Theodore Hiebert-The Yahwist's Landscape - Nature and Religion in Early Israel (1996)

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Copyright © 1996 by Theodore Hiebert

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hiebert, Theodore.
The Yahwist's landscape : nature and religion in early Israel /
Theodore Hiebert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-509205-8
1. J document (Biblical criticism) 2. Nature—Biblical teaching.
I. Title.
BS1181.4.H54 1995
222'.106—dc20 95-11578
135798642
Printed in the U n i t e d States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
This study of the role of nature in biblical religion is motivated by two devel-
opments. One of these is the new interest in nature and the human place
within it in Western religious traditions, prompted by the environmental
crisis. Historians, ethicists, and theologians have begun to uncover the intel-
lectual legacy of Western culture regarding nature and to assess its strengths
and weaknesses as a resource for an enlightened ecological ethic. Since the
Bible stands at the origin of Western traditions, its perspectives on the natu-
ral world have been subjected to close scrutiny by environmentalists and
biblical scholars alike, who are often rather quick to blame or defend biblical
points of view. This study is intended as a contribution to the ongoing task
of uncovering, and making available to its heirs, the biblical legacy regard-
ing the natural world and its significance in religious thought.
The other development that motivated this study is a growing personal
dissatisfaction with the traditional approach to nature in biblical scholarship.
This uneasiness first arose out of my dissertation work on Habakkuk 3, an
elaborate account of God's appearance in the form and phenomena of the
thunderstorm. How was one to account for such a vivid presentation of na-
ture as a medium of revelation within a religion, so I had been taught, that
embraced history and rejected nature as the realm of divine activity? As an
aberration? A vestige of nonbiblical thought?
This dissatisfaction grew as I realized that the results of modern biblical
scholarship, to which those with a renewed interest in nature in the West's
religious traditions would turn for information, were based on a prohistory,
antinature presentation of biblical religion, which did not consider texts like
Habakkuk 3 of crucial significance. When one turns to scholarship on na-
viii Preface
ture in biblical religion, one invariably confronts two widespread assump-

tions: ancient Israel originated in the desert, and its religion was stamped
with an historical consciousness that marginalized the world of nature. Often,
these two assumptions have been regarded as interrelated, and almost always
they have shaped the content of exegetical and theological analyses of bibli-
cal perspectives on nature. Both seemed to me to be, at best, overstatements
of the case and, at worst, misconceptions of the biblical environment and
biblical thought.
The purpose of this study then is to lay open as carefully as possible the
presuppositions that have shaped traditional scholarship on the role of na-
ture in biblical religion, examine the anthropological and philosophical
sources of these presuppositions, and test them against the details of a sub-
stantial and influential biblical text. The text selected for that purpose con-
tains the oldest narrative traditions in the opening books of the Bible, a set of
stories modern scholars have traditionally attributed, in their final form at
least, to the Yahwist, a great narrator of the Israelite monarchy. The narra-
tives attributed to the Yahwist have been influential in the development of
scholarly approaches to nature in the Bible, and they have been of great in-
terest as well to contemporary readers exploring the legacy of environmen-
tal values in Western traditions.
Throughout this study, I have kept two audiences in mind. One of these
is biblical scholars, since I am criticizing in this study a number of traditional
scholarly assumptions, and I am proposing a different approach to concep-
tualizing nature in biblical religion and a different way of interpreting cer-
tain biblical texts. The other audience is nonbiblical scholars who are inter-
ested in the values regarding nature in the West's religious traditions. With
this audience in mind, 1 have tried to place the most technical data and the
majority of the references to the history of biblical scholarship in the endnotes,
where it is available to those who wish to pursue these matters further. I
believe biblical scholarship should be more available to a broad audience,
especially on a topic of such wide popular interest, but it is a difficult chal-
lenge to write for specialist and generalist alike. 1 do not think 1 have always
been successful, but [ hope both audiences will find something here to en-
rich their reading of these biblical narratives.
The basic research on which this study is based was funded by an Ameri-
can Schools of Oriental Research/National Endowment for the Humanities
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archae-
ology in Jerusalem, and by a grant from the Endowment for Biblical Research,
Boston. A number of my colleagues, Frank Cross, Paul Hanson, Jo Ann
Hackett, John Huehnergard, and Gordon Kaufman, have read parts of the
manuscript and have made suggestions that have forced me to bring more
rigor and clarity to the line of argument within this study. Throughout this
project, Timothy Weiskel, director of the Harvard Seminar on Environmen-
tal Values, has been a provocative and supportive conversation partner. I am
thankful to Brian Murphy and Margaret Studier, who have done more than
their share to put [his manuscript into readable form. Finally, I am indebted
Preface ix
to my wife, Paula Sharpe Hiebert, who has given a tremendous amount of

her own time and energy to discuss these ideas with me and to provide enough
encouragement and time for me to put them together in this way.
Cambridge, Massachusetts T. H.
December, 1994
Contents
Abbreviations, xiii
1 The "Problem" of Nature in the Bible, 3
2 The Primeval Age, 30
3 The Ancestors in Canaan, 83
4 The Southern Narratives, 117
5 The Bible and Nature: Ancient Israelite Views
and Modern Environmental Theologies, 140
Appendix:
Table A.1 Sources of the Pentateuch, 163
Table A.2 Sections with Hebrew/English Verse
Number Differences, 171
Notes, 173
Index, 207
Abbreviations
AB Anchor Bible
ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. Edited by D. N. Freedman. New

York: Doubleday, 1992.
AJSL American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature
ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3rd ed.
Edited by J. B. Pritchard. Princeton: Princeton University, 1969.
BA Biblical Archaeologist
BAR Biblical Archaeology Review
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BDB F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexi-

con of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CTA Corpus des tablettes en cuneiformes alphabetiques. A. Herdner.

Paris: P. Geuthner, 1963.
ER Encyclopedia of Religion. Edited by M. Eliade. New York:

Macmillan, 1987.
xiv Abbreviations
GKC Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar. Edited by E. Kautzsch, translated by

A. E. Cowley. Oxford: Clarendon, 1910.
HTR Harvard Theological Review
ICC International Critical Commentary
IDB Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. 4 vols. Edited by George

Buttrick. Nashville: Abingdon, 1962.
IDBSup Supplementary volume to IDB. Edited by Keith Crim. Nashville:

Abingdon, 1976.
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JB Jerusalem Bible
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JJS Journal of Jewish Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JPSV Jewish Publication Society Version
JT5 Journal of Theological Studies
KAI Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften. H. Donner, W. Rollig.

Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1971.
KJV King James Version
NAB New American Bible
NEB New English Bible
NRSV New Revised Standard Version
TDOT Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Edited by G. J.

Botterweck and H. Ringgren. Translated by John T. Willis. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1974.
TWAT Theologisches Worterbuch zum Alten Testament. 4 vols. Edited

by G.J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer,
1970-72.
Abbreviations xv
VT Vetus Testamentum
VTSup Vetus Testamentum, Supplements
ZAW Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZDPV Zeltschrift des deutschen Palastina-Vereins

1
The "Problem" of Nature

in the Bible
In both the popular consciousness and the enduring achievements of West-

ern culture, the world of nature is remembered and represented as a familiar
part of the biblical story. Biblical images of nature have, in fact, become a
standard feature of the Western imagination. One of the now famous examples
of this phenomenon in popular culture was the recitation of Genesis 1 on
the first moon voyage. To express their amazement at the natural beauty of
the planet earth floating in space as a small blue sphere, the Apollo 8 astro-
nauts chose to read, out of all the nature literature of Western culture, the
biblical story of creation.
Almost as well-known to many as this creation story are the vivid natu-
ral images painted in the poetry of the psalmists, who claimed that the heav-
ens declare the glory of God. The Twenty-third Psalm, probably the most
beloved poem in the Bible, is full of natural scenes and contains what may be
the most familiar image of God in Scripture: "The Lord is my Shepherd."
Other nature images come to mind. When God gives Moses the law, it is on
a mountain in the midst of a dark cloud full of thunder and lightning. When
God speaks to Job, the divine speech comes from the whirlwind and con-
tains the greatest survey of the wonders of wild nature in the Bible. All in all,
the concrete details of the biblical environment—its flocks of sheep and goats,
vineyards and olive orchards, farmers sowing and harvesting grain, lush oases
and vast deserts, donkeys and caravans of camels; its sacred mountains, vivid
thunderstorms, and harsh droughts—have etched themselves into the litera-
3
4 The Yahwist's Landscape
ture and art of the West and into the minds of Jews and Christians, religious
and nonreligious alike.
Nature As a Problem
Yet when one turns to those who have examined this topic in most detail
one finds a different picture. In the history of biblical scholarship, on the one
hand, and in recent literature on the environment and Western religious
values, on the other, nature has commonly been presented as a problem in
the Bible. Biblical scholars and environmentalists have questioned whether
the world of nature has any significant value within biblical thought and
whether, in fact, serious attention to it does not stand in some conflict with
the core dogmas of biblical religion.
These reservations about the role of nature in biblical thought are not
the result of shared contexts, goals, or methods of interpretation, or of any
close cooperation between biblical scholars and environmentalists. The
respective cultural settings and constituencies of these scholarly circles are
very different in most respects, as are their lines of argumentation. Certainly
little collaboration has taken place. Environmental writers seldom take ad-
vantage of the years of biblical scholarship on the topic that has preceded
their interest in it. Yet both parties have come to regard nature as a problem
in the Bible, and their arguments are not entirely dissimilar. In fact, their pre-
suppositions and attitudes about biblical life and thought intersect at impor-
tant points. To understand their common claim that nature is a problem in
biblical religion, to understand the similarities and differences in their de-
fense of this claim, and ultimately to evaluate its basic merit, the views of
biblical scholars and environmental writers must be briefly reviewed.
The Problem in Biblical Interpretation

History versus nature The judgment by twentieth-century biblical schol-
ars that nature in the Bible is a problem is based on several widely held con-
victions. To illustrate these, we may start with a classic essay by Gerhard von
Rad, appropriately titled "The Theological Problem of the Old Testament
Doctrine of Creation." 1 The thesis of this essay is stated succinctly in the
opening sentence: "The Yahwistic faith of the Old Testament is a faith based
on the notion of election and therefore primarily concerned with redemp-
tion." By "redemption" von Rad is referring to the salvation or well-being of
humans, of the whole human race at one level, but even more precisely, of a
particular people that the God of the Bible has chosen or elected for a special
relationship. It is this divine-human relationship, according to von Rad, about
which biblical religion is primarily concerned.
By contrast, the nonhuman world is a secondary concern. "How far is
the idea of Yahweh as Creator a relevant and immediate conception, over
against his redemptive function?" asks von Rad. After surveying the biblical
accounts of creation in Genesis and the references to creation and nature in
The "Problem" of Nature in the Bible 5
the Psalms and Prophets, he arrives at a largely negative answer. In all of these
texts, according to von Rad, "the creation of the world by Yahweh is not being
considered for its own sake, nor as of value in itself. On the contrary . . . it
performs only an ancillary function. It provides a foundation for the mes-
sage of redemption, in that it stimulates faith. It is but a magnificent foil for
the message of salvation."2 Nature has been reduced to a stage, magnificent
though it may be, for the great human drama about which the Bible is prima-
rily concerned.
Basic to von Rad's conclusion that creation is a theological problem are
two conceptions that typify standard treatments of nature in the Bible. The
first is the presumption of a sharp dichotomy between redemption and cre-
ation, that is, between the realm of human culture and history on the one
side and the world of nonhuman nature on the other. Redemption and cre-
ation, history and nature, are regarded as distinct conceptual categories, each
relatively unique and self-contained in its own right. They may be separated
from one another, discussed in relative isolation, and variously compared or
contrasted. In all of this, history and nature are not only assumed to be mean-
ingful modern categories, intelligible to the contemporary interpreter and
reader alike, but they are also believed to be appropriate for penetrating the
ancient mentality of biblical writers. In a disarming statement, von Rad re-
veals at once the well-defined modern philosophical distinction between
history and nature that underlies his analysis and its potentially question-
able value for understanding ancient thought. "We are struck," he writes
about the writings of the exilic prophet Second Isaiah, "by the ease with which
two doctrines, which to our way of thinking are of very different kinds, are
here brought together." 3
A second conception prominent in von Rad's essay and common in bib-
lical scholarship more generally is the judgment that these two realms, now
distinguished from one another, do not share equally in the biblical drama.
One of them, the realm of human culture, dominates biblical religion. It is
the primary and, for all practical purposes, exclusive concern of biblical au-
thors. The redemption of the human race, and of the people of God in par-
ticular, surpasses all other interests. By consequence, the realm of nonhuman
nature recedes into the background and becomes less important. The world
of creation is, as von Rad puts it, everywhere in the Bible "subordinated to
the interests and content of the doctrine of redemption," at times "altogether
swallowed up in the doctrine of redemption." 4 Thus nature is not only sepa-
rated from human culture, but it is regarded as subservient to it.
Together, these two conceptions provide the basic framework for most
of what has been written by biblical scholars about nature in biblical thought
during the last century. Both are prominent in the work of another influen-
tial biblical theologian, G. Ernest Wright, whose scholarship may be used to
fill out this picture further. Like von Rad, Wright viewed nature and history
as distinct spheres and believed human history to be the central concern of
biblical writers. This view of nature and history in fact was regarded by Wright
as "the one, primary irreducible datum of biblical theology." 5
For Wright biblical theology was based exclusively on the history of the
people of God. "Biblical theology is first and foremost a theology of recital,"
wrote Wright, "in which Biblical man confesses his faith by reciting the for-
mative events in his history as the redemptive handiwork of God. The real-
ism of the Bible consists in its close attention to the fact of history and of
tradition because these facts are the facts of God."6 Within such a religion
that claimed "history as the arena of God's activity," nature lost its inherent
significance. "Nature was not an independent object," according to Wright,
"it was instead a handmaiden, a servant of history."7
Wright saw biblical religion, by virtue of its preoccupation with the his-
torical process, as sharply distinguished from the religions of its environment.
The religion of the Bible represented to Wright "an utterly unique and radi-
cal departure from all contemporary pagan religions."8 He described the radi-
cal difference between biblical religion and other religions in the following
way.
Natural religion in Biblical times analyzed the problem of man over against nature.
In the struggle for existence the function of religious worship was that of the
integration of personal and social life with the natural world. . . . The life of the
individual was embedded in society and society was embedded in the rhythm and
balance of nature which was the realm of the gods. . . .
In the faith of Israel, even in the earliest preserved literature, there is a radical
and complete difference at every significant point. The Israelite did not analyze
the problem of life over against nature. The latter plays a subordinate role in the
faith, except as it is used by God to further his work in society and history. Instead,
the problem of life is understood over against the will and purpose of the God
who had chosen one people as the instrument of his universal, redemptive purpose.
. . . Here then is an utterly different God from the gods of all natural, cultural and
philosophical religion. He is no immanent power in nature nor in the natural process
of being and becoming. The nature of his being and will is revealed in historical
acts.9
From Wright's analysis emerge two further conceptions characteristic

