The Genesis of Genesis

The Bible, when you get inside it more, turns out to be this complex, sometimes conflictual dialogue between different perspectives that are very opposed to each other. Many people, when they read the Bible, just presuppose, oh, I’m supposed to just agree with everything in it and just, you know, organize my whole life around it. But the Bible itself models a process of argument and wrestling and that sort of thing. That’s how this text got put together.

Hey, Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Oh, man, things are good. We’re gonna. We’re gonna dig into some stuff. Some. Some. The Genesis, if you will. Of Genesis.

The precursors to the Genesis.

Yes, indeed. Which is. Which sounds like. Why don’t you introduce our guest who’s going to tell us all about it.

Sure thing. Today we’re going to be talking with Professor David M. Carr, who is professor of Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Excuse me. And also teaches classes at Jewish Theological Seminary, also in New York. Welcome to the show, David. Thank you so much for being here with us.

Well, it’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Well, we’re glad we could have you. I have been working with your stuff for a while now. I wrote a dissertation at Exeter University that was mainly focused on Hebrew Bible and really enjoyed some of the stuff that you’ve written, particularly The Formation of the Hebrew Bible. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, Reading the Fractures of Genesis was, I think, the first work of yours that I came across, which I think you published almost 30 years ago ago. And then today we’re. we’re going to be democratizing to some degree your work in both a commentary on Genesis 1 -11 and your book, The Formation of Genesis 1 -11: Biblical and Other Precursors. Does that sound right? Did we get the. the brief correct there?

That was fantastic.

Okay. I wonder if you might just to begin introduce yourself a bit, let our audience know who you are.

Yeah, well, I, as you did a great job of introducing where I am right now at Union Theological Seminary in New York. I taught for 12 years at a little seminary in Ohio before that. So I’ve been at this Hebrew Bible thing for a good while and I’m amazed that I still find it fascinating. I can be an eternal student. I just attach Bible to some other topic and it’s legit, which is a lot of fun, I have to say. I feel like over my career I’ve done a lot better job speaking to doctoral students and fellow colleagues with my work. And I’ve tried at various points to write to a broader audience and to some extent have reached folks, but feels like some, some somewhat like somebody with a rifle who’s aiming at a target and always hits above it. That’s true of me. So I’m so happy to have this chance to, to talk with you all and have you bring me into contact with your amazing audience.

Yeah, well, we’re, we’re excited to have you. We’re excited to, to get to it. I, I will admit that I have not apparent. Look, your, your books are apparent. Dan has said how amazing they are. I have not been able to access it. I didn’t get, I didn’t get a copy of your book before the, the thing. So I am, I’m a babe in the woods. I apologize. I wish I had been able to. To dive in beforehand, but something tells me I wouldn’t get it. Something tells me that, like there, I, I don’t have the necessary background, so I’m going to be here filling in for our listeners asking dumb questions and we’ll. I think we’ll be able to, to make it through together.

Sounds great.

As Bill Murray says in my wife’s favorite movie, What About Bob? Baby steps.

So that’s a good way to start. That’s a good way to go about this.

We, we’re going to start with defining what we’re talking about. Genesis 1 through 11, also known as the primeval history. Why do we have our own title for these 11 chapters? Where is this coming from and what sets it off from the rest of the book of Genesis ?

Well, these chapters are the part of Genesis that really talk about general human origins. The people of Israel don’t yet appear anywhere in these chapters. Abraham will be called by God at the beginning of chapter 12, right after these chapters. And, and that starts the story of the promise to him and his and. His descendants, and the gradual formation of the people of Israel out of his grandkids. So that story is going to start in Genesis 12 . But Genesis 1 -11 are, are these stories of ancient primeval origins, of creation, of flood, of, you know, various emergent aspects of human civilization, of the great cities of Mesopotamia. Basically, the. The writers of Genesis are telling about their setting before they’re going to get to the big story of, you know, how they came to be as a people.

Yeah, I think, I think a lot of our, of our. Even listeners who haven’t read the book cover to cover would know a lot of the sort of stories of the first 11 chapters of Genesis because they are so. They’re, they’re iconic. You know, we’re talking Adam and Eve, we’re talking Noah and the flood, we’re talking the Tower of Babel. We’re talking Babel or Babel or whatever you call it. These are, these are pretty, you know, every, every children’s Bible storybook has all of these stories in it. And then there are entire, you know, books of the Bible that aren’t touched in the children’s books. So there’s something there, there’s something special about these in that way.

Yeah, so true. And, and for the various people who tried to read the Bible from beginning to end, usually they make it through the first 11 chapters. They’re going to cut out sometime, maybe later on, but they’ll make it through this primeval history.

Yeah, the narrative slows to a crawl as soon as we get past those.

Although I gotta say, chapters five and ten, you know, when you start to get into who begat whom. Yeah, that. That can be pretty thick. That can be.

Fair enough, fair enough.

Now you, you mentioned this is where the writers are kind of establishing their setting. And I think a lot of people assume one of two things. Either that these chapters come down from hoary antiquity, somewhere in the obscure past, are incredibly ancient texts, or they adopt the tradition that Moses received the whole Pentateuch by revelation. And so this, that’s kind of the, the temporal setting is, is the time of, of Moses. But for scholars, that’s not likely when, when these texts came together, if you had to. We’ll talk a little bit more about the details as we get deeper into the interview. But if you had to kind of lay our scene a little bit, where are we talking in time for these stories coming together?

