The Shape of Primeval J at the Moment of Compilation

Abstract

There is widespread agreement that the components of the Primeval Story (Genesis 1:1-11:27) fall into two separate narrative complexes, with minimal editorial transitions. Dividing the texts into Primeval P and Primeval J (or non-P) yields two accounts of the distant past that each set the stage for the emergence of the Israelite ancestors. While identification of the components of Primeval J has reached a near consensus, the question of order has received too little attention. The current order of the J elements in Genesis has been the default starting point, perhaps because this seems true of the P elements. The discussion below begins differently, by asking what order produces the most coherent plot. The primary result of this process is the placement of the flood story near the end of the account, while producing a central sequence of texts: Cain and the development of human civilization (4:17-25), the intervention of divine beings (6:1-4), the career of Nimrod (10:8-12), the demise of Babylon (11:1-9).

1. Introduction

There is widespread agreement that the components of the Primeval Story (Genesis 1:1-11:27) fall into two separate narrative complexes, with minimal editorial transitions. Dividing the texts into Primeval P and Primeval J (or non-P) yields two accounts of the distant past that each set the stage for the emergence of the Israelite ancestors.1 The most important outcome of the separation into sources is the recognition that there were multiple points of view in ancient Israel about this background. The most prominent features of both accounts are the creation of humans and their environment and the great flood, creating an impression that they have much in common, but the two accounts disagree profoundly about some issues, and each addresses concerns that the other ignores. The J account has been the most difficult to characterize because of its own enigmatic nature and because the P account controls the framework of the hybrid version of the Primeval Story that now appears in Genesis.2 The goal of this essay will be to determine what the Primeval J account the compiler of Genesis used looked like.3 Understanding this stage as precisely as possible provides the best opportunity to examine how the compiler of Genesis used this material and what part it played in the forward progression of primeval traditions. In the past, source criticism has been dominated by backward movement, with the desire to find traditions earlier than the texts we have, perhaps even their original forms. Hindy Najman has proposed a more dynamic approach to interpretation that can also move in a forward direction. Part of what makes this possible is that some biblical texts “have imbedded compositional histories that are left transparently on the surface for all to see and engage in a variety of ways” (Najman 2025, p. 13). The description of J Primeval will depend upon movement both backward and forward from the particular moment the compiler used it to produce Genesis.

While identification of the components of Primeval J has reached a near consensus, the question of order has received too little attention. The current order of the J elements in Genesis has been the default starting point, perhaps because this seems true of the P elements. The discussion below begins differently, by asking what order produces the most coherent plot. The primary result of this process is the placement of the flood story near the end of the account, while producing a central sequence of texts: Cain and the development of human civilization (4:17-25), the intervention of divine beings (6:1-4), the career of Nimrod (10:8-12), and the demise of Babylon (11:1-9).4 These four elements are closely connected and unique to J, and they form the core of its perspective, but their dispersal in Genesis 1-11 dilutes the power of its presentation.

These four texts exhibit a high degree of incoherence in their present positions in the book of Genesis, the type of incoherence that is the most important motivating factor for practicing source division of the text in the first place. Leaving these texts in their Genesis order in a reconstructed Primeval J also produces an incoherent plot in which these four elements appear unconnected to the texts around them. Furthermore, their primary ideas about city-building and human fame get drowned out by the flood account that occupies and dominates the center of the story because it was at the center of Primeval P, which led to its central position in Primeval Genesis. In Primeval J, the deity is at odds with the development of human civilization, epitomized by city-building, and the divine efforts to prevent it escalate through the flood which, at best, allows for some space in which the Shem–Eber group can establish itself. This plot will appear in clearer form in the reconstructed Primeval J at the conclusion of the discussion.

2. The Current State of the Source Criticism

Source division of the Pentateuch has a long and tangled history. The Documentary Hypothesis in its classic form dominated the field for over one hundred years, but its influence began to falter in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Two primary factors, one internal and one external, led to this decline. Internally, the Documentary Hypothesis began to accumulate conclusions it was not well equipped to support.5 Most of these were part of an attempt to reconstruct the history of Israelite religion based on dates assigned to the four sources, which often ran from Solomonic JE to Josianic D to post-Exilic P. This structure became a “totalizing system” that sought to encompass all study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel, but eventually took on so much weight that it collapsed as questions arose about many of its individual pieces.6 It is always essential to state that the chronology of the hypothetical sequence of sources above produced a portrait of decline from a romanticized, egalitarian Israelite past to a rigid, legalistic Judaism, a portrait that fed anti-Semitic sentiment and Christian supersessionism.