of traditional treatments of nature in the Bible. One is that the Bible's em-
phasis on history and its subordination of nature is distinctive in the ancient
world. At its origins in ancient Israel, biblical religion, according to Wright,
represented a new vision of reality different from all others. On the one side
are Israel's neighbors, regarding the world through the lens of nature, iden-
tifying divine power and will with natural phenomena, and grounding their
liturgy and worship in nature's rhythms and orders. On the other side is Israel,
viewing the world through the lens of human history, associating God with
human culture, its social institutions and political events, and reciting within
its worship its formative historical experiences. The ancient world could be
divided neatly according to Wright, with natural religions on the one side
and historical religion, found only in the Bible, on the other.
A second and related conception is Wright's view that this distinctive-
ness of biblical religion represented an intellectual and theological break-
through in ancient Near Eastern thought. The kind of breakthrough involved
has been described in various ways. For Wright, this breakthrough meant
the drastic shift from viewing human life as confined by the unchanging cycles
of nature to viewing human experience as a meaningful process en route to
a goal; from accepting society as bound to the status quo and its hierarchical
structures to embracing social evolution and human justice; from practicing
rites of sympathetic magic insuring one's physical security to reciting God's
saving acts on behalf of the poor and oppressed.10 According to Wright's
scheme, nature was not just the neutral background for the real drama of
human redemption, but the realm of a complex of beliefs and behaviors super-
seded by and antithetical to biblical religion. The world of nature is thus not
merely peripheral to biblical religion but potentially perilous to it as well.
For H. and H. A. Frankfort, who edited a widely used study of ancient
Near Eastern thought entitled Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure
of Ancient Man, Israel's rejection of nature and acceptance of history as the
realm of religious reality represented an advance that could be phrased in
more philosophical terms. It was the initial step in "the emancipation of
thought from myth." 11 Whereas ancient Near Eastern societies functioned
in the framework of "mythopoeic thought," in which subject and object—
the realm of nature and the realm of humanity, or the natural world and the
divine—were not distinguished from one another, biblical culture made the
first move toward speculative thought, which stands behind modern science,
by distinguishing God from nature and identifying history, not cosmic phe-
nomena, as full of divine meaning and purpose. Biblical thought thus repre-
sented the first stage of a journey away from myth, to be completed in its
entirety by the later Greek philosophers.12
As this brief survey of several key scholarly figures shows, the view of
nature in recent biblical interpretation has been predicated upon four simple
conceptions: (1) nature and history are distinct categories, (2) biblical reli-
gion was grounded in history rather than nature, (3) in this regard biblical
religion was distinct from other ancient religions that were grounded in na-
ture, and (4) the Bible's historical consciousness was an advance in the evo-
lution of human thought. The natural consequence of such a stress on his-
tory as the center of biblical religion is the marginalization of the world of
nature as a significant concern. The result is the characterization of nature
as a problem.
This scheme and its conclusions have been widespread and highly influ-
ential in the biblical scholarship of the twentieth century. By way of illustra-
tion, a few other representatives of it may be cited. A good place to begin is
with H. Wheeler Robinson, the author of a classic and often-cited essay en-
titled "The Hebrew Conception of Nature." The essay begins with a contrast
between Babylonian and Israelite deities:
They [the Babylonian gods] were nature-deities, with all the ethical limitation
which this implies; He [Israel's God] was above Nature, as its Creator and Con-
troller according to a moral purpose. . . . The primary conception of Yahwch which
made such progress possible cannot have been itself a development from natural
phenomena. Its inspiration was derived from the very different realm of human
history. Yahweh's ultimate relation to things is a derivative from His primary

relation to men."
Sigmund Mowinckel, a scholar known for his vigorous and sympathetic

exploration of the ancient Near Eastern cosmogonic motifs that were incor-
porated into Israelite worship, is nevertheless decisive about Israel's histori-
cal distinctiveness. In his discussion of the enthronement festival, the cen-
terpiece of his study of the Psalms in Israelite worship, he asserts that
something new was added to the festival in Israel. This derived partly from the
contrast between Yahweh and the local deities of nature and fertility and partly
from the historical influence on Israelite religion of their experience of Yahweh
in a decisive historical hour. . . . On the whole this historical character is a really
fundamental feature of the religion of Israel. . . . This is what has made Israelite
religion something essentially different from the 'natural' religions and 'nature-
religions' of the Near East.
The line between history and nature and between Israel and its neighbors is
very sharply drawn here, and its consequence for understanding Israelite
worship is precisely described: "The reality re-experienced through the cult
is no longer first and foremost the cyclical course and renewal of nature, but
the historical 'facts of salvation.' The facts of salvation, 'recalled' and repeated
by means of the festival, were removed from the sphere of natural religion
(fertility and so on) to the world of historical reality." 14
The observations on the character of Israel's God in two commentaries
on the Book of Genesis may also be cited. Umberto Cassuto, in his discus-
sion of the creation narratives, makes a clear distinction between the God of
Israel pictured in them and the gods of Israel's neighbors. "Then came the
Torah and soared aloft, as on eagle's wings, above all these nations," he wrote.
"Not many gods but one God . . . not a deity associated with nature and iden-
tified with it wholly or in part, but a God who stands absolutely above na-
ture, and outside of it." 15 In a more recent commentary, Nahum Sarna ex-
presses a similar portrait of the creation narratives.
The theme of creation, important as it is, serves merely as an introduction to the
book's central motif: God's role in history. The opening chapters are a prologue
to the historical drama that begins in Chapter 12. ... The God of Genesis is the
wholly self-sufficient One, absolutely independent of nature, the supreme,
unchangeable Sovereign of the world who is providentially involved in human
affairs. He is, therefore, Lord of history."'
This centering of biblical religion on the historical process and the con-
sequent marginalization of the world of nature within it has been described
by James Barr as one of the reigning orthodoxies of our age. "Historians of
theology in a future age will look back on the mid-twentieth century and call
it the revelation-in-history period," he writes. "No single principle is more
powerful in the handling of the Bible today than the belief that history is the
channel of divine revelation." 17 This principle is as operative among histori-
ans of religion as among biblical theologians. When the religion of the Bible
is considered in broader comparativist contexts, it is invariably character-

ized as uniquely historical. The great comparativist Mircea Eliade, for exam-
ple, drew a sharp division between natural—primordial, cyclic, archetypal—
and historical views of reality, and he saw in Israelite thought the first decisive
rejection of the former and adoption of the latter. In this regard he found the
roots of the austere historical consciousness of modernity in the Hebrew
Bible.18
Two studies of sacred space in which Israelite thought is examined in a
broader comparative context might be noted by way of further illustration.
Hans J. Klimkeit introduces an analysis of Egyptian thought on this topic by
way of the traditional dichotomy: "We can, to a certain degree, contrast the
space-oriented mythical thinking of Egypt with the historical thinking of the
Old Testament. . . . [Israel] has its special position on account of the great
historical deeds of Yahweh, not on account of its geographical environment,
or the geographical factors of its Lebensraum. Whereas Israel. . . thinks histori-
cally in terms of time, Egypt thinks more geographically, in terms of space
[author's emphasis]." 19 Robert L. Cohn, who goes a long way toward break-
ing down this dichotomy in his studies of sacred space in biblical thought,
nevertheless starts his work with the traditional assumption: "It remains true
that for Israel, history, conceived as a purposeful sequence of divine-human
encounters, served as the organizing principle for communicating the Isra-
elite experience of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible."20
The desert versus the sown This view of biblical religion as historical rather
than natural in character has often been related to a view of the precise physi-
cal environment in which it came into being. This is the view that the desert
was ancient Israel's native environment and that Israel's earliest culture was
the pastoralist economy of nomadic shepherds. According to this view, Israel's
consciousness of nature—even more, its central religious and cultural tenets—
can only be understood in the context of desert nomadism. As Israel's for-
mative environment, the desert and the specialized pastoral nomadism con-
nected with it left an indelible stamp on all later generations. Though Israel
may have settled among Canaanite farmers and taken up their way of life, its
desert pastoralist origins gave Israel the distinctive religious consciousness
that was to characterize its thought and set it apart from its agrarian neighbors.
This view of Israel's origins was presented as forcefully by Albrecht Alt
as by any twentieth-century scholar. In a series of essays in the 1920s and
1930s, Alt analyzed the beginnings of Israel in terms of its desert origins and
the effects of this landscape on Israelite life and thought. Alt defended a theory
of the Israelite settlement as a peaceful infiltration into the arable zones of
the Canaanite hills by nomadic pastoralists from the surrounding deserts. 21
He argued for the origin of Israel's religion in the desert experience of Israel's
ancestors before their settlement among Canaanite farmers. 22 And he pro-
posed an interpretation of Israelite law that connected its original and dis-
tinctive features to this desert setting in which Israel was born. 23 For Alt,
Israelite thought, from its early perception of God as a deity bound to tribal
groups to its unique forms of law, bore the lasting imprint of its desert ori-
gins and could be clearly differentiated on this basis from the thought of the
ancient Canaanite farmers among whom Israel settled and whose ways it
slowly assimilated, though not without intellectual conflict and tensions.
In his essay on the origins of Israelite religion, "The God of the Fathers,"
Alt argued that the deity worshipped by Israel's earliest ancestors possessed
an historical character that was to be directly associated with the desert
nomadism of those who worshipped him. "The seeds of a completely differ-
ent development from that of local and nature gods were implanted at the
very inception of [Israel's] cult, " Alt claimed.
The god was not tied to a greater or lesser piece of earth, but to human lives, first
that of an individual, and then through him to those of a whole group. . . . The
gods of this type of religion show a concern with social and historical events which
most other primitive numina either lack altogether or possess only to a much more
limited degree. This makes it even more appropriate to the way of life of nomadic
tribes.24
According to Alt, this historical consciousness, forged in the furnace

of the desert and its ancestral deities, later became the distinctive feature of
Israelite Yahwism, even while Yahwism assimilated some characteristics
of the nature gods of its Canaanite neighbors:
Everything that we recognized as truly characteristic of these gods—their asso-

ciation with particular groups of men, families, clans, or tribes, their providential
oversight over the fortunes of their worshippers in the desert, and where they had
settled, their concern with social and historical events—all this recurs, only on a
higher level and over a much wider field, in the character of Yahweh as the God
of Israel. . . . The idea that Yahweh rules over the nation as a whole and over
its history, is clear and precise from the beginning, and is the most distinctive
characteristic of the religion of Israel.25
This conception of Israelite religion as distinctively historical on account

of its desert origins was popularized for a generation of students in the widely
read introduction to ancient Near Eastern thought, Be/ore Philosophy: The
Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. In their concluding chapter on the
unique aspects of Hebrew and Greek thought, IT. and H. A. Frankfort relate
Israel's rejection of natural phenomena and acceptance of history as the rev-
elation of God to a formative desert period. According to the Frankforts, we
may best
understand the originality and the coherence of their speculations if we relate them
to their experience in the desert. . . . The Hebrews, whatever their ancestry and
historical antecedents, were tribal nomads. . . . It seems that the desert as a meta-
physical experience loomed very large for the Hebrews and colored all their
valuations. . . .
The organized states of the ancient Near East were agricultural; but the values
of an agricultural community are the opposite of those of the nomadic tribe,
especially of the extreme type of nomads of the desert. . . . For, wherever we find
reverence for the phenomena of life and growth, we find preoccupation with the
immanence of the divine and with the form of its manifestation. But in the stark
solitude of the desert, where nothing changes, nothing moves (except man at his
own free will), where features in the landscape are only pointers, land marks
without significance in themselves—there we may expect the image of God to
transcend concrete phenomena altogether. . . .
. . . The doctrine of a single, unconditioned, transcendent God rejected time
honored values, proclaimed new ones, and postulated a metaphysical significance
for history and for man's actions.26
It was Israel's "metaphysical experience" of the desert, according to this line

of thinking, that led it to dissociate divine reality from natural surroundings
and identify it instead with peoples and their movements, that is, with human
history.
Such a view of Israel's desert origins has typified biblical scholarship both
earlier and later than Alt, its most formidable spokesman.27 An illustrative
example is the classic study of Israel's social institutions by Roland de Vaux.28
This study of the familial, civil, military, and religious institutions that char-
acterized sedentary Israelite society throughout its national life is prefaced
by an introduction entitled "Nomadism and Its Survival." It begins with the
following assertions: "At the beginning of their history the Israelites, like their
ancestors before them, lived as nomads or semi-nomads, and when they came
to settle down as a nation, they still retained some characteristics of that ear-
lier way of life. Consequently any study of Old Testament institutions must
begin with an investigation into nomadism. . . . Naturally, such a life entails
a distinct pattern of society, and enjoins a code of behavior all of its own."29
Following these assertions, de Vaux spells out the implications of such a view-
point for his interpretation of Israel's tribal structure and legal system, both
of which betray, according to de Vaux, their desert origins. These classic and
influential statements by Alt and de Vaux are only two of the many that have
been made in the past century claiming the desert as Israel's native environ-
ment and associating Israel's distinctive religion with it.30
This standard view of Israel's origins is based on several crucial concep-
tions of ancient environments and their related economies. The first is the
belief that ancient Near Eastern environments and cultures can be neatly
divided into separate spheres, the desert and the sown as they are sometimes
called. On the one side is the arid or semiarid desert with its specialized
pastoralists practicing a nomadic life-style to provide pasture for their herds.
On the other side is the arable land of the humid zones, with its sedentary
farmers cultivating the soil of their ancestral estates. Such a dichotomy has
customarily pictured each environment with its related economy as relatively
autonomous, self-contained, and independent of the other, so that conflict
between them is to be expected as a logical consequence of their differences.
A second conception is that biblical culture and thought in their origins
are to be associated exclusively with one of these settings, desert nomadism,
while the culture and thought of the societies of the Bible's environs—in
particular the Canaanites but also the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, for
example—are to be associated rather with sedentary agricultural life. Thus
biblical society could be clearly distinguished from those of its neighbors by

virtue of its unique way of life and natural environment.
A third conception basic to this standard reconstruction of Israel's ori-
gins is the notion that nomadic pastoralism represents a more primitive stage
of societal development than sedentary agriculture. Forces of social and his-
torical change naturally encourage the evolution from herding to cultivation:
nomadic pastoralists customarily settle down and become sedentary farm-
ers. Though Israel, from the time of its settlement in the Canaanite hill country
at the beginning of the Iron Age, was clearly an agrarian society, its real roots
were to be connected with an earlier nomadic stage of cultural development.
The prevailing view within biblical interpretation during the last cen-
tury of the place of biblical society in its natural environment and of its atti-
tude toward the natural world in which it found itself is thus based on two
foundational dichotomies that have often been considered related and mu-
tually reinforcing—one philosophical and the other geographical. On the one
hand is the well-defined distinction between nature and history and on the
other hand the clear-cut division between the desert and arable land. Together
they have provided the intellectual framework for the widely held view of
Israel as a desert society that conceived out of its nomadic existence an his-
torical consciousness new in the history of religions, whereby the natural
world was devalued and stripped of its sacred significance.
The Problem in Ecological Literature

