 Psychologist Frank Kyle found that when you ask people how well they know and could explain something that's complicated but familiar, they tend to vastly overestimate their knowledge. He uses the example of the engineering of a helicopter. People tend to think they could explain with the level of detail you see in the diagram on the left, but when they actually try to explain it, they tend to convey a much more basic picture like the diagram on the right. The blade spins and picks up the helicopter, but we kind of run out of explanation at that point. The reason for this is that when something is familiar, we mistake that familiarity with a detailed understanding. So I can use this computer to put slides together and record this video. That might lead me to assume that I know computers much better than I actually do. So if I have to open the Windows registry and edit the code, I'm probably going to cause more problems than I solved. Kyle caused this faulty confidence to the illusion of knowledge. Part of the reason the illusion of knowledge is so prevalent is that we are uncomfortable not knowing something. We all have some degree of a need for closure. Unclosure is that comforting sense that what we know already is all we need to know. If we're confronted with a lack of knowledge, we immediately reach for some answer and we are not usually that careful about what sources we consult. The first page of Google results usually tends to satisfy our need for closure. But then once we have that answer, we tend to fall back into that illusion of knowledge. We have a psychologist Linda Richter and Ari Kruglansky called this seizing and freezing. We want simple answers that are general enough to apply to a variety of situations so we don't have to keep revising those answers. And of course we want other people to validate those answers. We tend to dislike people who tell us we're wrong even if we are wrong. But remember that the difference between great literature and popular literature is the extent to which it de-familiarizes what it describes. It forces us to suspend our generalizations and our sense of closure and look even at familiar things or things that we think are familiar more closely. That's why in this class so far we have been looking at literature from a different historical cultural context, very different than our own. And we have had to read this literature in a form that is different than the forms we're used to. We may be used to novels or short stories rather than broken clay tablets. This requires us to recognize that our ideas about what literature is only suffice to explain a relatively small part of the large body of world literature. Now as we begin to closely examine the biblical literature of Genesis we may be tempted to fall back on that feeling of closure and familiarity. But this literature comes from a world that is closer to the Mesopotamian world of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis than it is to our 21st century American cultural world. That's why for this lecture it's very important that you know all the concepts we've discussed so far this semester. Notice that these terms are in blue rather than red. I'll put the term in red the first time I introduce it. But after that I'm just going to mark it blue so you don't think this is a new term that you need to learn for the first time. But it is something that you need to have already in your notes. It's also very important that you have read the texts of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh as they are printed in Stephanie Daly's edition of Myths from Mesopotamia. That means that you've read the individual tablets of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis rather than a popular press edition that fills in the breaks in these texts for you, like the Stephen Mitchell version. If you've read Daly's edition you have the experience with redaction, both reading someone else's redaction and having to assemble the discordant sources yourself in order to figure out what the coherent story is, namely the standard Babylonian versions and the old Babylonian versions of Gilgamesh. If you've kept up in this way with both the concepts and the application of those concepts, then this lecture should make sense, but if you haven't, then most of what I'm about to say about Genesis will probably not make much sense at all. So hold on while I'm going to race through some of the things we've learned already. Remember that we narrativize reality. We pass on a version of the past encapsulated in a cultural form, and generally that cultural form is a narrative, and that narrative is going to have individual protagonists and antagonists exercising personal agency to overcome conflict, as opposed to an analysis of a systemic structure, like a broader historical or cultural force or economic force. Narratives make reality easier to understand, but they simplify reality in the process. When we're confronted with new facts or new stories, we interpret them by trying to fit them into familiar stories. That's a lot easier than having to reorganize our whole system of knowledge to accommodate this new unfamiliar information, but it means that we don't notice the difference between the new thing and the thing in our heads. That simplification enables us to generalize, to rearrange reality in our imaginations in order to simulate and predict possible future events, and to communicate with people whose experiences have not been exactly like our own. But that abstraction and simplification usually involves adding explanations about causes and effects or intentions of other people that we cannot actually know for sure. Abstracting and simplifying reality into a narrative has a purpose, but it also has a side effect. It makes us think we know more than we actually do. The narrative fallacy happens when we think we know why, but we actually only know what. We know the effects, but we jump to the wrong conclusions about the causes. Even when we look directly at a text, we tend to project things from our own heads and our own personal experience or personal context that are not in the book in front of us. We think we know that Dr. Frankenstein cackled It's Alive after he and his hunchback assistant Igor brought his creature to life with a lightning machine. However, none of these things, other than Frankenstein, who's not a doctor, Victor Frankenstein and his creature are the only things that are actually in the text. The rest comes from the Hollywood version starting with the 1931 movie by John Whale. None of these are in Mary Shelley's novel. Most of what we think about the novel, Frankenstein, comes from these later iterations with vastly different elements and sort of moral explanations. The Frankenstein movies we've seen are our personal context and we should not confuse that personal context with the text itself or with the novel's historical context in early 19th century Europe. We have to use some sort of context in order to fill the gaps in a text, whether these gaps are actually left over from broken clay fragments or if they're just things the author didn't bother to describe because he or she assumes you already know this. We have to fill in these gaps to make sense of this ambiguous new information, but we have to be careful about which context we derive this information from. When you're reading for personal enjoyment, by all means, interpret the text as you see fit. But remember that while personal context may be relevant to you personally, academic literary scholarship interprets the text using its historical context. And some interpretations fit that historical context better than others, even if they're totally unfamiliar to us personally. And that's never a simple task because we have different schemata. We don't always know that we're importing the wrong schema into interpreting a text. Even when we try to remember a narrative verbatim, we unconsciously familiarize it by adding our own schemata and we add explanations to rationalize the events it describes. Our memories don't work like video cameras, instead, we carry scripts and schemas and we use them to fill in these gaps and as a result it's hard to notice when a new text doesn't cohere with those expectations. Okay, now with that said, I know that some people may feel threatened by the very idea of applying the tools of literary criticism to a reading of the Bible. I certainly did myself when I was an undergraduate. Many people will say that the Bible is a matter of belief, not something that should be subjected to critical evaluation. So first we should specify what we mean by belief. When we use the word belief, we use it in a variety of ways. I want to disambiguate two of those ways. One type of belief is called creedal belief. The word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which is a first person verb, not a noun. It literally means I believe. It's the first word of the Nicene creed, you know, credo in unum deum, patrim omnipotem, I believe in one God, the Father omnipotent, maker of heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible. It's the first word of the Nicene creed, which is a public statement of whose words were chosen after much debate in the Catholic Church's First Council of Nicaea in 325 in the Common Era. It's recited by an individual in order to express belief held in common with a particular identity group. It's chosen and held not through testing hypothesis against counter evidence, but it's something that supersedes facts. Credo belief should not be confused with contingent belief. Contingent belief is a belief that is subjected to testing and must be revised or abandoned if it cannot be supported by the total available evidence. Credo belief is something that is relevant to theology. If you have a certain dogma or doctrine that you're sure is in the Bible, use that to read that text. But that's a different element of study or different method of study than what's called religious studies. If you take a religious studies class in a university as opposed to in a seminary, in a university religious studies class, it's going to be focused on contingent belief. What is actually in the text? How does that best cohere with the context of its history and the people that produced it rather than how does it apply to us now in our personal context? But everybody has credo beliefs, even people who are not religious. We believe in things like peace and human rights, and these are things that cannot be disproven by empirical testing. We hold on to belief in peace even in the midst of a war, and we believe in human rights and an open society, even if that makes us vulnerable to those who don't share those beliefs. So in this class, and any critical study of religious texts, these do not require you to alter your credo beliefs. All you have to do for this class is two things. Understand how the majority of modern scholars that is religious studies scholars read the text and why they read it that way. So it's not just a claim, it's a claim with the reason that explains the evidence. It's important to know all of these things, not just the end result, not saying that, well, scholars say is not enough. What I'm going to try to do as much as I can in a brief period of time is say, here's what they believe and here's how they came to that belief. And the second thing is to understand how scholars believe the text was composed and what led them to think that. Now, there are some beliefs about the Bible that everyone would agree are false even if they seem intuitively true at first. There's an old story that has been misapplied and reused and attributed to people even in the last few years, but it actually dates back to the 1880s when a new version of the Bible, not exactly a new translation, but an editing of an older translation was in production and people were trying to go to different churches and gather money to finance the publication of this new edition. And an old farmer stands up and says, hey, what's the matter with the good old King James version? It was good enough for Saint Paul and it's good enough for me. And this is comical because we realize, okay, the King James version was not something that Paul or Saul of Tarsus would have known anything about. He spoke Coine Greek and could have read classical Hebrew. But the King James seems old. It seems authentic. It's familiar to us because it has this sort of this language that we only use in a ritualized or, you know, in a holy context. Very similar to Shakespeare, too. But we, you know, notice how we sort of hold Shakespeare not as canonical religious literature, but as something that's sort of higher than everything else. And it's the difference in its language makes it seem that way. But the King James Bible sounds like Shakespeare because it comes from Shakespeare's time between the year 1604 and 1611. King James commissioned a team of scholars to translate it. Now, before that, we had the Vulgate Bible. This is the Latin Bible that's been used by the Catholic Church and other churches that was translated originally from the Hebrew and Greek texts into Latin in the year 382 by Saint Jerome. And it was not actually declared canonical by the Catholic Church until the Council of Trent in 1545 or, you know, the Council that ended in 1563. The oldest copy of it goes back a long ways, but it goes back to the year 692 in the Common Era or AD. That's still when we're thinking about things that