Primeval history
The primeval history is the name given by
The body of material tells how God created the world and all its beings and placed the first man and woman (Adam and Eve) in his Garden of Eden, how the first couple were expelled from God's presence, of the first murder which followed, and God's decision to destroy the world and save only the righteous Noah and his sons; a new humanity then descended from these sons and spread throughout the world, but, although the new world was as sinful as the old, God resolved never again to destroy the world by flood, and the history ended with Terah, the father of Abraham, from whom descended God's chosen people.[2]
The primeval history is generally considered to have been completed along with the rest of the Book of Genesis in the 5th century BCE, but a sizeable minority of scholars have dated it to the 3rd century BCE, pointing to discontinuities between the contents of the work and other parts of the Hebrew Bible.
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 Hexameronor 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
- 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 Table of Nations (the
- The toledot of Shem (11:10–26)
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] However, the almost complete absence of all the characters and incidents mentioned in the Primeval history from the rest of the Hebrew Bible has led a sizeable minority of scholars to conclude that these chapters were composed much later than those that follow, possibly in the 3rd century BC.[5]
Genesis draws on a number of distinct "sources", including the
Verse | Priestly | Yahwist |
---|---|---|
1:1–2:4a | Creation story A | — |
2:4b–4:26 | — |
|
5:1–24 | Descendants of Adam | — |
6:1–8 | — |
|
6:9–13 | Reason for the Flood | — |
6:14–8:22 |
| |
9:1–17 | — | Noahide covenant |
9:18–27 |
| |
10:1–32 | 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.[8] 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.[9] Most notably, almost none of the persons, places and stories in it are ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.[9] 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.[10] 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;[5] 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] David M. Carr argues that the latest edition of the pre-Priestly version of the narratives probably dates to the mid-7th century BCE, during the period of Neo-Assyrian hegemony.[12]
Mesopotamian (and Egyptian) myths and the primeval history
Numerous Mesopotamian myths (and one Egyptian myth) are reflected in the primeval history.
Bible story |
Mesopotamian (Egyptian) myth |
---|---|
Genesis creation narrative: Genesis 1 | Memphite 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 Apsu in the Enuma Elish.
|
Cain and Abel | Cain and Abel are paralleled by the gods Dumuzi and Enkimdu
|
Genealogies | The |
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 action within Genesis 1 ends with God marking it as good),[18] and how evil contaminates it through disobedience (the Eden story) and violence (Cain and Abel).[1]
Chronology
The
See also
- Allegorical interpretations of Genesis
- Framework interpretation (Genesis)
Notes
- ^ See John Van Seters, "Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (1992), pp.80, 155–56.
- ^ "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
- ^ a b Blenkinsopp 2011, p. ix.
- ^ Blenkinsopp 2011, p. 1.
- ^ Blenkinsopp 2011, p. 4.
- ^ Enns 2012, p. 5.
- ^ a b Gmirkin 2006, pp. 240–241.
- ^ Carr 2000, p. 492.
- ^ Kugler & Hartin 2009, p. 85.
- ^ Sailhamer 2010, p. 301 and fn.35.
- ^ a b Blenkinsopp 2011, p. 2.
- ^ Sailhamer 2010, p. 301.
- ^ Gmirkin 2006, p. 6.
- ^ Carr 2020, p. 245.
- ^ Kvanvig 2011, p. 1.
- ^ Kvanvig 2011, p. 2–3.
- ^ Kugler & Hartin 2009, p. 53–54.
- ^ Borger, R. (1974). Die Beschwörungsserie Bīt mēseri und die Himmelfahrt Henochs. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 33(2), 183–196. http://www.jstor.org/stable/544732 p.192
- ^ Utuabzu (October 9, 2015)
- ^ Verses 10, 12, 18, 21, 25 and 31
- ^ Levenson 2004, p. 11.
- ^ Ruiten 2000, p. 124.
- ^ Najm & Guillaume 2007, p. 6.
- ^ Guillaume 2007, p. 252–253.
- ^ Franz Delitzsch, New Commentary on Genesis. 2 Volumes, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001. p. 363
- ^ Alter 1997, p. 28.
- ^ Davies 2008, p. 27.
- ^ Matthews 1996, p. 38.
Bibliography
- ISBN 978-0393070262.
- ISBN 978-0-567-37287-1.
- ISBN 9789053565032.
- Carr, David M. (2020). The Formation of Genesis 1-11: Biblical and Other Precursors. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190062545.
- ISBN 9780664232887.
- ISBN 9780567370303.
- Day, John (2021). From Creation to Abraham: Further Studies in Genesis 1-11. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9780567703118.
- ISBN 9781587433153.
- Gertz, Jan Christian (1994). "The Formation of the Primeval History". In 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 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 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 originalon 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.
- ISBN 9780830878888.
- ISBN 9781317544258.