Preface and Acknowledgements

The following commentary is a guided tour of some of the most interesting and discussed chapters of the Bible. Much like a tour guide informs his group about particular features of an often-visited city, this guide to Gen 1-11 discusses aspects of the biblical text that I know the most about and find particularly fascinating. In this case, many other such commentary/tours of Gen 1-11 have been and will be done, and this tour makes no pretense to cover the text comprehensively.1 Instead, in agreement with the focus of the overall series, I focus on ways that the Bible might be illuminated through a combination of close reading and attention to the original literary contexts of the texts under discussion. In addition, I have tried to bring together diverse worlds and forms of biblical criticism together in this commentary. I attend in the historical exegesis portions to a mix of international perspectives on the philology and formation of the texts discussed, and I include at least some pointers (in the Synthesis) to how such discussions might interact with non-historical approaches to the biblical text.

Having brought this commentary to a close, I have ever more respect for my predecessors who have done the same. I keep learning interesting things about these texts, and so there is never a point of obvious closure. Moreover, as one works on a commentary of this sort over years, the successive stages of learning necessarily end up reflected in diverse diachronic levels of the commentary itself. I and my editors have done our best (perhaps like the editors of Gen 1-11 itself) to bring the whole into a coherent unity. Nevertheless, I hope remaining imperfections can stand as an important reminder that this guide offers an imperfect and partial, but hopefully suggestive mix of ways one might understand the texts in Gen 1-11.2 It does not, contrary to some concepts of biblical commentary, purport to have mastered the text.

This work would be more imperfect if I had not had the aide of numerous people. I have presented and gained invaluable feedback on my work as I presented it to two seminars on Gen 1-11 at Union Theological Seminary (Fall 2015 and Fall 2019) and two seminars at NYU (Spring 2017; Spring 2019 host Liane Feldman), two meetings of the Columbia University Hebrew Bible seminar (September 2015, May 2019), two Colloquiums on Old Testament at Heidelberg and Tübingen (January 2016; hosts Jan Gertz and Erhard Blum), a conference on scribalism and orality at the College de France (May 2016; host Thomas Römer), a workshop on scribalism and Genesis in Koblenz (February 2016; host Michaela Bauks), a faculty and doctoral student gathering in Zurich (July 2018; host Konrad Schmid), and multiple presentations at both the International SBL (2017) and Annual SBL meeting (2016, 2018, 2019). Along the way, I gained specific help from more people than I can gather and name here. Nevertheless, the following is an alphabetical list of some of the individuals who provided extra comments on my work and/or private copies of theirs: Fynn Adomeit, Joel Baden, Walter Bührer, Simeon Chavel, Colleen Conway, John Day, Paul Delnero, Albert DePury, Liane Feldman, Dan Fleming, Aron Freidenreich, Jan Gertz, Esther Hamori, Robin ten Hoopen, Ki-Eun Jang, Ed Greenstein, Christophe Nihan, Thomas Römer, Konrad Schmid, Stephan Schorch, Mark Smith, and (for discussion of theological matters) my Union Seminary colleagues John Thatamanil and Andrea White.

Above all I thank Erhard Blum for his extraordinary help. Initially he read and discussed my work across a series of visits to Tübingen in Winter 2016 (funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung) and Summer 2017 as we planned then to write this commentary together. Even when he had to withdraw as co-author, he continued to provide generous help up to the final days of the commentary's completion. Along the way I have become ever more convinced that Erhard Blum is one of the premier Hebrew philologians and exegetes of our age. This commentary, especially the translation, is immensely better as a result of his input, even as I must stress that he did not read the final whole and would not agree with some of the positions adopted in it.

One thing that both Erhard Blum and my wife, Colleen Conway, encouraged me to do was to publish my work on Gen 1-11 in two books. My initial work on this commentary ended up being too long to be included in a single volume, and my diachronic discussions of precursors to Gen 1-11 had become too technical. Therefore, I made the decision to include those more technical, diachronic discussions in a separate monograph, The Formation of Genesis 1-11, which was published this year (2020) by Oxford University Press (New York). I still treat diachronic issues in this commentary, but the separate publication allowed me to treat them in a more summary way.3 I apologize in advance to some readers who then must consult a different book to find more detailed coverage of issues that interest them. At the same time I hope that this move thus makes this particular volume more accessible to those who do not need as much technical background.