happened 3,000 years ago. That doesn't seem like it's that far after all. Now, before that, or we know that obviously the the Bible was written in Hebrew, but our oldest Hebrew text for which we have a manuscript is the Aleppo Codex that goes back to 900 CE. At least that was the case until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back to between 270 BCE, you know, before the Common Era. But these really rediscovered in 1947 and they confirm some of the things that are in older versions of the Bible or the versions that we're familiar with, but they're also different in some ways as well. So, not entirely, not a perfect match. And this is important because it makes us rethink our conventional assumptions about the book itself. A Codex, a book that binds all these pages together, and we assume because all those pages are bound together that they all originated at the same time. They all come from the same author or the same sort of process. But the very word Bible itself comes to us through its use, not as in its original Greek singular term, Biblos, but through the Latin term Biblia, in the Greek term before that, which was a translation of the Hebrew word used, that meant books. And that word comes from the city of Biblos in modern day Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast north of Israel. And Biblos was an important city because it produced the types of papyrus needed to write something down. But the references in the Bible to Ta Biblia, in other words to the books, do not refer to the Bible as we have it today. And they don't even refer specifically to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. It may include some or all of these books, but it also seems to include books that we no longer have in our possession. Numbers 21-14 refers to a book called The Book of the Wars of Yahweh. Joshua 10-13 and 2 Samuel 1-18 refer to the Book of the Upright. The books of Kings and Chronicles, which we do have, themselves refer to the Book of the Acts of Solomon and the Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel, none of which have been passed down to us, but seem to be things that were referred to as Ta Biblia, as some of the books. That means that no matter how far back we go, we never have an Ur text. We never have that one original, the Bible. Instead, we have different iterations, different translations, and translations of translations of translations, which have a pretty good fidelity, considering the amount of time over which they're being copied. But the fidelity isn't perfect. There are changes we see between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex. Changes in translation, but also changes in what gets added, what gets left out. Each of these are iterations, so that we can understand what we're talking about. If the word Bible itself isn't going to help us, we are focusing on what Christians call the Old Testament. But keep in mind, Jews still use this as their holy book today, and it's not old to them. It's still contemporary. So I'll refer to it as the Hebrew Bible or as the Tanakh. Tanakh is an acronym for the three different sections of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible. The first is the Torah, which means teaching or instruction or law, and that's the first five books. Then there's the Niveim, that's the prophets. These are books like Joshua judges, first and second Samuel, first and second Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the minor prophets. Then there's the Kethuvim, which translates as something like writings, and it sort of means like everything else. Miscellaneous, you know, Psalms and Proverbs, which are, you know, the forms of those are different because Psalms has lots of different songs. Proverbs is individual aphorisms that were, you know, part of the oral tradition that were written down on one place. Then there's like the Book of Job, which is itself a narrative, and then there's first and second Chronicles, which are histories. We will frequently use the word Pentateuch, which is Greek for five books to describe the Torah, because the word Torah has meant different things. So in the Bible itself, frequently is used to mean a reference to the oral tradition. Things that were taught orally, or the law that was passed down orally, that may or may not have been written down at the time that that reference is used. So the Hebrew word Torah originally meant teaching or instruction, but throughout the first millennium BCE, it slowly began to mean the written text. It would be referred to as the Torah of Moses during the Second Temple period, which is after the Babylonian captivity. The reason that the Greek word Pentateuch has come to describe the Hebrew text is that during the last few centuries before the Common Era, after the Middle East was conquered by the Greek Alexander the Great, most of the educated people in Israel mostly spoke Greek. That's why we call the first book of the Torah Genesis, even though Genesis is a Greek word, not a Hebrew word. The Hebrew word is Barshit. That's the first words of the text. Remember how in Mesopotamian texts like Atrahasis or Gilgamesh, they didn't use that title, the title that we use. Gilgamesh, the old Babylonian version, was surpassing all of the kings or superior to all of the kings because that was the first line. Whereas the standard Babylonian version was he who saw the deep or he who found out all things, which was both translations of the same first line. So the same thing with the book of Genesis, the Hebrew word Barshit meant win first because we all think we know that the opening lines of Genesis are, of course, in the beginning. But a more precise translation is when first God began to create the heaven and the earth. So Barshit means win first. It's a subtle difference, but it's going to be very important later on. When you first read Genesis, you start with the creation of the world. And you read something that seems pretty familiar because we know basically what happens. We know the plot of this narrative. We know the story, even though we're coming in. We've probably read these lines of text. But as tends to happen in Sunday school and in church, we tend to read a few verses at a time. We rarely sit and read the Bible cover to cover, or maybe never cover to cover in one sitting, obviously. But even one book in one sitting, or several chapters of one book in one sitting. Usually it's just a few verses at a time. So when you read this in linear fashion, you read Genesis 1, then Genesis 2, then Genesis 3, you may have noticed something. In Genesis 1, notice God creates plants, then God creates animals, then God creates man and woman. And as you get to Genesis 2, it may seem like the whole story has stopped and started over again. And we have a different order of creation. First, man is created, then the plants are created, then the animals are created, and then woman is created. So this is Genesis 1 on the left, Genesis 2 on the right. We see that in Genesis 1, first let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind. Then living creatures, let the birds fly, every living creature. Then the very last thing God does, so God created humankind in his image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them. So it seems that as the narrative puts everything in order, that order differs from what we read in Genesis 2. In Genesis 2, we read that then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, revived into his nostrils, then we have the creation of the plants after Adam is created. Out of the ground, the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. After that is the animals, and notice how God creates the animals out of the ground, because it is not good that the man should be alone. So God says, I will make him a helper as his partner, but the first partner is an Eve, it's the animals. And so he creates all the animals of the field, brings them to the man to see what he would call them, and he gave names to all these things, but for the man there was no, there was not found a helper as his partner. So God sort of trots out all the animals individually and Adam names them, but none of them is really a good partner. So God caused a deep sleep to fall upon man, and as he slept, God took one of his ribs and closed up in its, closed up its place with flesh, and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man with that he made woman and brought her to the man. So Adam is the very first thing created, Eve is the very last thing created. Now you've seen this before, you read a narrative and then it seems like something happens, but halfway through the description the narrative stops, starts over, and either says that this thing happened a second time, or maybe we're supposed to read this as a continuation of the first description even though there's this repetitiveness, there's this redundancy. We call this a doublet when we saw it in Atrahasis. A doublet is the same story being told twice in the same narrative, but it contains some sort of alteration or contradiction that indicates that it's not just a refrain like in a song. So when we find a repetition we want to look to see if it serves a purpose in the narrative, and in the case of Atrahasis on page 12 we have lines repeated like a chorus in a song, but they serve a different narrative purpose each time. The first time we see the passage in the yellow box it is Anu telling New School what to say, the second time it is New School actually delivering that message, but then when we come across the lines on page 13 and 14 they don't tell a new part of the story, they're telling the same part of the story again, so they don't have a new narrative purpose. They're only there because the redactor, in this case we know that there is a redactor, it's Stephanie Dahle, your editor, and she marks this in the left hand margin where she says, you know, she's switching to the standard Babylonian version, but she has to switch to the standard Babylonian version because there is a gap in the old Babylonian version, and she doesn't smooth it over the way other translators might make it more like a novel, because then that becomes Stephanie Dahle's version rather than a close match of the original text, so she's trying to show fidelity to the original text even though that makes it difficult to read, but she doesn't want to change it any more than she absolutely has to in order to translate. Besides repeating itself, we saw that there were these contradictions, like the speech of Anu in the old Babylonian version is repeated in the standard Babylonian version, but this time it's Aeah, also known as Enki, who says the exact same lines, and it actually makes more sense in the standard Babylonian version because Enki or Aeah is the one that usually sides with humanity, or in this case with the Agigi, the underdogs, the lower-ranking gods. So that becomes a clue, this change of names too, remember if it was the old Babylonian version it would be the name Enki, but it's the standard Babylonian version which is written a thousand years later, and at that time they've come to use the word Aeah instead of Enki, so we have the same story told twice in the same narrative, it just repeats itself rather than describing another incident, there's a contradiction, so something has changed, and there's this change of names, and the reason this is done this way is because of the fragments in the text as Stephanie Dolly has it, she has to make the executive decision, do I try to patch these together and sort of leave out some things and add things that I think, or leave out things that are redundant and add some explanation to sort of, you know, patch or take these two things together, or do I just put the fragments as they are and change as little as possible, and she changed as little as possible, so this kind of clue, we see a narrative progress in telling the story, but then it stops and then it starts over retelling something, there's a change or a contradiction between one part of the narrative and another part of the narrative, and we have a name that's changed, where it's consistently in the old Babylonian version, the god Enki is called Enki, but in the standard Babylonian version he's called Aeah, it's easy to find, it's easy to spot when it's marked for you, if you looked for it, of course many people didn't look for it when you read it for the first time, you were looking just to find the plot, the basic order of events, and then you had to recognize that the narrative didn't follow the sequence of the story it was trying to tell, or it was changing, each narrative was telling the story in slightly different, in a different chronology. Now if we apply what we recognized in reading Atrahasis as well as Gilgamesh, we'll come to the same conclusion that scholars began to come to about two or three centuries ago, that is they realize that Genesis one, chapter one through chapter two verse three, tell one creation account, and Genesis two verse three for the next several chapters tell a second creation account. Genesis two verse four says these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created and in the Lord, in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth we start over again. So why does it start over there? Well for one thing remember that Genesis and the rest of the Bible, the chapters were not added when the book was first written, in fact those chapters were not added until around