Externally, the weakening foundation of the traditional Documentary Hypothesis coincided with the rise of new approaches to biblical literature that made use of literary and sociological theories that had arisen in other academic fields of study. These approaches provided new energy to a field that had become weighed down by the domination of historical-critical approaches. Unfortunately, creating space for new ways of reading often involved denigrating old ways, or even declaring them dead. Meanwhile, the space created by the deflation of the documentary approach to source criticism allowed other variations, most of them supplementary in nature, to expand their influence. Around the beginning of the new century and new millennium, however, the Documentary Hypothesis has been rejuvenated in a form truer to its literary origins. The neo-documentary approach has shaped itself as a literary response to the narrative incoherence of the Pentateuch and has resisted inclinations to ask and answer historical questions based on the identification of sources and their points of view.7 One of the advantages of the neo-documentary approach is its emphasis on comprehensiveness. The composers of the biblical books conserved conflicting traditions to an extent so great that the stages of formation of the sources themselves are still visible in the final form of the text.8 These features may often be the basis of supplementary approaches to the formation of the Pentateuch.9

It turned out that what may have appeared to be a diversion for study of the Pentateuch, into literary approaches that paid primary attention to the final form of the text rather than identifying earlier sources, was a fortuitous path for the latter. Ronald Hendel expressed this turn of fortune in a 2011 article called “Is the ‘J’ Primeval Narrative an Independent Composition?” Hendel responded to critics of the whole idea of a J source, particularly those who accused it of having no discernible style of its own: “This position may have been credible a generation ago, when literary study of biblical narrative was virtually nonexistent. But I submit that it is not credible today, when there are many lucid descriptions of the literary art of biblical prose” (R. J. Hendel 2011, p. 204). Hendel was claiming that advances made in the study of narrative art (sometimes called poetics), one of the methods of biblical study that gained massive influence in the last quarter of the twentieth century and seemed to have eclipsed source criticism, has provided some of the tools for its revival.10 While those who formerly worked to identify sources used characteristics of texts like vocabulary, syntax, theology, and duplication as their primary tools for analysis, they now have very carefully developed understandings of characterization, settings, and plot development at their disposal. Hendel’s use of the term “narrative art” pointed back to the work of two scholars of the Hebrew Bible who wrote influential books in the early 1980s, Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative) and Shimon Bar-Efrat (Narrative Art in the Bible). Perhaps nobody could have guessed thirty years ago that these two books, which were leading the field away from methods that divided the text up into more original units and toward those that read the final form of the text closely, would eventually bring the field back full circle, to a consideration of the production of biblical books from earlier sources. This time around, readers are giving more attention to the sources as distinct literary traditions that had purposes and perspectives of their own. So, a question like “What did Primeval J look like when the writer of Genesis took it up as a source for a larger, composite work?” can receive careful attention. As Samuel Boyd has argued, “A firm grasp on a coherent theory of what the Torah looked like the moment before it was edited together can also explain much [sic] of the literary features after it was redacted” (Boyd 2023, p. 37). A consideration of the form of J at the moment it was combined with P begins with a consideration of its individual elements, as they appear in Genesis 1-11.

3. The Components of Primeval J

The components of the J Source in Genesis 1-11, in the order they appear in the biblical book, are listed in

Table 1. Elements of Primeval J in the Genesis Order.

2:4b-24	YHWH Elohim makes the garden and the life within it
2:25-3:24	The humans eat the fruit, and YHWH Elohim expels them from the garden
4:1-16	Cain and Abel are born, Cain kills Abel, and YHWH Elohim curses Cain
4:17-24	The genealogy of Cain through Lamech and the development of civilization
4:25-26? a	The birth and naming of Seth
5:29	[Birth] and naming of Noah
6:1-4	The Sons of God
[6:5-8; 7:1-5, 7-10, 12,
17, 22-23; 8:2b, 3a,	The Flood
6-12, 13b, 20-22]
9:18-27; 10:1b	Noah’s sons after the flood
10:8-12	Nimrod and the expansion of city-building
10:13-19, 21, 24-30	Genealogies of Egypt, Canaan, and Shem
11:1-9	Building and abandonment of Babylon

^a These two verses, most often assigned to J, are the most difficult to assign and will receive extensive discussion below, concluding that they are an editorial transition produced by the composer of the book of Genesis.

.

Once these are extracted and the reader considers the plot of Primeval J, problems emerge. Too many of the pieces are fragmentary and isolated and do not play any perceptible role in a plot. For example, Cain produces a creative set of descendants who vanish as the plot moves on to the flood, with no reason for 4:17-24 to report the development of this group of humans who would soon drown in the deluge, along with their cultural innovations. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim takes representatives of the craft guilds onto his vessel to survive the flood and continue their work and pass on their knowledge, but there is no hint of this concern in the entire flood complex of Genesis. This is one of the ways that Primeval P obscures or overrides the concerns of Primeval J. Likewise, the texts we now label as Genesis 6:1-4, 10:8-12, and 11:1-9 stand alone, with noapparent connection to texts around them. Each of these texts will receive more detailed attention below.

