The Genesis of Genesis with David Carr

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

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

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

Dan Beecher Things are good. We're going to dig into some stuff, the genesis, if you will, of Genesis.

Dan McClellan Hmm, the precursors to the Genesis.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed. Which sounds like a lot of fun. Why don't you introduce our guest, who's going to tell us all about it?

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

David Carr Well, it's so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

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

David Carr That was fantastic. Okay.

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

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

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

David Carr Sounds great. As Bill Murray says in my wife's favorite movie, "What About Bob?"

Dan McClellan baby steps. Okay.

David Carr That sounds good.

Dan Beecher That's a good way to start. That's a good way to go about this.

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

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

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

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

Dan McClellan The narrative slows to a crawl as soon as we get past those.

Dan Beecher Although I got to say, chapters 5 and 10, when you start to get into who begat whom- The begats, yeah ... that can be pretty thick. That can be- Fair enough.

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

David Carr This is a great place to start. I think we can think about authors who are literate scribes. They're the scholars of their community, in a tiny community in what we now call Israel-Palestine, in the sort of eastern edge of the Mediterranean. And they are writing about, give or take, 2,500, 2,600 years ago. And they're working within what, in their setting, is just a really pretty tiny kingdom. It's only a little bit bigger than the greater New York area, where I live. And they have, all around them, major civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, also large Syrian cities and stuff. Those are the sort of big kingdoms that they have to contend with. And they're small-scale farmers or village dwellers. There's some a little bit larger towns, and that's probably where these scholars worked. But they're living in this kind of context, and they're having to contend with everyday life, which can be really hard in those contexts, and sometimes massive catastrophes. In many ways, I think the story of the formation of the Bible is the story of various texts being written in the furnace of communal trauma. And it's not just one, it's a bunch of them, one after the other, as these little tiny kingdoms are buffeted by major empires who have an interest in their area. And so that's, yeah, that's a very different way, I realize, of setting the Bible, setting it in the context of a group of people confronting the difficulties of everyday life and of collective trauma. But for me, getting insights into the way the Bible was forged in that kind of context really adds a whole different level of meaning to me. It helps me understand why the Bible became the text that we're still talking about today, like on this podcast, when a lot of the texts of these major empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia were lost in the sands when the kingdoms were destroyed. There's some kind of resilience in these texts that was forged in trauma, and I think people nowadays and across the centuries can hear that deeper music in them.

Dan McClellan And I think it's reflecting some of the universal experiences of humanity. You mention the trauma, the fact that they have persevered, and a part of that is the fact that the groups of people who have curated those texts have managed to persevere in the face of so much persecution, so much trauma. 2,500, 2,600 years ago, we're talking just before and after the Babylonian exile, which seems to be one of the largest traumatic scars that is left on the surface of the Hebrew Bible. Would you say that these texts begin their formation prior to the exile and kind of take the shape that we know them now after returning from the exile? Is it a little hard to tell, or is it something where we can say, "Oh, this is definitely before. This is definitely after"?

David Carr It's so rare in biblical scholarship that you can say anything is definite, I have to say. I will say this, for what it's worth, as an orientation point. One of the things that scholars started to recognize already over 300 years ago is that these chapters in Genesis, and actually much of the rest of the Torah are formed really out of two probably originally separate written strands. Mm-hmm. And scholars often refer, I know you know this already, but just to mention it for anybody in the audience who doesn't. One of those strands is referred to by scholars as the priestly strand. Not that there are any priests in the primeval history, really. But that's what they call it, the priestly strand, or P for short. And it starts with the seven-day creation account in Genesis 1, and then it includes those genealogies that bog people down often in Genesis 5 and 10 that you were mentioning, Dan. Mm. And then it also includes other crucial parts of the flood narrative and that sort of thing. That's one strand that originally existed separately, and then there's what scholars used to refer to, and many still do, as the J strand, the Yahwistic strand. I tend to prefer a more neutral term for complicated reasons of non-P, non-priestly strand, which starts with the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2 to 3, and the Cain and Abel story. I mean, amazing stories, narrative stories that have a very different feel to them than the seven-day creation account or whatever. And then it continues with its own flood strand, and onto a story of Noah and his sons, and the Tower of Babel story. Anyway, this J strand or non-P strand, you'll hear me use the term non-P more here. Mm. It has its own separate character to it, and most scholars, over the last few hundred years, have thought it was an originally separate strand. And back to your question, Dan, I am still of the opinion, and I'm probably in the majority in North America, but in the minority vis-a-vis some of my European colleagues. I think the non-P strand is a pre-P strand and probably pre-exilic. Mm-hmm. So it was formed in the time, there's still a lot of trauma going on, but that big one hasn't happened yet. Whereas the priestly strand almost certainly was formed in the wake of the Babylonian exile and destruction of Jerusalem and that kind of thing, and you can see that subtly reflected in different aspects of that material. Yeah.