Such a presentation of biblical religion resonated well with the Western mood
in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The preoccupation with his-
tory and human redemption, which was considered biblical religion's dis-
tinctive genius and primary concern, was regarded as the ultimate source of
the modern commitment to human dignity and social justice. This was cer-
tainly the case for G. Ernest Wright, who viewed the nature religions of the
ancient Near East as bound up by nature's unchanging cycles and as defend-
ers of the status quo and of entrenched political power. By contrast, he saw
in the historical consciousness of biblical thought a dynamic spirit embrac-
ing the new and moving toward a goal, the first force in ancient religion for
revolution and social change. 31
It is a conception that has subsequently been taken up into the litera-
ture of liberation theology. J. Severino Croatto, in his Exodus: A Hermeneutics
of Freedom, makes the same contrast Wright did. Ancient religions that sought
to align human life with the orders of the cosmos bound their adherents into
its ceaseless and unchanging rhythms. In them humans were not free. "Mythic
persons," claims Croatto, "are not free, creators in the sense of being aware
of a vocation; rather, they are subject to the cosmos." By contrast, in biblical
religion
history displaces the cosmic. God is visualized in human events more than in the
phenomena of the physical world. . . . Now human beings do not need to associate
themselves with the rhythms of the cosmos to imbibe the sacred. . . . The rela-
tionship between God and humans is no longer cosmic, but rather dialogical, within
a historicity in which human beings are responsible for a destiny but where they
are also challenged by the prophets or by the Gospel. Thus we understand that
human beings created in the image of God are free.32
The desacralization of nature that was a major component of this recon-
struction of biblical religion also fit the modern Western mood. It was iden-
tified as the ultimate source of the scientific mentality that had freed society
from primitive superstitions and had produced new and remarkable tech-
nologies. By removing God from nature, according to this view, biblical reli-
gion had reduced it to an object rather than a subject, to neutral matter that
was no longer reverenced but that could now be dispassionately examined
and manipulated. Accepted widely in theological circles, this viewpoint was
described succinctly by Harvey Cox in his best-seller, The Secular City. Cox
argued that biblical religion "opened nature for science" by breaking the
integral connection between the human race, the gods, and the cosmos that
defined the ancient religious systems of Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt. By sepa-
rating nature from God and from society, the biblical view of creation began
the "disenchantment process," as Cox called it, whereby nature was freed
from its religious overtones and perceived in a matter-of-fact way. "This dis-
enchantment of the natural world," wrote Cox, "provides an absolute pre-
condition for the development of modern science."33
With the appearance of the environmental crisis in the final decades of
the twentieth century, this traditional conception of biblical religion found
itself in an entirely new and less friendly world. What had been considered
unquestionably admirable within it suddenly came under direct criticism and
was for the first time characterized as seriously problematic. How this came
about can best be seen by looking at a few representative pieces of ecological
literature that have been motivated by the environmental crisis and that are
concerned with uncovering the values that have produced it.
One of the earliest and most widely discussed statements of this kind
was a speech delivered by the historian Lynn White, Jr., to the American
Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1966, published the next year
for a broad popular audience in the journal Science.34 Entitled "The Histori-
cal Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," White's essay set the stage for subsequent
discussions in a number of important respects. In the first place, White ar-
gued that the source of the environmental crisis lies not just in science and
technology but in deeply held attitudes and values toward the world of nature.
Furthermore, he endeavored to show how contemporary values derive from
the West's religious heritage, a heritage that goes back ultimately to the Bible
and its stories of creation at the beginning of Genesis. Finally, White deliv-
ered a rather scathing indictment on the biblical worldview. In its creation
accounts, White saw a dualistic perspective and an anthropocentric bias that
disturbed him. According to White, the biblical stories of creation set hu-
mans apart from nature and pictured them as superior to it, sharing in large
part God's own transcendence over it by being created in the divine image.
The physical creation for its part was made solely "to serve man's purposes"
14 The Yaliwist's Landscape
and was placed under human dominion. The result, in White's opinion, was
the familiar Western notion "that it is God's will that man exploit nature for
his proper ends."35
While White demonstrates no knowledge of the history of biblical schol-
arship on the texts or issues he discusses, it is not hard to recognize the par-
allels between his critique and the results of biblical scholarship. White's
"dualism of man and nature" is conceptually parallel to the dichotomy be-
tween history and nature that has played such a major role in the standard
treatments of nature in biblical interpretation. And his focus on anthropo-
centrism—the centering of the narrative on human well-being—corresponds
closely to scholarly descriptions of biblical religion as primarily concerned
with human history and redemption. For White such an image of the cos-
mos and the human place within it is untenable in an ecological age. In the
Bible's unusual preoccupation with human affairs and its objedification of
the world of nature lie the seeds, in White's opinion, of the anthropocentrism
of Western society and of its exploitation of the physical environment.
This characterization of the biblical approach to nature is prominent also
in the writings of Thomas Berry, a cultural historian who has been at the fore-
front of the ecological movement in the United States for many years. Bibli-
cal religion, as Berry understands it, was so strongly oriented toward a deity
who transcends nature and enters into a relationship with a covenant people
that it rendered the natural world "despiritualized and desacralized. . . . The
very purpose of Genesis," he claims, "was to withdraw Israel from the Near
Eastern orientation. Whatever the benefits of such diminishment of the divine
in the natural world, it rendered the world less personal, less subject; it became
something seductive, more liable to be treated as object." For Berry, biblical
traditions are so absorbed with human redemption and so "radically oriented
away from the natural world" that they have become "dysfunctional" and
must be set aside and replaced by a new story of the universe.36
In a chapter entitled "The Problem of Nature in Theology"—there is the
word "problem" again—that introduces his book, Theology of Nature, George
Hendry traces the West's attitudes toward nature back to the Bible as well.
After asking "why the world of nature was dropped from the agenda of the-
ology," Hendry surveys major Western thinkers from Augustine to Kant to
Barth and discovers "the concentration of theology on the theme of God and
the soul, or God and man." But does not this focus, he asks, "faithfully re-
flect the central emphasis of the Bible?" He believes it does, quoting in his
defense Gerhard von Rad's essay with which this chapter began. "In Israel's
faith history is always the primary field of the action of God," writes Hendry,
"and his action in nature is secondary and instrumental to it. ... The loca-
tion of the creation story at the beginning of the canonical Scriptures gives a
misleading impression of Biblical faith; for this is not where Biblical faith
begins. Biblical faith begins with the God of the people, not with the God
who created the heavens and the earth." 37
Such a view that the devaluation of nature in Western thought can be
traced back to the Bible and its historical orientation has become standard in
literature on values and the environment. Paul Santmire calls it "the critical
ecological wisdom," and it has become a largely unquestioned truism in
environmental circles.38 To illustrate, we may take a News week article on ecol-
ogy and religion in which columnist Kenneth Woodward describes Genesis
as "designed to desacralize nature." He proceeds from this to the more gen-
eral claim that "in the religions of the West, the world of nature—from plan-
ets to plankton—has little theological significance . . . what matters is human
redemption, not divine creation."39 The echoes of Gerhard von Rad and
G. Ernest Wright are unmistakable here, and they illustrate the extent to
which the view of nature in the Bible that has characterized biblical scholar-
ship is reflected—whether self-consciously and by design, or not—in the
current discussion on the environmental values embedded in Western reli-
gious traditions.
Rethinking the Problem

This then is the prevailing view toward nature in the Bible that one finds in
traditional scholarship, a view that rests on crucial dichotomies regarding
Israel's environment and theology. It has been accepted by contemporary
theologians as the starting point for Western philosophical thought about
the natural world, and it has found its way, through one means or another,
into much environmental literature. The validity of this view of Israelite reli-
gion depends in the first instance on how well it explains the details of the
biblical text itself. That is, in fact, the central aim of this book: to submit this
traditional view of Israelite religion to a reexamination based upon the tex-
tual data of one important and influential biblical author, the Yahwist. The
core of this book, chapters 2, 3, and 4, are devoted to this task. But before
this study of the Yahwist is undertaken, the presuppositions that lie behind
this traditional view of nature in the Bible must be examined briefly in their
own right.
Reexamining Presuppositions
History versus nature The conception that biblical religion was primarily
concerned with human history and only secondarily with the natural world
rests on several key suppositions popular in the age that gave rise to modern
biblical scholarship. One of these was the supposition that nature and history
were distinct and useful categories for analyzing ancient religions. Another
was that human culture had evolved from religions of nature to religions of
history. Both were characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ger-
man idealism, represented most prominently by the great philosopher
G. W. F. Hegel, which had a major influence on early modern biblical schol-
arship. Hegel's writings in particular have influenced biblical scholars, many
of whom are indebted to his categories of thought and some of whom quote
him directly in their defense.
As an idealist, Hegel was heir to a long tradition in Western philosophy
and theology, represented by such figures as Plato in classical antiquity and
Descartes and Kant in the enlightenment. With its dualism between mind
and matter, idealism had divided the world into two metaphysically distinct
orders, the spiritual and the material, and had placed ultimate value on Mind
and Spirit. In his own adaptation of this philosophical tradition, Hegel de-
veloped a view of the history of religion as a dialectical process passing
through three stages: (1) the religion of nature, in which God or Spirit is
identified directly with nature; (2) the religion of spiritual individuality, in
which Spirit is distinguished from nature; and (3) absolute or revealed reli-
gion, in which the Spirit-Nature dichotomy is overcome in the incarnation
of Christ.40
Within this scheme, the religions of the ancient Near East exemplified
for Hegel the first stage of religious development, the religions of nature.
Ancient Israel, for its part, played a major role in the second stage. Israelite
religion, according to Hegel, divided the world sharply between the natural
and the spiritual and in the process "undeified" and devalued nature while
moving toward a religion of humanity and freedom. The split between spirit
and nature in this second stage of religious development is expressed by Hegel
in strong language:
This Power which has potential being, Nature, is now degraded to the condition
of something powerless, something dependent relative to the underived Power,
or, to put it more definitely, it is made a means. Natural things are deprived of
their own independent existence. Hitherto they had a direct share in Substance,
while now they are in the subjective Power separated from substantiality,
distinguished from it, and are regarded as only negative. . . . Nature is represented
as thus entirely negated, in subjection, transitory. 41
Within this second stage of religious development, according to Hegel, hu-

manity stands with God over nature: "Man is exalted above all else in the
whole creation. He is something which knows, perceives, thinks. He is thus
the image of God in a sense quite other than that in which the same is true of
the world. What is experienced in religion is God, He who is thought, and it
is only in thought that God is worshipped." 42
Key elements in Hegel's philosophy of religion—his dichotomy between
Nature and Spirit, his concept of evolutionary development from a religion
of nature to a religion of humanity, and his assignment of ancient Israel to a
central role in both—had a distinct influence on biblical scholarship in the
modern era. Julius Wellhausen, whose classic reconstruction of Israelite reli-
gion provided the starting point for twentieth-century scholarship, contrasted
natural and historical religion and saw in Israel's own literature a develop-
ment from a religion of nature—or something very close to it—in the older
sources to a religion of history in the later Priestly Writings. In the process,
according to Wellhausen, Israelite religion became "denaturalized" and finally
came to represent an absolute "negation of nature." 43
Other scholars, down into the twentieth century, in particular those wish-
ing to emphasize the sharp break with natural religion in ancient Israel, have
enlisted in their support the views of Hegel. G. Ernest Wright, for example,
quotes Hegel prominently in defense of his argument that Israel broke from
its ancient Near Eastern milieu with its transcendent deity, its concerns for
human history, and its demotion of nature to the status of "a mere creature."44
Mircea Eliade, to cite another important figure, goes so far as to discern "a
parallel between Hegel's philosophy of history and the theology of history of
the Hebrew prophets," in that both value the invisible event of history as a
manifestation of the will of God over against "the viewpoint of traditional
societies dominated by the eternal repetition of archetypes." 45
The conceptual world of Hegelian idealism has thus provided the cat-
egories and language for much of the traditional biblical scholarship that has
emphasized Israel's new historical consciousness and its subordination of
nature. The question raised by this fact is whether the idealistic tradition in
Western philosophy, especially in its Hegelian form, provides the appropri-
ate framework for analyzing biblical thought, a conceptual system that ante-
dated the earliest forms of idealism. Such a question can only be properly
answered by a reexamination of biblical texts with this particular issue as
the focus of attention. At this point it is sufficient to point out how conspicu-
ously traditional treatments of nature in the Bible have drawn on idealistic
categories regnant in the age in which they were conceived and developed.
At the same time, a word might be said here about the potential prob-
lems of using Hegelian thought to analyze the biblical conception of nature.
The biblical Hebrew language possesses no terms comparable to the modern
words "nature" and "history," which divide reality into two independent and
unified realms. This does not necessarily mean that ancient Israel did not in
some fashion reflect upon the realities represented by these terms, but it does
raise the question whether Israel organized its universe by these categories.
One finds in Israelite literature words for the earth and its features and for
political entities and social institutions, but no words that divide these mat-
ters conceptually and absolutely into two different spheres and orders of
reality as do the modern words "nature" and "history."
A brief look at the word spirit, a term that played a major role in Hegel's
thought and that he regarded as the antithesis of nature, provides just a single
illustration of the potential difficulty of applying Hegel's categories to bibli-
cal thought. "Spirit," ruah in biblical Hebrew, does not divide between spiri-
tual and natural, between mind and matter, ruah, a widely used term, can be
employed for the common wind, for the breath of human beings, and for the
being of God. It moves so easily across the boundaries Idealists have drawn
between spiritual and material that one is often at a loss to translate it in mod-
ern terms that rely so heavily on idealistic categories. In Genesis 1:2, where
the ruah 'elohim, "Spirit of God," hovers over the waters before creation, are
we to understand it as the physical wind of God, or as the spiritual presence
of God, or are these categories not operative or, on the other hand, interre-
lated in Israelite thought?
Toward the end of his career, Gerhard von Rad, one of the greatest pro-
ponents of Israel's unique historical worldview, expressed some misgivings
about the interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures that stressed history to the
exclusion of nature. While by no means abandoning his staunch historicist

approach, von Rad opened his new discussion with the observation that "the
greater part of what the Old Testament has to say about what we call Nature
has simply never been considered. If 1 am right, we are nowadays in serious
danger of looking at the theological problems of the Old Testament far too
much from the one-sided standpoint of an historically conditioned theology."46
In the course of his article, von Rad recognized in rather disarming fash-
ion the modern and anachronistic character of the concepts of "history" and
"nature." Noting that the use of this vocabulary puts the issue in contempo-
rary philosophical dress, he asserted that "the Old Testament draws no such
distinction between Nature and history, regarding them as one single area of
reality under the control of God." Such notions as nature and history are
"merely vast ciphers, so many images projected" onto reality. Consequently,
"anyone who wishes to see the world in some measure as Israel saw it must
first rid his mind of both mythical and philosophical ways of thinking. It is
much easier said than done!"47
Indeed. Yet von Rad himself considered this an unavoidable endeavor.
He put before biblical scholars the following observation and ensuing
challenge:
The religion of Israel was intensely interested in the world, which it saw in direct
and immediate relation to God. It was no less fascinated by the phenomenon of
the world than by the phenomena of a "history" [notice now the quotation marks]
wholly directed by God. Are we not then confronted at this point with an exegetical
task similar to that which we have already in part performed in respect of the Old
Testament theology of history? 48
Von Rad is here asking for no less than a new study of the biblical view
of nature, a study that would not only retrieve neglected texts but reexamine
the philosophical assumptions that have controlled past interpretations.
Coming just three years before Lynn White's essay regarding the ecological
bankruptcy of biblical traditions in 1967, von Rad's remarks raised many of
the same issues. Together these two essays have set a new agenda for biblical
studies that has only begun to be addressed.
Some have already seriously questioned the common conception that bib-
lical religion is uniquely preoccupied with history. Bertil Albrecktson, for
example, has argued, on the basis of a comparison of biblical texts with other
ancient Near Eastern documents, that Israel's association of divine activity
with human history is not a unique phenomenon but one shared widely with
its neighbors.49 And James Barr has questioned the conception that history
itself is as foundational to biblical revelation and religion as is often claimed.50
Such figures as Rolf Knierim and H. H. Schmid have, in programmatic es-
says, more directly addressed von Rad's concern for a reconsideration of
nature in biblical thought, and they have argued that it was a much larger
and foundational concern than traditionally believed. 51
What such studies have begun to expose are the inadequacies of tradi-
tional idealistic categories as a framework for describing the character of
biblical religion. And by consequence they have questioned the accuracy of

the picture of biblical religion constructed on the basis of these categories. It
is increasingly being recognized that the obsession with history and the prob-
lem with nature in traditional scholarship may be more in the nineteenth-
century idealist agenda than in the texts of the biblical authors themselves.
What is now necessary are new readings of substantial biblical texts in which
the old presuppositions can be systematically reexamined and a new approach
to the study of nature in the Bible may be fashioned.
The desert versus the sown In order to do this properly, the presupposi-
tions about the actual biblical environment, which have predominated in tra-
ditional biblical interpretation, must also be reexamined. These presupposi-
tions—that biblical society originated in the desert as a pastoral and nomadic
culture—are crucial because they have been so closely associated with claims
for the Bible's special historical consciousness and its disregard for nature.
The Bible's desert origins have frequently been believed to have placed a dis-
tinctive stamp on biblical thought and life that was never fully lost.
The traditional idea that Israel originated in the desert rests, as has been
observed, on several key assumptions: that pastoral nomadism is an autono-
mous phenomenon to be sharply differentiated from sedentary agriculture,
and that it represents an earlier stage of cultural development than farming.
Both of these assumptions, in fact, are characteristic of anthropological theo-
ries regnant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the now
standard reconstruction of early Israelite history was developed by biblical
scholars. Based upon analogies with later more developed and independent
forms of pastoralism reliant upon riding animals, such as camels and horses,
pastoralism in antiquity was considered by early anthropologists as an
autarkic enterprise. Furthermore, it was believed to be a primitive stage of
cultural development. According to the tripartite theory of social develop-
ment widespread in early anthropological study, human culture evolved
naturally in unilinear fashion through three stages: from hunting and gath-
ering to herding to cultivation. 52 Such a view of cultural evolution is old and
widespread, going back at least to Aristotle's pupil Dicaearehus, who held
that humans had evolved from shepherds to farmers. 53
On the basis of new archaeological, zoological, and botanical evidence
accumulated since the 1950s, combined with new comparative anthropologi-
cal data, this traditional conception of pastoralism in antiquity has been
seriously questioned and new hypotheses proposed in its stead.54 It now
appears unlikely, for example, that at the time of Israel's origins pastoralism
was the autonomous, economically self-sufficient, culturally distinct phenom-
enon presumed by early anthropologists and by biblical scholars who pro-
posed the older reconstructions of Israel's beginnings. Pure pastoral nomad-
ism emerged only later in the Levant with the domestication of riding animals
in the late second and early first millenia B.C.E., the period when Israel had
already become a landed political entity."
Sheep and goat pastoralism in antiquity was always closely integrated
with sedentary agriculture in some way. In fact, it is better to think of an-