It is impossible to state with certainty that the interests of Primeval P matched more closely those of the composer of Genesis, but this would explain the apparent moves the latter made in producing one narrative out of two. One apparent example is the role of genealogies. In an isolated P narrative like the one produced by Feldman, the genealogies “help to move the timeline of the story forward quickly” (Feldman 2023, p. 56), something the P genealogies still do in the book of Genesis, while the J genealogies threaten to sidetrack the plot. The motivation to give P the upper hand would have been more intense if the writer of Genesis wanted to obscure some of the concerns of Primeval J. In this case, the Primeval P material provided a useful resource for that purpose. One of the starkest differences between Primeval J and Primeval P is their portrayal of the passage of time, and this aspect provides a helpful lens to differentiate the two strands and understand them individually.11

4. Chronological Markers in the Two Primeval Narratives

The Primeval J material is notorious for its lack of concern for the passage of time. It leaves readers with no idea how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden before the deity expelled them. It does not provide ages for Cain and Abel at the time of their conflict and the latter’s death. The J genealogical material in Genesis 4 and 10 does not give ages for the characters at the times when their sons are born or when the characters die. The first reference to a time period in J is the hypothetical age limit of 120 years imposed upon humans in 6:3. The J flood report uses a sequence of days, beginning in 7:4 when YHWH informs Noah that the rain will begin in seven days and continue for forty days and nights. The rain stops after forty days, at which time Noah sends out the sequence of birds. The report in 8:6-12 refers to two seven-day intervals of waiting after the rain had stopped before Noah departed the ark with the other occupants. These are the only references to passage of time in the J flood account and the entirety of Primeval J.

By comparison, the P account is filled with chronological references, beginning with the familiar seven-day creation account. The genealogies in chapters 5 and 11 provide ages for the characters at the times their first sons are born and the times of their deaths. The flood story in P provides a more detailed chronology. Noah was six hundred years old when the flood began, seven days after he and his family entered the ark. More precisely, it was the 17th day of the second month of his six hundredth year. The waters receded enough for the ark to come to rest on a mountain after 150 days. A major component of the argument here is that the heavily chronological nature of P allowed, or caused, it to dominate the chronology of Genesis 1-11. This is a phenomenon that extends throughout most of the Pentateuch. The ancestral account of P provides Abram’s age when he left Haran (12:4), when Ishmael was born (16:16), when Isaac was born (21:5), along with many other chronological notices. Notes at Exodus 40:17, Numbers 10:11, and Numbers 14:34 establish the thirteen-month stay at Sinai and the forty-year journey in the wilderness. The parallel J accounts provide little, if any, sense of the duration of these events. The attention to chronology in the entire Priestly narrative makes possible a diagram and discussion like that produced by Liane Feldman in her discussion of the pacing of the P narrative as a distinctive element of its literary style (Feldman 2023, pp. 37–42). Such a discussion of the J source would be impossible, because its narrative style pays little attention to the passage of time.

Given these observations, the chronology of P likely influenced the composer of Genesis 1-11, and the Primeval J material needed to fit within that chronology.12 The flood story in P followed the birth of Noah’s sons immediately, forming the bridge between the two halves of the P genealogy that went from Adam to Abram. The story of Nimrod and the building of many cities, including Babylon (Genesis 10:8-12 and 11:-19), which I will argue below preceded the flood in Primeval J, would have been a diversion, so the compiler needed to put them elsewhere. The brief genealogies of Noah’s sons that now appear in Genesis 10 pay some attention to the geography of the post-diluvian world and have provided a useful place for the composer of Genesis to place the stories of Nimrod and Babel. A more thorough consideration of the components of Primeval J will build a case for this understanding of its plot.

An increase in attention to the passage of time is apparent in a trajectory of texts that present primeval narratives: Primeval J > Primeval P > the corresponding chapters of Jubilees. Chronology is one of the overriding concerns of Jubilees, which it addresses in four different ways. First, it seeks to reconcile the dating of events in Genesis with a solar calendar.13 Second, Jubilees inserts additional chronology into P texts like the genealogy in Genesis 5, such as the names of the men’s wives and the years of their marriages. Third, Jubilees adds entirely new texts, such as Abraham’s final speech to Isaac in Jubilees 21, with a date for the event. Finally, Jubilees adds chronology to material from the J source, including Primeval J, such as the amount of time Adam and Eve spent in the Garden of Eden (Jubilees 3), seven years before God expelled them, and the placement of the death of Cain in the same year as the death of Adam (Jubilees 4). It is difficult to say for certain where the concern for chronology of the composer of Genesis fits, because they added so little original material to that already found in J and P, but the arrangement of elements in Genesis 1-11 points to a concern at least equal to P and likely greater. This yields the following trajectory of increasing chronological emphasis for the four collections of primeval traditions: Primeval J < Primeval P < Genesis 1-11 < Jubilees.