Dan McClellan We had Leanne Feldman on a bit ago to talk about her book, "The Consuming Fire." So we have a little bit of an orientation to P. I believe she's a little closer to Joel Baden and the neo-documentary hypothesis than I am, and perhaps than you are. But you mentioned the seven-day creation account that we find in Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3 or 4A, and then we have the other one running from the second half of Genesis 2:4 down through the rest of the Adam and Eve story. I'd love to hear, I bring up the fact that these are two different, originally independent creation accounts quite frequently on social media, and the picture that I have tried to paint is of an earlier account where there are concerns with the way God is represented, there are concerns with the way the creative act is represented, where we have the priestly group coming in and trying to massage it into something that's a little more comfortable. Could you talk about your thoughts on the relationship of these two creation accounts? Sure.

David Carr Yeah, it's a fascinating example, I think, of writing and counter-writing, where the two texts are originally set up in opposition to each other before they're then brought into the same strand. Hmm. But the Garden of Eden story, this is a story that I've been reading it for decades as a full-time professional scholar, and I still see new things in it every time. But it's this incredible story about how God initially creates these childlike humans in a garden, tells them, "You can have all these yummy trees, anything you want, except for this one tree in the middle of the garden." And anybody who has kids knows, if you want to guarantee that somebody's going to eat from- ... something, you just do that. Just tell them that they can do anything. And it says, "If you don't do it, if you eat from this tree, you will definitely die. You will surely die." And there's this whole dialogue. I won't go deeply into the story, but the woman eventually realizes, "Hey, wait a minute. Thanks to the snake, I realize this tree will give me some good wisdom. I'll become like God, knowing good and evil." And she and her man eat from it, and the snake is right. Their eyes are opened, they get wisdom, but God then says, "Oh, this is not good.

Dan McClellan They have God-like knowledge.

David Carr What if they also eat of the tree of eternal life and gain immortality? I've got to send them out of the garden." And does so, and as a result of that, the humans will definitely die, just as God had predicted. It wasn't that God was going to put them to death, it's just that they will gain mortality because God can't tolerate having them in the garden if they've eaten of the tree of knowledge. What's interesting, back to your question, Dan, about this story, is it's positing a God who's worried about humans becoming too God-like. And God is kind of remarkably human in this story. He's walking in the garden, jealous, kind of duplicitous with regard to the humans. There's a lot going on there. I like this picture of God myself. But apparently, the authors of the priestly story weren't so happy with it. And so what's remarkable about the way they tell their story in Genesis 1 is they tell this story about a absolutely majestic, royal-like God who says decrees and instantly things are just magically come into place. And as a crown of this entire creation, this God is not scared of having humans be godlike, but actually makes humans as God images in order to rule all living creatures in this cosmos. So it's diametrically opposed to the message of the Garden of Eden story. Uh-huh. And there are all sorts of other subtle indicators that the person who wrote Genesis 1 had the Garden of Eden story in mind and was trying to replace it. And then the radical move was made later to turn what was supposed to be the replacement into the prologue of the Garden of Eden story, and they were put one after the other in the same strand.