cient societies existing on a continuum from intensive cultivation to inten-
sive pastoral activity than to imagine them as pure forms of one or the other.
In his summation of the various treatments of this topic collected in Pasto-
ralism in the Levant, Richard Meadow observes that "the dichotomy drawn
between the desert and the sown is an oversimplification. While these cat-
egories may be enshrined in the literature of the region, focus on normative
values tends to obscure how relationships were actually played out on the
ground."56
Groups specializing in pastoralism certainly could exist, but they were
never isolated from agriculture. Within these groups, a limited cultivation
of grains is normally practiced, but in a more secondary role than in typical
agrarian settings. Furthermore, because of the specialized character of their
economy, such pastoralists are actually more, rather than less, dependent on
the world of sedentary agriculture for their survival; Their own need for car-
bohydrates and agricultural products, for pastures for their herds in arable
zones during the dry season, and for markets for their animals and animal
products demands a close symbiotic relationship to their agricultural neigh-
bors. "The more specialized pastoral nomadism becomes," according to
Emmanuel Marx, "the more it is integrated into the social fabric of a com-
plex urban civilization." 57 Because of this symbiotic relationship, and with-
out the riding animals necessary to cover the vast distances of the desert,
specialized sheep and goat pastoralists regularly inhabit the semiarid zones
contiguous with arable land as well as the pasture lands unsuited for cultiva-
tion within the arable zones themselves. They are not pure nomads but pos-
sess a sedentary base from which herds are moved in rather confined and
regular patterns to exploit seasonal pasturage. This type of specialized pas-
toralism is therefore commonly referred to as seminomadic or transhumant
pastoralism.58
Such pastoralists have always been a minority in ancient Near Eastern
society. By far the more typical form of pastoralism in the Levant is one sub-
sumed in a multipurpose household as a subsidiary part of a mixed economy
based on the cultivation of grains and fruits. In this form, animal husbandry
is part of a sedentary village society and is closely integrated with cultivation
as one component of a single subsistence agrarian economy. Raising animals
in this context enriches the agricultural economy with animal products—
milk, meat, wool, leather—and hedges the risks of subsistence (arming
through diversification.59
The implication of these newer reconstructions of pastoralism in antiq-
uity is that an accurate description of any ancient Mediterranean society,
including that of early Israel, cannot be made by categorizing it in terms of
the traditional dichotomy between agriculture and pastoralism. A valid de-
scription must instead rest on a nuanced assessment of the forms, the bal-
ance, and the ratio of one to the other in a particular society, place, and time.
The traditional view of Israel's origins as an autonomous pastoral society of
nomads at home in the desert is ruled out by the realities of ancient Mediter-
ranean economics. The realistic question that emerges from the new data is
the following: in what proportion did early Israel combine herding and cul-
tivation in its economy? Or, for our purposes in this study, exactly where on
the pastoral-agricultural continuum are Israel's ancestors to be placed?
Just as the independence of pastoralism in the ancient Near East has been
questioned by new archaeological and anthropological data, so has the tra-
ditional notion that pastoralism antedates agriculture. In the actual history
of the evolution of human culture in the ancient Near East from food-
extracting societies—hunters and gatherers—to food-producing societies—
herders and farmers—the domestication and cultivation of plants predates
by several millennia the domestication and herding of animals. When it did
emerge, pastoralism did not develop out of hunting, as early anthropologists
thought, but came into being as a secondary offshoot of sedentary cultiva-
tion, which itself appears to have provided the indispensable conditions for
the domestication of animals to take place at all.60
Changing economic, political, demographic, and environmental condi-
tions may of course press any particular society from a more intensive pas-
toral economy to a more intensive agricultural one. But the reverse may also
be true. 61 Such a process of change is more complex and subtle than imag-
ined by those who thought of human, and Israelite, evolution as a unilinear
development from herding to farming. There appears now to be no eviden-
tial basis for the traditional view that nomadic pastoralism represents an early
stage of cultural development out of which sedentary agriculture naturally
and expectedly emerges, as was once assumed by proponents of Israel's
nomadic origins.
A critique of Israel's origins in desert pastoralism in much this same vein
has been pursued already for some years by a school of scholars, in particu-
lar George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald, who regard Israel's beginning
as a peasant revolt by indigenous peoples rather than as the infiltration of
desert pastoralists. 62 Mendenhall began his critique of the older peaceful
immigration and military conquest theories of Israel's settlement of the hill
country by a reexamination of the assumption that Israel's ancestors were
originally pastoralist nomads. He claimed that the "sharp contrast" between
nomadic pastoralists and sedentary villages assumed by biblical scholars did
not conform to observations of the actual practice of pastoralism in the Middle
East; that the modern Bedouin in any case, dependent as they are on the camel,
are not a good analogy for reconstructing Israel's origins; that such cultural
traits as tribalism were not necessarily reflections of nomadism; and that the
biblical text itself presented Israel's ancestors, both before and after the flood,
as villagers and farmers whose pastoralism was pursued in this context. 63
Gottwald has carried this critique much further by a more thorough
analysis of pastoralism in antiquity and by a more detailed reappraisal of
biblical texts in this light. "To employ pastoral nomadism as an explanatory
model for early Israel," writes Gottwald, "is to go wrong from the start." 64
For both scholars, the critique of pastoral nomadism is part of the larger
sociological and ideological agenda that aims to defend a view of the birth of
Israel as a revolt against oppressive political structures. Whether or not this

theory of Israel's origins can be sustained over the long run, the critique of
traditional conceptions of pastoral nomadism that it incorporates has done
much to undermine outdated notions of ancient environments and econo-
mies.65 The traditional view of Israel's origins in the desert as nomadic
pastoralists, based on views of pastoralism widely accepted in the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, when modern historical study of
the Bible came into its own, have now by and large been abandoned by archae-
ologists and anthropologists as inadequate or inaccurate.
Thus the two presuppositions that have led to the view of nature as a
problem in the Bible—Israel's desert origins and its unique historical con-
sciousness—are both problematic in and of themselves. They reflect ways of
looking at the environment and religion that were popular in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries when modern biblical scholarship originated but
that, when reexamined, have serious if not fatal flaws as models for describ-
ing ancient societies. It is obvious that an adequate picture of biblical reli-
gion can only be reconstructed with linguistic and conceptual tools more
amenable to the actual economies and ideologies of biblical antiquity. The
most recent archeological and anthropological data and reconstructions of
ancient environments must replace outmoded nineteenth-century notions
of the desert versus the sown as the backdrop for analyzing the biblical envi-
ronment. And a new language must be found to move beyond the dualism
present in the idealistic division between spirit and matter, history and nature,
for analyzing the biblical view of nature.
Rereading Biblical Texts

This can only be accomplished, of course, within the context of a reexami-
nation of the biblical texts themselves. Many new investigations by biblical
scholars into the place of nature in biblical literature have in fact already
appeared. Primarily responses to the criticism of the Bible by environmen-
talists, these new studies have created a new genre of biblical interpretation
on nature themes in biblical texts. Too numerous to mention, these studies
have made an admirable start at reviving dormant texts and themes, provid-
ing fresh readings of familiar material, and calling into question old ap-
proaches and habits of interpretation.66
The study of the Yahwist's epic in this volume builds upon and extends
these studies in several ways. In the first place, its scope is new: it represents
the systematic analysis of the thought of a single, but substantial, biblical au-
thor. Most past studies have been much more specific or much more gen-
eral. On the one hand, essays on nature in the Bible have focused on such
crucial, but very short, texts as the command to exercise dominion in Gen-
esis 1:26-28, undoubtedly the most widely discussed verses in recent writ-
ing on nature in the Bible. While essential, these studies are necessarily lim-
ited by their narrow scope, which excludes from detailed analysis the larger
textual and ideological context of the verses in question. The almost exclu-
sive preoccupation with the creation accounts in discussions of nature in the

Bible, as if the creation of the natural world in Genesis 1-2 exhausts its sig-
nificance for biblical thought, represents the same kind of circumscribed
focus.
On the other hand, essays on nature in the Bible have been expansive
and far-reaching, covering the biblical view of nature as a whole within the
boundaries of a single article. Such studies have the merit of striving for a
broad synthesis, but they are limited in several respects in what can be accom-
plished. Little detailed exegesis of texts is possible in such a format. And a
level of generality is required that cannot do proper justice to the differences
in perspective among the Bible's authors or to the nuances within a single
writer.
The kind of analysis needed to carry the discussion of nature in the Bible
beyond the results of current work is the study of individual biblical authors
in a comprehensive and systematic fashion. Such a study is narrow enough
in scope to allow for a detailed analysis of texts and encourage attention to
the distinctive perspectives of a particular writer, thereby avoiding the homog-
enizing of biblical views. At the same time, this kind of study is broad enough
in scope to allow for the examination of a pattern of thought encompassing
various dimensions of the human-nature relationship. While such a study is
still far from a complete and systematic treatment of the entire range of bib-
lical thought on the topic of nature, it is the necessary next step that must be
taken on the way to such a goal.
Another respect in which this volume extends current discussions is its
special attention to the presuppositions that have underlain modern schol-
arly work on nature in the Bible and its concern to submit these presupposi-
tions to a new, critical review within the process of biblical interpretation.
Defenses of the Bible in response to the criticisms in recent ecological litera-
ture are more frequently aimed at precise points of interpretation than they
are at major, foundational assumptions. In fact, an irony is present in much
recent biblical scholarship designed to defend and rehabilitate the place of
nature in the Bible in that it rests on the same presuppositions about nature
and history that have led to the "problemizing" of nature in biblical thought.
In order to break new ground, these old presuppositions must be more care-
fully uncovered and more seriously reexamined in the process of rereading
biblical texts.
The Yahwist as a source for study For this study of nature in biblical reli-
gion, the writer whose work provides the primary source is the Yahwist. The
selection of the Yahwist deserves an explanation, both for the general audi-
ence, which may not be familiar with this author, and for the scholarly audi-
ence, for whom the Yahwist's existence is no longer the foregone conclusion
it once was.
After Julius Wellhausen's influential synthesis at the end of the nineteenth
century, in which he described the authorship and development of the litera-
ture in the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, a broad scholarly consen-
sus developed around the view that these books are composite in character.67
Traditionally attributed to a single author, Moses, these books came to be re-
garded, according to the hypothesis that Wellhausen put into classic form, as
in actuality a combination of four continuous sources or documents authored
by four different writers living at different times in Israelite history. The oldest
narratives, dated variously within the monarchic period (tenth-eighth centu-
ries B.C.E.), were attributed to the Yahwist, so named because this author pre-
fers to use the divine name "Yahweh" (Jahweh in German—hence the accepted
abbreviation of the Yahwist as J instead of Y), and to the Elohist, so called be-
cause this author prefers the more general "God" ( elohim in Hebrew—hence
the abbreviation E). These old narratives, according to this "documentary
hypothesis," were later incorporated into a new edition of Israel's beginnings
prepared by Priestly Writer(s)/Editor(s) (abbreviated P). The Priestly Writer
gave a new focus to the older narratives, primarily by making Mt. Sinai the
focus of the narrative and adding at this place in the narrative a massive body
of ritual and social regulations that now accounts for the end of Exodus, all of
Leviticus, and the beginning of Numbers. It was recognized early that the book
of Deuteronomy was a separate source (abbreviated D), which has widely come
to be recognized as the introduction to the history of Israel that follows in
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.
Of these four authors, the Yahwist, or J, has been identified as the figure
responsible for the oldest stories in the first five books of the Hebrew Scrip-
tures, also known as the Pentateuch ("five books") or Torah ("law"). These
include most of the stories of the creation and the preflood eras at the begin-
ning of Genesis, and most of the narratives of Israel's ancestors, Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, which make up the remainder of the book. Also attributed
to the Yahwist are the majority of the accounts of Israel's escape from Egypt
and wandering in the wilderness in the books of Exodus and Numbers. A
precise division of the Pentateuch into its constituent sources, highlighting
those texts that make up the Yahwist's work in particular, may be found in
an appendix at the end of this book.
The kind of redaction or compilation of traditions proposed in the docu-
mentary hypothesis is not unique to the first five books of the Bible but has
been recognized in one form or another in almost every corpus in the Hebrew
Bible and in the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. The book of
Isaiah, for example, is believed to contain speeches from three different pro-
phetic figures living in different periods of Israelite history: the Judean mon-
archy, the Babylonian exile, and the period of Persian repatriation. The rec-
ognition and treatment of such distinct sections of a larger literary corpus,
together with their respective historical and social contexts, have tradition-
ally been considered essential for a proper understanding of the corpus's aims
and content.
The study of the Yahwist, and of the composition and completion of the
Pentateuch in general, has entered a new stage in the final decades of the twen-
tieth century, a stage full of much more ferment than in the preceding years.
On the one hand, there is a new interest in the documentary hypothesis and
in the Yahwist in particular. For years, the only book-length study of the
Yahwist in English was Peter Ellis's, The Yahwist: The Bible's First Theologian.68
In the last five years, three new studies of the Yahwist have appeared: Robert
Coote and David Ord's The Bible's First History; John Van Seters's Prologue
to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis and The Life of Moses: The
Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers; and the literary critic Harold Bloom's
The Book of J, which has popularized the Yahwist beyond the world of aca-
demic biblical scholarship.69 And this list does not include a number of new
studies in other languages.70
This new interest in the Yahwist and in the traditional source analysis of
the Pentateuch coincides with a new attack on the entire documentary hypo-
thesis itself. These new critics object to its fragmentation of the Pentateuchal
narrative, arguing for a more unitary approach, or they recognize its com-
posite character but deny the existence of the traditional continuous sources,
putting forward instead new proposals for the Pentateuch's constituent parts
and new models for understanding its compilation. 71
The dust from this new debate is not likely to settle soon, and in the in-
terim some position must be assumed as a starting point for the study of
Pentateuchal traditions. For the analysis in this book, that starting point
is the narrative material that predates the Priestly contributions to the
Pentateuch, in particular that strand within this pre-P material traditionally
ascribed to the Yahwist. By the attribution of this narrative to an individual,
the Yahwist, and by the use of terms like "author" and "writer" for this indi-
vidual in the analysis that follows, 1 do not wish to imply that these narra-
tives were created de novo by a single creative author. It is more likely that
these narratives have behind them a long history of tradition and transmis-
sion, for which the designation, the Yahwist's narrative, refers to the last stage,
edition, or version of this process of the handing down and recitation of Israel-
ite traditions.
I do wish to make the case in the study that follows, however, that the
non-P narratives traditionally assigned to J have a unified and cohesive ori-
entation to the natural world. It is this unified textual perspective that I have
in mind when speaking of the Yahwist, (or referring to the Yahwist as an
author or writer), rather than a specific theory of the compilation or author-
ship of this material. I also wish to make the case that the perspective on the
natural world contained in texts presumed to be Yahwistic contrasts sharply
at points with that represented in Priestly texts. So, while this is not a study
of the literary formation of the Pentateuch, it does provide data that can be
taken into consideration for this debate as well.
The Yahwist is a particularly attractive choice among biblical writers for
a reexamination of nature in biblical thought. In the first place the Yahwist's
work is a narrative about origins, the origins of the world and human society
as J knew it. Stories of origins such as this are customarily foundational
narratives, explaining and legitimating the basic realities and values of the
author's own world. Furthermore, J's account is the earliest of the Penta-
teuchal sources and, if dated early in the monarchy as has customarily been
the case, would represent the Bible's oldest sustained reflection on God, the
world, and the human place within it.72 As such, it sets the basic parameters
of the way the world was to be understood in biblical society.
By reason of its age and its prominent and defining position in the Bible,
the Yahwist's work has been touted as among the most important sources of
the Western intellectual tradition. With an obvious exuberance, Harold Bloom
calls the Yahwist's narrative "a work that has formed the spiritual conscious-
ness of much of the world ever since."73 Peter Ellis called it the world's "first
major theological opus" and judged the Yahwist, as the author of Israel's na-
tional epic, "more than comparable to Homer." 74 Such accolades may be
somewhat extravagant, but they point to the formative and influential posi-
tion the Yahwist's narratives hold in the Bible and in Western religious tra-
dition. Some of the most familiar images of the world and of humanity in
Western culture derive from these stories attributed to J. No reexamination
of nature in the Bible would be complete without serious consideration of
this formative body of literature.
Past readings of the Yahwist's view of nature Before embarking on this reread-
ing of the Yahwist, a few illustrations may be provided of the way in which
the old presuppositions about nature and history and about the desert and
the sown have affected past scholarship on the Yahwist's work itself. Here,
as in biblical interpretation more broadly, these problematic dichotomies have
played an important role.
The conception of Israel as an autonomous nomadic desert culture that
evolved into a sedentary agricultural society has led many scholars to see these
two distinct viewpoints in J and consequently to divide J itself into two
sources, one reflecting the older nomadic pastoral background and the other
a later sedentary agricultural setting. Otto Eissfeld, for example, building on
a tradition going back to Rudolf Smend's work, separated out from J an older
stratum because he thought it preserved Israel's original nomadic setting.
Eissfeld thus found in the traditional J two sources: a nomadic source he
named the Lay (L) source because of its perceived primitive and secular char-
acter, and an agricultural source, J proper. Eissfeld's assumptions about the
dichotomy between the desert and the sown and about the natural evolution
from desert pastoralism to sedentary agriculture are clear in his discussion
of the relationship between his L source and J. "It appears that the L strand
in the primeval history pictured men as nomads," writes Eissfeld, "whereas
J and P clearly think of them as husbandmen. . . . It is quite clear that in Israel,
which became an agricultural people from being a nomadic people, an out-
line of their history which places nomads at the beginning must be older than
one which pictures the first men as husbandmen. . . . L is no doubt giving
expression in this to his enthusiasm for the nomadic ideal."75
George Fohrer was also convinced that the desert and the sown could
be isolated as distinct perspectives within the Yahwist's work, and he too
singled out a series of texts that he believed represented a nomadic perspec-
tive. He called this source N, the Nomadic Source Stratum. In contrast to
Eissfeld, however, he connected this nomadic source with a later revival of

