Lecture 1
Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.
1.1
The Old Testament, or Tanakh (Intro to the Hebrew Bible)
Contents: The biblical story spans time from creation (Gen. 1) to Judaism’s encounter
with Hellenism in the wake of Alexander the Great (Daniel), from the Bronze Age
through to the Iron Age.
It’s set in this region of what’s now called the Middle East and for each setting, it
provides a variety of literatures.
It tells the story of Israel and the relationship of the Israelites to God subjects
addressing questions such as: Who are we? What is our history? What are our
standards of morality? How do we relate to those outside our community? How, and
whom, shall we worship? Through a range of story genres including cosmological myths
and stories of origin (Gen. 1–11), sagas of culture heroes (Gen. 12–50, Joshua,
Judges), law codes (Leviticus, Deuteronomy), prophetic oracles (Amos, Isaiah…), court
tales (Esther, Dan. 1–6), and apocalyptic visions (Zech. 9–14, Dan. 7–12).
Names - I’ll just mention the names of the books here that tell us more or less what they
contain or who they are about.
Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim
The Torah is often called The Book of Moses as a major part of the first 5 books are
about Moses, but now Moses is seen more as a legendary figure than a real historical
character.
For many people the Pentateuch (Torah) is the heart of the scriptures. It starts with
creation and ends with the death of Moses, recalling oral traditions going back to the
Bronze Age, relaying the history of the Jewish people militarily, politically, socially to
give a sense of their place and identity.
Today I will talk about the first part of the first book, Genesis.
Genesis tells a story that starts with creation, narrating the interaction between God and
the people of the earth and especially his singling out one group of people as being
special.
Genesis – origins
If you look at creation myths around the world, they all share the same basic themes
which suggests a common origin and common belief/world-view of all the myths.
Common themes are:
(1) Creation From Nothing. This idea involves the Creator “calling forth into being”
the creation that came into existence totally as a result of His will. Christianity has
traditionally taught that creation was from “nothing” and this view is found in
several Scriptures support this view. Genesis states six times “and God
said...and so it was” indicating creation from nothing for at least part of the
creation or, at some point in time, all physical reality.
(2) Creation from Chaos. The occurrence of creation from chaos, or the producing of
a structure from undifferentiated material is a common theme. These myths
generally stress that creation is the process of forming the earth and living things
from an existing chaos or mass of undefined, unstructured elements, the act of
reducing chaos and bringing about order. This
is the theme of Genesis 1: 1-2 that teaches that the earth was undifferentiated in
the beginning or, as Gen. 1: 1 says “And the earth was without form and void.”
(3) Emergence Myths. In this category God creates the material out of nothing, and
then forms or shapes it into useful forms. Humans and other parts of creation
thus emerge from some other substances or preexisting material. For example,
the formation of man from the dust of the earth, and of woman from made from
Adam’s side in Genesis 2. God also formed all plants from the existing earth
Then God said, “Let the earth produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants and the
various kinds of fruit-trees that bear fruit containing their seed!” And so...the earth
brought forth vegetation, the various kinds of seed-bearing plants and the various
kinds of trees that bear fruit containing their seed. The Scriptures often refer to
God as a potter, molding an existing substance into something else (Jer.18: 1-9).
Many myths also teach creation through “the word” or the logos (see also John
1:1, 16) [10, p. xxiii]. In this category God or gods create through sounds Genesis
states that creation came about because God verbally ordered it to occur: “God
said, ‘Let there be, and there it was!’”
(4) Separation Myths. In many myths, divisions or a separation of something occurs.
The idea of the creation of heaven and earth by division is common in myths the
world over. Genesis contains several separation examples in creation, such as
the division of the waters, and of night and day.
(5) Creation From a Cosmic Egg. Some creation myths include the concept of a
Cosmic Egg, a
“germ” or some raw material such as water or clay that God created or already
existed, and out of which humans, animals, plants, the earth or some other part
of the universe were formed. In
Genesis 1:1-25, an earth shrouded in darkness and “without form and void” is
first bathed in light and then divided into dry land and seas from whence plant
and animal life springs forth. But we find that dry land and seas with their
abundant plant and animal life earth are brought about by the power of God’s
Word, not the inherent powers of “cosmic egg” earth.
(6) Earth-Divider Myths or where a divine being divides the water by bringing the
land up from the sea, permanently separating the two. Genesis 1:10 says that
God divided the land and water by commanding “let the dry ground appear [out
from the sea] and it was so; and God called the dry ground earth, and the waters
he called Seas”.
In addition, many creation myths....involve the sun, and the life-giving,
regenerative
properties of light...is almost universally identified with primary creative forces.
Everywhere the sun or light plays an important, if not a central role..” in creation
(Van Over, 1980, p. 15-16). The Scriptures also often use the word sun and light
in this sense, even stating that “God is light” (1 John 1:5 see also Isaiah 2:4, Mic
7:8; John 1:7-9; 3:19; 8:12; 9:5; 12:36; Acts 13:47; 26:18; 26:23 and other
verses).
The term light often refers not only to physical light, but also to knowledge and
insight. The first act of God after the creation of the heavens was light: “there was
darkness over the surface of the deep” so God said “Let there be light” and there
was light.”
We can say then that the essential categories of almost all creation myths are
found in Genesis and the fact that these concepts are almost universal suggests
a common origin in a set of events that actually occurred, or that they came from
some ancient common source that was transmitted to later generations by their
ancestors. These events were transmitted orally and would have been
embellished and changed as a society developed, but many of the essential
elements remain the same.