So, yeah, this is a great place to start. I think we can think about. Authors who are literate scribes. They’re the scholars of their community in a tiny community in what we now call Israel, Palestine, in the sort of eastern edge of the Mediterranean. And they are writing about, give or take, 25, 2600 years ago. And they’re working within what, in their setting is just a really pretty tiny kingdom. It’s only a little bit bigger than the greater New York area where I live. And they have all around them major civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, also large Syrian cities and stuff. Those are the sort of big kingdoms that they have to contend with.

And, and they’re small scale farmers or village dwellers. There’s some, a little bit larger towns, and that’s probably where these scholars worked. But they’re living in this kind of context and they’re having to contend with everyday life, which can be really hard in, in those contexts, and, and sometimes massive catastrophes. In many ways, I think the story of the formation of the Bible is, is the story of various texts being written in the furnace of communal trauma. And it’s not just one, it’s a bunch of them, one after the other, as this little, these little tiny kingdoms are buffeted by major empires who have an interest in their area. And so that’s, yeah, that’s a very different way, I realize, of setting the Bible, setting it in the context of a group of people confronting the difficulties of everyday life and of collective trauma. But for me, getting insights into the way the Bible was forged in that kind of context really adds a whole different level of meaning to me.

It helps me understand why the Bible became the text that we’re still talking about today. Like on this podcast, when a lot of the texts of these major empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia were lost in the sands, when the, when the kingdoms were destroyed. There’s some, some kind of resilience in these texts that was forged in trauma. And I think people nowadays and across the centuries can hear that deeper music in them.

And I think it’s, it’s reflecting some of the universal experiences of, of humanity. You mentioned the trauma, the fact that they have persevered, and a part of that is the fact that the, the groups of people who have curated those texts have managed to persevere in the face of so much persecution, so much trauma 2500, 2600 years ago. We’re talking just before and after the Babylonian exile, which seems to be one of the largest traumatic scars that is left on the surface of the Hebrew Bible. Would you say that these texts begin their formation prior to the exile and kind of take the shape that we know them now after returning from the exile? Is it a little hard to tell, or is it something where we can say, oh, this is definitely before, this is definitely after?

It’s so rare in biblical scholarship that you can say anything is definite. I have to say, I will say this for what it’s worth, as an orientation point. One of the things that scholars started to recognize already over 300 years ago is that these chapters in Genesis and actually much of the rest of the Torah are formed really out of two probably originally separate written strands. And scholars often refer. I know you know this already, but just to mention it for anybody in the audience who doesn’t, one of those strands is referred to by scholars as the priestly strand. Not that there are any priests in the primeval history really, but. But that’s, that’s what they call it, the priestly strand or P for short. And then the others. And it starts with the seven day creation account in Genesis 1 . And then it includes those genealogies that bog people down often in Genesis 5 and 10 that you were mentioning, Dan.

And then it also includes other crucial parts of the flood narrative and that sort of thing. That’s one strand that originally existed separately. And then there’s what scholars used to refer to, and many still do, as the J strand, Yahwistic strand. I tend to prefer a more neutral term for complicated reasons of non-P, non-Priestly strand, which starts with the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2 to 3 and the Cain and Abel story, I mean amazing stories, narrative stories that have a very different feel to them than the seven-day creation account or whatever. And then it continues with its own flood strand and onto a story of Noah and his sons and the Tower of Babel story. Anyway, this J strand or non-P strand, you’ll hear me use the term non-P more here, has its own separate character to it. And most scholars over the last few hundred years have thought it was an originally separate strand.

And, and, and back to your question, Dan. I am still of the opinion and I might… I… I’m probably in the majority in North America, but in the minority vis-a-vis some of my European colleagues. I think the non-P strand is a pre-P strand and probably pre-exilic. So it was formed in the time… there’s still a lot of trauma going on, but that big one hasn’t happened yet. And the… Whereas the Priestly strand almost certainly was formed in the wake of the Babylonian exile and destruction of Jerusalem and that kind of thing. And you can see that subtly reflected in different aspects of that material.

Yeah, we had Liane Feldman on a bit ago to talk about her book The Consuming Fire. So we have a little bit of an orientation to P. I believe she’s in… she’s a little closer to Joel Baden and the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis than I am and perhaps than you are. But you mentioned the seven-day creation account that we find in Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3 or 4a. And then we have the other one running from the second half of Genesis 2:4 down through the, the rest of the Adam and Eve story. I’d love to hear… I, I bring up the fact that these are two different and originally independent creation accounts quite frequently on social media. And, and the picture that I have tried to paint is of an earlier account where there are concerns with the way God is represented.

There are concerns with the way the, the creative act is represented, where we have the Priestly group coming in and trying to massage it into something that’s a little more comfortable. Could you talk about your thoughts on the relationship of these two creation accounts?

Sure, yeah. It’s a fascinating example, I think, of writing and counter-writing where the two texts are originally set up in opposition to each other before they’re then brought into the same strand. But the Garden of Eden story, you know, I, this is a story that every… I’ve been reading it for decades as a full-time professional scholar, and I still see new things in it every time. But it’s this incredible story about how God sort of initially creates these childlike humans in the garden. Tells them, you know, you can have all these yummy trees, anything you want, except for this one tree in the middle of the garden. And anybody who has kids knows if you want to guarantee that somebody’s going to eat something, you just do that. Just tell them that they, they can do anything. And so they, and it says if you don’t do it, if you, if you eat from this tree, you will definitely die. You will surely die. And, and there’s this whole dialogue. I won’t go deeply into the story, but the woman eventually realizes, hey, wait a minute, you know, thanks to the snake, I realized this tree will give me some good wisdom.