the year 1200 of the Common Era in medieval England by the Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langdon, he's the one that went through and said Genesis chapter one should stop here and chapter two should start here and he labeled all the individual verses. But if we see that narrative scene where these things have been put together, if we see that repetition and we notice the contradiction in the order of creation and we use that as a clue to separate these two as if we were separating two tablets of the Babylonian narratives, then some things which we may not have noticed start to pop out. For instance in Genesis one in your English translation you have God referred to as God, but in Genesis two you have God referred to as Lord in all capital letters. Now that is an English translation and a tradition of English translation in which the four-letter name Yahweh which loosely translates as you know Y-H-W-H if we were to transliterate the Hebrew letters into modern English letters. That was the personal name of God and that would be revealed to Moses later in the book of Exodus but it's used for him in the second creation account in a way that's not used for him in the first creation account. So once we divide those two narratives by you know how they repeat each other then we start to see there's another clue. God is described by a different name in one versus the other. So there's this Yahweh creation account is the second one and in the first creation account God's name or God is called Elohim and Elohim in Hebrew is plural. It's not just one God but it's God's plural. Although it seems to refer to one person, one entity, that same word Elohim is occasionally in Hebrew literature and elsewhere in the Bible used to refer to other gods, the gods of the nations, the pagan gods. But here it seems to be used as a name although the word itself means gods in the plural. And in the second creation account the God when he's described as Yahweh puts things together almost by hand. So out of the ground he forms the animals and he shapes Adam from the dust and he takes the rib like he's performing surgery. Contrast that with the way creation happens in the first creation account. He doesn't actually get down on the ground he actually just speaks and creation happens. So God said let the waters bring forth swarms and it happens you know he says let there be light and it happens he says let us make humankind in our own image. And the saying is the same as creating. Slightly different descriptions about how the creation happens, slightly different use of names but those things only pop out once we separate these things narratively. Now when scholars started to notice this at first obviously was very controversial. A lot of scholars that pointed this out and addressed addressed the public with it lost their jobs or sometimes jailed their books were burned. But as the years passed by increasingly scholars couldn't look away, couldn't ignore the fact that there seems to be two sources here. And as they looked closer at the rest of the Pentateuch, the rest of the books of the Torah, they noticed that there was more than just two. It was more than just one account that uses the word Yahweh to describe God, one account that uses Elohim. There were a lot of other issues and this has become known as the documentary hypothesis, frequently called also source criticism, where we look at the Bible not as one coherent thing written all at one time by one person, but as an accumulation of different iterations and different separate traditions from different places and different historical periods, different parts of the world, or different parts of the of Israel and Judah. And this looks at the Bible as a composite document consisting of at least four sources that are referred to as J, E, P and D compiled by one or more redactors later on, and that's based on as we saw these doublets, these reiterated stories and contradictions within the text, but also different ways of referring to God, such as Yahweh, and that's the J source, or Elohim, which is the E source. And if you can read the Hebrew, you can see that there are different idioms. If we were to read something that was written in Shakespearean English and compare that to something that was written in the 1800s, or even something as recent as the last few decades, if you read something that purports to have been written in the 1960s or 50s, but it has a word like meme. The word meme, M-E-M-E, we use frequently today, but that only came into the language in the 70s in a book called The Selfish Gene, and it only really became used popularly to refer to internet memes in the last 10 or 15 years. So we would know if we saw something that we thought came from earlier in the 20th century, and we saw that word, we would know, okay, this is something that actually originated after that. So there are linguistic differences that separate these accounts. There are also different ideas about the nature of God, whether God acts anthropomorphically, in other words he shapes Adam with the rest of creation with his hands, or he just speaks into creation, those differ. And there's also different theological ideas that arrived or emerged at different points in history that shape each of those different sources. And then there are anachronisms, references to the past that import names and circumstances that did not exist yet. So when we're told in Genesis 12-6 that Abraham passed through the land to the place of Shechem, at that time the Canaanites were in the land, that tells us that at the time this was written the Canaanites were no longer in the land, and if this was written by Moses the Canaanites would have still been in the land. So the most important argument for the documentary hypothesis isn't any individual one of these criteria, it's the fact that all the criteria fit together once you separate out the sources. The internal contradictions are resolved when we separate these doublets, though each of these sources contradicts the other. Within itself each source has consistent terminology, consistent Hebrew dialect, each source consistently uses one word or name for God at least up until the point where Moses is told Yahweh's name. So the E source and the P source don't use the word Yahweh until Moses is told to use that name in Exodus. So this is a familiar concept of redaction, when we read the epic of Gilgamesh even the old Babylonian version had sources that went back before it, and when we read Book 12 of Gilgamesh or Tablet 12 notice it made no sense at all, but it's clear that someone thought it was important enough to just sort of stick on the end even though it makes it seem as if Enkidu is still alive even though we know he died in Book 7 and it doesn't seem to make much sense with the way the world is portrayed, and that's because Tablet 12 goes all the way back to the time of King Shulgi around the year 2150 BCE and the rest of the standard Babylonian version only goes back to about 600 BCE. So this much older tablet was added on to the epic of Gilgamesh, but it doesn't really fit, and you have to decide when you read it, how do I interpret this? It clearly doesn't supplement anything that's been part of the narrative up to that point. So it's a familiar idea in the other literature we've read. It may not be something we presume that we're going to find in the Bible. We have been, we have our whole lives seen the Bible as one bound book in which everything seemed to fit together, and even within the Bible we assume well at least the book of Genesis is one coherent whole, but if we start to look, we start to apply the same methods of criticism to that, that we applied to Gilgamesh and to Atrahasis, we see the same sort of thing, the same sort of redaction. So the first source and probably the oldest source is the J source. Now it's called J because the name Yahweh is used, and you're probably thinking, well Yahweh starts with a Y, but it was a German scholars who initially used that term and they pronounce the J as if it was a Y. It has been mistranslated in the past as Jehovah because of a misreading of the Hebrew notation system, because ancient Hebrew didn't have vowels, it just had consonants, so sometimes people would put notations in, in the middle, but by the time those notations were added, it had, it was prohibited to say the name Yahweh out loud, so they put these notations in to remind people to say Adonai, which is the word for Lord, a title, rather than the name Yahweh, and what people did was sort of amalgamate Yahweh and Adonai from the Hebrew, and it became Jehovah. So the J source is identifiable not just by the name Yahweh, but it tends to refer to things that are important to the history of the southern kingdom of Judah, which I'll describe in a minute, but Israel was not always unified. There was this division between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, which is where Jerusalem is, and the J source seems to be primarily focused on the history of Judah, customs of Judah, locations in Judah, but also uses a dialect that is characteristic of Judah rather than northern kingdom of Israel. And Yahweh is described as anthropomorphic. In other words, he has a human-like form. He shapes the earth like a craftsman. He walks in the garden. He walks, as you'll see in the next readings, he meets Abraham face to face. Also, he has limited knowledge. He has to come down and look to see. He asks Adam where he is. He has to come down and go visit Sodom and Gomorrah to see if they're really as bad as he's heard. He has to come down to check out the Tower of Babel before he confuses the languages. And the way he creates human beings, notice, is very similar to the way Enki and Billet E. Lee create humans in Atrahasis. You know, they are both etiologies of the origins of human beings. So both gods shape human beings out of clay, but the clay alone isn't enough. In Atrahasis they have to sacrifice the god Ile-Wela, who's described as he who had intelligence. The word there, the Akkadian word is timu, which means intelligent, but it's also connected to etimu, which is the word for ghost or spirit. So it's that ghost that Enki and Billet E. Lee have to put into the clay to bring humans to life. And if you'll notice in Genesis 2 verse 7, we're told that, quote, then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being, end quote. And the Hebrew word used there is ruach, which can literally mean breath as in the air that comes from your lungs, but it's also the word for wind and it's the word for spirit. So Yahweh shapes human bodies from the dust and then like Enki and Billet E. Lee, he has to put a spirit into that matter. Luckily he doesn't have to sacrifice. He just breathes that spirit, that intelligence, that wind, that breath into Adam and it brings him to life. Now we contrast that to the E source, the one that uses Elohim, not the only one that uses Elohim as we'll see in a minute, but there's the the second source to come along historically seems to have been the one that refers to God in this plural word Elohim. And this seems to have originated in Israel, the northern kingdom of Israel, around between the year 800 and 700 BCE. And in it Elohim is more distant than Yahweh is. He doesn't come down and directly interact with humans the same way, with a couple of exceptions which we'll see in our next readings. But he's more distant, he's the one who speaks creation into existence rather than actually shaping it himself. Then there's the Deuteronomy source, D. Now D doesn't show up in Genesis and D is mostly just the book of Deuteronomy. But it's an important concept because by the time it's written we have a very non-anthropomorphic view of God and that is it insists that God cannot be seen, that he's unseen. And it requires that God be worshiped at the Mount of Moriah in Jerusalem, that's where the current temple mount is, and it condemns any other high places where traditional sacrifices had taken place for centuries. It's very concerned with social justice and that becomes a central concern. And it seems to have been produced in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah around the year 640, between 640 and 609, because he's the one who purged due to all the other religions, but also centralized the worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem. So that, you know, people couldn't, even if they only worshiped Yahweh, they couldn't do it at these other sanctuaries. They had to come to the temple mount in Jerusalem in order to do that. And it's in the book of Chronicles chapter 34 verse 14 that we're told that Josiah's, while he was restoring the temple of Solomon, his High Priest Hilkiah discovered what he called the book of the law of the Lord, given through Moses. And this is the earliest reference that we have to something like the Torah. But notice if they have the J and E sources, especially the J-sorts, which is a very anthropomorphic idea of God, and yet the book of Deuteronomy insists that God cannot be seen, then even these sources had to deal with, had to, you know, come up with a way to interpret the fact that in the J-source Yahweh is very anthropomorphic, very much seen, very much physical. And the last of the sort of major sources is the P-source, and that stands for priestly. The priestly source also uses the name Elohim for God, but it's identifiable because it's written much later. It's much more focused on things that