One example of this is the Babylonian creation myth, the Enumah Elish, In the Enuma
Elisha, Apsu (fresh water) and Tiamat (salt water) are male and female gods of chaos.
Marduk, the guardian god of Babylon, assisted by seven wind gods, inflates Tiamat with
air, kills her, and creates earth and the sky from her divided carcass then creates
humanity to be slaves of the gods.
Genesis depicts the uncreated as impersonal (Tohu wavohu-“without form and void”)
the divine “spirit” or “wind” hovers over the “deep” (Heb: Tehom) before dividing the
waters and gives humankind a divine component, “Let us make the human being in our
image…”
Another story you may have heard of, called The Epic of Gilgamesh,” is an epic poem
from ancient Mesopotamia is among the earliest known literary writings in the world. It
originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems dating back to the early 3rd or
late 2nd millenium BCE, which were later gathered into a longer poem (the most
complete version existing today, preserved on 12 clay tablets, dates from the 12th to
10th Century BCE).
It follows the story of Gilgamesh, the mythological hero-king of Uruk, and his half-wild
friend, Enkidu, as they undertake a series of dangerous quests and adventures, and
then Gilgamesh’s search for the secret of immortality after the death of his friend. It also
includes the story of a great flood very similar to the story of Noah in “The Bible”. An
epic, an old form of storytelling with certain characteristics – always a journey, a hero, a
moral paragon who is beloved of the gods, divine intervention is always involved.
The stories in Genesis have a number of parallels with Gilgamesh:
Sexual temptation leading to a loss of connection with nature, the separation of the
human and the divine, the human becoming aware of their own mortality. It has a plant
of eternal life, a snake that eats the plant and prevents humans from themselves living
forever.
Like Gilgamesh, The Hebrew Bible can also be considered a kind of epic story of the
Chosen People, the Israelites with a cast of heroes (Moses, David, Solomon and
others), a journey (Exodus), but more importantly, a journey to become the
representatives of the role they have been given, the establishment of the collective
identity as the “Chosen people,” through trials and tests by God, a kind of moral selfdiscovery and self-invention.
From this we can consider that the stories in these earliest of the Scriptures, the
cosmological stories, the creation of the earth and humankind, arise from a common
source and are interpretations of the world-view of the time in which they were written.
The big difference, however, is that the Babylonian myth Enumah Elish with Apsu and
Tiamat has a war of the gods and human beings are slaves of the gods, but in the
Hebrew story (scripture) – Genesis – there is one god creating humans in his image
who are not slaves but have dominion over the birds, fish, etc. while God is directly
involved guiding, advising, punishing the people, making promises and pledges, thus
connecting himself with human history.
Davis - “Commonly held beliefs about the Creation are repeated throughout Genesis.
The difference is that in Genesis this was shaped into an account of the special
relationship between the Israelite God and humanity. The ancient nature gods were
transformed into a personal God with a clear and rigid moral code.” (45) “This God was
going to make these people his favorite, but they had to follow the code, do what God
mandated, and much of the Hebrew scriptures tell the story of what happens when the
Children of Israel don’t keep up their end of the Promise.”
Before Darwin came along in 1859 with his theory of natural selection, the Genesis
account of creation had been accepted as a perfectly acceptable account of how the
world began. Biblical scholars now accept that the story of Adam and Eve as a Hebrew
story of human origins similar to the myths of other ancient peoples, and, of course, with
carbon dating of fossils, we know the world began much earlier than approximately
6,000 years ago.
Also, Genesis isn’t just about the beginning of the human race – it’s also about the
beginning of evil – about how and why sin and suffering entered human experience and
stayed there.”
Genesis has – two creation stories, the first in Genesis 1 and the second in Genesis 2.
Both share similarities with other creation myths of the ancient Near East but differ from
them in distinct ways.
The two creation accounts have different literary styles, scope, and organizational
principles. Genesis 1 describes the creation of the entire cosmos (heaven and earth)
over six days, with rest on the seventh day. Genesis 2 is a more straightforward
narrative in the formal sense, with a series of tensions and resolutions. And in contrast
to Genesis 1, which surveys the cosmos as a whole, Genesis 2 focuses on humanity on
the earth.
There is a different order of events in each. Both open with different (opposite)
descriptions of the initial state of the world. Genesis 1 starts with the earth inundated
with water (Gen 1:2), so that God has to separate the waters for the dry land to emerge
(Gen 1:9), Genesis 2 begins with the earth as a dry wilderness (Gen 2:5), until a stream
or mist emerges to provide water (Gen 2:6).
Genesis 1 has water first, then land, followed by plants, animals, and finally humans
(Adam, consisting in male and female together). By contrast, Genesis 2 begins with
land, then comes water, followed by a human (’adam, later specified as a man, ’iš), then
plants, animals, and finally a woman (’iššâ).
Is Genesis 1 a prologue, setting up the conditions for creation? from a literary
standpoint, this has an epic character, lacking dramatic development. The humans do
not actually govern the animals, or multiply and fill the earth until the 2nd creation story
which in contrast has dramatic tension, uncertainty and the unexpected.
Seven days
Each separate act of the first creation begins with the words “And God said, “let there
be…” followed by a naming or description of the particular creation along with a
numbering of the day and God’s judgement of its goodness; that is, God calls them into
existence and then assesses what has been produced:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was
good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and
the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first
day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.”
7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above
it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was
morning—the second day.
