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The Primeval history (German: Urgeschichte), the name given by biblical scholars to the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, is a mythic history 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 (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.
Contents
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..."):
• The toledot of heaven and earth (Genesis 1:1-4:26)
• The book of the toledot of Adam (5:1-6:8) (The Hebrew includes the word "book")
• The toledot of Noah (6-9:28)
• The toledot of the sons of Noah (10:1-11:9)
• The toledot of Shem (11:10-26)
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. 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. The following table is based on Robert Kugler and Patrick Hartin, "An Introduction to the Bible", 2009:
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 (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. 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 (the 6th century BCE) 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 (and one Egyptian myth) 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.
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 (Can and Abel).
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. From Creation to Abraham, time is calculated by adding the ages of the Patriarchs when their first child is born. It seems possible that the period of the Flood is not meant to be included in the count – 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. 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. 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. Noah and Terah each have three sons, of whom the first in each case is the most important.