would be relevant to priests, things like how rituals are to be performed, where those rituals come from. In other words, it's the P-source that's going to tell us why we have the Sabbath as a day of rest. Well, it's because the first chapter of Genesis, it's the seventh day on which God rest. Therefore, this is an etiology of this ritual, but the rituals are most relevant to priests, and that's why this seems to be a source created by and for priests. It focuses on rules and boundaries, but it also focuses on reassuring the exiled Hebrews of their unity as a people and their connection to Yahweh by this covenant. All of these things that are introduced later in the Torah that become especially important during the period of the Babylonian captivity. And that Babylonian captivity happens when the kingdom of Babylon, the empire of Babylon, conquers the kingdom of the much smaller kingdom of Judah, and they force the majority of the aristocracy in a large segment of the population to relocate. They make them come back to Babylon and live there until 537 when the Babylonians are conquered by the Persians, and the Persian king Cyrus allows the Hebrews or the Israelites to return back to Israel and Judah. So, all of this reference to something that happens during the sixth century BCE lets us know that the P-source is telling about what happened before that, but it's very much concerned with telling that those that older history of the world in a way that is relevant to people living during and immediately after the Babylonian captivity. But it also sort of gives itself away when it refers to historical circumstances and customs that were unknown in the earlier sources, the sources like J and E. Now after the Babylonian exile is when the sort of final version most likely was sort of put together and there is not necessarily another source but there is this process where these four sources were put together into one redaction and sometimes there's going to be a line or two added here or there between the the other sources, like between J and P. And this is what we call the redactor. So by now you know what redaction is, you've done it yourself, you've sort of seen how it works in in Atrahasis when we have these tablets that are redacted together. So in the introductory essay that you read about the Pentateuch, one of the editors says that in contrast to modern editing which is fundamentally interested in developing a single viewpoint, the redaction of the Torah like the editing of other ancient works was not interested in creating a purely consistent singular perspective, but it incorporated a variety of voices and perspectives and wished to preserve them despite their repetitions and contradictions. This is part of the process of the formation of the authoritative scripture. The ultimate result of this redaction, which most likely took place during the Babylonian exile or soon thereafter in the early Persian period, was the creation of a very long book narrating what must have been thought to be a formative period of Israel, from the period of the creation of the world through the death of Moses. So these redactors have a particular purpose for this book, but like Dali in Atrahasis, they don't want to change anything, they just say okay we've got this version and we've got this version, we could sort of retell the story in a sort of unified whole, but we're not going to do that, that would not show fidelity to the original, we're going to put them in as is. Now most scholars now agree that there were many stages of redaction, this didn't just happen at one time, and also the individual sources themselves probably came from multiple sources. So J probably wasn't all written at one time, E probably wasn't all written at one time, they had oral tradition, oral narratives, laws, you know songs that you see, and one of the good things about the Oxford New Annotated Bible is that they change the indentation to let you know okay this is prose, you know it's just one sentence after the other, it's just description, and then it switches to a song so they indent it like it's poetry, that is because if you read in the original Hebrew it would, you would see these sort of lines with scansion and figurative language and the fit of the way a song or poem would work. So it's all these different you know past texts and oral traditions that are compiled even with the sources like J and P that are that we can see the stitch together in this final redaction. But this redaction seems to be organized in a particular way not in chronological order, they don't write the book of J first and then have the book of E and because you know E was written second and then Deuteronomist after that and then the priestly source after that, they do interweave these to some extent, they try to keep all the information from both of or all the sources but they try to weave them in sometimes by putting the J source and then the P source as we saw in the creation account, sometimes by conflating them, by putting them together you know one verse from one then another verse from another as we'll see in the flood story. But the purpose seems to be to create this sort of primeval history in the first 11 chapters of Genesis in which from Genesis 1 to Genesis 1126 we have the creation account and then how bad the world was before the flood and then the flood used to sort of recreate and purify humanity and then after that we have what you're going to read for next time which is the ancestral history about Abraham, his son Isaac, Isaac's son Jacob and all the way to Joseph and the entry into Egypt which is going to set the stage for Exodus and the return from Egypt. So the redactor is trying to put things in chronological order but that means not putting the narratives in the order that they were written rather putting them in the order of the things that they described. Okay so I know there's a lot of history to go over here and again you don't have to to know the dates you know specifically but this is just to help sort of put everything in its historical context. The brown lettering is relevant to Mesopotamia so it goes all the way back to the first Sumerian Diocese around 3200 BCE. Important to remember that like the Gilgamesh tablets are coming from 2150 BCE, the old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh you know between 2000-1600. The version of Atrahasis and the flood that you read was written sometime in the reign of Ami Saduca which was between 1702 and 1682 BCE. But as far as the historical Israel, the historical Israelites, we have possible references that may help enlighten things like the Hebrew migration into Israel may have coincided with the invasion of the Hyksos, Semitic people into Egypt between 1700-1600. We have no historical sources that describe Moses but his time period seems to be roughly contemporary with the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses. Partly we know that Moses is an Egyptian name because the Egyptian pronunciation of Ramesses would be Ramesses, Ra Moses. But he would have existed somewhere in the time of Ramesses or Menefta. That would be the historical setting for the Exodus. We have a reference to a people called Israel living in the land of Canaan around the year 1200. And we know that there are Israelite tribes that are inhabiting tribal areas throughout Canaan between 1200 and 1000. But it's not until the United Monarchy between the years 1000 BCE and 922 that we have a united like Israel and Judah are one kingdom. They've become a powerful kingdom and they've become a very literate kingdom. And this is when the book of J was probably written somewhere in Judah because Judah was the sort of dominant area of that United Kingdom. And then we have the division, the northern kingdom of Israel rebels against Judah and they divide in the year 922. And it's during this time the northern kingdom seems to have created its own version rather than accepting the J version of Judah of the south. They write down their version, the Elohist version. But then in 722 Israel is conquered, the northern kingdom is conquered by the Assyrians. And later King Josiah still ruling in Judah consolidates the political power as well as religious authority at the Temple Mount. That's when the book of Deuteronomy becomes very important. And then starting in the year 597 but culminating in the defeat in 587 the Babylonians defeat both the Syria so they acquire Israel but they then go beyond the Syria's conquest and they also conquer Judah. And they forcibly relocate the portion of Judah's population to Babylon. This is when the priestly source becomes very relevant. And then after Cyrus the Persian defeats the Babylonians and allows the Israelites to return that's when the redaction tends to happen. Now notice the map below me. There's this huge Arabian desert between these two major empires. First there's the Akkadian empire which defeated the Sumerians and then later the Akkadians were defeated by the Babylonians. But Mesopotamia, whichever you know city-state was ruling at the time, is always the home of a major empire. And remember there's another major empire in the Hittite empire in Hathi Anatolia or modern-day Turkey. And then of course there's the Egyptian empire. And the connection between the Egyptian empire and these other two empires is a very in order for one to fight with the other or to communicate with the other or to trade with the other they can't cross the Arabian desert. They have to go up along the coast of the Mediterranean and that means going past the hill country of Judah and Israel. So Israel and Judah are very closely connected with these empires not by proximity but by this channel of movement. And so whenever merchants are traveling back and forth but also armies are traveling back and forth they're always trying to conquer this area so that they have the upper hand. They're getting closer to their enemies so they have a point from which to attack that other empire. Or they're just trying to trade. There's this sort of information from each empire passing back and forth across Israel, Judah. And there is reason to believe that stories from both Egypt as well as Mesopotamia are being passed along that same time. A lot of cultural elements are at least known to other people of Israel but they are still you know for most of this time an independent kingdom until they're eventually conquered. So they're aware of these other cultures but they are still their own distinct people. Here's just another way to conceive of that. This is a timeline put together by Shay Cohen who's got a great lecture series. His Harvard biblical studies class is available online and I'll have a reference to that at the end of the this presentation. So remember that in this first creation account, Genesis chapter one and the first three verses of chapter two, God doesn't shape things with his hands like a craftsman you know as he does in chapter two, the later part chapter two but he just speaks existence speaks reality into existence he speaks creation into existence. Now this is a part of the priestly source the very first the chapter of Genesis is one of the latest additions to the Bible it seems kind of counterintuitive but we know this because of how much reference there is to Mesopotamian belief system and that ability to speak creation into existence is something that was an integral part of Babylonian religion dating back a thousand years before the Babylonian captivity. So in the Babylonian epic of creation its Babylonian title or Cadian title was Enuma Elish which literally means win on high that is the first the opening line of the poem is win on high which would be pronounced Enuma Elish and this account is as old as it originated sometime between the year 1125 and 1104 BCE but it was continuously copied because it was extremely important to the Babylonians it was consistently copied all the way until at least 305 BCE so for about 800 years it was frequently copied and recopied and recopied very similar to Gilgamesh and Atrahasis and in this the god Marduk is one of the younger gods but he's the most powerful god and he's asked by the older gods to defeat this goddess monster called Tiamat remember in Genesis the word Tehom derives from Tiamat to the this Akkadian word or this Akkadian name and that is the deep her name literally means the deep water so like the salt water of the ocean the water of death the water you don't want to drink the water that is threatening as opposed to the Opsu you know the Enki or Eya's water which is the fresh water that you can drink and water your crops with in order to get Marduk to defeat this giant goddess the other gods have to sort of give him the power that is going to be necessary and part of the power they give him they sort of come together to give him this power which is the power to speak and change reality through his speech and so they tell him oh Marduk you are our champion you hereby or sorry we hereby give you sovereignty over all the universe sit in the assembly and your words shall be preeminent may you your decree oh lord impress the gods command to destroy and to recreate and let it be so speak and let the constellation vanish in other words the stars in the sky will go away when Marduk says for them to go away speak to it again and let the constellation reappear so he spoke and at his word the constellation vanished he spoke to it again and the constellation was recreated and