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

David Carr That latter statement is probably the most accurate. Yeah. We don't have a way of knowing what's in their minds, but that's a typical scholarly cautious thing. I will say, one of the exciting new developments in Pentateuchal study, and believe it or not, even after 300 years, we're coming up with some really exciting new stuff, I think. Is becoming more aware of ways in which these two strands I was talking about earlier, the priestly strand and the earlier non-priestly strand, or maybe not always earlier in some ways. They existed separately, but I mentioned before that the community in which these were written is pretty tiny. Mm-hmm. And literacy within the ancient world of the Levant was not widespread. So if you have a tiny kingdom with only a tiny minority of people able to read, and you have two complete accounts of the origins of the world, people are going to know about both of them. Mm-hmm. And they're going to start to add to each one in relation to the other. And so we're starting to see evidence in these two strands that they were modified by scribes who were still transmitting them separately before they finally come to a point where they go, "Well, why are we working these two documents separately? Let's just make them one document and have it all together." And I think that's probably the most plausible explanation for why they did it. It's sort of archival, but they're also reading these for meaning. Mm-hmm. And so, for example, when they put these two creation stories together, there was no real alternative but to put the larger, more spacious vision of the creation of the whole cosmos in Genesis 1 at the beginning. Yeah. And then put what was actually the earlier creation story about the Garden of Eden as a follow-up. Yeah.

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

David Carr Yes, I definitely think they are. And you did a really nice job of summarizing a lot of these key elements. The story of the Garden of Eden, it never exactly verbally parallels anything in the Gilgamesh Epic, but it's constantly in interaction with some of its ideas. You mentioned the theme of immortality, which obviously is a big ultimate result. But also the snake and the fruit and the lost human chance at immortality. Gilgamesh just barely almost has that immortality and loses it. There are just all sorts of subtle ways in which that's reflected. And then the Enuma Elish Epic seems to have been the background for the Genesis 1 seven-day creation account. Mm-hmm. Where the Enuma Elish Epic is all about trying to show how the Babylonian state god, Marduk, is the end-all be-all, the supreme god over all the other gods. And he can create by a word and destroy by a word, and he creates the cosmos out of dividing up the sea goddess into two. And there are all sorts of interesting ways in which Genesis 1 says kind of- Marduk doesn't even begin to figure into the picture. In fact, there are no gods that figure into the picture. There's just God, capital G, and that's it. And so it tells an Enuma Elish-like story, but now with Marduk completely obliterated and the God of Israel as the center point of the story. So I think both of these stories are constantly interacting with the literatures of these bigger empires that surrounded the scribes. And as I say in one of my books, "Writing on the Tablet of the Heart," scribes, ancient scholars of the time, that literate minority, they learned to write on older literature. And at least at some point, we can't reconstruct exactly how or why it appears that that older literature that they were reading, and actually probably memorizing, were these stories of Gilgamesh or Atrahasis is another one that comes up, we might talk about that a little later, that were really important parts of the curriculum of the ancient Near East. And so if you were going to be a scholar, a literate person, you knew them, at least at certain periods in history. Yeah.

Dan McClellan That was the canon, the literary canon at the time before the canon as we know it now. Exactly. So I think the Garden of Eden story is fascinating. I also think it's fascinating to consider how the priestly authors, to some degree, seem to be trying to supplant it, where God says, "Hmm, it's not good that we have this situation, and let's try this. Let's try this. This isn't working." And then the priestly authors say, "No. God says it and then immediately recognizes, 'Yes, this is good.'" Mm-hmm. Exactly. So it seems to be saying, "No, not that way. It's our way." Now, a question I get frequently that I've talked about on social media a lot is the relationship of Genesis 2 and 3 to Genesis 4. Mm-hmm. Because once we transition, we've got Adam and Eve in the garden, and then we transition to children of Adam and Eve. And it seems like the narrative in Genesis 4 is presupposing a fully populated Earth, where Cain is like, "Hey, people are going to notice this, and I'm going to get in trouble, and so I'm going to go over here to this city that has a name already. I'm going to find a wife." My perspective, my understanding is that Genesis 4 was probably written or initially circulated independently of Genesis 2 and 3. I don't know if people have strong feelings about which came before the other, but what can you tell us about what you think about the relationship of these two parts of ostensibly the same story? Yes.