the older nomadic ideal that arose as a reaction to sedentary agricultural
society, with its questionable Canaanite character. "The whole presentation,"
he claimed, "can best be understood as a reaction and reply on the part of
conservative nomadic circles to J's enthusiasm for settled civilization. . . . The
author of this source stratum comes from the mileau of a cattle-raising soci-
ety faithful to Yahweh, which opposed or rejected Canaanite civilization and
the Palestinian civilization of Israel with its Canaanite traits."76 While not all
have been convinced by such a bifurcation of the Yahwist's work, some form
of it is not uncommon in detailed exegetical treatments of J's narratives.
Rudolf Smend's isolation of nomadic and agricultural sources behind J's story
of the Garden of Eden, for example, has appealed to many later exegetes, such
as Claus Westermann, who appropriates it in his exhaustive commentary on
Genesis.77
The way in which this dichotomy between the desert and the sown has
played into the related dichotomy between history and nature may be illus-
trated from Peter Ellis's study of the Yahwist. While not dividing J into con-
stituent nomadic and agricultural sources, as had Eissfeld, Fohrer, and oth-
ers, Ellis saw in J an admiration for the nomadic existence of early Israel,
symbolized for example in the shepherd Abel, and a hostility toward seden-
tary Canaanite society, symbolized for example in the farmer Cain. Connected
with these two settings, according to Ellis, were two kinds of religion, the
religion of Yahweh, in which the deity was interested in humans and entered
into covenants with them, and the religion of Baal, in which a nature deity
was worshipped through fertility rituals. In this contrast between the histori-
cal religion of Israel and the nature religion of Canaan could be perceived,
according to Ellis, "the broad, theological outline of the saga as a whole:
namely, the rise of chosen, covenanted Israel and the covenanted Davidic
dynasty and their conquest of the forces of anti-God in the world, represented
by the fertility religion of the Canaanites in the time of the Yahwist."78
Just how normative—and how arbitrary in its actual application—this
nature-history dichotomy has been in analysis of the Yahwist may be illus-
trated further by describing the use made of it by Julius Wellhausen at the
end of the nineteenth century. For Wellhausen, in contrast to Ellis's later
views, J was rather solidly on the nature side of this division. According to
his reconstruction of Israelite religion from Pentateuchal traditions, Israel's
religion evolved from a natural to a historical one. In its earliest stage, repre-
sented by the Yahwist's work, Israelite religion was based in agriculture, that
is in nature and its seasonal cycles. In the next stage of religious develop-
ment, reflected in Deuteronomy (D), a new historical consciousness arose
and was combined with the older agricultural orientation of J. Later, in the
final stage of Israelite religion, found in the Priestly (P) stratum, the connec-
tion with natxire was severed and life and religion became exclusively bound
up with history. Thus J was regarded as a witness to a primitive stage of Isra-
elite religion in which nature played a major and formative role.79
One can see in these illustrations both the longevity and the influence
of the traditional presuppositions about the desert and the sown and about
nature and history in the interpretation of the Yahwist's work itself. Other
examples could be mentioned here, but they will be reserved for discussion
when the specific texts they bear upon are brought up for analysis in the
chapters that follow.
Rereading the Yahwist This study then represents an attempt to take a new
look at the Yahwist's view of nature. It is new in approach because it does
not take the traditional, anachronistic, and clearly problematic presupposi-
tions about the desert and the sown and about nature and history as its start-
ing point. In place of the old anthropological models of desert shepherds and
sedentary farmers, more recent archaeological and anthropological data on
the environments and economies of the ancient Near East will be employed
as a context for interpretation. Furthermore, the Yahwist's thought will be
discussed in language that does not presuppose the post-biblical, idealistic
categories of matter and spirit, of nature and history that have played such a
dominant role in reconstructions of biblical religion.
This study is new in another sense as well, because it makes nature its
central focus. Interpreters have invariably commented upon this aspect of
J's narratives. They could hardly avoid it because the natural environment is
such a prominent part of J's stories. But they have done so only in passing
and as a secondary concern. Their comments about it are usually brief, dis-
connected, and unexamined. They have not considered the natural world
crucial, nor have they tried to describe its role in the Yahwist's narratives and
ideology in a systematic and synthetic fashion. This is a direct consequence,
of course, of the widespread view that the world of nature is a peripheral
concern in a religion absorbed with human redemption.
The following study of the Yahwist's work has been divided into three
sections according to the major parts of the overall narrative itself. The first
section, in chapter 2, deals with the Primeval Age, the period from the cre-
ation of the world to the great flood, which brought about a new beginning
for the world and its human civilization. While this is the shortest of the major
parts of J's work, it will, for several reasons, be given the most attention. In
the first place, its well-known stories—Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,
Cain's murder of Abel, and Noah's Ark and the Great Flood—have captured
the imagination of later generations in a way that other parts of the narrative
have not and have thus played a much larger role in subsequent thought than
their brief scope might suggest. Second, these stories, while brief, describe
the very beginnings of the world and humanity and are therefore especially
foundational for later reality. They provide a unique window into the
Yahwist's own conceptions about the very essence of things. Third, because
they come at the beginning of the Yahwist's work, these stories introduce the
reader to certain basic facts and points of view present throughout the work
that deserve, at the outset, some fuller introductory comments.
The second section of this study, in chapter 3, deals with the Ancestral
Age, the period from the great flood to the settlement of Israel's ancestors in
Egypt. This part of the Yahwist's work, describing Israel's ancestors as resi-
dents of the Canaanite hill country that was to become the heartland of bib-
lical Israel, is both the longest and the most significant part of the epic. It
centers J's narrative geographically and ideologically. The third section of this
study, in chapter 4, treats the Mosaic Age, the period during which Israel's
ancestors are to be found in the south, first in Egypt and then in the Sinai
desert. This is an age of exile.
In the analysis of each of these parts of the Yahwist's work, two issues,
directly related to the two kinds of presuppositions that have controlled bib-
lical interpretation, will be of primary concern. First, the environment pre-
supposed by the narrative will be investigated. If the dichotomy between
nomadic pastoralism in the desert and sedentary agriculture in arable zones
is a misleading model for understanding ancient environments and ways
of life, what alternative setting might better describe that assumed by the
Yahwist's narratives? Based on a more realistic assessment of ancient envi-
ronments and on the details of the stories themselves, how might one recon-
struct the Yahwist's actual landscape?
Each chapter will also investigate the Yahwist's attitudes toward that land-
scape. In this regard, J's view of the relationship between human culture and
the world of nature will come under special scrutiny. If the dichotomy
between nature and history is more at home in the Idealist tradition and
its particular Hegelian expression in the last two centuries than in ancient
thought, what alternative mode of thought might better describe the Yahwist's
point of view? Without starting from the modern dualisms that separate
matter from spirit and nature from history, how might one describe the
Yahwist's ideology?
The relationship between the two, the Yahwist's landscape and the
Yahwist's ideology, is absolutely crucial for understanding the Yahwist's work.
It is impossible to understand properly the Yahwist's attitudes toward na-
ture without a clear conception of the precise kind of environment that con-
tributed to their formation and in terms of which these attitudes were devel-
oped and expressed. At the same time one must be careful not to collapse
the two as if the Yahwist's ideology is to be explained alone from its environ-
ment. The fallacy of such an environmental determinism can be illustrated
very simply by a comparison, as is occasionally made in chapter 2, between
the thought of J and P, both inhabitants of the same environment. Such com-
parisons reveal the great influence exercised by social factors and particular
agendas in the attitudes toward nature that are expressed in their respective
works.
In the final chapter of the book, chapter 5, the results of this reexamina-
tion of the Yahwist's work will be summarized. In addition, the implication
of these results will be explored, on the one hand for the historical recon-
struction of biblical religion and on the other for contemporary theology.
2
The Primeval Age
The Yahwist's epic begins with three of the most familiar stories in Western
literature: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Cain's murder of his brother
Abel; and Noah's ark, in which Noah's family and all species of animals sur-
vived the great flood. These stories are actually the primary episodes in a more
detailed account of the first era of world history, a primeval age cut off from
subsequent history by a catastrophic flood. This primeval age is above all an
age of origins, in which the basic features of the world of nature and of human
society come into existence.
Of all biblical texts, the primeval narrative has been the primary source
for reflection on the biblical understanding of nature. This is as true in tradi-
tional historical scholarship as in recent treatments of biblical perspectives
on nature in light of the environmental crises. The main reason for this spe-
cial attention to the primeval age is its focus on the origins of the natural
world. Stories of origins such as these are not just descriptions of events in
the distant past but etiologies, that is, explanations of why things are as they
are in the present. They are first and foremost founding stories. In the act of
coming into being, the character of the world, its inhabitants, and their rela-
tion to one another is revealed and established for all time. The realities
of the author's world are in such accounts of origins both explained and
validated as part of a design built into the world from its very beginnings.
Origin stories thereby possess, to use the words of Paul Ricoeur, a "founda-
tional function." 1 In them, the author's basic beliefs about the world become
transparent. Because of its foundational character, the primeval narrative
will be given more detailed attention in this study of the Yahwist's view of
30
The Primeval Age 31
nature than its modest length in the Yahwist's epic overall might otherwise
suggest.
A second, less substantive, but nevertheless important reason that the
primeval narrative has played such an important role in discussions about
nature in biblical thought has been its prominent place at the beginning of
the Bible. This narrative is by no means the only Israelite account of creation.
Other texts, in particular many of the psalms, offer additional versions, some
similar to those in Genesis, some quite different. 2 Yet because of the simple
fact that it occurs first in the biblical story, the creation of the world described
in the primeval narrative in Genesis has always had the greatest impact on
both scholarly and popular discussions about nature in the Bible.
In these discussions of creation and nature in Genesis, most time and
energy has been devoted not to the Yahwist's narrative but to the first ac-
count of creation in Genesis 1:1—2:4a, attributed to a later Priestly Writer (P)
who prefixed it to the older Yahwistic epic. This simple editorial act, by which
the Priestly Writer placed his creation account first, has had far-reaching con-
sequences. Readers interested in the biblical view of creation have either
stopped at the end of P's account, or they have read the following material
through the lens of P's version. In either case, P's view of nature and the human
place in it has become the standard for understanding biblical thought. No
text has been quoted more frequently or discussed more avidly in recent
debates on biblical religion and ecology than the Priestly account of the cre-
ation of the human race:
God created humanity in his image; in the image of
God he created it; male and female he created them.
And God blessed them and God said to them, "Be
fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it;
rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky
and all of the animals created on the earth." (Gen
l:27-28)3
This nearly exclusive interest in the Priestly viewpoint has persisted in

spite of the fact that the Priestly Writer's account is immediately followed by
the Eden narrative, the opening episode of the Yahwist's epic, which repre-
sents an independent account of creation and reflects a view of the human
role in nature remarkably different from that of the Priestly Writer. The
Yahwist's narrative actually provides the bulk of the information about
the primeval age as it is presented in the Bible. To J's cohesive account of the
first age of human history, from Adam to Noah, the later Priestly Writer has
added nothing new, only alternative accounts of creation (Gen l:l-2:4a),
Adam's genealogy (Gen 5:1-32), and the flood (sections of Gen 6:9-9:17).
Yet the Priestly Writer's perspective on nature has dominated ancient and
modern treatments of biblical thought. One of the aims of the following analy-
sis is to rescue from relative obscurity the foundational and distinctive per-
spectives on nature reflected in the Yahwist's epic.4
The Environment of the Primeval Age:

Israelite Highland Agriculture
Ours is not a maritime country; neither commerce nor the

intercourse which it promotes with the outside world has
any attraction for us. Our cities are built inland, remote from the
sea; and we devote ourselves to the cultivation of the productive
country with which we are blessed.
Josephus, Apion
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits
of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer,
Studies in Pessimism:
Psychological Observations
The Yahwist's account of the primeval age begins in the Garden in Eden (Gen
2:4b-3:24), the first environment the Yahwist brings to life. A lush, irrigated
orchard, Eden is the setting in which plants, animals, and humans come into
being. Yet this garden is a temporary location, neither the real home of the
primeval heroes nor the actual world in which the Yahwist's epic is to unfold.
That world lies outside the garden. And this world outside the garden pro-
vides the perspective from which the story of the Garden of Eden is told. It
is to the details within the Eden story that reveal the outside perspective from
which it is narrated that we turn before taking up the ecology of the garden
itself.
Adam and Eve