you can actually read this as well it's in your book Myths from Esopotamia on page 250 and that's not where the similarity with the peace source in the first chapter of Genesis ends after Tiamat is defeated this gigantic goddess monster thing Marduk defeats her but it's out of her body that he creates the earth and so we read that face to face they came Tiamat and Marduk sage of the gods they engaged in combat they closed for battle the lord Marduk spread his net and made it encircle her to her face he dispatched the Imhulu wind Tiamat opened her mouth to swallow it and he forced in the Imhulu wind so that she could not close her lips fierce winds distended her belly in other words this wind is making her expand because it's going in she can't stop it her insides were compressed and she stretched her mouth wide he shot an arrow which pierced her belly split her down the middle and slit her heart vanquished her and extinguished her life her waters he arranged so that they could not escape he sliced her in half like a fish for drying half of her he put up to the roof of the sky drew a bolt across and made a guard hold it with half of her he made a roof fix the earth remember that in the Mesopotamian conception of the world that we talked about without your houses there were there was water above the earth and there was water below the earth and the earth the world we lived in was sort of this bubble I had like you know these mountains these barriers on the sides it had this dome over it that that kept the waters in the sky back but there was a bolted gate that the there would always be a god appointed to you know keep it closed but if if the rain came it was because the god unbolted the gate and the waters came down well if you imagine that kind of schema as the body of Tiamat Marduk is actually creating the earth where humans live through the body out of the body the insides of this this monster these creating so the human world was imagined as being inside the dead body of Tiamat so when we read Genesis if we have in mind the earth as a globe as we know it to be what we read may not make much sense so Genesis says in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of Tehom Tiamat while a wind from God okay this wind didn't make much sense in the original description but now we see the connection where the wind is defeating this the deep just as the Im Hulu wind was used by Marduk then God said let there be light so he's speaking creation to existence he called the the light day in the darkness night and he said let there be a dome in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters above from the waters below or the waters from the waters so God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome and so and it was so and God called the dome sky now if we think of this creation from the sense of okay well there's a globe and you know we're on the the mass that's in the you know the sort of rind of this big sphere doesn't make much sense but if you think of it in the Babylonian terms the same thing is happening although Tiamat is no longer a monster Tiamat is just the deep and there's no battle there's no theomaki that's the word for when gods fight each other it's just something that has already happened and you could say that God literally has no competition in Genesis but why these similarities why this you know conception of a dome that humanity lives between the waters the waters above and the waters below that's not to say that there never was an idea that the Hebrew God had fought with monsters there's a in Psalm 74 13 through 17 we read that the Psalmist says you divided the sea by your might you broke the head of the dragons in the waters you crushed the heads of Leviathan you gave him this food to the creatures of the wilderness you cut openings for springs and torrents you dried up ever flowing streams your day yours is the day yours also is the night you established luminaries in the sun you have fixed all the bounds of the earth and made summer and winter this is kind of a creation account and it does come directly from crushing the head of Leviathan and these these sea creatures later in in Psalm 89 verses 9 through 11 the Psalmist says you ruled a raging of the sea when its waves rise you stilled them you crushed Rahab like a carcass you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm the heavens are yours the earth is yours all the world that is in it you have founded them these similarities indicate there was a sort of Marduk-like story about Yahweh or Elohim at some point but what's important is that's not neither the the Babylonian version nor this other version we see in these two Psalms is exactly what happens in Genesis what happens in Genesis is an adaptation of a narrative that does not just repeat that story but tells it from a very specific point of view almost like a contradiction of the narrative where the the P source or the the priestly writer knows the Babylonian version but says no that's not the way this is the way it was so this is an example of what we call syncretism we can't we shouldn't sound dismissive we don't want to say something like the Bible copies the Babylonian creation myth because it doesn't copy it it appropriates it and it clearly changes it to fit the Hebrew worldview or at least the worldview of that priestly source living either during the Babylonian captivity or after it namely there is the belief in one God this sort of thing happens the same sort of thing happens when the Cambridge students try to remember the Chinook narrative in Bartlett's War of the Ghosts example but it can happen accidentally like that when we add our own schemata to a description or a narrative of a different culture but it can also be done deliberately and that seems to be what's happening in Genesis the author seems to be saying I know the Babylonian narrative of creation obviously I'm here in Babylon I've been you know we've been captured as a people we've been defeated militarily and we're we're sort of being forced to assimilate to this culture that is not ours I know that story but I disagree with parts of it so I'm going to give my people's versions I'm going to give the people of Judah's version or the people of Israel's version of it and so he then takes out these other gods and takes out the theomaki takes out the fight with the deep and has just you know the sort of ownership of the deep that that God shows and he gives a version of the story with only one God creating the earth but creating the earth in the same terms that that seem clearly adapted or appropriated from the the Babylonian version so this is an example of syncretism this is something we're going to see a lot during the semester when a story moves from one culture to another and it changes in ways that seem to be deliberate so syncretism is the attempted union or the reconciliation of diverse or even opposite tenets or practices especially from different philosophies religions or cultural worldviews so this may be the result of a single conscious decision or it may be something that happens gradually as different populations integrate elements of their different distinct cultures so this is one of the reasons that it helps us to understand what's going on in Genesis when we separate these accounts out if the P source which is the first chapter of Genesis or you know the first chapter of Genesis was added by the P source and then the you know second, third, fourth chapters or the J source this older source that has a more anthropomorphic version of God when we separate those sources out we see distinct texts that sort of become coherent and I know it's confusing that the the light the latest source the P source is the one that added the very first passages of the bible but we've seen this before as well remember that the epic of Gilgamesh the standard Babylonian version which is written around the year 600 starts with you know of he who found all things I shall tell the land and it was called that that was its name you know he who saw the deeper he who found out all things but we have a reference in the second tablet of the old Babylonian version written more than a thousand years before the standard Babylonian version that says this is the second tablet of he was superior to all other kings which tells us that the old Babylonian version of the epic of Gilgamesh started with the line he was superior to all other kings that means that in your book pages 50 and 51 the standard Babylonian version much later or sometime between the old Babylonian version the standard Babylonian version somebody added this first part about you know bringing back knowledge from the time before the flood about you know looking at the baked bricks that the wall of Uruk was built out of so the standard Babylonian version added later focuses on Uruk itself the walls of Uruk the technology of Uruk the the longevity of Uruk whereas the old Babylonian version seems to have been focused on the power of Gilgamesh himself as an individual person so this we see this element of redaction in Gilgamesh we see the same thing happening so after the creation account we come to another one of the most famous elements of Genesis which is the fall of man or the original sin in which Satan tempts Adam and Eve to or Satan tempts Eve to eat an apple and then Eve tempts Adam to eat the apple and this is the the original sin for which human beings are you know for all generations afterwards you're punished but if you read the text you see like in the case of the lightning machine in Frankenstein what we think we know about the text isn't actually there starting with Satan chapter three starts with now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God has made he is described as a wild animal not as an angel or fallen angel or any other kind of spiritual thing he is you know like these other wild animals or beasts of the field the character or the the idea of Satan isn't in the the Hebrew Bible as we can see of it now as the devil the word Satan comes from Hasatan which literally means accuser so Hasatan or someone called accuser shows up in the book of Job in a few other books where he's described as a as a heavenly being Satan came among you know he goes into God's court he goes into heaven and he comes among them to present himself before the Lord the Lord said to Satan you know where have you come from and Satan answers the Lord from going to and fro on the earth from walking up and down on it the Lord said to Satan have you considered my servant Job there's no one like him on earth blameless so they're having this conversation Satan kind of wanders around and then he kind of shows up to hang out with God and have a conversation and God wants to brag on this guy Job and Satan points out you know the kind of thing somebody might point out only if they were not afraid to speak to truth the power he says yeah people only obey you because you know you give them good things and you protect them from bad things I bet if I I took away what he had he would curse you so it becomes this bet between God and Satan but Satan does terrible things to Job and his family but notice this is with God's permission that he does this so this kind of builds into our idea of the devil as somebody who just does this all the time but Satan there is not a name it's this a court title this is basically a voice of an opposition in a royal court somebody who would go around see what people were saying complaining about the king and then go back to the king and say it to his face because the other people were afraid to it's good to have some sort of voice of an opposition in any kind of government because that way if people are afraid to complain to you directly then you can go hear them complaints and bring it to to them so that's the characterization of Hasatan and the Ha at the beginning of that is like the word the it's a definite article the Satan rather than somebody named Satan this is from the essay about Satan in the dictionary of dictionary of deities and demons in the bible which is sort of handy reference if you're interested in this sort of thing most scholars translate Hasatan as the accuser which they understand to be a title that describes a specific roller office none of the four texts in none of the four texts is satan indisputably used as a proper name it is difficult to maintain as many scholars have that we can see in the Hebrew bible a developing notion of satan it's sort of anachronistic to project satan back into the book of Job much less back into Genesis so what about Lucifer you may have heard that name used to refer to the devil as well the name Lucifer comes from the book of Isaiah and Isaiah lived between the year 742 and 700 at a time when the Assyrian empire was in the process of conquering Israel the northern kingdom it was attacking Judah as well and the Assyrian king referred to in this passage that Isaiah is saying you're going to be cast down you're ahead now but you're going to you're going to be defeated by our God and it seems that he's referring to Sargon II who was an Assyrian king who was defeated on the battlefield not by the the Israelites but he was defeated on the battlefield and his corpse was left on the battlefield and not recovered and that is a big deal in fact we know that's a big deal because Tablet 12 of Gilgamesh is all about Enkidu being stuck in the underworld without a proper burial remember he was buried fine in book 8 of