We might note certain problems of who is narrating “And God said …”? If the earth was
“without form and void” what is it then? Does it even have existence? And what is the
“spirit moving on the face of the deep”? One day is determined according to the
movement of the Sun, but the Sun is only created on the 4th day. The plants and trees
were created on the 3rd day – how could they precede the Sun? all of this then points to
a mythical account, rather than an account of physical creation, a cosmology integrated
into an account of the creation of the world that itself is based on age old themes.
Balanced pairing of days and works:
Day 1
Day 4
Light
Day 2
Separation of the waters and sky
Day 3
Dry lands, plants
Sun, moon and stars
Day 5
Water creatures, birds of the air
Day 6
Animals and human beings
Are there two phases here? Creation by the light and creation by the Sun – the first =
the principle of separation, the second by the principle of movement, connected by their
common elements – light (1&4), water (2 & 5), and land (3 & 6).
In Genesis 1, it states:
26 - Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they
may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the
wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. 2.2
The second account has man created from the dust of the earth. In the first he is the
ruler of the beasts, now the beasts are helpers and companions. Woman and man are
created in one act in the first; in the second, woman comes from the rib of man.
Friedrich Weinreb tells us that in contrast to our modern thinking which has a clear
separation between subject and object, in the mythic view of history expressed in the
Bible, there was no separation between physical and metaphysical. This means that
events occurring on the psychological or spiritual planes are described as concrete
events, similar to what he calls “dream pictures.” In a dream, meaning is given to
images connected to reality, but in the mythic view, there is no separation and the
concrete descriptions correspond to the metaphysical reality.
In the two accounts of the creation, separation of male and female is therefore more
abstract in the first version, but, in the second, it is a real, actual division.
When the woman appears, the female principle becomes dominant. Adam, expressing
the male principle, becomes passive and obeys the woman, becomes subordinate to
the female which determines the course of events.
The woman is a physical expression of the man, who is the soul or spirit; the
conversation between the serpent and the woman takes place within the man. The
body wants to take an independent path of development, persuading the spirit/soul to
follow. Awareness of physical body = moving away from God. Eating from the tree
meant man could now decide for himself, freeing his will, and be liberated from God.
From the Garden to the Tower
Following this account of creation, we confront questions of evil, death, division, strife,
suffering and freedom. Genesis 1 ends with the world is good: “And God saw
everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” After this of course things
start to go very bad. The original harmony of creation was disturbed and the order God
created out of chaos was disrupted, a story of alienation from God, from each other and
from the land.
Genesis 2:15 - The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it
and take care of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from
any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
It takes barely a paragraph before this one rule is broken, making the man and woman
at odds with one another, with the natural world, and with God. They have knowledge of
what they have done, become aware of their nakedness and feel full of shame.
Forbidden fruit –the first disobedience Genesis 3: 1-7 -Now the serpent was craftier than any of the wild animals the Lord God
had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree
in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but
God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and
you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that
when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good
and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the
eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave
some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them
were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and
made coverings for themselves.
Note – the serpent speaks accurately, the woman’s decision is thoughtful, she doesn’t
tempt or seduce Adam, his choice seems to be one of conscious solidarity with his
partner (cf. New Testament, 1 Tim. 2:14 reads, “Adam was not deceived, but the
woman was deceived and became a transgressor”). However, we can also note that
this has been interpreted socially as a warning to men against allowing their wives to
speak to strangers (“the snake in the grass”), historically suggesting the influence
women exert over men and the danger this represents (later we’ll see this with
Solomon).
Man’s original condition was in a state of affluence and ease (“a garden surrounded by
rivers”) and his present state is his own fault because of his transgression of the
prohibition. But man was created in the image of God. Was it therefore in his nature to
transgress, to want to be like God?
Original sin = eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but man must have
had some knowledge of good and evil to have the desire for this knowledge. What does
it mean to have knowledge of good and evil? That knowledge of such things =
understanding the nature of things. The first = obedience to divine revelation; the
second = life in human freedom. In order to have this man needs separation from the
Gods. But man Is not wholly autonomous, he is still subject to divine purpose, the laws
passed down from God, so we could say that the Bible still represents an expression of
the nature and character of man in the face of the mystery of the ways of God.
Consequences
According to the text, this act of disobedience had powerful consequences. All the ills
which had been absent from the Earthly Paradise – toil, pain, suffering, conflict, death –
were now realities.
Perspectives
Jewish and Christian interpretations.
Jewish – focus on questions such as: Is knowledge of good and evil preferable to
innocence? Is moral choice better than a state of innocence where nobody is tempted to
do evil? An affirmation of the importance of free will, of the capacity to choose between
good and evil.
Christian – a story of the “fall;” human beings’ fall from God’s grace into suffering and
sin. Adam and Eve’s disobedience is called the “original sin” and many Christians see
this as being passed down to all.
Romans 5:19 - For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the
obedience of one shall many be made righteous.
Adam and Eve’s disobedience brought physical and emotional suffering, moral evil, and
death into the world:
Milton:
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse
The phrase “original sin” now refers to both the first human’s act of disobedience and to
a flawed state of all humans after this act. The disobedience and the subsequent
expulsion from Eden are known as “The Fall” (of man).
In Henry V, Shakespeare compares attempted betrayal by his closest friends to this
first act of infidelity in the Bible, saying, “For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like/
Another fall of man” (Henry V, Act II, Scene ii, 152-153).
