the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters,

Note: An eternal undulation, The cosmic flapping of eagled wings, Outside the, Bittersweet transience, Of space-time, Can He not breathe again? If the original creation, Crinkles and burns, Won’t He blow into the nostrils, Of a black hole?

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“Let there be light.”

Note: The jitters and hope and commandment of creation

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4And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.

Note: Can the generator be a discernment? Are these not separate roles? Is God a divine plan? Or is God the divine intelligence of harmonies, Imbued in a cosmic order? We shant forget the costs of miracles, To make matter congeal to into higher planes, It so accept most matter shares not such transcendences, With the sublimity of humans comes much else, Void, mutations, and evil

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And so it was.

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26And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth.

Note: Human as a moderator, And mirror image

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“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it,

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31And God saw all that He had done, and, look, it was very good.

Note: Why does Genesis make God An architect? Is design not emergent? Is it not, More numinous and awe-inducing, That all this order emerged, From a seed that had no plan? How could a seed so small Produce all this? More impressive than vision; To see the smallest layers of the fractal; With only a vector, And the promise of a spiral

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Literally, the phrase would mean “beast of the earth,” but the archaic construct form for “beasts of,” ḥayto, elsewhere regularly occurs in collocations that denote wild beasts.

Note: Is man not a beast of the Earth? Is that not Adam and Eve Before knowledge?

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the LORD God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature.

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18And the LORD God said, “It is not good for the human to be alone, I shall make him a sustainer beside him.”

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21And the LORD God cast a deep slumber on the human, and he slept, and He took one of his ribs and closed over the flesh where it had been, 22and the LORD God built the rib He had taken from the human into a woman and He brought her to the human. 23And the human said:                 “This one at last, bone of my bones                     and flesh of my flesh,                 “This one shall be called Woman,                     for from man was this one taken.”

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does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they become one flesh. 25And the two of them were naked, the human and his woman, and they were not ashamed.

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God, now called YHWH ʾElohim instead of ʾElohim as in the first version, does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning (yatsar instead of baraʾ, “create”), blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib. Whatever the disparate historical origins of the two accounts, the redaction gives us first a harmonious cosmic overview of creation and then a plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins.

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1Now the serpent was most cunning of all the beasts of the field that the LORD God had made.

Note: Cunning equates the snake at Eden to Odysseus; both stories relate to temptation

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And the woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the garden’s trees we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden 3God has said, 4‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, lest you die.’”

Note: All things except the middle

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the serpent said to the woman, 5“You shall not be doomed to die. For God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will become as gods knowing good and evil.”

Note: Why did God lie to them? Why did he not want them to have opened eyes? To know good from evil? Otherwise is man not one of several beasts of the Earth? I thought God set man aside deliberately to moderate the earth?

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the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate,

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7And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.

Note: Dawn of self-awareness

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the human and his woman hid from the LORD God in the midst of the trees of the garden.

Note: Why hide if not fear or guilt? Ah, embarrassment of nudity

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“Who told you that you were naked? From the tree I commanded you not to eat have you eaten?”

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“What is this you have done?”

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“The serpent beguiled me and I ate.”

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On your belly shall you go                     and dust shall you eat all the days of your life.

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He will bite your head                     and you will boot him with the heel.”

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“I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs,                     in pain shall you bear children.                 And for your man shall be your longing,                     and he shall rule over you.”

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18Thorn and thistle shall it sprout for you                     and you shall eat the plants of the field.                 19By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread                     till you return to the soil,

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for dust you are                     and to dust shall you return.”

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22And the LORD God said, “Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever.”

Note: Why?

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He drove out the human and set up east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the flame of the whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life.

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having touched the fruit, and seeing no ill effect, she may proceed to eat.

Note: Reason

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But taʾawah means “that which is intensely desired,” “appetite,” and sometimes specifically “lust.” Eyes have just been mentioned in the serpent’s promise that they will be wondrously opened; now they are linked to intense desire. In the event, they will be opened chiefly to see nakedness. Taʾawah is semantically bracketed with the next term attached to the tree, “lovely,” neḥmad, which literally means “that which is desired.”

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12. gave by me, she gave me. The repeated verb nicely catches the way the first man passes the buck, not only blaming the woman for giving him the fruit but virtually blaming God for giving him the woman. She in turn of course blames the serpent. God’s curse, framed in verse, follows the reverse order, from serpent to woman to man.