the Epic of Gilgamesh so that wasn't a problem in the main narrative of the Epic of Gilgamesh but it was a big deal in book in Tablet 12 that there was that Enkidu had this improper entry into the underworld and that means that his spirit could be restless well it was thought that Sargon II was in that same situation because he didn't get proper burial he was going to haunt his old capital he was going to be a problem to the people that he formally ruled and it's at this time that someone makes a copy of Tablet 12 of the Epic of Gilgamesh apparently to sort of serve as guidance into how the people ought to deal with the situation where this king is gone unburied but there is this reference in Isaiah this is Isaiah chapter 14 in verse 18 he references this person's unburied body but notice throughout this entire thing he's talking about a king of Babylon actually it's a king of Assyria but it wasn't always clear the people back in the mountains of Israel weren't always clear on exactly what was going on in this case it seems Isaiah was describing an Assyrian king as a Babylonian king but he's clearly talking about a human king how the oppressor has ceased how his insolence has ceased the Lord has broken his staff the staff of the wicked well he goes on to refer to this guy as Daystar and that is translated into Latin as Lucifer you know Lightbringer Daystar Son of the Dawn and that was a term that was used to refer to the king's Babylon but if you look at it anachronistically later we have the the view from like Milton's Paradise Lost that Satan was an angel that was you know disloyal and so he was cast down out of heaven that would kind of make sense in fact this passage actually gave rise to that assumption that a Daystar doesn't refer to Sargon the second or any other actual king it actually refers to the spiritual being but at some point we have to jump from references to the the the Babylonian Empire to somehow at some point we're all of a sudden talking about angels in heaven being cast down so unlikely that word Lucifer was ever intended in the time of Isaiah to refer to any spiritual being incidentally there is one other Gilgamesh relevant note here and that's in verse 8 the trees of Lebanon rejoice because the Mesopotamian king will no longer be able to cut them down the way his predecessors have for centuries this is the exploitation of the Lebanese lumber that we saw in Gilgamesh when Gilgamesh and Enkidu go and fight with Humbaba who guards the forests the cedar forest of Lebanon all of these cedars have been cut down by these Mesopotamian kings and taken back to Mesopotamia to build things but now because this Mesopotamian king is dead the trees themselves are rejoicing because nobody's going to come cut them down but we we know about this this sort of phenomenon the cutting down of these trees because we have the ideology in the Epica Gilgamesh just a side note now you may be thinking don't I remember a Bible verse about the devil being a deceiver so how do I know I can trust all this maybe this interpretation of these passages from Job and Isaiah and even Genesis aren't the devil covering his tracks because doesn't the Bible say that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist and the answer is maybe it depends on what you regard as canon as as official doctrine because that comes from the book of the usual suspects that's the 1990 film that won Kevin Spacey an Oscar and it's a great movie but it's not a book of the Bible but of course that was not the first narrative portray Satan as the ultimate sort of conspiracy agent but that is not in Genesis what we have in Genesis is a snake and in Genesis that serpent tells the truth he's not deceiving he contradicts God's warning that Adam would die on the day he ate from the tree and but Adam did not die on the day he ate from the tree he lived for nearly a thousand years I think it's 980 and all told the snake says God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil verse 22 God confirms this saying see man has become like one of us knowing good and evil so there's no deception though the serpent does stir up some social drama between humans and God in the text as we have it there is no devil in the garden there's a snake and it's compared to the other wild animals this is an animal fable very much like Gilgamesh losing the herb of rejuvenation to a snake these are both ideologies this wasn't about how the snake lost its legs why it crawls on the ground and why humans have to till the land and feel pain during childbirth and these sorts of things these are ideologies and by the way that part about feeling pain and childbirth is was used for centuries to deny women access to medicine during labor you're supposed to feel pain during childbirth it's your duty as a fallen fallen human but the part about human beings eyes being opened and they're becoming like God's should sound familiar if we compare that to Shamhat speech to Enkidu in Gilgamesh in the standard Babylonian version in tablet one page 56 we're told quote Enkidu had been diminished he could not run as before yet he had acquired judgment had become wiser and then Shamhat Shamhat tells him you've become profound Enkidu you've become like a God again almost the same words although taken and applied in a very different context also notice that Eve doesn't tempt Adam verse six tells us that she took of its fruit in eight and she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it is in verse 12 that we're told quote the man said the woman whom you gave to be with me she gave me fruit from the tree and I ate in other words this isn't Eve tempting Adam this is Adam coming up with an excuse for a decision he himself made after he's confronted and then God drives Adam and Eve out of Eden the reason being now he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever so this is not a moral story they're not cast out for sin they're cast out because now they're dangerous now they're too close to becoming too powerful let's keep them away from this tree of life that would let them live forever therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken he drove out the man and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed a cherubim sword flaming and turning or and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life this reference to cherubim is actually not that uncommon cherubim were not the sort of little baby angels with you know like little fat babies with wings like we see in Renaissance paintings the word was the the Hebrew word that referred to the the lamasu of the of Mesopotamia or the Sphinx of Egypt there were these you know half human and you know part animal composites that were had the bodies of either lions or bulls or something like that which we see all over both Mesopotamia as well as Egypt the the idea of a tree of life was also a frequent Mesopotamian idea because remember to keep a tree growing in Mesopotamia they're not a lot of trees they're very sort of sacred and it was imagined that there's all these images of these divine beings protecting this tree which is only accessible apparently in the Mesopotamian worldview to these divine beings so then there's the story of Cain and Abel the second generation of humanity which usually provokes a lot of questions about where does this reference to wives come from you know how is Cain getting married in verse 14 of chapter 4 so this the story is told in a way that presumes the presence of a broader population your note tells you and this indicates that the narrative about him we're not originally connected with creation so one frequent critical explanation of this the inconsistencies here where did all these other people come from and who is Cain afraid is going to kill him that he needs to be a venge sevenfold you know if if it's just Adam and Eve and there are two kids where did where the rest of the people come from and why is Cain afraid that this this mark is going to make him susceptible to retaliation for what he did to Abel it appears that this is an etiology of a neighboring tribe of the Hebrews or the Israelites called the Kenites and the name Cain and Kenite is spelled differently in English but it's actually spelled the same in ancient Hebrew and it seems to be an explanation of where these people came from and why unlike the the Israelites themselves are prohibited from taking more revenge than the damage that's done for them the Lex Talionis the the eye for an eye tooth for a tooth passage in in Leviticus 24 a 19 to 21 that says you know you can practice the retaliation of a life for a life but you can't do more than that you can't kill two of theirs for one of yours but this was apparently what the Kenites did the Kenites were apparently allowed to kill seven of the rival tribe for every one of theirs that was killed and now it seemed to be okay they were not held accountable to that same law in Leviticus and this seems to be an explanation of why an etiology for why that group of people who who do worship the same God can can follow this different law and after that is yet another doublet that gives us a clue about that we have yet another source and that is this reference to the book of the records of a human and it's translated here is the list of descendants of Adam used by the redactor to form a logical framework for the for combined sources of of Genesis and what follows is the sort of list of you know so and so followed so and so followed so and so that doesn't seem to be part of either the j or the p source it seems to be the redactors addition and then we come to another familiar story that hopefully by now we're starting to look at much more critically now remember we've used this as an example of the sort of imposition of our own schema similar to the Cambridge students in Frederick Bartlett studies a hundred years ago hearing this chinook story and not really listening to what was actually there to do because this was a completely alien story to them but we want to be careful if we do that ourselves we can sort of watch as as the narrative iterations progress through history we can sort of watch different cultures imposing their own schemata and figure out what the schemata are but we ourselves want to be careful about imposing our own schemata and of course the schemata we have comes not from the stories the the previous narratives like Atra Hasas or Zesudra or Udnapishtim in Gilgilgamesh tablet 11 and it doesn't typically even come from reading the bible directly as kids we probably heard the story of Noah before we were even able to read and that story was probably accompanied by pictures pictures of this big cruise liner or you know a wooden version of a modern freighter and it had giraffe and elephants and all those sorts of animals that we as kids found very interesting but that's as it is and it's certainly not looking at it within its larger context in connection with Mesopotamian sources so notice this isn't just three different stories about a flood but we have individual narrative incidents that very closely match we have in in Gilgamesh Udnapishtim says that on the seventh day he put out and released a dove the dove when it came back it found no purging place was visible to it and it turned around then he put out a swallow the swallow went it came back for no purging place was visible to it and it turned around then he put out a raven the raven went saw the waters receding it ate preen lifted its tail and did not turn around the raven of the dove maybe not the swallow but at least we have the raven and the dove happening in Genesis the same way for the same purpose described not only where they put out to you know see if they found somewhere to land but specifically there's no perch there's no place for it to put its foot and in both Atrahasas in Gilgamesh there is a female deity who immediately starts to regret what she's done because human beings are her offspring and she had allowed El Lill to send this great flood to order this great flood and she knows that she's complicit in it but she mourns and she she blames El Lill for you know forcing that decision because she thinks human beings have been wiped out and remember that's Nintu the mother goddess in Atrahasas it changes to Ishtar in Gilgamesh a thousand years later but in both cases the same gods who were complicit in sending the flood at least one of them now regrets it and part of the reason they regret it is because now there's no more humans to give them sacrifices to make them burnt offerings and the gods need clearly burnt offerings and in Atrahasas we're told that after something happens the lines are broken in tablet three but Atrahasas puts out something provides food and the gods smelt the fragrance gathered like flies over the offering and when they had eaten the offering something but that tells us at least that the gods needed to be there they craved that burnt offering adaptation of the same line in Gilgamesh Utnapishtim who is Atrahasas tells us then I put everything out to the four winds I made a sacrifice set out the offering upon the mountain peak arranged the jars seven and seven in the bottom of them I poured reed, pine, and myrtle the gods smelt the fragrance the gods smelt the pleasant fragrance the gods like flies gathered over the sacrifice and so when we come to Genesis if you read this line about you know the Lord smelt the pleasing odor Noah built an altar the Lord took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered the burnt offerings on the altar and then the Lord smelt the pleasing odor that might seem sort of an odd thing it's very anthropomorphic but you know okay he likes sacrifices but that specific references to the smell and the feeling that the God has about the smell are the kinds of things that somebody different people witnessing a major flood wouldn't include wouldn't be able to include and then like Nintu and Ishtar say you know we will never do this again they make the gods you know regret sending that flood and say it's never going to happen again and in Genesis 8 21 the Lord said in his heart I will and notice in his heart he doesn't say this to Noah the Lord says in his heart I will never again curse the ground because of humankind of course he goes on to say their inclination of human heart is evil from youth so hey you know what are you going to do they're evil so punishing won't do any good nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done and then after that another thing you probably remember from childhood is the rainbow this is a sign that God's never going to send this or it's a sign of the covenant between him and Noah and that he will never again send the flood this is a sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth so this reference to some object belonging to God as a sign that this will will never happen again that also has parallels although it's more ambiguous in Atrahasis and Gilgamesh there's this reference to those flies that gathered over the offering being like lapis lazuli and this this blue gemstone or not really a gem but this blue stone that was considered very valuable and either Nintu and Atrahasis or Ishtar in Gilgamesh says you know this lapis lazuli necklace will you know by which I will remember it by which I remember presumably what we see in Gilgamesh I'll never forget the significance of my lapis lazuli necklace I'll never remember these times you know these times when we tried to destroy humanity so in both cases there are very common not just descriptions of events in the world but specific elements of narrative specific descriptions of the thoughts of the gods this reference to some sign of never harming humanity as a whole again but what's important here is it's not just a story it's not just a single event that's being recognized from different perspectives it seems to be it's like it's coming from the same narrative one narrative is being reiterated in another rather than just different narratives telling the same story the biblical scholar James Kugel puts it this way he says quote the fact that the biblical and Mesopotamian accounts agreed in so much in so many details suggested to scholars that there was actually a literary connection between them that is the different accounts did not seem simply to agree on the events that had occurred but on how those events should be retold including things that could not have been based solely on historical observation the fact that the same assertion indeed the very same expression is found in both Gilgamesh and the bible seemed to suggest that one text was dependent on the other or that both derived from a still earlier source and so it helps to return to what Stephanie Dolly said when we first read Atrahasas she says you know it's probable that these near eastern flood stories are a version of a tale or different versions of a tale which originated in lower Mesopotamia in other words downstream Mesopotamia the Mesopotamia that's most likely to receive major floods even if they're they're rare although it wasn't necessarily from a single devastation the variety of detail found in them illustrate a kaleidoscopic character of the folk tale in which certain basic elements are widely used in new combinations and are adapted to national interest in different literary settings we see a clear distinction of national interest giving completely different readings about the nature of the flood obviously the the genesis flood as we know is a story about how human beings were wicked and God had to wipe them out because they were wicked whereas in Atrahasas and in Gilgamesh it was merely they were overpopulating the gods had to do something about human population we were eating up the resources of Mesopotamia so the the theme was different the way it was integrated into a culture is different but there are enough commonalities to let us know that these seem to have come from a common source not just a common event but a common narrative she says you know all these flood stories may be explained as deriving from the one Mesopotamian original used in Travelers Tales for over 2,000 years along the great caravan routes of western Asia translated and broided adapted according to local taste to give a myriad of divergent versions and again that trade route she's referring to to get from Egypt to Mesopotamia you had to go along the through Canaan you know past the the mountains of Israel and so there's a consistent inundation of stories from both Egypt and from Mesopotamia that's available to the the natives of Canaan and that diversion divergence between versions doesn't stop when we focus just on Genesis so when you read through Genesis 6 through 8 you probably noticed a few more doublets Noah and his family enter the ark twice and in Genesis 6 version 19 God tells Noah of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every kind into the ark and keep them alive with you they shall be male and female of the birds according to their kind and the animals according to their kind of every creeping thing on the ground of its kind two of every kind shall come into you and to keep them alive that much we probably remember from childhood but notice in Genesis 7 verse 2 God tells Noah quote take with you seven pairs of all clean animals the male and its mate and a pair of the animals that are not clean the male and its mate and seven pairs of the birds of the air also male and female now what they mean by clean versus unclean animals means animals that you can eat that are kosher follow kosher laws things like cattle those are also things you can sacrifice they're clean animals whereas you know lions and pigs and that sort of thing those are not kosher you can't sacrifice them you also can't eat them but if you're going to eat them or sacrifice them on the trip or immediately after the trip you need more than two pairs otherwise if you sacrifice one of the two you're not going to have a breeding couple so that appears at least in the Genesis 7 verse 2 version other doublets Noah and his family enter the ark twice in 6 through 16 and again through 7 verse 7 through 9 and 7 13 through 16 in chapter 8 verse 20 through chapter 9 verse 17 we have two different covenants between God and Noah and the each doublet has some sort of variation on the other now I know it's difficult sort of because of this conflation it's difficult to see where does one version stop and start and you know sometimes just a few verses later another version will stop and start your notes kind of help point the way but there's a great resource on pbs.org that was put together by biblical scholar Richard Elliot Friedman in which he has this little application that allows you to read the entirety of Genesis 6 7 and 8 with color coded J in blue and P in pink and you even have the redactors additions in the middle like Genesis 6 verse 9 says these are the records of Noah that wasn't either the J source nor the P source but appears to be the redactors sort of patching the two together but because they switch back and forth so much it helps to be able to look at them in different color codes but also besides sort of giving us every version where you go from J to P to J to P to J to P he also allows us to read just J so if we read the J source in Genesis 6 we can then switch instead of then stopping and reading the P source we can go straight to J in Genesis 7 and then J in Genesis 8 and then we can compare that with the P source in Genesis 6 Genesis 7 and Genesis 8 reading the separate sources as independent narratives lets us see that each one was complete and coherent on its own before it was redacted before it was interwoven each one makes a complete narrative but our redactors felt the need to conflate the two accounts interlacing them even when the even with the contradictions between each doublet so now you've actually read four flood accounts for narratives about somewhat the same story now remember a story can be multi-formed it can have several different versions that completely contradict each other but if we recognize the story's multi-formity then it's only the narratives that we expect to be relatively coherent but sometimes we see that the desire to include you know multiple elements can sometimes conflict so we're in the position that Stephanie Dye predicted in the introduction to Gilgamesh when she said that you know we've got all these fragments missing and we've got these fragments available and we might think that oh if I just find the rest of the fragments I'll have a complete whole ur text or you know something complete but she says you know finding a new fragment may perplex us rather than elucidating an old problem in fact the more text fragments come to light the harder it becomes to produce one coherent addition and if our goal is to remove all contradictions and to just have the version the ur text we might be disappointed but as she says with Gilgamesh so too with potentially with the flood our interest lies not only in the story and its characters but also the unique opportunity that the epic or in this case the different narratives provide for tracing earlier independent folktales which were combined in the creation of the whole work and we can see how the whole work in written form never became fossilized but was constantly altered through contact with continuing oral narrative tradition and as we've seen through continuing textual tradition so Irving Finkel the cuneiform specialist at the British Museum that I mentioned when we talked about Atrahasis has made the argument that it seems that during the Babylonic captivity the Israelite people were being educated in cuneiform writing at least some somewhere the ones that were already literate in Hebrew seem to have been educated because the Babylonians wanted to assimilate them they wanted to make them good Babylonians and by teaching them how to write in their way hopefully make them more connected to the empire but the Atrahasis text that you read the old Babylonian version remember was a school exercise Epic Aya was a junior scribe and it seems that the three tablets he wrote were sort of an exercise in how to write cuneiform and the exercise needs a text to copy and it's very possible and Irving Finkel makes this argument that the Hebrew authors or the Hebrew scribes that were being educated in Babylon during the Babylonic captivity were probably being taught to write things like individual Gilgamesh epics or Atrahasis or something like that and that's why we have these very precise almost individual lines of narration taken from Gilgamesh and placed into Genesis but this is also syncretism it's imagined that you were sort of taken away your country was defeated and you were taken to this foreign empire and they told you okay do this school work and learn these stories about us our stories of course there's going to be this resistance this undermining that sort of imperialism by saying okay I'll take your text your story but I'm going to tell it my people's way with our idea of what God is so if there was this flood it would have happened this way if the world was created you know something like the the Enuma Elish says Marduk created the earth well we're going to change that and we're going to show that you know our God would have created it this way so this is an example of or this could be an example of syncretism and so we don't want to think of it as just a copying or just a derivative from the Mesopotamians this is something that is very much a product of the the of Judah and Israel and the Hebrew language and Hebrew people and Hebrew culture of this time after the flood we have more of the sort of explanation of where the present cultures of the world the ones contemporary with the biblical authors came from so we're told that Kush became the father of Nimrod and he was the first on earth to become a mighty warrior he was a mighty hunter before the Lord therefore it is said like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord clearly this is an etiology it says here's this saying that people have where does it come from well I'll tell you where it comes from it comes from this guy named Nimrod and the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Eric, and Akkad all of them in the land of Shinar and from that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh as well as these other places well Nimrod as well as these other places that he he mentions are places we've seen before Nimrod is not a person Nimrod was a city the city of Nimrud which is south of Nineveh an Assyrian city the city of Babel obviously is Babylon Eric is actually Uruk this is the city of Gilgamesh and Akkad is the city of Akkad which is the when Sargon the first conquered the Sumerians and he created the Akkadian empire we don't actually know where the location of the city of Akkad is but it appears to be somewhere near the later city of Babylon the Babylonians later sort of take over