Note: images and themes related to this story have become part of the Western cultural
heritage, including ones that have been added later that are not part of the original
story; for example, the association of the serpent with Satan [The serpent in Genesis 3
is not called Satan. It’s only later in the history of the Hebrew Scriptures that a clear
notion of Satan as an adversary of God developed. (English “devil” comes from the
Greek word used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew word for Satan which means
“adversary.” Later, Jewish thought began to identify the serpent of Genesis with Satan
(eg, the Book of Wisdom 2:24). The notion of Satan developed earlier in Christian
thought where the angel Lucifer is believed to have rebelled against God and become
the leader of the other fallen angels and the enemy of humankind. The Book of
Revelation in the NT (20:2) specifically identifies Satan as a serpent); the apple as
“forbidden fruit” [the Adam’s apple name of the thyroid cartilage at the base of the throat
based on the legend that says a piece of the forbidden fruit lodged in Adam’s throat as a
warning of grief to come]; sexual connotations in the serpent’s “temptation of the man;
and the Christian terms the “fall of man” and “original sin.”
Literary influences- Emily Dickinson, Ode to My Family by The Cranberries.
We can find a number of archetypal motifs in the next 2 parts of Genesis (symbols,
characters or repeated plot patterns) These are 1. Sibling rivalry, 2. Crime and
punishment, 3. Murder, 4. Detective story, 5. The rejected one, 6. The guilty child, 7.
Innocent victims, 8. Expulsion, 9. The wanderer.
There are many similar patterns in G 3 and 4 – birth, work, a challenge from God, failure
to meet the challenge, God asking what’s going on, the consequences, including exile.
The themes are the same – the man and woman reject God, their son Cain rejects God.
There is human choice, a call to moral responsibility, sin, consequences, divine
patience, and judgement, and protection of rights afterwards.
The first murder
In Lecture 1, I mentioned the phrase “the primal eldest curse” as a Biblical allusion that
Shakespeare used in Hamlet as a reference to the story of Cain and Abel.
The fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis dramatizes the newly disrupted relationships
between human beings with an account of the first fratricide, the murder of a brother by
a brother:
Genesis 4: 2 Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. 3 In the course of time
Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. 4 And Abel also
brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked
with favor on Abel and his offering, 5 but on Cain and his offering he did not look with
favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.
6 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you
do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is
crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”
8 Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.”[d] While they were in the
field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
This is a narrative that echoes through Western literature. The American writer, Johnn
Steinbeck, who used Genesis 3-4 as inspiration for his novel, East of Eden (1952)
explained the power of the story:
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, … Humans are caught — in
their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty,
and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the
only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. There is no
other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left
only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill? As
I went into the story [of East of Eden] more deeply I began to realize that without this
story [of Cain and Abel]—or rather a sense of it—psychiatrists would have nothing to
do. In other words, this one story is the basis of all human neurosis—and if you take the
fall along with it, you have the total of the psychic troubles that can happen to a human."
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.
It was so important to Steinbeck that at one point he proposed to his publisher that the
book be called Cain Sign.
Am I My Brother's Keeper?
According to the Bible, Cain was the first murderer in history, killing his brother because
he felt jealous. Although the Bible gives no reason for why God chooses Abel's sacrifice
over Cain's, Cain's violence is sparked by anger at the rejection of his gift, and jealousy
and resentment toward his brother. As a result, not only does he kill, he lies. As
punishment, he is condemned to "till the ground" fruitlessly and to be "a restless
wanderer." His mark is not a curse, but a protective sign of God's enduring care.
Cain replies to God’s offer to explain his actions with the ironic question:
Am I my brother's keeper?
Genesis 4:9 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,”
he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Joseph Telushkin, a contemporary Jewish scholar, wrote: “It is no exaggeration to say
that much of the rest of the Bible reads as an affirmative response to Cain’s heartless
question.” Cain’s response is an effort to evade or deceive God. Biblical tradition
directly connects sin with falsehood, an inability to face who we are and what we have
done. God, however, is not fooled:
Genesis 4:10 -The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries
out to me from the ground.
According to Genesis, humans are responsible for each other, they are their brother’s
keepers and liable for the consequences of abdicating that responsibility. Cain receives
both punishment (exile) and mercy. The “mark of Cain,” although often considered a
mark of shame, is a sign of God’s protection so that Cain will not suffer the same fate as
his brother.
Interpretation
Genesis 4 may recreate Israel’s early struggles between agriculture and animal
husbandry. There’s no rationale given for God’s rejection of Cain’s sacrifice though.
Cain – tragic or evil?
1. The account may favor animal sacrifices over harvest offerings. Supporting this view is
its insistence on the potency of blood.
2. Was Abel’s sacrifice more fitting because he brings “of the firstlings of his flock and of
their fat portions” while Cain brings just “An offering of the fruit of the ground” (4:3–4)?
3. Cain, the founder of the first city and, therefore, of sustainable agricultural produce,
prevails, but his pastoral brother remains (nostalgically?) mourned.
4. The notion of primogeniture, followed here, is contradicted by later biblical stories. In the
Old Testament/Tanakh, birth order is less important than one’s merit and divine
sponsorship. Jacob and Esau/ Ishmael and Isaac.
From bad to worse
The word “Nod” means “wandering” in Hebrew. The phrase “the land of nod” now
means a state of sleep maybe because your thoughts wander and your head nods.