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

Dan Beecher So- What kinds of parallels are those?

David Carr Well, they kind of go through a very similar sequence. I should get the book out, but you start out with a problem situation. In the case of the Garden of Eden story, it's this forbidden tree. In the case of the Cain/Abel story, it's Cain getting really pissed off because God didn't pay attention to him and his offering and only focused on his brother's offering. And that's never explained in the story. It's just Cain's really mad. Right. And God basically confronts him and says, "You've got a choice here." This is paraphrasing wildly. "And you need to master sin." And then the very next thing he does is take his brother out to the field and kill him. The corresponding thing in the Garden of Eden story is they eat of the fruit, and then both stories go into a dialogue with God, an interrogation that goes back and forth. Yeah, and then there's an aftermath.

Dan McClellan You have the same reference too, because part of Genesis 3 is, "Your desire will be for your husband," which could be a sexual desire, could be a desire to dominate, but, "He will rule over you," is also parallel, isn't it, between Genesis 3 and Genesis 4 with sin lying at the door? Yeah.

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

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

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

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

David Carr Well, I think they had a different idea of literal truth than we do. The way they would write history would not be the way most of us would try to write a good quality history now. They were more comfortable, say, reconstructing what they thought Abraham must have said because of what they believe. And they would think, "Okay, then that's what he said, is what I believe would be what he would say," and that's what you do. We wouldn't do that now. But I think, for example, back to the example we were talking about before of the priestly creation story being written to contradict the Garden of Eden story and replace it. I think the people who wrote that priestly creation story believed that what they were writing was correct, and that the Garden of Eden story was incorrect. I do think that's one reason why they wrote it the way they did and didn't just sort of add some things around the edges of the Garden of Eden story and leave it at that. They really felt like they believed in it. And in a sense, I think, yes, they both believed that what they were writing had happened, but they were as equally committed to what it meant about God, what it meant about the Sabbath, because that's the crowning aspect of the seven-day creation account, and that sort of thing. So they believed in it. But then, the texts travel over time, and it turns out that both of these texts persist as important, that the priestly account doesn't succeed in replacing the non-priestly material. And so, 150 years later, communities say, "We're not going to let either one of these go." And so they just put them together. Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's funny, when I was reading through this part of Genesis and I read the account of the flood, and then I got to the Tower of Babel, and I went, "Oh, yeah, because if everyone's descended from the same family, we have a language problem. How do we explain why there are so many languages?" And suddenly there's a reason why we need to explain why there's all of these languages. And so it made sudden sense to me, like there's a certain sense that can be found in just going like, "Oh, wait, some smartass just was like, 'Okay, well, if we all descended from Noah, why are those guys speaking a different language and those guys a different language?'" Or something like that. It just seems like a lot of these, there are questions that get answered by the next thing or whatever.

David Carr Yeah, that's exactly it. And really back to where we started this conversation about what is a primeval history. A primeval history is a story about how these aspects of the audience's reality came to be. It's just, it's all of that. And this actually kind of relates to something I think many people haven't realized enough reading these chapters, which is they sometimes will talk about a creation story. Fair enough, in a way. And then they'll distinguish a creation story like the Garden of Eden or the Genesis 1 seven-day account, which we've been talking about so far, from the stories that come after, as if they're somehow different stories. But for the ancients, the social reality that they lived in was as much a part of their world as the natural, what we call our natural scientific reality. They didn't separate a sort of natural world from a social world. So the whole primeval history, all the way up to the Tower of Babel story that you were just talking about, Dan, is, in a sense, a creation story. It's all an origin story about the world they live in, including multiple languages, including farming, and childbirth, and Sabbath, and- And wine and sex and all this sort of thing. It's all bound up together, and that's all part of this origin story, which is Genesis 1 to 11.

