in this commentary, these negative strands of interpretation of Gen 1–11, particularly those focused on semi-outsider figures in the story world (e.g., Cain, Nimrod), have been used by some to justify exclusion, colonization, or enslavement of perceived others, especially people of African descent, who are often identified with those figures.
Another broader trend to note is the way that the flood narrative’s depiction of the evil of humanity in Gen 6:5–7 appears to have influenced early Jewish and, particularly, Christian readings of the Garden of Eden story (Gen 2–3). We may already see this in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus (4Q422 1:11–12), which seems to link the “evil inclination” (רע … יצר) of humanity mentioned in Gen 6:5 to rebellion of the first human in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2–3).12 This idea of original human evil, undergirded by a reading of Gen 2–3 in light of Gen 6:5–7, then appears even more explicitly in Paul’s reading of the Garden of Eden story as an account of the “fall” of all of humanity into sin and death (Rom 5:12–21; also 1 Cor 15:21–22, 45–49).13 The Eden story served for Paul as a crucial background for his broader theology about Jesus’s salvation of the entire world, both gentile and Jewish. Though there were other stories in Scripture, such as the golden calf incident (Exod 32:1–14), that depicted sins by Israel, Paul focused on the Gen 3 story of disobedience in Eden because of its potential to illustrate a universal human deficiency—something suffered by both gentiles and Jews—to which Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection could stand as a universal solution.14 In the wake of Paul’s interpretation, most Christians have read Gen 2–3 as a story of the original sin of the first humans that was then inherited by all of subsequent humanity.15
The more interpreters focused on Gen 3 as the story of a fall into sin, the more they also sought figures to blame, and the most obvious suspects often ended up being Eve and the snake, rather than the man in the story. To be sure, Paul himself juxtaposed Adam’s bringing of sin with Christ’s bringing of salvation (e.g., Rom 5:12–21), and only a few early Jewish interpretations stressed Eve’s role in bringing death into the world (e.g., Sir 25:24; Philo Creation 151–152). Nevertheless, following the scriptural precedent of 1 Tim 2:14–15, many Christian interpreters particularly blamed Eve for the garden sin, projecting onto her an anxiety about women, bodies, and desire that was characteristic of their context.16 In addition, building on the above-described early-Jewish tendency to see angelic and other demonic powers at work in the primeval period, Christians saw the snake of Gen 3 as Satan in disguise, tricking the woman into her temptress role.
More recently, especially in the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, these first chapters of Genesis have been a central locus for European Christian development of concepts of race, as Europeans colonized and enslaved people of color. On the one hand, the primeval history posed a challenge for concepts of race because it posited a unitary origin for all humans, with the diverse peoples of the world sharing a common set of parents and being siblings to each other. On the other hand, the depiction of post-flood peoples in Genesis 10 came to be a crucial template for European constructs of “Semitic,” “Hamitic,” and “Japhetite” (the latter often associated with Europeans) races and development of religiously-based ideologies supporting racial domination. In particular, the stories of Cain and Ham were reinterpreted to provide an account of African peoples as subhuman products of a separate line of Adam’s descendants, bearing the dark “mark” of Cain’s infamy (Gen 4:15) and the curse of Ham’s descendants to slavery (Gen 9:25).17
In the contemporary context, the first chapters of Genesis also have been a focus of discussions around gender, ecology and broader questions surrounding the relations of humans to other living beings. For example, some feminist interpreters such as Phyllis Trible have critiqued traditional Christian readings of the Garden of Eden story as a story of a fall caused by Eve’s weakness. So also, Trible and others have found salutary the Gen 1 description of God’s creation of male and female “humanity” (האדם) in (or as) God’s image.18 Meanwhile, an increasing sensitivity to the problem of human destruction of the environment has raised questions about the anthropocentric character of Gen 1–3, particularly God’s intent in Gen 1:26–28 for humans to “rule” and even “subdue” creation. An oft-cited 1967 article on “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” by Lynn White attributes part of this crisis to the anthropocentric perspective of the Genesis creation stories.19 In response, some religious interpreters of the Bible have offered more ecofriendly readings of Genesis, seeing Gen 1:26–28 as envisioning human royal care for creation or the stories of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel as chronicling the corruption of the earth that follows on human misdeeds.20 Still more recent readings of Gen 1–9 have followed the lead of Jacques Derrida in raising questions surrounding the basic distinction between humans and all other living beings that is presupposed in many such readings, a distinction that is a particular focus of the creation stories in Gen 1–3.21
Major Contours of the Diachronic Background to Gen 1–11
This commentary aims to enrich the above-surveyed centuries-long conversation about Genesis with a mix of diachronic and synchronic analysis, each pursued in turn and in relation to each other. As stated in the preface to the series, “diachronic analysis” is understood here to pertain to the “depth dimension” of a given text—that is its various sorts of identifiable precursors: earlier source or compositional-redactional strata, oral traditions, and/or separate biblical or non-biblical texts with which the text specifically interacts. The following section of this introduction prepares for the diachronic portion of the commentary by surveying the main precursors of Gen 1–11 to be discussed across the course of the commentary, starting with pre-biblical Near Eastern literary traditions.
Ancient Non-Biblical Precursors
Much of Gen 1–11 appears to interact with primeval traditions attested in a variety of non-Israelite contexts. Genesis 1, in particular, manifests some potential links to motifs seen in Egyptian contexts. Genesis 6:1–4 features some elements known from Greek, Hittite (originally Hurrian), and Ugaritic texts. In general, however, the texts in Gen 1–11 show the most identifiable connections to texts in the Mesopotamian Sumero-Akkadian literary tradition.
There are several factors that may contribute to the predominance of parallels between Gen 1–11 and Mesopotamian literary texts. To start, we have better access to Mesopotamian literary texts because they were recorded on imperishable clay tablets and sometimes collected in large archives, such as the library of Ashurbanipal. Yet, even beyond such accidents of preservation and collection, the Mesopotamian literary tradition appears to have included an unusually large number of stories about primeval times that are analogous to parts of Gen 1–11. Egyptian scribes seem to have developed relatively few such traditions about primeval times.22 Moreover, most traditions specifically connected to the Levant (e.g., Ugarit) and broader Mediterranean (e.g., Greece) focus on royal-legendary heroic figures rather than the creation of the cosmos and human civilization.23 In connection with Gen 6:1–4, I will mention Hittite-Hurrian myths around Kumarbi and some Greek traditions (especially in Hesiod and Homer) that apparently develop older Near Eastern, Hittite, and Levantine themes about ancient interactions of the gods and humans. Nevertheless, the level of focus on such primeval times is far less in Egypt and Mediterranean scribal spheres than that seen in the Mesopotamian literary tradition, and there is not good evidence for a text in Gen 1–11 specifically responding to a specific text in the Egyptian, Greek, Hittite/Hurrian, or Phoenecian sphere.
Finally, it is important to recognize the multiple occasions in which the Judean scribes might have been exposed to Mesopotamian literary traditions or themes from such traditions. We know that cuneiform texts—specifically including the Adapa and Gilgamesh epics—circulated in the Levant during the Bronze Age, and it is possible that early Judean scribes encountered echoes of those texts in some form, whether preserved versions of some Mesopotamian texts themselves or Canaanite