I’ll become like God, knowing good and evil. And she and her man eat from it. And the snake is right, their eyes are open, they get wisdom. But God then says, oh, this is not good. They have godlike knowledge. What if they also eat of the tree of eternal life and gain immortality? I’ve got to send them out of the garden and does so. And as a result of that, the, the humans will definitely die, just as God had predicted. It wasn’t that God was going to put them to death, it’s just that they will gain mortality because God can’t tolerate having them in the garden if they’ve eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. What’s interesting, back to your question, Dan, about this story is it’s positing a God who’s worried about humans becoming too godlike. And you know, God is kind of remarkably human in this story, is walking in the garden, you know, jealous, kind of duplicitous with regard to the humans.

There’s a lot going on there. I like that. I like this picture of God myself. But. But apparently the authors of the Priestly story weren’t so happy with it. And so what’s remarkable about the way they tell their story in Genesis 1 is they tell this story about an absolutely majestic, royal like God, who says, decrees, and instantly things just magically kind of come into place. And as a crown of this entire creation, this God is not scared of having humans be godlike, but actually makes humans as God images in order to rule all living creatures in this cosmos. So it’s like diametrically opposed to the message of the Garden of Eden story. And there are all sorts of other subtle indicators that the person who wrote Genesis 1 had the Garden of Eden story in mind and was trying to replace it.

And then the radical move was made later to turn what was supposed to be the replacement into the prologue of the Garden of Eden story, and they were put one after the other in the same strand.

And that decision. Do you think this is more an archival move, like let’s record them on the same scroll? Or do you think this was a literary move, we’re going to appropriate for our own purposes the, the Priestly account as kind of an introduction to the other one? Or do you think we don’t really have a way of knowing what was in their minds?

That latter statement is probably the most accurate. We don’t have a way of knowing what’s in their minds. But that’s a typical, scholarly, cautious thing. I will say one of the exciting new developments in Pentateuchal study, and believe it or not, even after 300 years, we’re coming up with some really exciting new stuff, I think is becoming more aware of ways in which these two strands I was talking about earlier, the Priestly strand and the earlier non Priestly strand, or maybe not always earlier. In some ways they existed separately, but I mentioned before that the, the community in which these were written is pretty tiny, and literacy within the ancient world of the Levant was not widespread. So if you have a tiny kingdom with only a tiny minority of people able to read, and you have two complete accounts, you know, of the origins of the world, people are going to know about both of them, and they’re going to start to add to each one in relation to the other.

And so we’re starting to see evidence in these two strands that they were modified by scribes who are still transmitting them separately before they finally come to the point where they kind of go, well, why are we just keep, why are we working these two documents separately? Let’s just make them one document and have it all together. And I think that’s probably the most plausible explanation for why they did it. It’s sort of archival, but they’re also reading these for meaning. And, and so, for example, when they put these two creation stories together, there was no really real alternative but to put the larger, more spacious vision of the creation of the whole cosmos in Genesis 1 at the beginning.

Yeah.

And then put what was actually the earlier creation story about the Garden of Eden as a follow up.

Yeah. And you, you mentioned that it presents a deity who’s a little bit jealous of their, their divinity. They’ve created humanity to, to till the ground to do all these things. They’ve created humanity to, to till the ground to do all these things. Sounds quite similar to some Mesopotamian stories that we have where. Well, one, we’ve got for instance, Gilgamesh who’s seeking out eternal life. He had to watch his buddy die and decompose and he’s, he doesn’t like that idea and so he’s seeking out eternal life and there’s a, there’s a serpent snatches it from him right at. The, right at the end. But we’ve also got in Enuma Elish and other traditions from the Sumerian, the Akkadian literature, humanity being created to do the work the gods don’t want to do. And, and they’re also keeping them at arm’s length. Do we, do you see the influence of any, or maybe many of these traditions on the way the, these authors are writing?

Are they, are they writing in response to, are inspired by, are they rejecting these other traditions that are, that are probably far more widespread in the, the empires around them?

Yes, I definitely think they are. And you did a really nice job of summarizing a lot of these key elements. The story of the Garden of Eden is never exactly verbally parallels anything in the Gilgamesh epic, but it’s constantly in interaction with some of its ideas. You mentioned the theme of immortality, which obviously is a big ultimate result, but also the snake and the fruit and you know, the lost human chance at immortality. Gilgamesh just barely, you know, almost has that immortality and loses it there just all sorts of subtle ways in which that’s reflected. And then the Enuma Elish epic seems to have been the background for the Genesis 1 seven-day creation account, where the Enuma Elish epic is all about trying to show how the Babylonian state god Marduk is the end all, be all, the supreme god over all the other gods.

And he, he can just, he can create by a word and destroy by a word. And he creates the cosmos out of dividing up the sea goddess into two. And, and, and there are all sorts of interesting ways in which Genesis 1 says kind of Marduk doesn’t even begin to figure into the picture. In fact, there are no gods that figure into the picture. There’s just God, capital G. And that’s it. And so it sort of does. It tells an Enuma Elish-like story, but now with Marduk completely obliterated and the God of Israel as the center point of the story. So I think both of these stories are constantly interacting with these, the literatures of these bigger empires that surrounded the scribes. And as I say in one of, one of my books, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, you know, this is scribes, ancient scholars of the time that those that literate minority, they learned to, to write on older literature.