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Enmity. Although the serpent is by no means “satanic,” as in the lens of later Judeo-Christian traditions, the curse records a primal horror of humankind before this slithering, viscous-looking, and poisonous representative of the animal realm. It is the first moment in which a split between man and the rest of the animal kingdom is recorded. Behind it may stand, at a long distance of cultural mediation, Canaanite myths of a primordial sea serpent.

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18. The vista of thorn and thistle is diametrically opposed to the luscious vegetation of the Garden and already intimates the verdict of banishment that will be carried out in verses 23–24.

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In the Hebrew here, the phonetic similarity is between ḥawah, “Eve,” and the verbal root ḥayah, “to live.” It has been proposed that Eve’s name conceals very different origins, for it sounds suspiciously like the Aramaic word for “serpent.” Could she have been given the name by the contagious contiguity with her wily interlocutor, or, on the contrary, might there lurk behind the name a very different evaluation of the serpent as a creature associated with the origins of life?

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The cherubim, a common feature of ancient Near Eastern mythology, are not to be confused with the round-cheeked darlings of Renaissance iconography. The root of the term means either “hybrid” or, by an inversion of consonants, “mount,” “steed,” and they are the winged beasts, probably of fearsome aspect, on which the sky god of the old Canaanite myths and of the poetry of Psalms goes riding through the air. The fiery sword, not mentioned elsewhere but referred to with the definite article as though it were a familiar image, is a suitable weapon to set alongside the formidable cherubim.

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Abel became a herder of sheep while Cain was a tiller of the soil.

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7For whether you offer well,                     or whether you do not,                 at the tent flap sin crouches                     and for you is its longing                         but you will rule over it.”

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9And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

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“My punishment is too great to bear. 14Now that You have driven me this day from the soil and I must hide from Your presence, I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.” 15And the LORD said to him, “Therefore whoever kills Cain shall suffer sevenfold vengeance.”

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20And Adah bore Jabal: he was the first of tent dwellers with livestock. 21And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the first of all who play on the lyre and pipe.

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24For sevenfold Cain is avenged,                     and Lamech seventy and seven.”

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knew. The Hebrew verb suggests intimate knowledge and hence sexual possession. Amos Funkenstein notes that it is the one term for sexual intercourse associated with legitimate possession—and in a few antithetical instances, with perverse violation of legitimate possession. Given the clumsiness of modern English equivalents like “had experience of,” “cohabited with,” “was intimate with,” and, given the familiarity of the King James Version’s literal rendering, “to know” remains the least objectionable English solution.

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the builder of a city. The first recorded founder of a city is also the first murderer, a possible reflection of the antiurban bias in Genesis.

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5And all the days Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years. Then he died. 6And Seth lived a hundred and five years and he begot Enosh. 7And Seth lived after he begot Enosh eight hundred and seven years, and he begot sons and daughters.

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Nothing reveals the difference of the biblical conception of literature from later Western ones more strikingly than the biblical use of genealogies as an intrinsic element of literary structure. As J. P. Fokkelman (1987) has noted, the genealogical lists or “begats” (toledot) in Genesis are carefully placed compositional units that mark off one large narrative segment from another:

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Repetition of formula dominates the genealogical list stylistically. Here the procreative act and life span of each figure are conveyed in identical language, and when there is a divergence from the formula, in the case of Enoch, it is very significant. Formulaic numbers as well are characteristically used by the biblical writer to give order and coherence to the narrated world. The seven generations from Adam to Noah of chapter 4 are here displaced by a different formulaic number, ten.

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This list incorporates both of the formulaic numbers: Lamech, the last of the antediluvians before Noah, lives 777 years; Noah, unlike his predecessors, becomes a begetter at the age of 500, halfway through a round millennium, which is the ten of the ten generations with two decimal places added. A millennium is the age most of the antediluvians come close to but never attain, as befits their mortality.

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Others, more plausibly, have linked the consolation with Noah’s role as the first cultivator of the vine. The idea that wine provides the poor man respite from his drudgery (see Proverbs 31:6–7) is common enough in the biblical world. Wine, then, might have been thought of as a palliative to the curse of hard labor, which is also the curse of the soil: the language of Genesis 3:17–18 is explicitly echoed here.

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the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were comely, and they took themselves wives howsoever they chose. 3And the LORD said, “My breath shall not abide in the human forever, for he is but flesh. Let his days be a hundred and twenty years.”