There are more distinctive features of P and J than can be treated here. Others will emerge in the following exploration of the major elements of Primeval J. The differing perspectives on the passage of time are the most important at this point because this feature has great impact on how the events are placed in order in Genesis 1-11. The form of Primeval J at the moment the composer of Genesis took it up and used it is a medial point. This stage fits what Najman described as “…traditionary processes that encompass both textual formation and textual interpretation…” (Najman 2025, pp. 27–28). Both P and J were texts with a compositional past that could have continued independently, but the compiler of Genesis received them in a particular form, interpreted them, then utilized them to construct a new text with their own rhetorical purposes.

5. The First Humans in the Garden and the Two Stories of Cain

In Genesis 2, YHWH Elohim makes a human to solve one of two problems for growing vegetation in the Garden of Eden, described in 2:5: “When every plant of the filed was yet to be on the earth and all vegetation had yet to spring forth, because the LORD God had not caused rain on the earth and there was no human to work the ground.” The human is assigned to work and keep the garden in 2:15. The lack of rainfall is a more complex consideration, because the deity chooses to leave the world dry, with the garden dependent upon irrigation from an underground spring. (The question of rainfall will be addressed further below in the discussion of the flood.) The cursing of the ground and its resulting infertility in 3:17-18 seem related to the deity cutting off access to this resource at the end of Genesis 3. The subsequent challenges Cain faces as a farmer result in his lack of success.14

The strongest instances of incoherence between any two adjacent elements of Primeval J are in the Cain stories of 4:1-16 and 4:17-26. First, after the divine being curses Cain to be a “fugitive and a wanderer” (4:12), Cain manages to settle and build a city (4:17). Second, after 4:2 describes Abel as a herder of animals, 4:20 describes Jabal as the originator of this way of life. The first of these issues is not difficult to resolve. The deity in J is not a skillful and all-powerful being. The first instance of divine struggle and correction appears early, in 2:18-19, when YHWH Elohim realizes that the lack of a companion for the human leaves a gap in the creative process. The initial response to this realization extends the sense of struggle. None of the animals YHWH Elohim makes from the earth and brings to Adam is a suitable companion for the initial human. Finally, making another human from part of the first one succeeds in resolving the problem, but the first story of the two humans together leads to the collapse of the garden economy. The humans elevate themselves to god-like status by choosing to eat from the tree of knowledge, so the deity must cut off their access to the Tree of Life lest they gain full divine status by having knowledge and being immortal.15 The second incoherence is more formidable and leads to the possibility that Cain’s genealogy originated independently and was inserted into the narrative material of J.

The Pentateuch is full of genealogies that appear somewhat independent of their narrative settings. They are precisely the kind of literary units that would have had an essential place in ancient Israelite culture, apart from a long continuous narrative like Genesis. The premier example may be the text commonly known as the Sefer Toledoth Adam, which is split between Genesis 5:1-31 (Adam to Noah) and Genesis 11:10-26 (Shem to Abram). The most likely scenario is that this genealogy was first incorporated into Primeval P, to move the story from creation to flood and then to the Israelite ancestors.16 If genealogies existed as independent units and composers of larger narratives embedded them at the most suitable places, this would explain the presence of a genealogy of Cain at 4:17-25 that exhibits some tension with its surroundings. Nearly three decades ago E. Theodore Mullen declared that “Any theory that attempts to explain the composition of the primeval history (and the Pentateuch as a whole, ultimately) must be able to account for the existence of two varying, and somewhat contradictory genealogies in such clear literary proximity to each other” (Mullen 1997, p. 111). The connections between the Cain genealogy that ended up in Primeval J and the portion of a genealogy from Primeval P that now fills almost all of Genesis 5 are numerous. They share many identical or similar names. Both genealogies are linear, until they segment in the final generation.17 The tension between these two genealogies directs the attention of the next section to an enigmatic text that lies between them in 4:25-26.

6. The Challenges of 4:25-26

The most difficult piece of Genesis 1-11 to assign to one of the two sources is 4:25-26, because it has elements that match those in both P and J. Like P, it knows of the Adam–Seth–Enosh sequence at the beginning of a human genealogy, but like J, it knows the Cain and Abel story. Like P, it uses Elohim as the divine designation in Eve’s explanation of Seth’s name, but like J, it uses the idiom “Adam knew his wife and she bore…,” an echo of 4:1. There has been a long debate about whether these two verses came from one of the two sources, more likely J, or was part of an effort by the composer of the book of Genesis to reconcile the conflicting genealogical material before and after it.18 The possibility that 4:25-26 joined with 5:29 to create the J account of the origins of Noah, with Enosh as Noah’s father, has been influential. This would have been a discrepancy the composer would have had to disguise by separating 5:29 from 4:25-26 and erasing any refence to Enosh within it.