And at least at some point we can’t reconstruct exactly how or why it appears that that older literature that they were, they were reading and actually probably memorizing were these stories of Gilgamesh or, or Atrahasis is another one that comes up. We might talk about that a little later. That were really important parts of the curriculum of the ancient Near East. And so if you were going to be a scholar, a literate person, you knew them at least at certain periods in history.

Yeah, that was the, that was the canon, the literary canon at the time, before the canon, as, as we know it now.

Exactly.

So I think the Garden of Eden story is fascinating. I also think it’s fascinating to consider how it’s trying to be. Well, the priestly authors to some degree seem to be trying to supplant it where God says it’s not good that we have this situation and let’s try this, let’s try this, this isn’t working. And then the priestly authors say no, God says it and then immediately recognizes, yes, this is good. So it seems to be saying no, not that way, it’s our way. Now, a question I get frequently that I’ve talked about on social media a lot is the relationship of Genesis 2 and 3 to Genesis 4 . Because once we transition, we’ve got Adam and Eve in the garden and then we transition to children of Adam and Eve. And it seems like the, the narrative in Genesis 4 is presupposing a fully populated Earth where Cain is.

Is like, hey, people are going to notice this and I’m gonna get in trouble and I’m gonna. So I’m gonna go over here to this city that has a name already. I’m gonna find a wife. I’ve. My perspective, My understanding is that Genesis 4 was probably written or initially circulated independently of Genesis 2 and 3. I don’t know if people have strong feelings about which came before the other, but what can you tell us about what you think about the relationship of. Of these two parts of ostensibly the same story?

Yes, I’m totally with you, Dan, in terms of thinking that the story of Cain and Abel was the earlier one. And it doesn’t presuppose a primeval world where they’re the very first people because, you know, at the very least, Cain can go off and get a wife. And it’s not clear where that came from. So there are all kinds of interesting parallels between the Cain Abel story and the Garden of Eden story. I think I have almost two pages of the parallels listed that people have noticed over time.

What kinds of parallels are those?

Well, they kind of go through a very similar sequence. I should get the book out. But you start out with a problem situation. In the case of the Garden of Eden story, it’s this forbidden tree. In the case of the Cain Abel story, it’s Cain getting really pissed off because God didn’t pay attention to him and his offering and only focused on his brother’s offering. And that’s never explained in the story. It’s just Cain’s really mad.

Right.

And God basically confronts him and says, you know, you’ve got a choice here. I’m. This is paraphrasing wildly, but. And. And you need to, like, master sin. And then the very next thing he does is take his brother out to the field and kill him. The corresponding thing in the Garden of Eden story is they eat of the fruit. And then both stories go into a dialogue with God. An interrogation that goes back and forth. Yeah. And then there’s an aftermath you have.

The same reference to. Because part of Genesis 3 is your desire will be for your husband, which could be a sexual desire, could be a desire to dominate. But. But he will rule over you. Is. Is also parallel, isn’t it, between Genesis 3 and Genesis 4 with sin lying at the door?

Yeah. Sin is lying at the door. Its desire is. Is for you. You must rule over it. Which is. This is an actual verbal parallel. There’s no way to imagine that these two texts were not written in relation to each other. And then the question becomes so sort of which came first or, or how are they related? Many scholars maybe because the Garden of Eden story is so famous and so central and that sort of thing presuppose the Garden of Eden story was first and those things that seem to cite it in the next chapter in Genesis 4 were a later imitation of the Garden of Eden story. I’m more tempted to think the reverse for various reasons. That first you had the Cain Abel story that is really a kind of an implicit story that’s providing some background to a neighboring people of the authors, the Kenites, and that then the person who wrote the larger non-Priestly primeval history, this pre-exilic primeval history, sort of took that Cain Abel story as a model for what they did in the Garden of Eden story and they sort of extended it backward.

That’s my, that’s what I think makes more sense.

Yeah, I, I’ve. One of the things that I found really interesting, I was saying this to Dan earlier, before you, before we had you with us on the call, is that I liked that the subtitle of your book, The Formation of Genesis 1 -11, is Biblical and Other Precursors. And I said to Dan, wait, the Bible is the precursor to the Bible? And he was like, yeah, it was. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about is like the Bible continually precursing itself.

Yes, exactly. That the Bible, when you get inside it more, turns out to be this complex, sometimes conflictual dialogue between different perspectives that are very opposed to each other, which for me kind of becomes an interesting model. Many people when they read the Bible just presuppose, oh, I’m supposed to just agree with everything in it and just, you know, organize my whole life around it. But the Bible itself models a process of argument and wrestling and that sort of thing. That’s what, that’s how this text got put together.

Do you think that the people who Originally read these texts, the people, you know, the people for whom these texts were written at, you know, the contemporaneous to the time of the writing. Do you think that they understood them in that way as being explorations of ideas as opposed to literal truths?

Well, I think they had a different idea of literal truth than we do. The way they would write history would not be the way most of us would try to write a good quality history now. They were more comfortable say, say, reconstructing what they thought Abraham must have said because of what they believe. And they, they would think, okay, then that’s what he said is what I believe would be what he would say. And, and that’s what you do. We wouldn’t do that now. But so, but I think, for example, back to the example we were talking about before of the priestly creation story being written to contradict the Garden of Eden story and replace it. I think the people who wrote that priestly creation story believed that what they were writing was correct and that the Garden of Eden story was incorrect. I do think that’s one reason why they wrote it the way they did and didn’t just sort of add some things around the edges of the Garden of Eden story and leave it at that. They really felt like they believed in it.

