Later rabbinic and mystical Jewish interpretation of these chapters have varied widely, depending on the theme under discussion. Overall, interpreters often have tended to reinterpret various parts of the Gen primeval history through the lens of the flood narrative’s report of the pervasive, irremovable evil of humanity (Gen 6:5–7; also 8:21). For example, an initial stratum in the Enochic Book of the Watchers (1 En. 6:2–7:5) is the earliest tradition to link the evil of the flood (Gen 6:5) with the preceding story of marriages of sons of God and daughters of humanity (Gen 6:1–4) by telling how those marriages produced violent giants whose violence caused the flood.10 The above-noted tradition about evil Nimrod built on that picture, seeing the “warrior” (גבור) Nimrod of Gen 10:8–9 as a continuation of the line of evil, giant “warriors” noted in Gen 6:4. This interpretation then was complemented by a broad tendency to attribute grave sexual sins to Noah’s son, Ham (Gen 9:22–23), and see the building of Babylon (often seen as Nimrod’s work) as an illustration of the persistence of human evil in the post-flood period (Gen 11:1–9; cf. Gen 8:21).11 As will be discussed later in this commentary, these negative strands of interpretation of Gen 1–11, particularly those focused on semi-outsider figures in the story world (e.g., Cain, Nimrod), have been used by some to justify exclusion, colonization, or enslavement of perceived others, especially people of African descent, who are often identified with those figures.
Another broader trend to note is the way that the flood narrative’s depiction of the evil of humanity in Gen 6:5–7 appears to have influenced early Jewish and, particularly, Christian readings of the Garden of Eden story (Gen 2–3). We may already see this in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus (4Q422 1:11–12), which seems to link the “evil inclination” (רע … יצר) of humanity mentioned in Gen 6:5 to rebellion of the first human in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2–3).12 This idea of original human evil, undergirded by a reading of Gen 2–3 in light of Gen 6:5–7, then appears even more explicitly in Paul’s reading of the Garden of Eden story as an account of the “fall” of all of humanity into sin and death (Rom 5:12–21; also 1 Cor 15:21–22, 45–49).13 The Eden story served for Paul as a crucial background for his broader theology about Jesus’s salvation of the entire world, both gentile and Jewish. Though there were other stories in Scripture, such as the golden calf incident (Exod 32:1–14), that depicted sins by Israel, Paul focused on the Gen 3 story of disobedience in Eden because of its potential to illustrate a universal human deficiency—something suffered by both gentiles and Jews—to which Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection could stand as a universal solution.14 In the wake of Paul’s interpretation, most Christians have read Gen 2–3 as a story of the original sin of the first humans that was then inherited by all of subsequent humanity.15
The more interpreters focused on Gen 3 as the story of a fall into sin, the more they also sought figures to blame, and the most obvious suspects often ended up being Eve and the snake, rather than the man in the story. To be sure, Paul himself juxtaposed Adam’s bringing of sin with Christ’s bringing of salvation (e.g., Rom 5:12–21), and only a few early Jewish interpretations stressed Eve’s role in bringing death into the world (e.g., Sir 25:24; Philo Creation 151–152). Nevertheless, following the scriptural precedent of 1 Tim 2:14–15, many Christian interpreters particularly blamed Eve for the garden sin, projecting onto her an anxiety about women, bodies, and desire that was characteristic of their context.16 In addition, building on the above-described early-Jewish tendency to see angelic and other demonic powers at work in the primeval period, Christians saw the snake of Gen 3 as Satan in disguise, tricking the woman into her temptress role.
More recently, especially in the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, these first chapters of Genesis have been a central locus for European Christian development of concepts of race, as Europeans colonized and enslaved people of color. On the one hand, the primeval history posed a challenge for concepts of race because it posited a unitary origin for all humans, with the diverse peoples of the world sharing a common set of parents and being siblings to each other. On the other hand, the depiction of post-flood peoples in Genesis 10 came to be a crucial template for European constructs of “Semitic,” “Hamitic,” and “Japhetite” (the latter often associated with Europeans) races and development of religiously-based ideologies supporting racial domination. In particular, the stories of Cain and Ham were reinterpreted to provide an account of African peoples as subhuman products of a separate line of Adam’s descendants, bearing the dark “mark” of Cain’s infamy (Gen 4:15) and the curse of Ham’s descendants to slavery (Gen 9:25).17
In the contemporary context, the first chapters of Genesis also have been a focus of discussions around gender, ecology and broader questions surrounding the relations of humans to other living beings. For example, some feminist interpreters such as Phyllis Trible have critiqued traditional Christian readings of the Garden of Eden story as a story of a fall caused by Eve’s weakness. So also, Trible and others have found salutary the Gen 1 description of God’s creation of male and female “humanity” (האדם) in (or as) God’s image.18 Meanwhile, an increasing sensitivity to the problem of human destruction of the environment has raised questions about the anthropocentric character of Gen 1–3, particularly God’s intent in Gen 1:26–28 for humans to “rule” and even “subdue” creation. An oft-cited 1967 article on “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” by Lynn White attributes part of this crisis to the anthropocentric perspective of the Genesis creation stories.19 In response, some religious interpreters of the Bible have offered more ecofriendly readings of Genesis, seeing Gen 1:26–28 as envisioning human royal care for creation or the stories of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel as chronicling the corruption of the earth that follows on human misdeeds.20 Still more recent readings of Gen 1–9 have followed the lead of Jacques Derrida in raising questions surrounding the basic distinction between humans and all other living beings that is presupposed in many such readings, a distinction that is a particular focus of the creation stories in Gen 1–3.21
Major Contours of the Diachronic Background to Gen 1–11
This commentary aims to enrich the above-surveyed centuries-long conversation about Genesis with a mix of diachronic and synchronic analysis, each pursued in turn and in relation to each other. As stated in the preface to the series, “diachronic analysis” is understood here to pertain to the “depth dimension” of a given text—that is its various sorts of identifiable precursors: earlier source or compositional-redactional strata, oral traditions, and/or separate biblical or