Cain married, had a son named Enoch, and built the first city. The descendants of Cain
included artisans and murderers, the inventors of metalwork and music, and animal
husbandry, but also the perpetuators of violence and vengeance. There is a section of
genealogies in Genesis 5 listing all the descendants, emphasizing the great age people
live to, in contrast with the shortness of human life after the flood, when God sets a limit
of the human life span. Virtue was in short supply among early humans, even as their
level of sophistication and civilization grows. God grows frustrated and decides to wipe
the slate clean. He finds just one righteous family and decides to preserve this family
from destruction together with the animals.
Genesis 6: 5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become
on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil
all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his
heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the
human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that
move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in
the eyes of the Lord.”
This situation leads to the story of Noah, which we will look at in the next lecture.
Lecture 2
The first part of Genesis is almost entirely myth– the two creation stories, Adam and
Eve, Cain and Abel, the sons and daughters, Noah and the Ark together with some
genealogy, which I’m not really going to deal with. They are symbolically rich
narratives about archetypical characters set in some primeval time dealing with the
origin and nature of humanity in relation to the divine.
I noted some qualities of the first creation story – its symmetry/balanced presentation of
the order of creation, how it progresses from the heavenly to the human, an orderly,
harmonious picture of creation, that is fairly abstract.
The second creation then reverses the order to start with the earth and humanity,
suggesting a shift from the divine perspective of perfect order and harmony to the
human and earthly realm of history. It also changes into a dramatic narrative
introducing division, and separation and the story moves toward disorder and
disjunction – banishment from Eden and dissociation from God. Following this is the
story of transgression and exile in Cain and Abel then to what we could call the ultimate
story of exile from God in which all of the people in the newly formed race of humans as
well as the animals and everything else will die (apart from a select few).
This is the story of Noah’s Ark, a story I’m sure you are all familiar with.
Noah’s is only one of many ancient Near Eastern and Greek deluge tales;
Many ancient cultures have their own legends of a great flood that destroys all humans.
Syrian, Sumerian, Greek, Babylonian, Chinese, Persian and even the Estonian, Irish,
American Indian, Toltec creation stories all include a variant of the flood story. A
universal flood is part of the mythology and legend of almost every culture on earth.
The Greek version is told in the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha.
The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic which I talked about last time also has a flood story. In
this version, Utnapishtim saved human and animal and plant life in the great boat he
built, he and his wife were the only ones to escape death, and because of this were
later deified by the god Enlil. Because Utnapishtim survives the flood later Gilgamesh
consults him about the secret of immortality.
Comparisons between Utnapishtim and Noah indicate a shared mythic structure.
That is,
1. Both were warned by gods about the flood, and told to build boats. Utnapishtim’s is a
cube, but the design is in both cases divinely given.
2. Both give exact dimensions for building the boat.
3. Both survive a flood caused by rain descending from the vault of the heavens and
subterranean waters coming up (the cosmology promoted by Gen. 1). The earth is
being un-created and dissolving into watery chaos.
4. Both arrive on a mountain and offer sacrifices. In the Gilgamesh epic, the gods
“Smelled the savor, smelled the sweet savor; the gods crowded like flies about the
sacrificer.” Gen. 8:21 reads: “When YHWH smelled the pleasing odor, he said in his
heart: ‘I will never again curse the ground…’”
5. Both release birds – dove, and raven to bring a sign of land after the boat is left on a
mountain top.
It’s not therefore a unique story, but shows that myths of the flood are far older than
Noah or the Bible. The translation of ancient cuneiform tablets in the 19th century
confirmed the Mesopotamian flood myth as an antecedent of the Noah story in the
Bible.
Many of these motifs are common in flood myths around the world. From 200 creation
myths, Morris [40, p. 4] found the similarities
Event Percent that Contain
1. Catastrophe a flood only, not other type 95%
2. Was flood global? 95%
3. A favored family saved? 88%
4. Was the rainbow mentioned? 75%
5. Was survival due to a boat? 70%
6. Were animals also saved? 67%
7. Was flood due to wickedness of mankind? 66%
8. Were they forewarned? 66%
9. Did survivors land on a mountain? 57%
10. Were birds sent out? 35%
These stories typically have two common themes: (1) the flood is used as a form of
punishment and (2) the flood myth is often linked to a creation story as the destruction
caused by the flood leads to a purified creation, a recreation. This is exactly what is
found in the Biblical account.
And what this suggests is that we are dealing with a universal archetype or the faded
and embellished memory of a real event that was experienced by ancestors sometime.
So, the story of Noah must have predated Noah and be a retelling of a much older story
or event, but it is a retelling that transforms this universal myth into a story that fulfills
the purpose of the Hebrew tradition. Which is why expeditions to try and find remnants
of the ark on Mount Arafat or elsewhere, based on a literal interpretation of the story,
are fool’s errands and reports of its discovery such as this one, are nonsense.
Let’s look at that story now.
The first thing we can note is that the story is in fact two stories woven together. It’s
accepted that these two versions were written at quite different times – the first in the
early time of the Hebrew kings (about 800 or 900 BCE) and the second after 586 BC
when Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar. As a result, many details are
repetitious or contradictory, such as how long the flood lasted (40 days according to
Genesis 7:17, 150 according to 7:24), how many animals were to be taken aboard the
Ark (one pair of each in 6:19, one pair of the unclean animals and seven pairs of the
clean in 7:2), and whether Noah released a raven which "went to and fro until the waters
were dried up" or a dove which on the third occasion "did not return to him again," or
possibly both. Here’s the text itself … (3 slides)
If we look at this a little closer, we find that, on one hand, there is a year-long sequence
of events: the Flood comes in the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah’s six
hundredth year; the waters rose for a hundred and fifty days (Gen 7:24), that is, for five
months, and the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat on the seventeenth day of the
seventh month (Gen 8:4); on the first day of the tenth month, the mountains appeared;
on Noah’s birthday, the first day of the first month of his six hundred and first year, the
water began to dry up (8:13); and finally, on the twenty-seventh day of the second
month—almost exactly one year after the waters first arrived—the earth was dry again.