The setting outside of the garden from which the garden is described is re-
flected both in the introduction (Gen 2:4b—7) and in the conclusion (3:23—
24) to the story, which together provide a literary framework for the Eden
narrative as a whole. This post-Eden world is also reflected in the series
of divine decrees about life outside the garden, toward which the narrative
momentum of the story builds (3:14-19). Of these, the final decree in which
the land is cursed (3:17-19) provides the most information about the nar-
rator's perspective outside the garden. In these key texts, from the frame-
work and the climax of the Eden narrative, the first details of the Yahwist's
principal primeval landscape emerge.
4bWhen Yahweh, God, made earth ('eres) and sky—
5Before any pasturage (slah hassadeh) was on the earth ('eres),
And before any field crops ('eseb hassadeh) had sprung up,
The Primeval Age 33
Since Yahweh, God, had not sent rain upon the earth ('eres)
And there was no man (adam) to cultivate (abod) the arable land (adama),
6
Though a spring rose from the earth Ceres)
And watered the surface of the arable land ('adama)—
7
Yahweh, God, formed the man ('adam)
Out of soil ('apar) from the arable land ('adama),
And blew into his nostrils the breath of life,
And the man (adam) became a living being.
8
Yahweh, God, planted a garden . . . (Gen 2:4b-7).5
17
To the man (adam) he said, "Since you listened to your wife
and ate from the tree of which I commanded,
"Do not eat from it,"
cursed is the arable land (adama) on account of you;
(Only) through painful labor will you eat from it
All the days of your life.
18
Thorns and thistles will spring up for you,
and you will eat field crops ('eseb hassadeh).
19
By the sweat of your nostrils
you will eat bread
Until you return to the arable land ('adama)
Since you were taken from it.
For you are soil ('apar)
And to soil ('apar) you will return. (Gen 3:17-19)
Yahweh sent him out of the Garden of Eden to cultivate (abod) the arable land
('adama) from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man ('adam), and he
stationed, to the east at the Garden of Eden, 6 the cherubim and the flaming sword
brandished to guard the way to the tree of life. (Gen 3:23-24)
The expulsion from the garden (3:23-24) and the divine decrees that
precede it (3:14-19) obviously picture life outside of Eden and have been
interpreted in this way, but the story's opening sentence (2:4b—7) has not
usually been placed into this same context. More often, it has been read as
an attempt to describe the character of the void—the nothingness, barren-
ness, or chaos—which preceded creation.7 It has sometimes even been under-
stood as a brief remnant of a more elaborate account of creation, which once
introduced the Yahwist's epic but was later suppressed by the Priestly Writer
who substituted his own account (l:l-2:4a). 8
Neither of these traditional interpretations explains properly the con-
tent and function of the Yahwist's first sentence. The repetition of the pre-
position "before" (terem) in the opening subordinate clauses (2:5) certainly
places the listener at a time before the known world existed. Yet this is
accomplished not by describing the contours of primordial chaos but by
listing the most common and basic features of the audience's world—
pasturage, field crops, rain, cultivation—which had not yet come into being.
Precreation is thus defined by negating a list of ordinary realities. The de-
tails of this list provide no real information about the time before creation.
Rather, they outline the most basic features of the world of the storyteller.
Such a procedure is not unique to the Yahwist but is in fact a traditional

ancient Near Eastern technique for introducing origin narratives. The great
Mesopotamian creation epic, Enuma Elish, begins in just this fashion, list-
ing, in a series of introductory subordinate clauses like those of the Yahwist,
common aspects of the Mesopotamian culture and environment that had not
yet come into being.
When on high the heaven had not been named,

Firm ground below had not been called by name . . .
No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,
When no gods whatever had been brought into being,
Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined—
Then it was that the gods were formed. 9
The Yahwist is thus following a traditional pattern for the introduction of

a narrative of origins, and there is no reason to suppose a more detailed
account of divine creation or conflict ever preceded this conventional open-
ing of the Yahwist's epic.10
The Eden narrative's introductory sentence thus pictures neither the
garden's ecology nor the void preceding it. Its details instead provide data
about the familiar world of the storyteller and the audience outside of Eden.
Taken together with the divine decrees mandating the conditions for life after
Eden and with the conclusion to the story describing the expulsion from the
garden, these details provide the first concrete facts about the Yahwist's own
landscape as it comes into existence in the primeval age.
The central feature of the Yahwist's landscape in each of these three sec-
tions of the Eden narrative is 'adama, arable land. In the story's opening sen-
tence, J draws the reader's attention in from the whole earth (eres') to focus
it especially on 'adama. 'adama is the realm of human labor and its object
(2:5), the site of irrigating water (2:6), and the material from which human
and animal life are made (2:7; cf. v 19). In the divine decrees to govern life
outside Eden, 'adama is identified as the land which humans will farm to
survive (3:17-19). Finally, when the first couple is expelled from the gar-
den, it is to the 'adama they are sent (3:23).
Traditionally translated by a general term, such as "ground" (KJV, NRSV,
NEB), 'adama is employed by the Yahwist with a more precise sense. It is J's
technical term for arable land, fertile soil that can be cultivated. Whenever
the human work of cultivation is mentioned in these three parts of the gar-
den narrative, the object of cultivation is 'adama (2:5; 3:17—19, 23). Further-
more, 'adama is identified as the site of irrigating waters (2:6). By contrast,
the word 'eres is used with a more general sense. In the story's opening phrase,
where it is paired with sky (samayim, 2:4b), 'eres refers to the entire earth. In
succeeding phrases it is a general designation for all regions where rainfall
and vegetation are present (2:5).
This pattern of usage is typical of the Yahwist's style throughout the epic,
where 'adama is consistently used as a special term for cultivable land. Some
of the clearest examples are in the stories of Cain and Abel (Gen 4:2, 3, 10,
The Primeval Age 35
11, 12, 14), Noah (5:29, 8:21, 9:20), Sodom and Gomorrah (19:25), Joseph's
purchase of Egyptian farmland (47:18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26), and in the Yahwist's
decalogue (Exod 34:26).11 On the other hand, 'eres is employed by J for other
purposes. It is used to designate: (1) the earth as a whole (e.g., Gen 7:3, 11:1,
24:3; Exod 9:14, 34:10; Num 14:21); (2) a territory or country, as in "the
land of Egypt," "the land of Canaan" (e.g., Gen 10:10, 42:5; Exod 4:20; Num
21:31), or the land promised to Israel's ancestors (Gen 12:1; Exod 34:24;
Num 14:23); and (3) the ground in a general sense, in such expressions as
"he bowed down to the ground" (e.g., Gen 18:2; Exod 4:3; Num 11:31).12 In
the story of Cain and Abel, 'eres is even used in conscious contrast to 'adama
in order to identify the nonarable regions to which Cain is banished (Gen
4:12, 14).
This 'adama or cultivable soil, is presented by the Yahwist as the setting
for human society. The relationship between them, between human life and
arable land, is described in two ways. In the first place, the first human, 'adam,
is described as the cultivator of 'adama. This fact is explicitly stated in each
of these three sections of the Eden narrative: when typical human life is
described in the epic's opening clauses as not yet existent (2:5), when the
style of life for humans outside of Eden is prescribed by divine decree (3:17-
19), and when humans are assigned their role after being expelled from Eden
(3:23). The archetypal human outside Eden, from whose perspective the Eden
narrative is told, is the farmer, the cultivator of arable land.
But the connection between the first human being and the arable land,
between 'adam and 'adama, runs even deeper for the Yahwist. Not only does
'adam cultivate 'adama, he is fashioned by God out of the land he farms. This
point is also made by J in each of these sections of the Eden narrative: when
the first human is made out of 'adama as God's first creative act (2:7), when
the human destiny to return to the 'adama from which it was taken is spelled
out in the divine decrees (3:19), and once again when the first humans are
expelled from Eden (3:23). 'adama is the beginning and the end of human
life. As the first human was derived from arable soil, so all humans are des-
tined to return to it at death.
'adam is thus linked to 'adama in two important respects: 'adama is the
stuff out of which 'adam is made and is also the primary object of his labor.
And these two facts were certainly conceived by the Yahwist as closely inter-
related. The primary activity of human life was believed to be related to the
essential substance of the human creature. In each of the three sections of
the garden narrative under consideration, this interrelationship is stressed,
but nowhere is it more clearly and succinctly stated than in the conclusion
of the story at the expulsion from Eden: "Yahweh, God, sent him out of the
Garden of Eden to cultivate the arable land from which he was taken" (3:23).
For the Yahwist, the human being from primordial time has been destined
to farm the land from which he himself was formed.
This close relationship between 'adam and 'adama, developed in these
parts of the Eden narrative, is of course highlighted by the similarity of the
terms themselves. For J and his society, as for most traditional societies, names
reflect the essential nature of those who bear them, a phenomenon J will
repeatedly exploit in the epic. 13 Here the possession of names from the same
root, 'dm, signifies the essential identity of 'adam and 'adama. While the lin-
guistic relationship between these terms is regularly noted, the thorough way
in which they together establish the agricultural character of human exist-
ence has not been widely recognized.14
The center of the Yahwist's landscape, when it first comes into view
in these three parts of the Eden narrative, is arable land. And human society,
according to the Yahwist, derives from this land and is engaged in its cul-
tivation. The perspective from which J presents the origin of the world is
thus fundamentally agricultural. In fact, J is even more precise than this.
The particular kind of agricultural environment depicted by the Yahwist's
narrative is represented in additional details in these same parts of the Eden
story.
One key detail is the reference, in the epic's opening sentence, to rain-
fall as essential for the growth of vegetation:
Before any pasturage was on the earth.

And before any field crops had sprung up,
Since Yahweh, God, had not sent rain upon the earth. (2:5)
Such a detail might seem of little use for determining a specific type of agri-
culture, since all agriculture is ultimately dependent on rainfall. Yet when
the beginning of the Yahwist's epic is compared to the beginnings of origin
narratives from other cultures, this mention of rain stands out as a distinc-
tive characteristic of J's narrative.
In the great river valley civilizations of the ancient Near East, Egypt and
Mesopotamia, where agriculture was dependent on the inundation of low-
lands by flooding rivers and on irrigation systems related to them, narratives
focus on these phenomena rather than on the rainfall that is the ultimate
source of the rising rivers. A creation text from Ur, in just such a series of
introductory clauses describing not yet existent realities as those that begin
the Yahwist's epic, focuses on the key phenomena of irrigation agriculture:
In those days no canals were opened,

No dredging was done at dikes and ditches on dike tops.
The seeder plough and ploughing had not yet been instituted
for the knocked under and downed people
No (one of) all the countries was planting in furrows. 15
By contrast, J's reference to rain alone reflects the rain-based, dryland

farming characteristic of the highlands on the shores of the Mediterranean
where biblical Israel came into being. In such a setting, where irrigation was
impractical, fields on mountain slopes and small intermontane valleys are
completely dependent on direct rainfall to produce crops. "Rainfall," writes
geographer Yehuda Karmon about these highlands, "is the decisive climatic
factor in the physical existence of population and for plant life and agricul-
ture." 16 This contrast between the dry farming of the Israelite hill country
The Primeval Age 37
and the irrigation agriculture of its neighbors is described very specifically

in Deuteronomistic tradition:
The land which you are about to enter and take possession of is not like the land
of Egypt which you left where you sow your seed and irrigate with your feet like
a green garden. No, the land which you are crossing into to take possession of is
a land of mountains and valleys, watered by rain from the sky. (Deut 11:10-11)
A second key detail of the Yahwist's specific agricultural ecology is the
reference to particular kinds of vegetation in the Eden narrative's opening
sentence.
Before any pasturage (siah hassadeh) was on the earth,
And before any field crops ('eseb hassadeh) had sprung up. (2:5)
Both kinds of vegetation are customarily translated with such generic terms
that little can be made of them, when in fact they describe a very precise agri-
cultural environment.
The second plant type mentioned by the Yahwist, 'eseb hassadeh, is the
most important, as it is referred to again in the divine decrees as the primary
food cultivated by human beings (3:18):
Thorns and thistles will spring up for you,
and you shall eat the field crops ('eseb hassadeh),
by the sweat of your brow [literally "nose"] you shall eat bread (lehem).
Set apart for human consumption and placed in a parallel relationship to bread
(lehem) in these lines, 'eseb is undoubtedly the grain from which bread is
made. Thus 'eseb hassadeh can be translated literally as "grain of the field" or
more idiomatically as "field crops," as 1 have done here. This understanding
is consistent with the Yahwist's use of'eseb hassadeh elsewhere. In the plagues
of hail and locusts in the Egyptian delta, for example, it is differentiated from
tree crops and directly identified as wheat and barley (Exod 9:22, 25, 31, 32;
10:12, 15).17 Grain is in fact the field crop that, for biblical Israel, was the
basis of its highland Mediterranean agriculture, as archaeological evidence
and biblical references both attest.18 "The importance of field crops in ancient
Israel," notes the botanist Michael Zohary, "can be measured by the daily con-
sumption of bread, which was the major constituent of the meal of the poor,
the rich, and the king alike." 19
The other plant type mentioned in the story's opening sentence, siah
hassadeh, traditionally rendered with the general "plant of the field" (KJV,
NRSV, cf. NEB), is somewhat harder to identify since the Yahwist does not
again use this expression. When siah is employed elsewhere in the Bible,
however, it is used for vegetation that grows in semiarid and arid regions,
the low bushes and dwarf-shrubs characteristic of areas that lack enough rain
to support intensive agriculture (Gen 21:15 [the Elohist]; Job 30:4, 7). Since
such areas typically provide pasturage for the grazing of sheep and goats in
the hill country, J evidently describes here the vegetation that supports the
other major part of traditional hill country farming, stock breeding. Thus siah
hassadeh can be translated literally as "shrubs of the Held" or more idiomati-
cally as "pasturage," as I have done above. Raising sheep and goats provided
a valuable complement for grain-based agriculture by making use of grazing
land unsuitable for agriculture, providing manure for the fields, contribut-
ing products for the diet (milk, cheese, meat) and other uses (wool, bone),
and thus in general hedging the risks of subsistence farming through diver-
sification.20
The Yahwist has, therefore, in a few concise phrases within these parts
of the garden story that refer to life outside of Eden, sketched the particulars
of the distinctive environment that was to become normative for the human
race. It is the environment of the farmer involved in rain-fed agriculture,
cultivating grain on arable soil, and raising flocks on nearby pasturage. These
are the basic facts of existence characteristic of the mixed economy typical
of Mediterranean agricultural societies such as biblical Israel. Images of cul-
tivation and herding dominate not just the Yahwist's work but biblical liter-
ature as a whole. And material remains from Iron Age Israel, down to the
architecture of the typical Israelite farm house, substantiate this picture of
Israelite life. 21
To a great extent, this mixed agricultural economy is dictated by its
environment: the topography, the soils, and the climate of the hill country.
In today's West Bank, the heartland of biblical Israel, 36 percent of the land
is cultivable, 32 percent suitable for grazing herds, 27 percent too arid or rocky
for either cultivation or grazing, and 5 percent natural forest. 22 While natu-
ral forest would have made up a larger percentage of the Israelite hill coun-
try in the Iron Age, the relative balance of cultivable, grazing, and arid zones
would not have varied substantially. Israel's mixed agricultural economy was
thus a successful adaptation to its environment and a subsistence strategy.
Through diversified farming, ancient Israelites provided for a wide range of
subsistence needs and shielded themselves from excessive vulnerability to
any single environmental threat.
Cain and Abel

