first child is born.[16] It seems possible that the period of the Flood is not meant to be included in the count[17] – for example, Shem, born 100 years before the Flood, "begot" his first son two years after it, which should make him 102, but Genesis 11:10–11 specifies that he is only 100, suggesting that time has been suspended.[18] The period from the birth of Shem's son to Abraham's migration to Canaan is 365 years, mirroring Enoch's life-span of 365 years, the number of days in a year.[19] There are 10 Patriarchs between Adam and the Flood and 10 between the Flood and Abraham – the Septuagint adds an extra ancestor so that the second group is 10 from the Flood to Terah.[20] Noah and Terah each have three sons, of whom the first in each case is the most important.[21]

See also

• Allegorical interpretations of Genesis
• Framework interpretation (Genesis)

Notes

1. See John Van Seters, "Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (1992), pp.80, 155–56.
2. "How much history lies behind the story of Genesis? Because the action of the primeval story is not represented as taking place on the plane of ordinary human history and has so many affinities with ancient mythology, it is very far-fetched to speak of its narratives as historical at all." Levenson, 2004, pp.155–56.

References

Citations

1. Blenkinsopp 2011, p. ix.
2. Blenkinsopp 2011, p. 1.
3. Blenkinsopp 2011, p. 4.
4. Enns 2012, p. 5.
5. Carr 2000, p. 492.
6. Kugler & Hartin 2009, p. 85.
7. Sailhamer 2010, p. 301 and fn.35.
8. Blenkinsopp 2011, p. 2.
9. Sailhamer 2010, p. 301.
10. Gmirkin 2006, p. 240-241.
11. Gmirkin 2006, p. 6.
12. Kvanvig 2011, p. 1.
13. Kvanvig 2011, p. 2–3.
14. Kugler & Hartin 2009, p. 53–54.
15. Levenson 2004, p. 11.
16. Ruiten 2000, p. 124.
17. Najm & Guillaume 2007, p. 6.
18. Guillaume 2007, p. 252–253.
19. Alter 1997, p. 28.
20. Davies 2008, p. 27.
21. Matthews 1996, p. 38.

Bibliography

• Alter, Robert (1997). Genesis: Translation and Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393070262.
• Blenkinsopp, Joseph (2011). Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation: A discursive commentary on Genesis 1-11. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. ISBN 978-0-567-37287-1.
• Carr, David M. (1996). Reading the Fractures of Genesis. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 9780664220716.
• Carr, David M. (2000). "Genesis, Book of". In Freedman, David Noel; Myers, Allen C. (eds.). Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Eerdmans. ISBN 9789053565032.
• Davies, Philip R. (2008). Memories of Ancient Israel. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 9780664232887.
• Day, John (2014). From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780567370303.
• Enns, Peter (2012). The Evolution of Adam. Baker Books. ISBN 9781587433153.
• Gertz, Jan Christian (1994). "The Formation of the Primeval History". In Evans, Craig A.; Lohr, Joel N.; Petersen, David L. (eds.). The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 9789004226579.
• Gmirkin, Russell E. (2006). Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780567134394.
• Guillaume, Philippe (2007). "Tracing the Origin of the Sabbatical Calendar in the Priestly Narrative". In Zvi, Ehud Ben (ed.). Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures (II, Volume 5). Gorgias Press. ISBN 9781593336127.
• Hess, Richard S.; Tsumura, David Toshio, eds. (1994). "I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood": Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11. Sources for Biblical and Theological Study. 4. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 0-931464-88-9.
• Hughes, Jeremy (1990). Secrets of the Times: Myth and History in Biblical Chronology. A&C Black. ISBN 9780567629302.
• Kugler, Robert; Hartin, Patrick (2009). An Introduction to the Bible. Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802846365.
• Kvanvig, Helge (2011). Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading. BRILL. ISBN 978-9004163805.
• Levenson, Jon D. (2004). "Genesis: introduction and annotations". In Berlin, Adele; Brettler, Marc Zvi (eds.). The Jewish study Bible. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195297515.
• Matthews, K. A. (1996). Genesis 1-11. B&H Publishing Group. ISBN 9780805401011.
• Najm, S.; Guillaume, Ph. (2007). "Jubilee Calendar Rescued from the Flood Narrative". In Zvi, Ehud Ben (ed.). Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures II, Volume 5. Gorgias Press. ISBN 9781593336127. Archived from the original on 2014-12-17.
• Ruiten, Jacques T. A. G. M. (2000). Primaeval History Interpreted: The Rewriting of Genesis 1-11 in the Book of Jubilees. BRILL. ISBN 9004116583.
• Sailhamer, John H. (2010). The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition and Interpretation. InterVarsity Press. ISBN 9780830878888.
• Thompson, Thomas L. (2014). "Narrative Reiteration and Comparative Literature". In Thompson, Thomas L.; Wajdenbaum, Philippe (eds.). The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature. Routledge. ISBN 9781317544258.