Sources in Genesis Scholars generally agree that the
Torah, the collection of five books of which
Genesis is the first, achieved something like its current form in the 5th century BCE. However, the almost complete absence of all the characters and incidents mentioned in the Primeval history from the rest of the Hebrew Bible has led a sizeable minority of scholars to conclude that these chapters were composed much later than those that follow, possibly in the 3rd century BC. Genesis draws on a number of distinct "sources", including the
Priestly source, the
Yahwist and the
Elohist – the last two are often referred to collectively as "non-Priestly", but the Elohist is not present in the primeval history and "non-Priestly" and "Yahwist" can be regarded here as interchangeable terms. The following table is based on Robert Kugler and Patrick Hartin, "An Introduction to the Bible", 2009:
Relationship of the primeval history to Genesis 12–50 Genesis 1–11 shows little relationship to the remainder of Genesis. For example, the names of its characters and its geography – Adam (man) and Eve (life), the Land of Nod ("Wandering"), and so on – are symbolic rather than real, and much of the narratives consist of lists of "firsts": the first murder, the first wine, the first empire-builder. Most notably, almost none of the persons, places and stories in it are ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. This has led some scholars to suppose that the history forms a late composition attached to Genesis and the Pentateuch to serve as an introduction. Just how late is a subject for debate: at one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE; on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by some scholars, notably
John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period (the 6th century BCE) precisely because the primeval history contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth.
David M. Carr argues that the latest edition of the pre-Priestly version of the narratives probably dates to the mid-7th century BCE, during the period of Neo-Assyrian hegemony.
Mesopotamian (and Egyptian) myths and the primeval history Numerous Mesopotamian myths (and one Egyptian myth) are reflected in the primeval history. The myth of
Atrahasis, for example, was the first to record a Great Flood, and may lie behind the story of
Noah's flood. The following table sets out the myths behind the various Biblical tropes. ==Themes and theology==