This is okay until we see that there is time that is unaccounted for: the “forty days and
forty nights” that the rain fell according to Gen 7:12, which is mentioned again in 8:6 as
somehow coinciding with the first day of the tenth month. Thus, forty days became,
miraculously, seven and a half months. Then there are the seven days in which Noah
waited for the dove to return, and the seven days after that (8:10–12).
Another point we can consider – as soon as Noah gets off the ark, he starts to build an
altar and offer animal sacrifices to God. This seems inconsistent with God’s instructions
to Noah to take the animals “to keep alive with you.” Even worse, just before Noah
sacrifices the animals (8:20),
God had just told him to bring the animals out “and let them swarm on the earth and be
fruitful
and multiply” (8:17). (2 slides)
So there are two birds, two origins of the waters, two calendrical systems. And when the
opposing pairs are separated, it turns out that two narratives, each of which is also
consistent in terms of literary style – seen in the different use of vocabulary in each.
What, then, are these two Flood stories? According to the first, Noah is a good man
with three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and the rest of the earth is corrupted and
violent. God instructs Noah to build the ark and take two of each living thing, and Noah
does so, and in the six hundredth year of his life, Noah goes into the ark with his wife,
his sons, and his sons’ wives. The waters come from above and below, and
rise until everything dies; after a hundred and fifty days, God remembers Noah and
sends a wind to drive back the waters. Eventually the ark comes to rest on Ararat, and
Noah sends out the raven, which flies around until the waters have dried up entirely.
Finally, God tells Noah to come
out of the ark, and tells everything to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth; God
makes a few new rules regarding the consumption of meat, something new; and finally,
God makes a covenant with Noah and his sons that there will be no
more floods, with the rainbow serving as the sign of the covenant.
This story describes the undoing of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis. The
waters that were carefully separated by God to reveal the earth, those waters that are
above and below the world we know, are released, returning the earth to its pre-creation
chaos. Once again it is a divine wind that marks the end of the chaos. The re-creation of
the world is announced with the same divine blessing, be fruitful and multiply. There is
the reference in this story to God making humanity in God’s image, straight out of
Genesis 1. And now humans are allowed to eat meat, although with restrictions.
The second story begins with God recognizing that humanity is inherently wicked—but
that Noah is okay. So, Noah takes his seven pairs of clean and one pair of unclean
animals, and the rain comes for forty days and forty nights, and everything on earth
dies. At the end of the forty days, Noah sends out the dove, three times, and when it
finally doesn’t return, Noah opens the ark and sees that everything is dry. He builds an
altar and sacrifices animals. When God smells the sacrifices, God swears not to bring a
Flood again: there is the divine recognition that though humanity may be inherently
wicked, humanity also serves a purpose, in that it is only humans who are capable of
providing God with sacrifices. Maybe God has recognized that humans are imperfect
and that those imperfections must be tolerated.
So the two Flood stories, intertwined in Genesis 6–9, are each complete, continuous,
and internally consistent. It seems that there were in ancient Israel (at least) two
independent narratives of the Flood. We also know, of course, that these were not the
only Flood stories being told in the ancient Near East, or around the world. As we have
seen, virtually every culture has its Flood story, suggesting there may be some historical
truth behind the narrative, that there may in fact have been some prehistoric
catastrophic flood event, the memory of which was preserved and transmitted in
cultures across the globe.
It seems clear that both these stories come from the Mesopotamian traditions (where
flooding was, and continues to be, a serious problem), not ancient Israel where they
have the opposite problem – lack of water.
So, the flood is a reversal and renewal of God's creation of the world. In Genesis 1 God
separates the "waters above the earth" from those below so that dry land can appear as
a home for living things, but in the flood story the "windows of heaven" and "fountains of
the deep" are opened so that the world is returned to the watery chaos of the time
before creation. Even the sequence of flood events mimics that of creation, the flood
first covering the earth to the highest mountains, then destroying, in order, birds, cattle,
beasts, "swarming creatures", and finally mankind. (This parallels the Babylonian flood
story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where at the end of rain "all of mankind had returned to
clay," the substance of which they had been made. In narrative terms, Noah is
presented as a new Adam that recovers the original creation and restores the relation
between humans and God.
The world seems to be recreated after the flood and when Noah emerges from the ark,
we find words echoing the language of the first creation story:
God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and
their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the
animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the
earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
15 Then
A rainbow sign
When the rains cease, the waters began to recede and the ark finally comes to rest,
God blessed Noah and his sons, repeating the original command to humankind,
Genesis 8:15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and
your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the
birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can
multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
9 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in
number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the
earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground,
and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and
moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you
everything.
This is the first covenant between God and humans.
Genesis 9:8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my
covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature
that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came
out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with
you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there
be a flood to destroy the earth.”
12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you
and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set
my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the
earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds,
15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every
kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the
rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant
between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between
me and all life on the earth.”
Across both cultures and in all versions, there is one consistent element of the Flood
story. It marks the transition from the age before to the age of the present. In the biblical
accounts in particular, this transition is indicated by God’s changed attitude toward
humanity: the acceptance of what humanity is and how we behave. Maybe the “fall” in
Genesis, occurs here rather than in the Garden as it seems that now there no going
back to the Garden, and also no expectation that we ever should.