A more controversial possibility is that Lemech was also the father of Noah in Primeval J. Two factors help support this possibility. First, as a famous, heroic figure of the past, Noah’s name may have been inseparably linked to the name of his father, Noah ben Lemech. Two separate traditions, like Primeval J and Primeval P, could each have possessed this datum. Second, as noted in the previous section, the two genealogies that contain Lemech, 4:17-24 and 5:1-28, share a remarkable number of similarities. The separate J and P flood stories know a few important things in common. The deity flooded the world and a hero named Noah survived by building a large box to hold his family and some animals. Noah had three sons named Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Given these connections, it seems more likely than not that they would have preserved the same name of Noah’s father. This would have been more than a mere discrepancy for the compiler but a true scandal. Noah could not be descended from Cain in Genesis. This would be a case where the compiler of Genesis chose the perspective of P over J. It is difficult to say exactly what 4:25-26 is accomplishing, but hiding the troubling idea that Lemech in 4:17-14 is the same figure as Lemech in 5:1-31, the father of Noah, is a possibility.

The most significant problem with identifying 4:25-26 as an invention of the compiler is the contradiction between 4:25 and 5:3. In the former, Eve names Seth, while in the latter, Adam names him. If the compiler was joining two primeval genealogies, one of which already contained what is now 5:3, why create a redactional connection that is in conflict with it?19 Genesis 4:25-26 plays some essential functions in bringing together Primeval J and Primeval P, but the idea that it was entirely an invention of the compiler is difficult to accept. It remains the most difficult piece of Genesis 1-11 to make fit into a two-source understanding. If pieces of this tradition came from each of the sources, with the compiler adding others, the complexity of such a solution is beyond the scope of this discussion.

7. The Enigmatic “Sons of God” in Genesis 6:1-4 and the Nimrod Story

Arguments have endured for a long time about whether this little piece of text is part of a larger tradition, or if its brief and puzzling nature made it an ideal inspiration for developing a more expansive narrative. This question is closely connected to the book called 1 Enoch, particularly its first major section, often called “The Book of the Watchers” (1 Enoch 1-36). While scholars had been aware of the existence of 1 Enoch for a long time because of texts quoted in other works, the emergence of the complete work in its Ethiopic–Geez form during the 19th century magnified the debate. The 20th century discovery of numerous fragments of 1 Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls insured the place of 1 Enoch within Second Temple Jewish literature. As the study of 1 Enoch has expanded with greater access to texts, a near consensus has emerged that 1 Enoch is secondary to the story in Genesis 6:1-4, which leaves the fragmentary nature of the text an unresolved matter.20 Could it have been an integral part of a more cohesive plot in Primeval J?

Genesis places 6:1-4 just before the flood story and the eventual insertion of chapter numbers likely further encouraged assumptions about the connection between the Sons of God and the flood. At the same time, the chapter division may have discouraged questions about how 6:1-4 could have been related to anything that comes before it in Genesis. The statement limiting lifespans to 120 years is a poor fit with the continuing genealogy in 11:10-27, in which humans live much longer than this for many generations; however, the placement of this post-flood P genealogy considerably later disguises this discrepancy. The larger conflict that remains in Genesis is whether the unusual beings it describes survived the flood. The narrator seems to describe them as if the audience still considers them to be present in the world.

When the Primeval J components are withdrawn from Genesis and placed in their current order, 6:1-4 follows the naming of Noah in 5:29 and is succeeded by the J flood account beginning at 6:5. Neither of these texts offer any meaningful sense of continuity with 6:1-4. It is still an isolated text that plays no discernable role in the plot of Primeval J. The genealogy of Cain is a better fit leading up to 6:1-4 than the Sefer Toledoth Adam in Genesis 5, because it acknowledges overtly the presence of women in the world for the Sons of God to see. The genealogy even ends with a named daughter, Naamah, left hanging at the end, with no apparent reason for her presence.

The most profound connection to any other tradition in Primeval J is to the story of Nimrod, the first human to become a gibbor, a group introduced at 6:4. There has been reluctance among interpreters to connect Nimrod, the first gibbor, to the gibborim in 6:4. English translations do not help the situation with their often mismatched variations of mighty man, mighty one, warrior, hero, and powerful man.21 Much of the discussion of Nimrod has focused on the conflict between the African location at the beginning of the narrative, Cush in 10:8, and the list of Mesopotamian cities at the end. If the placement of Nimrod in Genesis 10 and the connection of Nimrod to the genealogy of Ham/Cush is a move of the compiler, then this problem ceases to exist. Nimrod is a thoroughly Mesopotamian figure. Samuel Boyd has drawn a connection between the gibborim of Genesis 6:4 and Nimrod, though it is primarily a theological or ideological one. In light of his contention that illicit crossing of the divine–human boundary is an important theme in Primeval J, Boyd argued that Nimrod reflected the behavior of the gibborim of Genesis 6 in his drive for power, achievement, and fame (Boyd 2023, pp. 156–57). He did not address how these figures and their behavior are connected across the narrative barrier of the flood. The rearrangement of J components proposed here will resolve this question by placing the two texts concerned with the gibborim adjacent to one another.

