foreign to the world of the Bible.36 Where modern readers might separate off the seven-day account of Gen 1 or the Eden story of Gen 2–3 as being stories of “creation,” ancient authors and readers probably would have seen the entire primeval history of Gen 1–11, including its account of post-flood peoples and cities in Gen 10:1–11:9, as an overall account of the primeval origins of the audience’s natural-ethnic-social world.37
Literary Stages in the Formation of Gen 1–11
P, Non-P, and Models for their Relationship
Two and a half centuries of scholarship have established a basic distinction in Gen 1–11 between a Priestly strand (often designated “P” in the following) starting in the seven-day creation account of Gen 1:1–2:3 and a non-Priestly strand (non-P; often termed “J”) starting with the garden of Eden story in Gen 2:4–3:24. The following commentary will argue for and develop this picture. The basic distinctions between these Priestly and non-Priestly materials have been established for over a century and will only be fine-tuned in minor respects across this commentary.
Basic Shape of P and non-PIn most cases, the conflator who combined them seems to have preserved major blocks of each. From the P source, the conflator preserved the P creation account in Gen 1:1–2:3, Adam-to-Noah genealogy in most of Gen 5*,38 and the Shem-to-Abraham genealogy of Gen 11:10–26. From the non-P primeval history, the conflator preserved stories about first humans found in Gen 2:4b–4:26; the brief account of sons of God and daughters of humanity in Gen 6:1–4; the stories of Noah and his sons in 9:20–27; and building of Babylon in 11:1–9. Nevertheless, the conflator appears to have more finely interwoven P and non-P sources in two cases where P and non-P contained parallel materials: the story of the flood (Gen 6:5–9:17) and the overview of offspring of Noah’s sons (Gen 10). In general, across the primeval history the conflator appears to have preserved the P narrative as the primary structuring element, while non-P materials have been more selectively preserved and reorganized to supplement this Priestly substructure. That said, substantial portions of both P and non-P strata have been preserved, forming relatively readable parallel strands.39 Though the conflator occasionally eliminated portions of the non-P narrative in the process of producing a readable text, the combined P/non-P result still preserves enough of each source to produce relatively secure hypotheses about their original contents.
Non-P = Post-P in Gen 1–11?Thus this commentary does not join with a number of recent studies that have argued for the post-Priestly, supplementary character of all or most of the non-P material in Gen 1–11. Starting in the late eighties, studies by Wenham (1987), Blenkinsopp (1992, 1995), Ska (1994), and Krüger (1997) argued that major portions of the non-P primeval history were post-Priestly expansions of the Priestly primeval history,40 and this approach was then developed extensively in several early twenty-first century monographs along with numerous essays.41 Overall, these studies have made significant contributions to our understanding of texts in Gen 1–11. Where many (including the present author) were once tempted to place the non-P (a.k.a. “Jahwistic”) primeval history in the early monarchal period, these more recent studies of the non-P primeval history materials have highlighted elements in it that point to a relatively later date, at least for portions of that history. Moreover, many of these studies have illuminated the character of the present (conflated) Gen 1–11 text by showing elegant ways in which the non-P parts of Gen 1–11 are selected and arranged in relation to the P materials that surround them.
P and non-P conceived separately, not supplementarilyThat said, there still are strong indicators that the P and non-P strands in Gen 1–11 were originally composed separately before they were combined: the extensive doubling of P and non-P elements (not typical when redactional strata are added), the relative readability of both strands as originally independent sources, the existence of competing conceptual systems in P and non-P, and identifiable secondary attempts to harmonize those systems. These features will be discussed at more length in the following commentary.42
P’s Relation to Non-PFurthermore, there are subtle indicators that P was partially modelled on corresponding parts of the non-P primeval history. To be sure, the narratives do not verbally parallel each other, and there is no locus where P cites non-P. In this sense, P is not a paraphrase of non-P nor is it a transformation of non-P in the manner of Chronicles vis-à-vis parts of Samuel–Kings. At the same time, the two strands are distinguished from other Near Eastern chronologies by a shared contrast in both narratives between the deity’s creation of an ideal initial creation order (P in Gen 1:1–2:3; non-P in Gen 2:4b–25) and then the disruption of that order by evil (non-P in Gen 3:1–4:24; P in Gen 6:11–13). Moreover, P’s depiction of the corruption of the earth by pre-flood violence (Gen 6:11–13; cf. 9:5–6) seems to adapt elements of the non-P depiction of events surrounding Cain’s pollution of the earth through the murder of his brother, Abel (Gen 4:8–14).43Across the following commentary I will discuss yet other elements in P that appear to have had their original home in the corresponding non-P narratives. These and other indicators suggest that the author(s) of P, though uninterested in providing an exact mirror of every element in non-P, had the non-P primeval history among its literary precursors.
Layers and Dating of the Pre-P Primeval History
The supplementary character of the non-P floodThis commentary will develop the case for one main, additional theory about the formation of the non-P strand: the idea that the non-P material in Gen 1–11 originally did not originally include a flood story. This idea was developed long ago in 1872 by Julius Wellhausen, largely on the basis of the fact that the etiology of various professions linked to Lamech’s sons in Gen 4:20–22 did not seem to presuppose that these sons and their descendants would be destroyed by a global flood.44 Ten years later Karl Budde offered a source version of Wellhausen’s approach, hypothesizing that the non-P material of Gen 1–11 originated in two J sources, one with a flood and one without.45 This two-source approach to the non-P (“J”) primeval history then enjoyed much popularity amidst a broader focus on source criticism in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s before it was discarded by most scholars in the early twentieth century.46
In recent years, Wellhausen’s original supplement approach to the question of the non-P flood narrative has been revived by scholars such as Kratz (2000) and Dershowitz (2016),47 and this commentary joins them. Not only does the etiology of professions in Gen 4:20–22 contradict the idea of a flood, but the flood also disrupts other etiological elements strewn across Gen 4:1–26; 5:29 and 6:1–4. We will see how various elements in Gen 4:1–24 etiologically explain aspects of the Kenite tribe, known as a present reality to the text’s later audience. Though Gen 5:29 and 9:20–27 are now widely separated from each other by the P and non-P flood narratives, they originally stood closer together in identifying Noah’s name as signifying the comfort that he would provide out of the ground (האדמה) from the toil (עצבון) caused by Yhwh’s curse of the ground (Gen 3:17–19). Finally, the description of divine-human marriages and Yhwh’s response to them in Gen 6:1–4, concludes with etiological elements linked to giants and famous warriors placed back in antiquity (מעולם), but an antiquity related to Israel’s earliest pre-monarchal history, not a pre-flood period.
These issues with etiologies in Gen 1–11 are the first of several indicators suggesting that the earliest non-P primeval history did not have a flood narrative. Instead, like the Mesopotamian creation traditions discussed above (most of which also did not feature a flood), the earliest non-P primeval history told a complicated story of early humans and God’s relations with them. Though this story encompassed many of the non-P materials (aside from the non-P flood narrative) in Gen 2:4b–9:27, it revolved particularly around three stories featuring the three major dyads of a primary family within a patriarchal context: male-female (Gen 2–3), brother-brother (Gen 4:1–16), and father-sons (Gen 9:20–27). It likely concluded with a couple of notes in Gen 10:15, 21 about the descendants