And in a sense, I think, yes, they both believed that what they were writing had happened, but they were as equally committed to what it meant about God, what it meant about the Sabbath, because that’s the crowning aspect of the seven day creation account and that sort of thing. So they, they believed in it. But then, you know, the texts travel over time and, and it turns out that both of these texts persist as important that the priest—the, the priestly account doesn’t succeed in replacing the non-priestly material. And so, you know, 100, 150 years later, communities say we’re not going to let either one of these go. And so they just put them together.

Yeah, yeah. It’s funny, I, when I was reading.

Through.

This part of Genesis and I read, you know, I read the account of the Flood and then I got to the Tower of Babel and I went, oh yeah, because if everyone’s descended from the same family, we have a language problem. How do we explain why there are so many languages? And suddenly there’s a reason why we need to explain why there’s all of these languages. And, and so it made sudden sense to me. Like there’s a certain sense that can be found in just going like, oh wait, somebody, some smart-ass just was like, okay, well if we all descended from Noah, why, why are those guys speaking a different language and those guys a different language or something like that. different language or something like that. It just seems like a lot of these, you know, there are simple, there are questions that get answered by the next thing or whatever.

Yeah, that’s exactly it. And really back to what, where we started this conversation about what is a primeval history. A primeval history is a story about how these aspects of the audience’s reality came to be. It’s just, it’s all of that. And this actually kind of relates to something I think many people haven’t realized enough reading these chapters, which is they sometimes will talk about a creation story, fair enough, in a way. And then they’ll distinguish a creation story like the Garden of Eden or the Genesis 1 seven-day account, which we’ve been talking about so far from the stories that come after, as if there’s somehow different stories. But for the ancients, the social reality that they lived in was as much a part of their world as the natural, what we call our like natural scientific reality. They didn’t separate a sort of natural world from a social world. So the whole primeval history, all the way up to the Tower of Babel story that you were just talking about, Dan, is in a sense a creation story.

It’s all an origin story about the world they live in, including multiple languages, including, you know, farming and childbirth and Sabbath and, and wine and sex and all this sort of thing is. It’s all bound up together and that’s all part of this origin story, which is Genesis 1 to 11.

I want to move on to what I think is one of the, the most fun three passages of, of Scripture in, in the Hebrew Bible, namely the, the Bnei Elohim story in, in Genesis 6 . But before I, I move on to that, I wanted to ask you real quick, do you think there’s anything to the theory that there was a liturgical function for these creation accounts, that they were part of New Year’s festivals, that they were part of some kind of liturgy in, in a temple or anything like that?

So I think that there’s a good case to be made for a liturgical function for some of the non biblical precursor texts from Mesopotamia. For example, the Enuma Elish has certain connections into the Akitu New Year’s festival in Babylon. And that’s part of why the authors of this text, who were dealing with the trauma of Babylonian destruction of their city and temple and exile, wanted to write their counter to this important text in Babylonia. But I don’t think that’s the primary context for these texts in Genesis 1 -11, as you probably know, Dan, I really do think for most of the texts in the Bible, whatever some of their genres are, that imitate some other things, they were mainly meant for, for use in ancient education in schools to be memorized so that you could sort of educate the next generation in that literate minority.

And so that’s what I think these texts are doing.

Okay, which now brings us. We’re going to talk a little bit. I think we can summarize some of the toledot, the genealogical material a little bit later. But when we get to Genesis 6 , we, we have the, the sons of God who notice that they, they really like the, the cut of the jib of the, the daughters of humanity and come down and take wives and have children with them. And the text says there were Nephilim on the earth in that day and after. And this seems to me to be a story that seems inserted at the beginning of, of the story of the Flood to give a more plausible rationale for the destruction of, of all the earth. Because once we actually get to God making the decision to destroy the earth, all it says is he looked around, there was violence everywhere, and so he, he decides to destroy the earth. What can you tell us about precursors to, to Genesis 6 , the role of this story in the, the beginning of the Flood narrative?

Yeah, well, this is one of my favorite texts too, actually. It’s such an interesting. I mean, it’s just these little corners of the Bible where you kind of go, oh man, I can’t believe this is here. Why didn’t anybody tell me about this? You know, I guess now that it’s juxtaposed with the Flood where, Which as you say, starts with God seeing that the evil of humanity is just thorough going and that sort of thing and being sorry God made them. Since this story comes right before that, it’s been tempting for many interpreters to say, okay, well, there must be something wrong with these divine-human marriages. This, the puzzle is that humans do absolutely nothing wrong in the story, right?

Yeah.

The only people, only beings that do anything are the sons of God who take the humans for wives and then have giant children of them.

And so, and the agency of these human women wouldn’t matter anyway. There. This is not a. Their will when it comes to marriage is pretty relevant in the text. They are taken.

Not in this text, they are taken there. There’s evidence that women had agency within marriage in ancient Israel, but that’s certainly not highlighted here. It’s just the sons of God doing it. And, and God. This is another place where I, I think we can overread it. God is not, does not ever say they did something wrong. God just says, my spirit can’t abide in these humans, and I will set a lifetime limit of 120 years. And then it goes on to say, and then giants were in the land at the time. And, and this is the time of the warriors of old who were the men of the name. And I mean, one thing I think we just have to remember Dan here is that 120-year lifespan within the world of the ancient Levant was huge. Like they could barely conceptualize anyone living that long. That was like the absolute outside limit.