Before I go on, I’d like to consider the question: could there really have been a real flood
in the Middle East at some earlier time? Could the story of Noah be literally true?
Did the European glaciers melt and the Mediterranean Sea overflow with a fast-moving
wall of floodwater, or was there a tsunami at some point earlier in history and all these
myths express in a stylized way the great destruction it caused?
The problem with this is that there is no geological evidence for a catastrophe of this
magnitude. In his Collected Essays, Huxley noted that a deluge that wiped out the
whole world drowning all men and animals conflicts with the basic understanding of
geology and therefore can only be a fable and not an account of a real flood. I will
consider some of the evidence for this now. The term for trying to account for an actual
flood occurring in the past is flood geology and flood geology contradicts a variety of
facts in many scientific disciplines - geology, stratigraphy, geophysics, physics,
paleontology, biology, anthropology, and archeology.
For example, in contrast to the catastrophism inherent in flood geology, the science of
geology relies on established principle of uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism explains
the formation of the Earth's features by means of mostly slow-acting forces seen in
operation today. In contrast, there is a lack of evidence for the catastrophic mechanisms
proposed by flood geologists, and scientists do not take their claims seriously.
A literal interpretation of the Flood story in Genesis implies certain physical
consequences which can be tested against what we actually observe, and the
implications of such an interpretation can be investigated: (1) using wood for the ark –
the ark was 450 feet long. Wood is simply not strong enough to prevent separation
between the joints. From a technical, engineering point of view, this would have been
difficult, if not impossible to hold together in rough seas,
(2) gathering the animals – how could animals like sloths and penguins travel to the
Middle East; what about koalas and kangaroos? Yaks and polar bears? Insects, snails,
slugs, earthworms?
(3) loading them and having space for the animals - getting all the animals aboard the
Ark presents huge logistical problems. An ark of the size specified in the Bible would not
be large enough to carry a cargo of animals and food sufficient to repopulate the earth,
especially if animals that are now extinct were required to be aboard.
(4) caring for the animals – food, sanitation, exercise, water. Many animals have
special diets (koalas, silkworms) – How did Noah gather all those plants aboard, and
where did he put them?
Many animals require their food to be fresh. Many snakes, for example, will eat only live
foods (or at least warm and moving). How did Noah keep all these food supplies fresh?
Food spoilage is a major concern on long voyages. The ark would need to be well
ventilated to disperse the heat and humidity, and How did such a small crew dispose of
all the animal waste? How were several thousand diverse kinds of animals exercised
regularly? How did a crew of eight manage a menagerie larger and more diverse than
that found in zoos requiring many times that many employees?
(5) where did all the water come from?
(6) geological evidence of a flood - Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core
series? Ice cores from Greenland? traces on the sea floors? in tree ring dating?
(7) fossil records (8) survival of modern plant species, fish, coral, fish predators - Many plants (seeds and
all) would be killed by being submerged for a few months, How did all the fish that don’t
live in the ocean survive? The Flood would have destroyed the food and shelter which
most species need to survive.
(9) animal ranges – e.g., how did koalas get from Ararat to Australia, polar bears to the
Arctic? (10) How did the human population rebound so fast? Genealogies in Genesis
put the Tower of Babel about 110 to 150 years after the Flood [Gen 10:25, 11:10-19].
How did the world population regrow so fast to make its construction (and the city
around it) possible? Similarly, there would have been very few people around to build
Stonehenge and the Pyramids, rebuild the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilizations,
populate the Americas, etc., (11) If God is omnipotent, why not kill what He wanted
killed directly? Why resort to a roundabout method that requires innumerable additional
miracles? http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
This points to the most likely scenario, that as I mentioned before, the two stories are an
account that seeks to explain and give support to the origin of the divine mission god
had planned for the Hebrews and the covenant he wished to make with them.
The children of Noah
From here, the descendants of Noah populated the Earth. According to Jewish
tradition, Shem and his children were considered the ancestors of Middle Eastern and
Asian peoples, Japeth the ancestor of Europeans, and Ham and his children the
ancestor of Africans.
Another fall: We find that Noah created wine, became the first man to get drunk, and
what happens next is indeterminate. We are told that Ham saw his father uncovered
and informed his brothers Shem and Japhet; the brothers, walking backward in order
not to see him, cover him.
9:20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of
its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of
Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and
Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward
and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that
they would not see their father naked.
24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to
him, 25 he said,
“Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.”
1. “When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said ‘Cursed
be Canaan’” (Gen. 9:25). What was “done”? Why curse Canaan? Well, Canaan comes up again later as
the land promised to the Israelites and which they invade and take over, but the rest is a mystery.
People scattered
The first ten chapters of Genesis account for humanity’s origins. Next, an account is
given of how the people who came from one family became spilt into many separate
communities that misunderstand one another: The story of the Tower of Babel.
This story closes the part of Genesis that deals with the whole of humanity and is a
reversal of chapter 1. Instead of creation and unity, now there is the language of divide
and scatter. This kind of inverted symmetry (chiasm) is a feature of biblical narrative.
Genesis 11:1-9 sets the stage for a major change in the focus of the scriptures – the
narrative now leaves behind the scattered nations and takes up the story of one family,
one nation, one chosen people.
Genesis 11:1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As
people moved from the east, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They
used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build
ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a
name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The
Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this,
then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and
confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building
the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the
language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the
whole earth.