A remaining issue related to the nephelim/gibborim is their continued existence after the flood. Genesis 6:3 hints at this possibility. Continuing references in the Hebrew Bible to these kinds of beings, such as Numbers 13:32-33 and Ezekiel 32:27, can create a sense of continued existence. The use of gibborim alone is more difficult because it seems to have become a more generic term for warriors who are completely human. This issue is too complex for full exploration here, but it points to an important question about the impact of the great flood. Is the assumption that it killed all life on dry land, except what was in the ark, present in all traditions related to the biblical flood story?

The narrative about Nimrod, including his hunting prowess and his prolific city-building, is a poor fit in its place at Genesis 10:8-12. It is attached to the P genealogy of Ham but is unlike any of the other P material in Genesis 10 presenting the descendants of Noah’s three sons. When removed from the Genesis narrative and placed in the J Primeval sequence illustrated in Table 1, it is still unconnected to what comes before and after it. The single link to 11:1-9, the reference to building Babylon, is the only connection to the plot in this general area, and this is separated by the genealogies of Egypt and Canaan.

A more promising connection lies in the city-building work of Cain in 4:17 and the origins of the gibborim in 6:1-4. English translations often obscure another important element of the text in 6:4:

הַנְּפִלִים הָיוּ בָאָרֶץ בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם וְגַם אַחֲרֵי־כֵן אֲשֶׁר יָבֹאוּ בְּנֵי הַאֱלֹהִים אֶל־בְּנוֹת הָאָדָם וְיָלְדוּ לָהֶ֑ם הֵמָּה הַנִּבֹּרִים אֲשֶׁר מֵעוֹלָם אַנְשֵׁי הַשֵּׁם׃

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the Sons of God came unto the daughters of men and they bore children. These are the Gibborrim of old, the men of the name.

The tendency to translate gibborrim as “mighty ones” or “heroes” misses the connection between these characters and Nimrod, who was the first gibbor according to 10:8.22 The link this word creates is only one of the reasons for connecting Genesis 6:1-4 to the Nimrod tradition. The gibborim, city-building, and fame (making a name) form the connections among the four odd texts in Genesis 1-11 that I will address together below.23

The genealogical material in Genesis 10:6-20 is entangled and confusing to the extent that a side-by-side presentation of the separate P and J material may be necessary. First, the P material comprising what is now Genesis 10:6-7 and 20 matches closely with the P genealogies of Japhet and Shem before and after it.

The sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. The sons of Cush: Seva, Havila, Savtah, Rama, and Savteka. The sons of Ramah: Sheva and Dedan. These are the sons of Ham according to their families and languages, in their lands and nations.

Next, the J material, comprising what is now Genesis 10:13-19, presents genealogies of Canaan and Egypt in a format different from the P genealogies.

Egypt became the father of Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, Pathrusim, and Casluhim. The Philistines came out from there, and the Caphtorim. Canaan became the father of Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth, and the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. Afterward, the families of the Canaanites dispersed. And the territory of the Canaanites is from Sidon, toward Gerar unto Gaza, and toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, unto Lasha.

The overlap of Egypt and Canaan made it possible and, perhaps, necessary for the compiler of Genesis to combine these texts into a unified genealogy of Ham. This harmonized genealogy also became the place to put the Nimrod narrative, but the decision to use Cush as the father of Nimrod in a clause that mimicked the J genealogies of Canaan and Egypt serves to expose the effort. The location of Cush is an element upon which J and P agree. The J account places the land of Cush in Africa in Genesis 2:13, describing the Gihon River (the Blue Nile) flowing in a circle around it. David Tuesday Adamo has made the case that the land of Cush throughout the Hebrew Bible is roughly equivalent to the land that comprises the modern nation of Ethiopia, and that it should even be translated as such (Adamo 2001, pp. 65–74).

The identity of Cush poses problems for the Nimrod story in its present position in Genesis 10. The P genealogy identifies Cush as a descendant of Ham in 10:6. If the excision of J’s Nimrod account happens at the beginning of 10:8, then it starts like a genealogy, identifying Cush as the father of Nimrod, matching the language of the other J genealogies at 10:13 and 10:15. This would have been a clever move by the complier to make the Nimrod narrative resemble the surrounding genealogies. J has no explanation for the origin of Cush in the genealogical material of Genesis 10, nor does it provide the origin of Egypt. The Canaan and Egypt genealogies serve a purpose in the larger J narrative, because the two geographic locations essential to the Abraham cycle in J are Egypt and Canaan. The introduction of Cush in J happens in 2:13 where the land of Cush is the location of the Gihon River. If the composer of Genesis wished to place the Nimrod story within the genealogical material of chapter 10, then a simple statement about Nimrod’s father fit the surroundings and was all that was necessary. The Cushite versus Mesopotamian identification of Nimrod has long been a difficulty for interpreters.24 How could this one person have a background in Africa and Mesopotamia? If the name of Cush was only introduced by the composer of Genesis, however, all the genealogical problems disappear.