This agricultural setting, introduced in the framework of the Garden of Eden
story, provides the context from which the Yahwist describes the world in
the primeval age before the flood. Of the seven generations who lived in this
age, the second—comprising Cain and Abel, sons of Adam and Eve—is given
the greatest attention. Their story is set in, and derives much of its color and
drama from, the agricultural environment that has just been described.
Most interpreters of the Cain and Abel story have understood its setting
differently. Cain and Abel have usually been identified as archetypes of two
distinct cultures, those of the agriculturalist and the pastoralist, one pursuing
a sedentary existence on arable land, the other practicing a nomadic life-style
following flocks in arid zones. Several variations of this approach have been
proposed. According to one, Cain (qayin), who was expelled from the arable
land, is to be identified as the ancestor of the nomadic, desert-dwelling people
living south of the Israelite hill country and referred to elsewhere in the Bible
The Primeval Age 39
by the name Kenites (qeni < qayin); while Abel is to be regarded as the ances-
tor of the peaceful, sedentary Israelites.23 According to another view, the
archetypes are reversed: Abel represents the peaceful Israelite nomads who
settled in Canaan, with whom the storyteller sympathizes, while Cain repre-
sents the violent Canaanite farmers among whom they settled.24 Still a third
approach avoids such ethnic identifications. It relates Cain and Abel rather
to a general division of labor established at the dawn of civilization between
two basic and distinct ancient Near Eastern occupations, farming and herd-
ing.25 All three approaches assume a fundamental, sometimes antagonistic,
distinction between farmers and shepherds.
The variety of ways in which the farmer-shepherd dichotomy has been
applied to this story may itself suggest something of the arbitrariness of this
approach. Even more of a problem is the fact that this understanding of Cain
and Abel is based on a conception of ancient environments and cultures no
longer tenable, the conception that the ancient Near East could be rather sim-
ply and categorically divided between the domains of the farmer and the shep-
herd.26 The weaknesses in this approach become clearest in the details of the
story itself, which reflect the same mixed agricultural economy that the
Yahwist has already described as the norm for human society after Eden.
In this story, as in those sections of the Eden narrative already exam-
ined, the focal point of the landscape is 'adama, arable land. It is on this land
that Cain and Abel live and that their story unfolds, 'adama is the land that
Cain cultivates (Gen 4:2) and that produces the crops he offers to God (v3).
It is the scene of Cain's crime, literally swallowing the blood of the stricken
Abel (vv 10,11). It is the agent of Cain's curse, refusing any more to yield its
productive power to his cultivation of it (vv 11, 12). It is, all things consid-
ered, the secure home from which he is banished (v 14). This banishment
shows just how central 'adama is to the narrative. The terrain outside of it is
viewed as unimaginably harsh, an environment unlivable for a human being.
Cain himself claims that leaving the arable land is a punishment too great
for a human to bear (v 13). Twice at this point in the narrative, once by Cain
and once by the storyteller, 'adama is identified directly as the realm of divine
activity, and leaving it means leaving the presence of God (vv 14, 16). This
portrait of arable land reflects the perspective of one who inhabits it and who
considers the surrounding desert dreadful, dangerous, and outside the pale
of divine protection and care.
Cain and Abel, who live on this land, are typical sons of a highland
farming family engaged in both cultivation and herding. The older, Cain, is
involved, as is his father Adam, in the cultivation of the arable land, present-
ing as an offering to Yahweh the fruits of his harvest (3:23, 4:2-3). The
younger, Abel, takes care of the sheep and goats, offering to God the first-
born of the flock (4:2, 4). This sharing of labor is characteristic of family life
in a Mediterranean highland farming village in which subsistence is depen-
dent both on the cultivation of fertile land and the raising of herds on less
fertile pastures near the cultivated fields. Here, as is common in such fami-
lies, the older son is primarily involved in cultivation, an activity related to
his prestige as the primary heir to his father's estate. Meanwhile, the younger
son is delegated to caring for the flocks, a less esteemed role in such farming
families.27
Cain, the older brother, is the central character of the story and of pri-
mary interest to J. Abel is a secondary figure who never speaks, is regularly
referred to as Cain's brother (vv 2, 8, 9, 10), and dies before he can produce
descendants. Cain is the Yahwist's second Adam, the tarnished hero of the
second generation. His name, qayin, according to his mother, means "creation/
procreation" (from qana), designating him the first creation of the human
race (4:1).28 Like his father before him, he is a cultivator of arable land ('obed
'adama; 3:23, 4:2). And like his father, he is an errant farmer, transgressing a
divine command (2:16-17, 4:7). The result of disobedience is the same for
both: the relationship between farmer and soil is imperiled. For 'adam the
ground is cursed and yields its produce only to great labor (3:17-19); for
qayin the ground refuses to produce at all (4:12).29
The conflict between Cain and his brother Abel is indeed archetypal, but
not archetypal of conflict between shepherds and farmers. It is archetypal
rather of conflict between brothers, between members of the same kinship
group sharing a single social and environmental setting, that of the Israelite
hill country. As such it illustrates the dire consequences of the failure to
negotiate such conflict successfully. In the postflood era, kinship conflict
drives the Yahwist's major ancestral narratives. The conflicts between
Abraham and Lot, Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his brothers all threaten
family stability. Yet in the new age these conflicts are all in the end negoti-
ated without bloodshed. In this light, the story of Cain's murder of his brother
represents the primeval negative paradigm for conflict resolution in a kin-
ship-based society such as biblical Israel. The punishment for the guilty is
exile, the loss of status in the family and a place on the ancestral farmland. 30
Of the factors that have directed interpreters toward the shepherd ver-
sus farmer reading of this story, two have been particularly influential. One
is God's preference for Abel's animal offering over Cain's harvest offering, a
fact interpreted to indicate God's approval of a pastoral life-style over an
agricultural one. 31 Since J does not give the reason for God's behavior, all
explanations must remain conjectures. At the same time, it is very unlikely
that this behavior is meant to reflect God's preference for animal offerings
and pastoral existence, since the Yahwist's decalogue prescribes offering the
first harvest of arable soil together with the first lambs of the flock (Exod
34:19, 22, 26). A more likely explanation for God's behavior lies in the over-
all design of the narrative itself. Just as God sets up a challenge for Adam by
planting and then prohibiting the tree of knowledge, so God sets up a chal-
lenge for Cain by introducing conflict and then prohibiting its violent reso-
lution. It is the human response in which the Yahwist is interested rather than
the reasons for the situation itself.
The second factor that has led to the shepherd versus farmer interpreta-
tion is Cain's banishment, which, together with the link between his name
and the Kenites (qayin/qeni), has suggested the story be read as an origin nar-
The Primeval Age 41
rative of a group of nomadic pastoralists in the southern desert.32 But key

details in the narrative argue against this reading. In the first place, the
Yahwist's etymology for Cain's name designates him as the first human pro-
creation rather than the ancestor of a particular ethnic group. Furthermore,
J does not make the connection between the ancestor and his descendants
explicit by a direct reference to the later nation, which is his usual practice in
etiological narratives (e.g., Gen 16:10-12; 19:37-38; 25:23, 30; 27:28-29).
Finally, J's mapping out of the political relationships of his day, within Israel
and between Israel and its neighbors, by means of ethnological etiologies,
commences only with Noah's sons after the flood. From these three sons de-
scend the peoples of the major areas of the Middle East with which the Yahwist
is familiar: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine (Gen 10:8-19, 21, 24-30).
Cain, then, must be viewed like his father Adam as a primeval ancestor
of the human race involved in the agricultural life-style of the Israelite high-
lands. According to the Yahwist's genealogical traditions that follow this story
(4:17-26, 5:9), Cain is the ancestor of the next great figure in the epic, Noah,
the first farmer after the flood (9:20). As a farmer, Cain takes his place among
the Yahwist's other primeval heroes, Adam and Noah, who are also proto-
typical farmers. Thus J traces the human race through its farmers, two dis-
obedient ones in the primeval era, Adam and Cain, followed finally by an
obedient one, Noah, through whom Yahweh saves the human race and rees-
tablishes agriculture in the new era after the flood (5:29, 8:20-22, 9:20). The
later Priestly editor either had different genealogical traditions or was troubled
by the Yahwist's connection between Cain and Noah. He cuts Cain loose and
transfers Noah's ancestry to Seth, the son of Adam and Eve according to an
alternate genealogy (4:25-26, 5:1-32).33
Cain's Descendants
Cain's descendants make up the remainder of the seven generations who lived
before the flood. Their names as J lists them are Enoch, Irad, Mahujael,
Methushael, and Lamech (4:17-18). Lamech in turn had four sons, one of
whom, Noah, survived the flood and became the primordial ancestor of the
postdiluvian era. Of these preflood generations the Yahwist offers little infor-
mation. Only for Lamech's family (4:19-24) are any details provided.
Two different environments have been associated with these generations.
According to one view they should be understood as the descendants of Cain,
the banished nomad (4:12-16). Thus Lamech's song (4:23-24) and the spe-
cialized skills initiated by his sons—Jabal's pastoralism (4:20),Jubal's music
(4:21), and Tubal-Cain's metal work (4:22)—are considered representative
of the customs, arts, and crafts typical of the life of desert nomads such as
the Kenites.34 According to a second view, these preflood generations should
be understood as the descendants of Cain, the city builder (4:17).35 Thus the
skills of Lamech's sons are taken to represent specializations within urban
culture. Cattle breeders, musicians, and metalworkers are identified as three
common guilds of city dwellers. 36
As has been argued above, the Yahwist's Cain is above all a hill country
farmer. His major role in the epic is neither as a desert nomad nor as an
urbanite but rather as a representative of the agricultural way of life prac-
ticed by his father Adam. His descendants, the preflood generations includ-
ing Lamech's family, should thus be considered children of Cain the farmer
and residents of this same agricultural milieu. Before illustrating how this is
the environment of Lamech's family, however, a word is in order about the
only other detail J provides for Cain's descendents: the Yahwist's mention of
a city and his attribution of it to Cain (4:17).
Though the Yahwist simply mentions the city without any descriptive
or evaluative commentary, scholars have been quite ready to explain J's atti-
tude toward it. According to one perspective, J views the city favorably, as
the first achievement of civilization.37 According to another viewpoint, J
presents the city as an evil place, built as it was by the first murderer, Cain.
Thus, this account of the first city is only the first salvo in a sustained anti-
urban polemic carried forward throughout the Yahwist's epic as a whole.38
The salient fact about the Yahwist's treatment of the city in this text is
his brief and neutral mention of it. By contrast to his elaborate description of
the first two generations, in which agriculture is presented as the primeval
occupation of the human race, this reference to the first city appears remark-
ably cryptic. It is a fact of the Yahwist's world, but by no means of central
interest. When compared with the detailed documentation of humanity's
agricultural life-style in the previous narratives, this brief, nondescript men-
tion of a city leaves the impression that here, too, the Yahwist views the world
from an essentially rural point of view.
When compared with origin narratives from the great urban cultures of
antiquity, the distinctive character of the Yahwist's treatment of the city be-
comes clearer. In Mesopotamian traditions about the preflood era, cities domi-
nate the landscape. The first human work at the dawn of civilization is the
establishment of cities, a series of five in most accounts. 39 These cities then
provide the focus for human life, functioning as economic centers that are
the distribution points for agricultural goods produced by their societies.40
The following lines from a Sumerian primeval tradition illustrate this well:
When the royal scepter was coming down from heaven . . .

[The king] laid the bricks of those cities in pure spots.
They were named by name and allotted half-bushel baskets.
The firstling of those cities, Eridu, she [Nintur] gave to
the leader Nudimmud
the second, Badtibira, she gave to the Prince and Sacred One,
the third, Larak, she gave to Pabilsag,
the fourth, Sippar, she gave to the gallant, Utu,
the fifth, Shuruppak, she gave to Sud.
These cities, which had been named by names,
and been allotted half-bushel baskets,
dredged the canals, which were blocked with purplish (wind-borne) clay,
and they carried water.
Their cleaning of the smaller canals established abundant growth. 41
The Primeval Age 43
The character of Mesopotamian civilization, centered in the city and the

