Perspective on Vocabulary and Genre in Genesis 1-11

Just how does one go about determining how to read these chapters? I’ve talked in previous posts about literary types and historicity, but this is more about approach.

I have both heard and read places where people state that these chapters are obviously narrative history because they “sound like it.” But how should one’s ears, or eyes, be trained in order to discern this in ancient literature? I would suggest that if you go to the passage with a modern set of genres, you will often be led astray.

Imagine for a moment that there is no Hebrew Bible, and you are an archaeologist. You carefully dig into a chamber that has been covered for millenia, and it is filled with clay tablets. There’s writing on the tablets. You don’t know what culture this material came from and you don’t know what it is. You set about deciphering the script and discovering the language, and there in your hands is the text of what we call Genesis 1-11.

What do you call this text? How will you decide just what it is? Well, we have much precedent for this sort of thing. One looks at the texts from surrounding culture, giving greater weight to texts that are closer in time and culture, and one tries to fit it into categories. If it is sufficiently different, one may create new categories.

In the case of Genesis 1-11 let me suggest two things. First, if we didn’t have it, but discovered it as a new text, we would have no problem categorizing it as an origin myth. Basically, that is. Second, we would be very exciting by this text, because there are unique characteristics that make it very different from other origin myths. So we would spend a great deal of time cataloging those differences.

Of course, things happened in reverse. We discovered Babylonian and Sumerian myths, while we already had Genesis. This is unfortunate in some ways, because we get very tense in categorizing Biblical literature. In popular understanding, the debate is always over whether something was copied or not. Was Genesis 1 copied from the Babylonian or Sumerian myths? Liberals say yes, conservatives say no. Which, of course, oversimplifies everything!

What’s really more interesting is looking at how the various documents might be related in terms of thought, vocabulary, cosmology, literary structure, and so forth. Two written works may be related without being copied. For example, if one writes a romance novel, one is using a literary genre, and there is a relationship between that work and others of the same genre. You may find similarities in vocabulary and style that fall far below the threshold for copying, but which nonetheless indicate influence, common knowledge, or even common culture.

These are better questions regarding Genesis 1-11. It is clearly not copied, in my view, but it is also clearly not unrelated. I will comment further on why I believe this in later posts.