Movement of the Nimrod narrative to a position just after the Sons of God story in 6:1-4 is the initial move that begins to make all the pieces fall into place. If the sequence is Cain’s genealogy (4:17-24)–Sons of God (6:1-4)–Nimrod (10:8-12), then there is a clear thread of development. The city-building acquisitional nature demonstrated by Cain, and embedded in his name, is magnified by the injection of divine power when the Sons of God procreate with his descendants. The result is a gibbor named Nimrod who builds five cities. The remaining issue is that one of those five cities has the name of the famous city in Genesis 11:1-9.

8. The Demise of Babylon

Interpretations of Genesis 11:1-9 have been influenced by the name commonly given to the story “The Tower of Babel,” which is not in the text. The story mentions a tower twice, but when it reaches a conclusion in 11:8, the tower is absent: “They left off building the city.” Even if this does not indicate an earlier stage of the story that did not contain the tower, it is a secondary aspect at best. The proper noun Babel appears nearly three hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, and in all but two of those it is rendered “Babylon” in nearly all English translations. Only the two occurrences in 10:10 and 11:9 are transliterated as “Babel.”25 The distinctive use of this name for the place makes it easier to dissociate the story from the biblical plot and read it as an isolated etiology of language diversification.

The tension between this story and the Priestly genealogies in 10:1a-7, 20 and 10:22-23, 31-32 is irresolvable. Primeval P understood language diversification as a natural consequence of the expansion of the human population after the flood, which is expressed in 10:5, 20, and 31, where various clans and nations descended from Noah’s sons have their own languages. The Babel story understands language differently and uses a different word to describe it (saphah = lip rather than lashon = tongue). It is tantalizing to consider that the ideas about language in Genesis 11:1-9 relate to the process of “vernacularization” in Mesopotamia, as described by Marc Van De Mieroop. This process covered much of the first millennium B. C. E. and involved the application of imperial political power, encounters with different languages, and the development of new scripts. Van De Mieroop noted the connection: “The confusion of tongues in the Tower of Babel story was thus not pure fantasy (Van De Mieroop 2025, p. 222).”26 Nevertheless, this understanding seems to fit the concerns of Genesis better than it does those of Primeval J. Perhaps a better understanding is that the Babel story in Primeval J was not about language. Gregory Boyd has proposed a different kind of translation for Genesis 11:2:

The LORD said, “Look they are one people and have the same plan”

What unifies the people of Babel/Babylon is not shared language but a common purpose to build a city.27 This view places city-building, rather than language, at the center of the story, making its connection to the other city-building text clearer. The confusing of the human plans is another failed divine attempt to stop humans from settling and building, leaving only one final attempt to follow.

Like the other texts in Genesis 1-11 that involve city-building and fame, the Babel story is a poor fit in its present place in Genesis, and it does not fit much better in a Primeval J story produce by simply extracting the J elements in their present order. Some careful attention to the J flood story will be the final piece of preparation before reconstructing J Primeval into a coherent narrative.

9. The Foundations of Culture and Rainfall in Primeval J

The J flood account involves Noah, son of Lemech, and siblings of the cultural founders listed in the genealogy of Cain. Noah fits into this crowd as the first planter of a vineyard. Whether we should understand him as the first wine-maker, as some translations like the NRSV do, is difficult to say. The language using the root חלל in an H-stem connects him more closely to Nimrod and connects both of them to the humans who began to call upon the name of YHWH in 4:26 and who began to multiply on the face of the ground in 6:1.28

Recent work by Noah Avigan has argued that the two-fold problem identified in Genesis 2:5 is only partially resolved in the Garden of Eden account. The reasons why there is no vegetation at the beginning of the story are because there has not been any rain and there is nobody to work the ground. YHWH Elohim immediately solves the second problem by making the man to till and tend the garden, but there is no mention of rain. Instead, the garden relies on a local underground spring for irrigation, according to 2:6. The lack of rainfall persists is at least part of the challenge humans face in farming outside the garden. The curse sequence acknowledges this difficulty in 3:17-19, and 4:1-16 describes the inability of Cain to grow crops successfully. The first rain in the J account is the beginning of the flood in 7:12, and it is uncontrolled rainfall that destroys rather than nourishes. Only after the flood in 8:22 does YHWH regulate the rain by seasons, removing the curse on farming, as promised in 5:29. Noah demonstrates the effectiveness of seasonal rainfall by becoming a successful tiller of the ground, including the development of the first vineyard. The failure of the deity to get rain right the first time reflects the failure in the Garden of Eden to get human companionship right on the first try. The J source has no problem presenting a deity who works by trial and error.29

Without rainfall, Cain failed to prosper as a farmer, leading to his jealous murder of Abel, the shepherd. The divine curse sends Cain wandering the earth until he settles and builds a city. Some interpreters have noted a degree of narrative incoherence in what most assume is a J sequence of texts. The failure of the divine curse to keep Cain in his wandering status may not be a surprise, however, if the deity in J is one who frequently fails and must change course. Countering Cain’s settling tendencies is an ongoing effort for this divine being. The more serious discrepancy is the description in 4:20 of Jabal as the first herder of animals, while 4:2 describes this way of life for Abel. These may be indications that the Cain genealogy in 4:17-24 was an independent unit, incorporated into the J narrative, similar to the way the P source likely incorporated the Sefer Toledoth Adam, which now appears in Genesis 5 and 11; but the genealogy of Cain can be a mostly coherent element of a reconstructed Primeval J plot, even if the genealogy has a prior life as an independent genealogy.