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

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

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

David Carr Well, this is one of my favorite texts too, actually. It's such an interesting... I mean, it's just these little corners of the Bible where you kind of go, "Oh, man, I can't believe this is here. Why didn't anybody tell me about this?" I guess now that it's juxtaposed with the flood, which as you say, starts with God seeing that the evil of humanity is just thoroughgoing and that sort of thing, and being sorry God made them. Since this story comes right before that, it's been tempting for many interpreters to say, "Okay, well, there must be something wrong with these divine-human marriages." The puzzle is that humans do absolutely nothing wrong in the story. Right. Yeah. The only beings that do anything are the sons of God, who take the humans for wives and then have giant children of them.

Dan McClellan And so- And the agency of these human women wouldn't matter anyway. Their will when it comes to marriage is pretty irrelevant in the text.

David Carr They are taken, not- In this text, they are taken. There's evidence- Yeah ... that women had agency within marriage in ancient Israel, but that's certainly not highlighted here. It's just the sons of God doing it. And God, this is another place where I think we can overread it. God does not ever say they did something wrong. God just says, "My spirit can't abide in these humans, and I will set a lifetime limit of 120 years." And then it goes on to say, "And then giants were in the land at the time, and this was the time of the warriors of old who were the men of the name." And one thing I think we just have to remember, Dan, here is that 120-year lifespan within the world of the ancient Levant was huge. Yeah. They could barely conceptualize anyone living that long. That was like the absolute outside limit. Interestingly, we find the exact same lifetime limit mentioned in Mesopotamian wisdom texts that are preserved in Syria, that are talking about the absolute limit of human life. So, this is something people are talking about. It's another place where Genesis is based on some precursors of some kind. Maybe not that particular text, but that kind of idea is in circulation. But where I'm going with this is, in the ancient world, we see myths around this in Hittite literature, in ancient Greek literature, that when the gods mate with humans, the resulting offspring have the characteristics of both. And that can mean usually that they're big, because gods are big. Right. You've got to remember that gods are really huge in the ancient world. They're also beautiful. Gods are beautiful. If it's a male They're strong. They're incredibly strong, superhumanly strong. And the other thing that humans can get from being mixed divine-human heritage is they can become immortal. And so what seems to be at issue in this story is very similar to the Garden of Eden story, where God will not abide humans having divine immortality. And this act by the sons of God threatens that. Mm-hmm. And so God doesn't say, "Oh, bad you. You did this," or whatever. God just says, "Okay, well, we're going to have to just put a circuit breaker on the lifespan of the offspring." And so they're going to be big, and they're going to be strong, and that's part of why we hear about giants and about warriors of old. They're the divine-human offspring. But they're not going to be immortal. But they're also, this is a subtle detail, is they're going to be men of the name, which is, I don't know how it's translated in many common translations, but the idea here is the ancients were well aware we all die, and the question becomes, well, okay, so what comes after? There was no concept of afterlife in this culture. So to some extent, it would be your kids. Mm-hmm. You'd have kids, and that would be your immortality, and the Garden of Eden actually talks a lot about that at the end. So that's one form of living on even though you will certainly die. But another main way that you had immortality in the ancient world was fame. And so, this text says, "I'm setting 120-year limit." It's great, big limit, actually, for divine-human offspring. But they're going to be famous. They're going to be the giants that you know from other legends. We hear about them in the Book of Joshua and so on. They were in the land of Canaan when the Israelites come. Right. Or the warriors of old, who are the men of name, like the giant famous warriors of David. These are people who are part of the broader setting of the audience, and they can, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, we know about those guys." And they're a testimony to sort of the truth of the story. So anyway, where I'm going with this is it's a take on this story that really doesn't involve any wrongdoing, really. It's just humans kind of struggling against this border of immortality. But then you have this real disjunction that happens where all of a sudden after this, where humans do nothing wrong, if anything, the women are raped, to God sees that the evil of humans is just complete and total. And you kind of go, "What? Where did this occur?" And I don't find it in this Genesis 6 story. Maybe you'd find it in the Cain and Abel story, though it's just one guy, and then his son, Lamech. The place where many people have tried to find that evilness, that's incorrigible evilness, is in the Garden of Eden story. And I think that's a lot of why people see original sin and that sort of thing in the Garden of Eden story, where it's just a story of two kids growing up in many ways. Yeah. So where I'm going with this is really to say, I really think what we're looking at right there between this really interesting ancient story about the origins of giants and famous warriors and the flood narrative, which is talking about the evil of humanity, is this is kind of a seam between an earlier layer of that origin story, which had no flood, and a later layer that was written at a very different time with very different precursors that has a different vision of what humanity's about and what God's about, too. You have a very different sort of flavor to the flood story that starts right then.