I must stress that most of this commentary is a synthesis of others' work. Of course, I have attempted through footnotes to indicate particular places where I have gotten ideas. Nevertheless, as a result of reading and composing this commentary over a number of years, there are places where I have absorbed something from somewhere and forgotten my source. In particular, I found myself coming back again and again to certain interpreters of Genesis that I found to be unusually good readers, even when I also disagreed with aspects of their positions. They are cited in the relevant parts of the commentary, but I list here some that I found to be particularly useful and interesting resources to be in dialogue with: studies of all of Gen 1-11 by Umberto Cassuto, John Day, Jan Gertz, Benno Jacob (the original German edition of his commentary), Andreas Schüle, Horst Seebass, Gordon Wenham, and Markus Witte; and studies on specific parts of Gen 1-11 by Samuel Abramsky (Gen 10), Norbert Clemens Baumgart (on Gen 4, 6-9), Walter Bührer (especially Gen 1-3; 6:1-4 and 11:1-9), Frank Crüsemann (Gen 2-3, 4 and 10), Karel Deurloo (Gen 4), Ron Hendel (text-criticism of Gen 1-11), Henning Heyde (Gen 4), Annette Schellenberg (Gen 1-3), and Odil Hannes Steck (on Gen 1 and 2-3). If nothing else, I hope the reader discovers in my footnotes some more guides like these to enrich their reading of Gen 1-11. It should be emphasized that I give full information on many materials that I cite at the locus where those materials are discussed, but (as per the style of the commentary) the reader must consult the selective bibliography at the end of this commentary for bibliographic information on items that are cited by author and short title across disparate pages.

The Kohlhammer staff, particularly Florian Specker and Jonathan Robker, have provided fantastic support as I have worked to complete this project. In addition, I must thank my fellow IECOT/IKAT authors. Some paved the way for this commentary by writing earlier volumes in the series, while others provided especially helpful feedback on draft sections of this commentary at IECOT author-editor workshops in November 2017, August 2019 and November 2019. In particular, I benefited from the careful, frank feedback of Christl Maier at those workshops, and feedback from Carolyn Sharp prompted me to engage postmodern and (consciously) ideological readings of Gen 1-11 more than I otherwise would have.

I conclude with three mechanical notes and one dedicatory one. As per the style of the series, I use abbreviations from John Kutsko et al., The SBL Handbook of Style: For Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014). Therefore, I do not provide a separate list of abbreviations here aside from noting here my frequent use of Gesenius18 to refer to the eighteenth edition of the Gesenius Handwörterbuch.4 In addition, even though the Hebrew names in Gen 1-11 often diverge from their common equivalents, I have used standard English forms of biblical names as they generally appear in the Bible (following the NRSV), and I default to the most common form of characters whose names change across the biblical narrative, e.g., Abraham rather than Abram. Along the way, I frequently use the convention of using an asterisk (*) to indicate a citation of a verse range that is substantially, though not completely, made up of the texts that I mean to point to. For example, I sometimes refer to priestly elements embedded in Gen 10-Gen 10:1a, 2-7, 20, 22-23, 31-32-with the shorthand Genesis 10* after I have specified those elements at least once in the prior discussion.

Finally, I dedicate this book to a person who will not be aware of its existence for quite some time: my new (and first) granddaughter, Kaia Comorau, who was born on Oct. 17, 2019 in the later stages of finishing this work. While the outset of the present decade (2020) seems quite fraught and the outlook for earth's life unclear, Kaia's birth and that of others in her generation stand as symbols of human commitment to the future. Genesis 1-11 is a story of first births, and it articulates both that potential and certain challenges for human life on this earth. I dedicate this critical analysis of Gen 1-11 to Kaia and other little ones in a prayer for them finding ways to flourish together. To quote a poem by Buddhist teacher and author, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel "For All Beings":5

May all beings be cared for and loved,
Be listened to, understood and acknowledged despite different...