Interestingly, we find the exact same lifetime limit mentioned in Mesopotamian wisdom texts that are preserved in Syria that are talking about the sort of absolute limit of human life. So this is something people are talking about. It’s another place where Genesis is based on some precursors of some kind. Maybe not that particular text, but that kind of idea is in circulation. But where I’m going with this is, you know, in the ancient world we see myths around us in, in Hittite literature, in ancient Greek literature, that when the gods mate with humans, the resulting offspring have the characteristics of both. And that can mean usually that they’re big, because gods are big. I mean, I’ve got to remember that gods are really huge in the ancient world. They’re also beautiful. Gods are beautiful. They’re, if there’s a male, they’re strong, they’re incredibly strong, superhumanly strong.

And, and the other thing that humans can get from being the mixed divine-human parentage is they can become immortal. And so what seems to be an issue in this story is very similar to the Garden of Eden story where God will not abide humans having divine immortality. And this, this act by the sons of God threatens that. And so God doesn’t say, oh bad you, you know, you did this, or whatever. God just says, okay, well we’re going to have to just put a circuit breaker on the lifespan of the offspring. And so they’re going to be big and they’re going to be strong. And that’s part of why we hear about giants and about warriors of old. That’s they’re the divine-human offspring, but they’re not going to be immortal. And, but they’ll have a. But they’re also, this is a subtle detail is they’re going to be men of the name, which is, I don’t know how it’s translated in many common translations, but the idea here is one of the, the ancients were well aware we all die.

And the question becomes, well, okay, so what comes after. There was no concept of afterlife in this culture. So you, to some extent, it would be your kids. You, you’d have kids and that would be your immortality. And the Garden of Eden actually talks a lot about that at the end. That, so that’s one form of living on, even though you will certainly die. But the, another main way that you had immortality in the ancient world was fame. And so this text says, I’m setting 120 year limit. It’s great big limit actually, for divine-human offspring. But they’re gonna, they’re gonna be famous. They’re gonna be the giants that, you know from other legends. We hear about them in the book of Joshua and so on. They were in the land of Canaan when the Israelites come, or the warriors of old. Who are the men of the name, like the giant famous warriors of David. These are people who are part of the broader setting of the audience. And they can. Oh yeah, yeah, we know about those.

Those guys, you know, and they’re. They’re a testimony to sort of the truth of the story. So anyway, where I’m going with this is it’s a take on this story that really doesn’t involve any wrongdoing, really. It’s just kind of humans kind of struggling against this border of immortality. But, but, but then you have this real disjunction that happens where all of a sudden after this, where humans do nothing wrong, if anything, the women are raped, so God sees that the evil of humans is just complete and total and they kind of go, what? Where did this occur? And I don’t find it in this Genesis 6 story. Maybe you’d find it in the Cain and Abel story, though. It’s just one guy and then his son. Lamech. The place where many people have tried to find that evilness that’s incorrigible evilness is in the Garden of Eden story. And I think that’s a lot of why people see original sin and that sort of thing in the Garden of Eden story, where it’s just a story of two kids growing up in many ways.

So where I’m going with this is really to say I really think what we’re looking at right there between this really interesting ancient story about the origins of giants and famous warriors and the flood narrative, which is talking about the evil of humanity, is this is kind of a seam between an earlier layer of that origin story, which had no flood, and a later layer that was written at a very different time with very different precursors that has a different vision of what humanity’s about and what God’s about too. You have a very different sort of flavor to the flood story that starts right then.

And this is something that you bring up in your book. But when we get into Noah’s life, it seems like Noah’s claim to fame is viticulture and we have these references to the people who are around and it’s like, oh, they’re the ones who dwell in tents and they’re the ones who make these. These instruments and tools and everything. It’s like, well, it doesn’t matter what they did if they’re about to all be destroyed in the flood.

It.

The way the story is told, it doesn’t seem to be anticipating the destruction of all humanity. And then all of a sudden we get the flood. So in your book, you talk about how it. It seems that the flood is a later insertion into this narrative. Can you expand a little bit on the flood narrative, how it’s coming in and interrupting things?

Sure, I can. I mean, you touched on the first major indicator, which is just that chapter four of Genesis, when it’s talking about the descendants of Cain, they build cities, they found music and pastoring herds and building tents, and there’s this whole building of culture and this sort of thing. And then you have this story we were just talking about in Genesis 6 , which, where there are a bunch of giants and warriors, which the audience is supposed to know about and think this story would explain. And. And then suddenly a flood comes and wipes every. And so it’s unclear kind of how the other story, how these stories work, if that’s actually the case. Now there is an ancient Mesopotamian story of the flood, Atrahasis, and in an adoption of that story into the Gilgamesh epic that we were talking about earlier, that solved this problem by actually having all the artisans and stuff come on the ark with the flood hero. So it’s like, it’s a big party, everybody’s on the boat together.

And so you can explain it that way, but the, the way the Genesis flood story goes, there’s only Noah, his sons and their wives on the ark. That’s it. So there’s a real kind of narrative problem there. Some ancient Jewish rabbinic interpreters solved this problem partly by imagining that one of the major giants that was born of the union of the gods and women held onto the outside of the ark during the flood. And that’s how he made it long enough.

I thought you were going to say that his nose stayed just above water level.

That’s so tall that I like that. Maybe there’s a. That’s a rabbinic tradition I haven’t uncovered yet.

I think it’s the. There’s the snorkel theory of.

