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.
It tells how God creates the world and all its beings and places the first man and woman 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.
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 :- The toledot of heaven and earth
- * The Genesis creation narrative
- * The Eden narrative
- * Cain and Abel and the first murder
- The book of the toledot of Adam
- * 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
- The toledot of Noah
- * God's reasons for bringing the Flood, 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, his drunkenness, his three sons, and the Curse of Canaan
- The toledot of the sons of Noah
- * the Table of Nations
- The toledot of Shem
- * the descendants of Noah in the line of Shem to Terah, the father of Abraham
Composition history
Relationship of the primeval history to Genesis 12–50
Genesis 1–11 shows little relationship to the remainder of Genesis. For example, the names of its characters and its geography – Adam and Eve, the Land of Nod, 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. Most notably, almost none of the persons, places and stories in it are ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. 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. 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; on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by some scholars, notably John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period precisely because the primeval history contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth.Mesopotamian (and Egyptian) myth and the primeval history
Numerous Mesopotamian myths are reflected in the primeval history. The myth of Atrahasis, for example, was the first to record a Great Flood, and lies behind the story of Noah's flood The following table sets out the myths behind the various Biblical tropes.| Bible story | Mesopotamian 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", 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 | 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. |