The Babel story provides a better introduction to the flood account in numerous ways. First, it creates space between the flood story and the Sons of God account, which always seemed an odd way to introduce the wickedness of humans and the subsequent divine punishment. The flood story in both sources views the event entirely as a punishment of human wickedness. Second, without the P genealogy in Genesis 5, the jump in Primeval J from Cain’s genealogy and the Sons of God story to the beginning of the J flood account, where “the evil of the humans multiplied upon the earth,” seems too sudden. The P genealogy puts 1500 years in this space in Genesis 5. The scattering of the people of Babel, along with the other building projects by Nimrod, allows for the multiplication of humans on the earth, so that their evil can overwhelm it, requiring a greater divine response. Third, and perhaps most important, the sequence of divine punishments in the J Primeval narrative now looks like this.

(1)

Cursing of the ground and snake and sending Adam and Eve from the garden.

(2)

Cursing of Cain, separating him from the ground, and banishing him to the East.

(3)

Scattering the group of people in Babel and confusing their language.

(4)

Flooding the whole earth and killing most of the humans.

The introduction to the flood story in Genesis 6:5-8 is vague about the nature of the problem that YHWH (the divine character) attempts to solve with the deluge. The J flood narrative describes “wickedness” and “evil” in 6:5, though the description of evil identifies only an internal “inclination” of humans, rather than any outward actions. The P version of the flood story claims the earth is “corrupt” and “filled with violence.” The justifications for the flood are complicated by the proximity of the strange text in Genesis 6:1-4. The description of the demi-god figures called the Nephilim/gibborim does not easily fit the narrative logic of Gensis1-11 because they should all die in the flood and become irrelevant.30 The text itself indicates some persistence on the part of those beings and seems to expect the audience to know who their descendants are. If the elements of Primeval J were in a substantially different order, with the city/fame sequence of texts together, preceding the flood, then one way it could have returned to the line of humans that produced Noah was using the small text that now appears at 5:29, reporting the birth of Noah and explaining his name.

10. Conclusions: A Reordered Primeval J

The preceding observations about individual elements of the J Primeval narrative, related elements of the P Primeval narrative, and the compilation of Genesis included proposals for reordering J Primeval. At this point, it is possible to pull all of those together to produce a complete presentation of this reconstruction in

Table 2. Reordered Elements o Primeval J.

2:4b-24	YHWH Elohim makes the garden and the life within it
2:25-3:24	Humans eat the fruit, and YHWH Elohim expels them from the garden
4:1-16	Cain and Abel are born, Cain kills Abel, and YHWH Elohim curses Cain
4:17-24	Genealogy of Cain through Lamech and the development of civilization
6:1-4	The Sons of God
10:8-12	Nimrod and the expansion of city-building
11:1-9	Building and abandonment of Babylon
5:29	[Birth] and naming of Noah
[6:5-8; 7:1-5, 7-10, 12,
17, 22-23; 8:2b, 3a,	The Flood
6-12, 13b, 20-22]
9:18-27; 10:1b	Noah’s sons after the flood
10:13-9, 21, 24-30	Genealogies of Egypt, Canaan, and Shem

.

Reconstructing the Priestly source has become fashionable in part because its obvious elements produce not only a coherent plot, but a comprehensive cultural system. It may be that there was no Primeval J with a coherent plot and clear ideological commitments, but nearly everyone assumes there was such a Primeval P. Is one of the reasons for uncertainty about Primeval J the result of looking at it the wrong way, with its potential elements in the wrong order? The reordered list in Table 2 seeks to remedy this problem. The human attempts to build and gain fame are now in a logical order and divine attempts to control these efforts are in an ascending sequence.

As I have proceeded, it has occurred to me that this situation shares some features of the famous three-body problem in astrophysics. Three bodies of cultural tradition—Genesis 1-11, Primeval P, and Primeval J—are interacting and exerting forces on each other in ways too complex to describe precisely. As the body of tradition with the smallest amount of cultural gravity, J is the one most affected by the others. The tendency to ignore the nature of J and the forces J exerts mimics the restricted three-body problem, but cultural gravity was not negligible. Its story of Israel’s deity and the interactions between this deity and early humans was potent. Understanding this potency sheds light on how and why Genesis 1-11 makes use of its elements, and obscure the order and some of the ideological concerns of Primeval J.