But anyway, people, early readers, saw that there was this issue and they had. They had to try to explain it. I think the. Another thing that kind of is striking. I think you mentioned, Dan, that Noah’s main claim to fame seems to be that he founded viticulture, the making of wine, which in ancient Israel was like, this is a big deal. People in the ancient world drank fermented beverages. It was one way to have safe drinking water because the alcohol would automatically take care of bacteria. And of course, they’d also get a little buzzed from it, or more than a little buzzed in Noah’s case. So anyway, so Noah’s name is explained in terms of his founding of viticulture, but we don’t get to hear about him doing that until after the flood story, where he’s kind of reintroduced to us as he’s a man of the arable ground. Ish ha-Adamah. And then we hear about, okay, and what did he do with the ground? He planted vines and then he got drunk on the, on the fruit from it.

I mean, what did he know? He’s the first human to do it. So he’s just like drinks a whole lot of it and he’s. He’s flat out drunk and gets naked. And there’s a whole story that comes from that. So that’s one Noah. But then there’s this flood hero, Noah, that’s like this. It has a very different character to him. And I. So I think I speak of sort of the two Noahs. The Noah, the original Noah who founds viticulture and has this drama with his sons, and the flood hero, Noah, which is what some later authors make of that figure as they make him into the flood hero, using the Mesopotamian stories as their model.

And now when, when we get to the flood, we have you, you talked about two different strands, the priestly and. And the, the non-P or J strand. And we see two beginnings, two middles and two ends to the flood story kind of woven together, don’t we?

We do. I mean, this is, this is actually relatively rare throughout the Torah to find two stories parallel to each other that are so tightly interwoven, like episode by episode. In most cases, it’s more like the two creation stories we were just talking about, where you have a complete priestly text and then a complete non-priestly text, and they’re not mixed together. But, you know, you can’t really pull that off with a flood story. If you told one flood story and then God at the end said, I’m never sending another flood, and then you told the other flood story, it would begin to look like the divine abuse cycle. I think they get away with it.

Once, but we already. We already took care of that with the creation.

Yeah, so they. So it. But it’s remarkable that they took. They, they preserved so much of these stories. Now, many scholars have pointed out in the last decade or two, there are, there are some gaps at points where it seems like, for example, that the J or non-P story doesn’t have an account of Noah receiving instructions to build the ark and then building it. That’s only in the priestly strand. But again, I just think for the authors who were combining these, they weren’t idiots. They wanted to produce a reliable, readable narrative. So you can’t have them building two arks according to two different designs and that sort of thing. So there were, there were places where they had to edit some. But still, even with all that, when you take apart all the doublets that occur across these chapters, you end up with remarkably continuous, not completely continuous, but remarkably continuous stories that episode by episode, it adds up to about 10 different parallels.

They. They all add up to the Flood story and they even have completely different chronologies that don’t match up with each other.

Yeah, I think that’s. That’s one of the exciting places where we can kind of see the seams of these things being worked together. The. The sale of Joseph into Egypt is another one that I’ve thought is. Is fascinating because you can pull them apart and, and get two full narratives. I’ve talked before about Noah and his sons, and you talk a bit in the book about how it seems that Ham is a late addition here. There are some textual things going on here, but one of the popular theories is that of what exactly went wrong. And we don’t have to get too deep into this, but do you favor a sexual sin having been committed, or is this really as simple as seeing the father naked and basically spreading his shame rather than protecting his. His honor? What do you think the nature of. Of the. The indiscretion there is?

I think in terms of the original text, it’s pretty clear that it’s the later. I mean, the latter option. You mentioned, Dan, that there was a strong belief in the ancient world that I think in our contemporary world we’re remarkably out of touch with. But it’s the idea that children owed their parents loyalty and honor. It’s the sort of obey your parents kind of thing. But it was very deeply ingrained, a basic idea that that’s. You really owed the older generation respect. And. And there’s even a text in Ugarit, which is a city north of ancient Judah and Israel that talks about the duty of the child to take care of their father when he’s drunk. That when you’re, when you’re, if you’re, if your parent gets vulnerable, you know, because they’ve had a few too many, your job as the child is to preserve their honor and take care of them.

And it is that which, actually, the original son in the. That story of Noah and his son is probably Canaan. That’s what Canaan fails to do is he. He both sees his father’s nakedness and then perhaps most importantly, he goes out and tells his brothers about it. So he. He just radically compromises that idea of filial duty. And so, you know, a hungover Noah wakes up, realizes what his youngest son has done to him, and curses Canaan to eternal slavery while blessing Shem, which in Hebrew means name. So we’re back to the name theme we were talking about earlier. Blesses Shem and his brother Yaphet. So I, for me, that’s what I think the original story was about. But, but there, there’s some texts later in Leviticus that talk about the sort of sexual promiscuity of Canaanites and that kind of thing that have verbal resonances with the story we’re talking about.

And I think over time in, in tradition, early Jewish tradition and, and later those, the kind of sexual connotations of that got kind of merged into this story. And of course, the nakedness, too, played a role in that. But the story says nothing whatsoever of anything that the son has done to Noah other than see his nakedness and talk with his brothers about it.

And we’re going to get the name theme coming up again at the end of the primeval history when we have folks who are building this tower. Yeah, the Tower of Babel in order to. It says it’s going to touch the heavens, but the main thing is they’re going to make a name for themselves. And again, we have God looking down, stroking his beard, saying, not too happy about this. Let’s go down and frustrate this. Now, in your book, you talk about the. The Tower of Etemenanki, which was constructed much earlier in near Babylon, was not totally destroyed, but fell into disrepair and took decades, like 80 some years for a project to finally kind of repair things. And so it seems to me like maybe this is kind of these folks thumbing their nose at the Assyrians for leaving this unfinished tower, not managing to get it finished for a while.