Dan McClellan And this is something that you bring up in your book, but when we get into Noah's life, it seems like Noah's claim to fame is viticulture. Yeah. And we have these references to the people who are around and it's like, "Oh, they're the ones who dwell in tents, and they're the ones who make these instruments and tools and everything." It's like, well, it doesn't matter what they did if they're about to all be destroyed in the flood. Yeah. The way the story is told, it doesn't seem to be anticipating the destruction of all humanity, and then all of a sudden, we get the flood. So in your book, you talk about how it seems that the flood is a later insertion into this narrative. Can you expand a little bit on the flood narrative, how it's coming in and interrupting things?

David Carr Sure, I can. You touched on the first major indicator, which is just that chapter four of Genesis, when it's talking about the descendants of Cain, they build cities, they found music, and pasturing herds, and building tents, and there's this whole building of culture and this sort of thing. And then you have this story we were just talking about in Genesis 6, where there are a bunch of giants and warriors, which the audience is supposed to know about and think this story would explain. And then suddenly, a flood comes and wipes everybody out. And so it's unclear how these stories work if that's actually the case. Now, there is an ancient Mesopotamian story of the flood, Atrahasis, and in a adoption of that story into the Gilgamesh epic that we were talking about earlier, that solved this problem by actually having all the artisans and stuff come on the ark with the flood hero. So it's a big party. Yeah. Everybody's on the boat together. And so you can explain it that way. But the way the Genesis flood story goes, there's only Noah, his sons, and their wives on the ark. That's it So there's a real narrative problem there. Some ancient Jewish rabbinic interpreters solved this problem partly by imagining that one of the major giants that was born of the union of the gods and women held onto the outside of the ark during the flood.

Dan Beecher And that's how he made it long enough to- I thought you were going to say that his nose stayed just above water level. That's so- He was so tall that- I like that.

Dan McClellan Maybe that's a rabbinic tradition I haven't uncovered yet.

David Carr But- I think there's the snorkel theory of the- But anyway, early readers saw that there was this issue, and they had to try to explain it. I think another thing that is striking, I think you mentioned, Dan, that Noah's main claim to fame seems to be that he founded viniculture, the making of wine, which in ancient Israel was like, "This is a big deal." People in the ancient world drank fermented beverages. It was one way to have safe drinking water because the alcohol would automatically take care of bacteria. And, of course, they'd also get a little buzzed from it, or more than a little buzzed in Noah's case. So anyway, so Noah's name is explained in terms of his founding of viniculture, but we don't get to hear about him doing that until after the flood story where he's kind of reintroduced to us as- Yeah ... he's a man of the arable ground. Ish Adamah. And then we hear about, okay, what did he do with the ground? He planted vines, and then he got drunk on the fruit from it. What did he know? He's the first human to do it, so he just drinks a whole lot of it, and he's flat out drunk and gets naked. And there's a whole story that comes from that. So that's one Noah. But then there's this flood hero Noah that's like this, it has a very different character to him. So I think I speak of sort of the two Noahs. Mm. The original Noah, who founds viniculture and has this drama with his sons, and the flood hero Noah, which is what some later authors make of that figure as they make him into the flood hero using the Mesopotamian stories as their model.

Dan McClellan And now when we get to the flood, you talked about two different strands, the Priestly and the non-P or J strand. And we see two beginnings, two middles, and two ends to the flood story kind of woven together, don't we? We do.

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