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5And the LORD saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart’s devising was only perpetually evil. 6And the LORD regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart. 7And the LORD said, “I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to cattle to crawling thing to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I have made them.” 8But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. 9This is the lineage of Noah—Noah was a righteous man, he was blameless in his time, Noah walked with God—

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14Make yourself an ark of cypress wood, with cells you shall make the ark, and caulk it inside and out with pitch. 15This is how you shall make it: three hundred cubits, the ark’s length; fifty cubits, its width; thirty cubits, its height. 16Make a skylight in the ark, within a cubit of the top you shall finish it, and put an entrance in the ark on one side. With lower and middle and upper decks you shall make

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everything on the earth shall perish.

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you shall enter the ark, you and your sons and your wife and the wives of your sons, with you. 19And from all that lives, from all flesh, two of each thing you shall bring to the ark to keep alive with you, male and female they shall be. 20From the fowl of each kind and from the cattle of each kind and from all that crawls on the earth of each kind, two of each thing shall come to you to be kept alive.

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God sees this intermingling of human and divine as the crossing of a necessary line of human limitation, and He responds by setting a new retracted limit (three times the formulaic forty) to human life span.

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Nephilim. The only obvious meaning of this Hebrew term is “fallen ones”—perhaps, those who have come down from the realm of the gods; but then the word might conceivably reflect an entirely different, un-Hebraic background. In any case, the notion of semidivine, heroic figures—in Numbers the Nephilim are thought of as giants who are offspring of miscegenation between gods and women—again touches on common ground with Greek and other mythologies.

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4For in seven days’ time I will make it rain on the earth forty days and forty nights and I will wipe out from the face of the earth all existing things that I have made.”

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6Noah was six hundred years old when the Flood came,

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the waters surged over the earth one hundred and fifty days.

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3. seed. The Hebrew term means both semen and the offspring that is its product. It is a very concrete way of conceiving propagation and the survival of a line, and seems worth preserving in a literal English rendering.

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6And it happened, at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark he had made. 7And he sent out the raven and it went forth to and fro until the waters should dry up from the earth. 8And he sent out the dove to see whether the waters had abated from the surface of the ground. 9But the dove found no resting place for its foot and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were over all the earth. And he reached out and took it and brought it back to him into the ark. 10Then he waited another seven days and again sent the dove out from the ark. 11And the dove came back to him at eventide and, look, a plucked olive leaf was in its bill, and Noah knew that the waters had abated from the earth. 12Then he waited still another seven days and sent out the dove, and it did not return to him again.

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it happened in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters dried up from the earth, and Noah took off the covering of the ark and he saw and, look, the surface of the ground was dry.

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the animals that are with you of all flesh, fowl and cattle and every crawling thing that crawls on the earth, take out with you, and let them swarm through the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.”

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21And the LORD smelled the fragrant odor and the LORD said in His heart, “I will not again damn the soil on humankind’s score. For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth. And I will not again strike down all living things as I did.

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3All stirring things that are alive, yours shall be for food, like the green plants, I have given all to you. 4But flesh with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat. 5And just so, your lifeblood I will requite, from every beast I will requite it, and from humankind, from every man’s brother, I will requite human life.

Note: Golden rule Vegetarianism

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18And the sons of Noah who came out from the ark were Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Ham was the father of Canaan. 19These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth spread out.

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Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. 21And he drank of the wine and became drunk, and exposed himself within his tent.

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22And Ham the father of Canaan saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. 23And Shem and Japheth took a cloak and put it over both their shoulders and walked backward and covered their father’s nakedness, their faces turned backward so they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24And Noah woke from his wine and he knew what his youngest son had done to him. 25And he said,                 “Cursed be Canaan,                     the lowliest slave shall he be                         to his brothers.”

Note: Echo of Eden, except Noah is unaware of his nakedness, but his sons are, and he curses them of their awareness

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No one has ever figured out exactly what it is that Ham does to Noah. Some, as early as the classical Midrash, have glimpsed here a Zeus–Chronos story in which the son castrates the father or, alternately, penetrates him sexually. The latter possibility is reinforced by the fact that “to see the nakedness of” frequently means “to copulate with,” and it is noteworthy that the Hebrews associated the Canaanites with lasciviousness (see, for example, the rape of Dinah, Genesis 34). Lot’s daughters, of course, take advantage of his drunkenness to have sex with him. But it is entirely possible that the mere seeing of a father’s nakedness was thought of as a terrible taboo, so that Ham’s failure to avert his eyes would itself have earned him the curse.

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