Can you talk a little bit about the precursor for the story of the Tower of Babel, is this a reflection of the Tower of Etemenanki?

I do think it is, yes. I think that seems clear. And then the question becomes sort of, how is it interacting with that tower and at what point? We all know this tower is the Tower of Babylon, I think, but it was, and it was located in Babylon. But there were significant periods of time when Babylon was actually ruled by an empire located a bit north of Babylon in what we now know as northern Iraq, but was ancient Assyria. And the Assyrian empires were incredibly powerful. They actually totally destroyed the Babylonian sort of their southern neighbor a couple of times. In the wake of one of those destructions, the Assyrians got involved in what was really the first big renovation project. To go back to what you were talking about, Dan, where they actually, for the first time cover the tower with ceramic outside things that are. That are like they’re fired brick and stuff.

And it’s striking to me that the aspects of the story, it’s very detailed actually in its description of the construction correspond a lot more in some ways to this Assyrian restoration of the Babylonian tower than they do to, like, the state of the tower during the Babylonian exile. It seems to be a reflection. And also one other thing is, you know, later on when the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem, burn its temple, kill most of its people, deport most of the rest of them into largely salinated abandoned parts of Babylon to finish their lives far from their homeland. You know, in the wake of that, most of the people who went through that really had a pretty low view of the Babylonians, you know, and we have various oracles in the books of Jeremiah and Isaiah and elsewhere that really proclaim absolute destruction of the Babylonians. Or Psalms 137 says, Happy are those who bash the.

The babies of Babylon’s heads against a rock. That’s. This is the attitude toward Babylon that comes in the wake of the exile. Whatever is going on in the Tower of Babel story, it’s not. It’s not that, it’s. They’re not. They. Humans come into conflict with God in a way without even knowing it, really. God just gets worried about their collective power, but it’s not like they’re bad or evil. And so I think back to your question about, like, what. How is it related to this tower? I think it’s one of the most famous architectural wonders of the ancient world. And the authors of this text seem to know some pretty detailed stuff about it. And so they use it as a jumping off point for telling a story about the spread of humanity in the wake of the flood because you got to spread over the whole earth now. And how you got the linguistic diversity, different languages that we were talking earlier about. So that’s their jumping off point, their knowledge of this amazing tower and that.

And that gives us the 70 nations of the earth. And now the table is set to introduce our hero, Abraham. It sounds like the, our main narrative arcs in the Primeval History are kind of presenting humanity is just trying to do their best, where the deity is kind of like a foil, is the antagonist in the story, that is making sure that they don’t breach those boundaries between humanity and divinity. And at the same time, though, we’re also working a lot of etiologies, a lot of origin stories for the world as we know it. Whether that is this unfinished tower that those losers over there were trying to build or why man, I really hate snakes or all the different aspects of human civilization as they understood it are, well, not all the different, but several of the different aspects are represented etiologically in these stories.

If you had to kind of sum up what the authors of, of the Primeval History are getting at, what would you say is kind of the point? What would you say there? They want their, their listenership to come away with.

If, if the Bible were a podcast, what would they.

That’s, you know, you really threw me a tough one there off the bat.

So give us our, give us the elevator pitch. Give us the 25 words or less.

Yeah, well, I would just say I was talking earlier about how the, these biblical texts were forged amidst trauma. And I actually think that was true. That was true definitely for the Priestly material. Almost all my colleagues, including my wonderful colleague Liane Feldman, would agree with me in defining the Priestly narrative and placing it more or less in that period, I think. And, but even the non-priestly strand that I was talking about when you had the flood, the flood is really talking about catastrophe and about God dealing with human evil and then somehow finding a way to cope with it, like saying, okay, I sent one flood, but I’m just, I realize they’re evil, but I’m not going to do that ever again. And one of the things I, I don’t know if we talked about this at the beginning of the podcast, but one of the books I did write for a broader audience had to do with trauma studies and the forging of the Bible amidst trauma. And so that’s some of where I’ve been coming from in this talk.

But Holy Resilience.

Exactly. And the, I do think that, you know, a lot of the big message that people are supposed to get out of both of these strands is that God can take whatever humanity can throw at God. That it was a struggle, not easy, there’s some back and forth, but God has dealt with a lot and the world we now have is a result of God kind of having to come to terms with a humanity that doesn’t fully live up to the ideal God originally envisioned. That’s more than 25 words. But that’s my, it’s great.

One of the things that I want to talk to you about is to flip that on its head and talk about, talk about it from the opposite perspective of God sort of being a disappointment to humanity. But we’re going to, if we get to that, it will be in the patrons only segment because we have run out of time. So if, friends, you would like to hear more conversation with David. David, you’re going to join us for our, our after party, which is, which is for our patrons only. I believe you’ve agreed to this.

I have.

If we haven’t tortured you enough, we will, we will get to more torture there. So if you’d like to hear that conversation, listeners, you can become a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma and you know, you, you can join at whatever level you’d like to join at and, and, and hopefully if, and if you want to hear that conversation, you’ll join at the $10 a month or over level or. But all our other patrons also get an early and ad-free version of every show. So that’s a great incentive just to be a patron just at those levels. If you have anything you’d like to reach out to us about, please feel free to do so. Contact at dataoverdogmapod.com and David, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate, it was such a pleasure to talk with you both.

Thank you, David, and bye, everybody.