from the Akkadians and there's constant fights between the Assyrians and the Babylonians but instead of something that happens over thousands of years which is what the historical what actually happened historically the biblical author here tries to explain everything by personalizing it saying there's this one guy Nimrod who founded all of Mesopotamia all at once you know Babylon Uruk and Akkad or in the wrong order Uruk came first then Akkad then Babylon but in this narrative it's all compressed into one person's lifetime so this is the J source sandwiched between P text or priestly texts it happens before the Babylonian captivity which is probably why it's so inaccurate the J source is not very familiar with Mesopotamia whereas the P source will be very familiar with Mesopotamia and finally the last story we probably know very well in the section of Genesis you read for for this unit or for this half of the unit and that is the Tower of Babel by now of course we recognize Babel as Babylon and maybe you started to suspect that the tower may not have been the sort of spiral conical thing that we've seen in art for the last several hundred years as European artists imagined it but that's only one of several things that's not exactly in the text the way we may have been told it the way the story may have been narrated to us outside of the Bible if we look at the actual text we see that it is a little bit redundant since Mesopotamia is called Shinar in Hebrew had already been settled in chapter 10 both are J source which is one reason or scholars argue that the J source was itself a redaction of folk tales of which this is clearly one and the typical interpretation we probably heard the first time we heard or read probably heard the story of the Tower of Babel was that people built a tower in order to enter into heaven they were going to build a tower that was so high that they were going to be able to get to heaven just by walking up the tower and that this is of course would be the Hebrew the heaven of Yahweh and therefore it was both an act of rebellion and unrealistic hubris that sort of led them to do this and the problem is this interpretation is a later rationalization it's taking what the text says and saying oh here's the actual reasons and here are the thoughts that were happening in people's heads things that are not actually in the text the text actually focuses on people coming together in a city and building the city itself specific reference to firing clay bricks this is a technology which Mesopotamians used that was not used in Canaan in Canaan they would just cut rocks as they found them in the ground and use those as building materials but in Mesopotamia there weren't enough rocks you couldn't do that so they had developed this technology of building these or making these clay bricks they built these giant kilns that were big enough to harden the bricks that they would go into to building with and then using those bricks that were once they were fired were much easier to shape you could actually build much more flat surfaces and therefore build much higher as with Adam and Eve after they eat from the Tree of Knowledge notice Yahweh is not actually punishing sin when he confuses the people's language his expression is one more like fear he says they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them and so when he confuses the language he says therefore or after God confuses the languages the narrator tells us therefore it was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth and from there the Lord scattered them abroad above the face of all the earth the word the Hebrew word used there is Balal which means to confuse and they would have made perfect sense as a folk tale told in Canaan and by people who didn't know the Babylonian version of the you know where the name Babylon came from the Babylonians themselves attributed the name Babylon to the Akkadian word Babilu which meant the gate of the divine or door to heaven the Enuma Elish gives an etiology in which Marduk after defeating Tiamat builds the central temple and names the city Babilu and he says when he does so I shall make a house to be a luxurious dwelling for myself I hereby name it Babylon home of the great gods we shall make it the center of religion this elevates the importance of the city in the mind of the Babylonians themselves the J-Source does the opposite it creates an etiology that denigrates the city and the Babylonian people focusing on the presence of multiple languages no doubt there were many languages spoken in a cosmopolitan capital of an empire as large as Babylon multiple languages are characteristic of a metropolitan area most metropolitan areas but that diversity can be bewildering to people who are from a culturally and linguistically homogenous world like the mountains of Israel and Judah both of these stories the one about Babilu the door to heaven in the Enuma Elish and the attribution of the word B'alal or to confuse in the Hebrew story these are both ideologies linguists specializing in Akkadian languages believe that the name Babylon came from a non-Semitic language in other words unrelated to Akkadian and Hebrew which are both Semitic languages but these two later cultures created different ideologies to suit their own languages and justify their own cultural viewpoints the central ziggurat of Babylon was not the only work of advanced architecture or religious observance it would have been the thing that travelers would remember and report as they passed through Israel and Judah so this is why the J source which is much earlier than the Babylonian captivity would have already had a Babylonian story in fact the J source seems to be less familiar with Babylon in particular than the P source the purpose of the story seems to be to condemn this technologically advanced and multicultural city and city life and it's a condemnation by these rural shepherds and the mountains of Israel and the resentment of rural people for urban centers was evident previously in the Epic of Gilgamesh when Enkidu says you know I will go fight Gilgamesh and show him the strength of a man of the country and of course we see this kind of thing happening today James Kugel the biblical scholar says quote for centuries and centuries this tale was read as a parable of human hubris and divine retribution long ago people had sought to overstep their bounds and God quickly put them back in their place such is not however the story's message for the modern scholar instead this tale appears to be a deliberate jab at the sophisticated Babylonian society along with that an ideological explanation of the similarity yet distinctness of Semitic languages okay so those are the books or the chapters of Genesis that are referred to as the primeval history and you'll see a note notable change in the types of stories that get told in the rest of Genesis starting with Genesis 12 we have the introduction of the character of Abraham and he's going to carry us through a lot of this and then you know his sons and his grandson and notice I have shortened the reading assignment I always hope one of these semesters I'm going to be able to get all the way through Genesis all the way to Joseph going to Egypt but the best I think we're going to be able to do is get to Jacob wrestling with the angel in chapter 32 so for next or for this week read chapter 12 through 32 and I know even that's still a lot to take in so I want you to pay attention to four things and that is pay attention to any time God or an angel or someone else that is not human shows up and speaks directly to humans also pay attention to any covenant between people or between humans and God and pay attention to any time a barren wife is granted a child late in life and then finally pay attention any time a husband lies to a king and says that his wife is actually his sister this is a way to sort of focus on what you're reading rather than worrying about having to take in everything and memorize everything you certainly don't have to memorize everything because there's so much going on in these 20 chapters 21 chapters now I've also posted an extensive list of suggested further readings on blackboard and I'll put a few up here for anybody that doesn't have access to blackboard if you're not part of the class or something like that and I'll put these down below in the description section so you can just click on them rather than have them type out these long addresses but I highly recommend if you're really interested in the historical literary criticism of the Bible beyond just the sections of Genesis that we're going to read there is the Harvard class taught by Shay Cohen that's available through iTunes or iTunes University that you can download and I'll put a link to that and also Yale has there has two religious studies courses one's a New Testament course which is great too but this there's a Hebrew Bible course through the Yale open courses I'll put that link to they're both extensive they come with readings that you have to do but also a lot of helpful lectures that separation of the J and P sources that we looked at with the flood story was by the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman and he has an entire book dedicated to that sort of thing it's called the Bible with sources revealed it's the the Pentateuch the the five books of the Torah and as you read through you see texts like like this he'll separate out the J source of the P source in Genesis and then later in Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy he separates out the the various sources but it does make it easier to sort of figure out individual narratives individual fragments and sort of see them in their own sort of autonomy their own telling their own message coming from their own place and time from their own authors now I've also if you're looking for books that are interesting well first of all Bibles that I would recommend obviously I recommend the Oxford that I gave you the Genesis from that's the New Oxford Annotated Bible another one that's popular among scholars is the Jewish Study Bible published by the Jewish Publication Society it's the you know in the entire Tanakh and if you're familiar with the quote-unquote Old Testament in a Christian Bible it will look different the they're mostly the same books but they're arranged in a different order and the translation might not necessarily be the kind you're familiar with uh another translation specifically of Genesis is a Robert Alters translation which is kind of difficult to read because it tries to be as as faithful as possible to the original language but it's it's as close to a verbatim word for word Hebrew to to English translation is we can get another translation but one that if you're wanting to get as close as you can to Hebrew without if you're learning Hebrew that'll help as far as commentaries on the Bible I highly recommend I've read James a few quotes from James Kugel's How to Read the Bible which is an extensive book you know give yourself time on that but it's it's easy to read and it's easy to follow an older more sort of classical specific work of scholarship on Genesis is Nehum Sarna's understanding Genesis and like I said it's one that you'll if you do the the Yale course that I gave you a link to this is the one that the professor uses if you're looking for something that's a good introductory text to biblical scholarship biblical criticism and the history of the the region and the culture a really good one is John Collins short introduction to the Hebrew Bible the thing is this and it's kind of expensive and this is an older this is the first edition there's a second edition out it's it's designed to be a textbook and it costs as much as a textbook so it's a if you can afford it it's great less expensive one is Richard Elliott Friedman the same guy who brought us the the Bible sources revealed has written a book called Who Wrote the Bible where he goes through the the history sort of he's more following the chronological the chronological order of the creation of the text rather than following the you know who wrote Genesis who wrote Exodus and so forth but it's a lot of basic information if you're interested in the back stories or the you know the evolution of the Israelite religion before the the monotheism familiar in the Bible an older but a classical work of scholarship is Frank Moore Cross his Canaanite myth in Hebrew epic that's dates back to the middle of the 20th century or you know later half the 20th century more recently Mark S Smith has several books but the the best sort of starter one is the the early history of God Yahweh and other deities in ancient Israel and if you're interested in archaeology a biblical archaeology Israel Finkelstein and Neil Oster Silberman have a popular press book called the the Bible Unearthed all of these are by scholars who mostly publish academic peer reviewed articles they mostly publish for other scholars in their field but these are all popular press books that are pretty easy to understand pretty easy to get into without having to know ancient Hebrew and Coenate Greek and you know the history of every single Assyrian and Babylonian dynasty so they're each of them makes a good introduction and also you know if you get the the new Oxford annotated Bible it has plenty of background material recorded and the notes at the bottom are very helpful for situating things in their historical context