Historical aspects of the story
Genesis 10:10 states that Babel (LXX: Βαβυλών) formed part of Nimrod's kingdom. The
Bible does not specifically mention that Nimrod ordered the building of the tower, but
many other sources have associated its construction with Nimrod (son of Cush and
great-grandson of Noah) which led to his reputation as a king who was rebellious
against God.
Genesis 11:9 attributes the Hebrew version of the name, Babel, to the verb balal, which
means to confuse or confound in Hebrew. The first century Roman-Jewish author
Flavius Josephus similarly explained that the name was derived from the Hebrew word
Babel (‫)בבל‬, meaning "confusion".
The Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (c. 94 CE),
recounted history as found in the Hebrew Bible and mentioned the Tower of Babel. He
wrote that it was Nimrod who had the tower built and that Nimrod was a tyrant who tried
to turn the people away from God. In this account, God confused the people rather than
destroying them because annihilation with a Flood had not taught them to be godly.
Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was
the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He
persuaded them not to ascribe it to God as if it were through his means they were
happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He
also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning
men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power...
Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod and to esteem
it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any
pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude
of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than anyone could expect; but the
thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height
seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick,
cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit
water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them
utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners [in the
Flood]; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages,
and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to
understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon,
because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the
Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion. The Sibyl also makes mention of this
tower, and of the confusion of the language, when she says thus: "When all men were
of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to
heaven; but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave everyone
a peculiar language; and for this reason, it was that the city was called Babylon."
How many languages?
The literal belief that the world's linguistic variety originated with the tower of Babel is
contrary to the known facts about the origin and history of languages. In the biblical
introduction of the Tower of Babel account, in Genesis 11:1, it is said that everyone on
Earth spoke the same language, but this is inconsistent with the biblical description of
the post-Noahic world described in Genesis 10:5, where it is said that the descendants
of Shem, Ham, and Japheth gave rise to different nations, each with their own
language: 26.
There are several mediaeval historiographic accounts that attempt to make an
enumeration of the languages scattered at the Tower of Babel. Because a count of all
the descendants of Noah listed by name in chapter 10 of Genesis (LXX) provides 15
names for Japheth's descendants, 30 for Ham's, and 27 for Shem's, these figures
became established as the 72 languages resulting from the confusion at Babel—
although the exact listing of these languages changed over time.
So there is an inconsistency between Genesis 10 where we find many languages and
Genesis 11 where there is one common language - quotes.
Linguistic considerations
Comparative studies have failed to produce much supportive evidence for the theory of
monogenesis or one original source. Instead, they suggest that there are at least 12
major linguistic families. The truth of this is further obscured by the fact that a single
language will undergo so many changes during a few thousand years that any
connection between it and other languages stemming from the same source would
become untraceable without corroborating evidence. So the present evidence for
monogenesis or polygenesis is at best rather inconclusive.
Have you ever wondered what language Adam and Eve spoke? According to Genesis
11, only one language was spoken until the Lord destroyed the Tower of Babel and
created a multiplicity of tongues (Gen. 11; 1, 9). Throughout most of human history the
story of the Tower of Babel has been sacrosanct, and with it, the belief that Hebrew was
the original language of mankind. While it is true that the Bible was first written in
Hebrew and that Christ spoke Aramaic--a derivative of Hebrew - linguistic scientists
have been unable to find in this language any characteristics which would identify it as
the prototype of the three thousand languages spoken in the world today.
Literary aspects of the story
The story uses parallelism. The first 4 verses deal with the people and their ambitions,
The turning point is in the fifth verse when God sees what they are doing. the last four
verses describe God frustrating those ambitions. There is also a parallel structure in the
verses. The first two verses are strictly narrative, describing what the people are doing.
Verses 8 and 9 are also narration, describing God’s response to the actions. The
beginning and end of the account is also linked by the descriptions in and out of Shinar.
Verses 3 and 4, like 6 and 7, use dialogue to portray human ambitions and God’s
response to those ambitions. The symmetry highlights the relationship between the form
of the people’s transgression and the penalty they faced.
The story also has a number of repetitions from earlier stories, the theme of alienation
from and the desire of reunion with the divine. I mentioned before that after the flood
these was no more expectation of returning to the Garden of Eden, to the state of
innocence, but maybe this story is one last attempt. Cain traveled east of Eden, but now
the people move “from the east,” reversing the direction of Cain, suggesting a desire to
return to Eden.
The story of the Tower of Babel is about the difference and distance of humanity from
God. The language of the divine creation in Genesis 1 “And God said” seems to be
mocked here with the repetition of this original phrase of creation when they say “Let us
make…” Adam and Eve had disobeyed God’s divine commandment not to eat of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge (of good and evil), presuming to become godlike
themselves through attaining such wisdom. And the descendants of Noah build their
tower in Babel because they want to create something lasting that will immortalize their
‘name’ or reputation, rather than God’s. For such hubris, they have their hopes (and
their tower) dashed to pieces. The great promise of humans has led to constant
disappointment it seems.
Next week we will see if they can do any better when we will take up the story of Abram
and Sarai, Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. For this you will need to read to
the end of Genesis from Genesis 12-50.
Recall: (1) According to Genesis, why were the first humans driven out of the garden of
Eden? (2) What are the major differences in the ways that Jews and Christians view
the events of Genesis 3? (3) How do the narratives of Cain and Abel, the great flood,
and the Tower of Babel reflect the biblical understanding of the consequences of sin?