king and dependent on irrigation agriculture, is clearly outlined in this text.
For Mesopotamian scribes, the preflood era was the period in which the urban
civilization that typified their culture had been founded. By comparison, the
Yahwist's presentation of the primeval age is decidedly nonurban. His first
two heroes are farmers, not kings, and they inhabit the rural, agricultural
environs that typified biblical Israel. The contrast between these two land-
scapes and their points of view could hardly be sharper.
Lamech's family, the only other primeval generation about which J pro-
vides any details, fits comfortably into, and reflects particular aspects of, the
same nonurban agricultural milieu represented by its ancestors Adam and
Cain. Both Lamech and his most important son Noah are farmers, as was Cain.
This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Lamech's brief speech at
Noah's birth: "This one will give us relief from our work, from the painful
labor of our hands, from the ground which Yahweh has cursed" (Gen 5:29).42
In these words, which repeat the vocabulary of the original curse on the land
and of Adam's charge to cultivate it (3:17), Lamech identifies himself too as
a struggling farmer. He also connects the destiny of his son Noah with this
same agricultural enterprise.
Before we look at Noah, the farmer who provides the transition from the
old age to the new, Lamech's other sons deserve attention. The first of these,
Jabal, is identified as the ancestor of those who reside in tents and own live-
stock (4:20).43 Owning herds and living in tents are characteristic of a wide
range of environments and economic life-styles. Yet the focus on herds and
tents here seems to indicate that J considers Jabal the ancestor of specialized
pastoralists who are characteristically seminomadic. Such groups have been
a constant feature of the Middle Eastern landscape, exploiting the semiarid
terrain contiguous with the more humid agricultural land, terrain that is
suitable for grazing livestock but not for intensive agriculture. The modern
Bedouin in the Judean Desert and Negev are only the most recent manifesta-
tion of a phenomenon that can be traced back into antiquity. The economy
of such groups is not self-sufficient and independent of sedentary society,
but exists in a symbiotic relationship with it. The specialized character of
herding makes pastoralists dependent, in fact, on nearby farmers for food
and material goods. Pastoral nomads have never represented a major pro-
portion of the Middle Eastern population. They have always been a periph-
eral minority, in the modern era representing no more than 10 percent of
the total populace.44
These features of specialized pastoralists fit well with their position in
the Yahwist's primeval genealogies. Their close relationship to the neighboring
agricultural society, as well as their status as a specialized, peripheral minor-
ity are all captured in their position as descendants of one of Lamech's less
important sons, Jabal. The specialized pastoralist is thus viewed as an off-
shoot, related to but less important than, the dominant agricultural society
reflected in the Yahwist's main characters, Adam, Cain, Lamech, and Noah.
Another of Lamech's sons, Tubal-Cain, is identified as a metalworker
(4:22). Forging metal is an occupation in varied cultures, from the nomadic
to the urban to the rural agricultural society of the Yahwist. Since the descrip-
tion of Tubal-Cain's work in the original Hebrew is somewhat difficult and
awkward, translators have retreated for the most part to the relative safety of
a general and neutral English rendering such as that of the JPSV: "who forged
all implements of copper and iron."45 However, if the Hebrew term hores is
translated in its familiar sense of "plowman," Tubal-Cain's occupation may
be rendered as "the blacksmith for all who plow with bronze and iron (lotes
kol-hores nehoset ubarzel)."46 He would thus represent the ancestor of vil-
lage blacksmiths, those who forged and sharpened the metal plow points used
by Iron Age highland farmers. Whatever the exact translation of Tubal-Cain's
work, there is no doubt that he was a blacksmith, a specialization which is
just as indigenous to the agricultural village in the Israelite hill country as it
is to desert nomadism or to the urban economy. It was a specialization of the
rural economy that provided an essential service for the Iron Age farmer. 47
In the case of Tubal-Cain, as in Jabal's case, J has located the origin of a spe-
cialized skill important to the mixed economy of highland agriculture among
the sons of Lamech, the last farmer of the primeval age.
Lamech's other son, Jubal, provides no further information about
the Yahwist's environment, but, as the ancestor of those who play stringed
instruments, he may be of particular interest to the Yahwist (v 21). While
Jubal's descendants are usually understood as musicians in a general sense,
J could be referring to a particular kind of musician, the epic singer or
bard. Jubal's lyre (kinnor) is regularly mentioned in conjunction with the
kind of song (sir) that relates Israel's epic story (Exod 15:1-18; cf. Judges 5).
Thus the Yahwist may here be tracing back to the primeval age the art of
epic song, the practitioners of which he may count among his own
ancestors.48
Among the sons of the last farmer of the primeval age is thus found the
origin of several specialized occupations that figure prominently in the high-
land agricultural society represented by their father Lamech. The members
of Lamech's family represent the origins of neither nomadic nor urban culture,
but further define aspects of the agricultural milieu depicted in the careers
of the major primeval figures. Among these figures is Lamech's most well-
known son, Noah, who, like his father and ancestors, is a prototypical hill
country farmer. His story, as told by the Yahwist, is strongly shaped by this
basic fact.
Noah
At his birth, Noah's destiny is linked to the practice of agriculture. In his birth
announcement, Noah's name is derived, by way of one of the Yahwist's folk
etymologies, from the verb nhm, "comfort, bring relief."
[Lamech] called his name Noah (noah), "This one will bring us relief
(yenahamenu} from our work and the painful labor ('issabon) of our hands, from
the arable land (adama) which Yahweh has cursed" (ererah). (5:29)
The Primeval Age 45
The relief Noah is expected to deliver is the alleviation of the dreadful toil of
subsistence farming initiated by the divine curse on arable land at the begin-
ning of the primeval age. Indeed, Lamech's announcement of Noah's name
and his purpose in life draws heavily on the original announcement of this
curse.
Cursed ('arura) is the arable land ('adama) on account of you \'adam],
Through painful labor (issabon) will you eat from it. (3:17)
Noah was born to turn back this curse and to moderate the arduous charac-
ter of agricultural labor in the primeval age.
This is the very assignment that Noah accomplishes upon his emergence
from the ark after the flood. In the Yahwist's conclusion to the flood story
(8:20-22), Noah's first act in the postflood age is to construct an altar and to
place upon it whole burnt offerings (olot; v 20). Upon inhaling the pleasing
aroma of this offering, God responds to Noah's act in two ways. And both
responses have a direct bearing on dryland farming in the new age. First, in
an explicit reference to Genesis 3:17, God decides "not to curse arable land
('adama) again"—or "not to continue to curse arable land" (both translations
are possible)—on account of 'adam (here used with its generic meaning, "the
human race"), nor will he again strike down all its life (v 21). Thus, 'adama,
arable land, is relieved of its debilitating curse.
In the second response to Noah's offering, God decrees the regular occur-
rence of the seasonal cycle that determines the rhythm and success of high-
land agriculture:
For all the earth's days
Planting grain (zera') and harvesting grain (qasir),
Cold season (qor) and hot season (hom),
Summer harvest (qayis) and autumn harvest (horep),
Day and night
Shall not cease. (v 22)
In this decree are listed the major occasions of the agricultural year in the
Israelite hill country: the sowing of grain in the fall (zera') and its harvest in
the spring (qasir), the harvest of summer fruit, including primarily grapes
and figs (qayis) and the autumn harvest of olives (horep). Commonly men-
tioned in biblical texts, these events are directly paralleled in an ancient agri-
cultural calendar from the Solomonic city of Gezer. It is the only document,
from the Bible or other sources, that provides a systematic record of the entire
Israelite agricultural year. A much briefer, but still useful, parallel is found
in a list of times for prayer from the Rule of the Community at Qumran. The
similarity in terminology and sequence of the seasons between Genesis 8:22
and these extrabiblical agricultural calendars can be seen in Table 2.1.
The planting of grain (zera'), after the arrival of the first good rains in
the late fall (November and December), is the first event in the agricultural
year mentioned by the Yahwist in this short survey. It is followed by the grain
harvest (qasir), the first harvest in the highlands that occurs in the spring.
Table 2.1 The Agricultural Year in Genesis 8:22, the Gezer Calendar, and the
Community Rule
Months Gen 8:22a Gezer Calendarb Community Rulec
November zera', yrhw zr', mw'd zr'
December "planting "two months of planting "the time of planting
grain" grain" grain"
January yrhw lqs, Imw'd ds'
February "two months of growth"d "to the time of
vegetation"
March yrh'sd pst,
"a month of cutting flax"
April qasir, yrh qsr s'rm, mw'd qsyr,
"harvesting "a month of barley "the time of harvesting
grain" harvest" grain"
May yrh qsr wkl,
"a month of grain harvest
and measuring"e
June yrhw zmr,
July "two months of cutting" f
August qayis yrh qs lqys
"summer "a month of summer "to the summer harvest"
harvest"g harvest"
September horep, yrhw 'sp,
October "autumn "two months of
harvest" h ingathering"
"Two other biblical texts describe the agricultural year schematically as a series of three
episodes roughly parallel to Genesis 8:22. Leviticus 26:5 refers to planting grain (zera'), thresh-
ing grain (dayis; i.e., the grain harvest), and the grape harvest (basir). Amos 9:13 refers to the
one plowing Chores) and sowing grain (mosek hazzara'), the one harvesting grain (qoser), and
the one crushing grapes (dorek 'anabim).
b
The Gezer Calendar actually begins with yrhw 'sp, the olive harvest in the autumn, before
proceeding through the list as given. The adjustment made here, to compare it with Genesis
8:22, in no way alters its agricultural sequence, just the point at which one starts its descrip-
tion. On the Gezer Calendar and ancient Israel's agricultural year, see Oded Borowski, Agri-
culture in Iron Age Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987) 31-44. Important studies,
among the many on the Gezer calendar, are those by W. F. Albright, "The Gezer Calendar,"
BASOR 92 (1943) 16-26, whose translation appears in ANET (320); and by S. Talmon, "The
Gezer Calendar and the Seasonal Cycle of Ancient Canaan," JAOS 83 (1963) 177-87.
c
Col. 10, line 7. The text in The Community Rule actually begins with the grain harvest
(mw'd qsyr). The adjustment made here for a comparison with Genesis 8:22, as with the Gezer
Calendar, in no way changes the basic pattern of the seasons listed. The text was published in
Millar Burrows, John C. Trevor, and William H. Brownlee, The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark's
Monastery, Vol. II, Fasc. 2: Plates and Transcriptions of the Manual of Discipline (New Haven:
American Schools of Oriental Research, 1951). On the relationship between this text and the
Gezer Calendar, see Talmon, 183-87.
d
The meaning of this line and the following one have occasioned a great deal of debate.
Since the term lqs occurs in only a single biblical context, Amos 7:1, and even there needs to
be clarified by the author, its identification has been difficult. And some have claimed that
The Primeval Age 47
Both barley (in April) and wheat (in May) make up this harvest, a fact reflected
in the mention of a grain harvest (qsr) in these two successive months in the
Gezer Calendar.
The harvest of fruit follows in the summer and early fall. In this case, as
with the cereal harvest, the more detailed Gezer calendar breaks down the
fruit harvest into its successive stages. The cutting (zmr) of June and July
likely refers to the grape harvest, the summer fruit (qs) of August to the fig
harvest in particular (pomegranates also ripened at this time), and the
ingathering ('sp) of September and October to the olive harvest. The Com-
munity Rule from Qumran uses the general designation qys, "summer fruit,"
for the entire fruit harvest, while the Yahwist refers to it in two phrases: qayis,
the summer harvest of grapes, figs, and pomegranates; and horep, the autumn
harvest of olives.
The reference to planting grain (zera'), harvesting grain (qasir), the sum-
mer harvest (qayis), and the autumn harvest (horep) in Genesis 8:22 thus
prescribes the regularity of the major episodes in Israel's agricultural year.
The additional terms, qor and hom,literally "cold" and "heat," probably refer
to the two climatic seasons of the Mediterranean agricultural year, the cold
rainy season, at the beginning of which grain is planted and at the end of
which it is harvested, and the hot dry season, when the fruit harvests take
place.49 The final pair of terms, day and night, simply completes the list of
the recurrent cycles that structure the farmer's life. Thus has Noah in his first
act of the new age, by the first offering devoted to God on the first altar, ful-
filled the destiny given him at birth. His righteousness and devotion have
moved God to terminate the curse on arable land and to stabilize the agri-
cultural seasons and their harvests.
The termination of the divine curse on arable land ('adama) through
Noah's act of devotion is the first major evidence that the Yahwist consid-
ered the flood to be the end of the primeval age. Until this point, arable land
pst, "flax," was neither grown in ancient Israel nor harvested at this time. For a survey of the
major proposals, see Borowski, Agriculture, 34-35.
The identification of the letters of the final term in this line, wkl, has been difficult. See
Borowski's discussion of the debate, Agriculture, 36.
f
The root zmr is connected with vine tending in the Bible (Lev 25:3, 4; Isa 5:6) and may
refer to harvesting the vineyard, rather than pruning it (see also, Isa 18:5; Num 13:23). For
this interpretation of the Gezer Calendar see Borowski, Agriculture, 36-38 and A. Lemaire,
"Zamir dans la tablette de Gezer et le Cantique des cantique," VT 25 (1975) 15-26.
g
qayis is used in the Bible both for summer fruit (Amos 8:1, 2) and for the season in
which fruit is harvested (Amos 3:5). It appears to have a particular connection with figs, since
it occurs in parallelism with the early fig (bikkura; Mic 7:1) and is coupled with vintage (Mic
7:1; Jer 48:32). In one case qayis occurs in a list between the produce of the vine, wine, and
the olive tree, oil, just the sequence of the Gezer Calendar (Jer 40:10).
h
horep is often paired with qayis in the Bible to refer to the winter season following the
summer season (Ps 74:17: Zech 14:8; Amos 3:15). It is used more specifically in Proverbs
20:4, as here in Genesis 8:22, to refer to the autumn harvest just before planting (cf. Job 29:40
where it is used figuratively for maturity).
lies under the divine curse (3:17, 4:11, 5:29); but once the curse is removed
after the flood (8:21), arable land is never again so described in the epic. The
conception of curse, and with it blessing, is employed by J in the rest of
the epic, starting with Noah's sons (9:25-27), but henceforward to describe
the relationships between political groups. The fact that Noah is the Yahwist's
first righteous hero (7:1), and that he builds the first altar (8:20), only adds
to this impression that he stands at the beginning of a new age.
The first thing Noah does after building the altar and making a sacrifice,
according to the Yahwist, is to plant a vineyard (9:20). He becomes thereby
the first and prototypical farmer of the new age: 'is ha'adama, "the man of
the arable land," as J calls him (v 20). As has already been noted, fruit grow-
ing is a standard part of highland Mediterranean agriculture. Together with
cereal production and herding, fruit crops—foremost among them, grapes,
figs, and olives—represent an essential element of the mixed agricultural
economy practiced by Israelite farmers. Noah's vineyard is thus typical of
the agricultural milieu that has provided the backdrop for the Yahwist's depic-
tion of the first human life in the primeval age.
While Noah's agricultural work places him in the same rural highland
environment of his primeval ancestors, the farmers Adam, Cain, and Lamech,
much attention has been devoted in the interpretation of this text to explain-
ing the particular mention of a vineyard. Some, influenced by Noah's drink-
ing and the questionable deeds that follow, have regarded the vineyard story
as disapproval of the excesses of alcohol or other reprehensible practices of
sedentary Canaanite farmers."50 This cannot be the Yahwist's point of view,
however. For J, Noah is humanity's first righteous ancestor (Gen 7:1) and
nothing in the story actually compromises this fact. The only unrighteous
act in the story is Ham's, for which his line, in particular Canaan, is duly
cursed (9:22-26). At the story's conclusion, Noah delivers the divine bless-
ings and curses that establish the relationships between his sons and their
descendants in the new age. Noah's drinking of wine is characterized by the
Yahwist with the same term used later to describe the celebrative drinking
of Joseph and his brothers (sakar; Gen 43:34), though modern translators
perpetuate a distinction that implicates Noah alone (e.g., NRSV: Gen 9:20,
"become drunk"; 43:34, "be merry"). 51
A more compelling explanation for Noah's vineyard is to identify it as a
stage in the development of human civilization, and to impute to the Yahwist
thereby a concept of the evolution of agriculture. 52 At first glance, the evi-
dence for such a view seems quite appealing. Human life starts in a garden,
which could represent a hunting and gathering stage, proceeds at the expul-
sion from Eden to the domestication and cultivation of grains, and then to
the mixed economy of grain farming and the domestication and herding of
sheep in the generation of Cain and Abel. These developments are followed
by urbanization and emerging specializations such as specialized pastoral-
ism and metalworking. Finally, the vine—and possibly other fruit species—
is domesticated by Noah and grown for its produce. This evolutionary view
The Primeval Age 49
is supported by a common translation of v 20: "Noah, the man of the soil,

was the first to plant a vineyard."53
All in all, this is not a bad chronological survey of the development of
food production in antiquity, which moved from hunting and gathering to
the domestication of grains (c. 7000B.C.E.), then animals (c. 5000), then fruit
trees and vines (c. 3000). But, in the end, this in fact does not appear to be
the Yahwist's view nor the plan by which he has structured the primeval age.
Adam is, according to the Yahwist, not a hunter-gatherer, but a farmer who
is commissioned to cultivate ('abad) even in the garden itself (Gen 2:5, 7,
15). When he leaves Eden, his occupation does not change but only takes on
the genuine character of grain based Mediterranean farming that was to char-
acterize his descendants throughout the primeval age and be reinstituted by
Noah in the new age after the flood. Herding is a part of the picture through-
out, being reflected in the Yahwist's initial reference to pasturage (2:5), in
the leather clothing made for Adam and Eve (3:21), in Abel's work (4:2), in
Jabal's specialized practice of it (4:20), and in Noah's animal sacrifice (8:20).
Noah's vineyard, in like manner, reflects a dimension of highland farm-
ing already referred to earlier in the primeval narrative. Both the fig tree (3:7)
and the olive tree (8:11), the other major fruit crops of Mediterranean agri-
culture, have already been mentioned. They are probably not to be taken as
wild examples of their species but as part of the familiar landscape of the hill
country farmer. As for the translation of Genesis 9:20, no simple solution
exists. The translation, "Noah was the first to plant," demands an infinitive
form of the verb, nata', "plant," just as in English, when in fact v 20 contains
a converted imperfect form, indicating an action consecutive to Noah's "begin-
ning" (wayyahel). As it stands, the text requires a translation something like,
"Noah, a man of the arable land, made a beginning and planted a vineyard."54
That is, when Noah began his agricultural labors after the flood, he planted
a vineyard. Such a statement does not attribute the first vineyard to Noah.
This concept that the known world came into being in its entirety at the
beginning of time—this lack of concern for periodization—has been under-
stood to be a characteristic of the Yahwist more generally, notably in the use
of the divine name. In contrast to the Priestly Writer and the Elohist, who
believe the divine name was revealed only at the time of the Exodus (E, Exod
3:14-15; P, Exod 6:2-3) and so do not use it until then, the Yahwist, as his
scholarly title suggests, uses the divine name Yahweh from the beginning of
time as if it were from the first the designation by which Israel's ancestors
referred to God. The same contrast between the Yahwist's lack of interest in
periodization and the Priestly Writer's great concern for it can be seen in the
treatment of the human diet during the primeval age. The Yahwist considers
stock-raising—presumably lor its meat along with dairy products and wool—
a part of farm life from the beginning, although the Priestly Writer makes it
clear that people before the flood were strictly vegetarian (1:29-30). Only
after the flood were people in P's narrative granted the permission to eat meat
(9:2-4).
Thus for the Yahwist, Noah's work represents a restoration rather than
a revolution of agricultural practice. Just as kingship must again be lowered
from heaven after the flood in Sumerian tradition,55 so the practice of agri-
culture must be reinstituted for the Yahwist. When the Yahwist describes
Noah planting (wayyitta'; 9:20) a vineyard, he may in fact see this as a reen-
actment of Yahweh's planting (wayyitta'', 2:8) the garden, the only other
instance in which J has employed the verb "plant" (nata') in the epic.
A factor that may have something to do with the Yahwist's particular
interest in the vineyard is his southern orientation, his interest throughout
the epic in the southern hill country and its prominent tribe, the tribe of Judah.
While grapes are grown throughout the Mediterranean and throughout the
highlands of ancient Canaan, the hill country south of Jerusalem has been
known in particular, in ancient and modern times alike, for its vineyards.56
When vineyards are mentioned later in the epic, in the tribal blessings the
Yahwist has incorporated (Gen 49:11-12, regarding Judah) and in the story
of the exploration of Canaan (Num 13:23), they are located in the southern
hills. Noah may be instituting the kind of agriculture especially characteris-
tic of the Yahwist's own region of the country.
Perhaps more important, however, are the narrative demands of the story
itself. The differences in agricultural detail among various stories in the
Yahwist's primeval narrative have to do with the unique character and nar-
rative demands of each story rather than any attempt to represent the evolu-
tion of human culture. In this particular case, the produce of the vine is essen-
tial for the plot of the story, which results in the curse on Canaan and blessing
on Shem, its ultimate concern.57 Taken together, the agricultural details from
the Yahwist's primeval narrative reveal the distinctive features of the high-
land agriculture practiced by biblical Israel, an agricultural life-style insti-
tuted with the first generation of human beings, carried on by their descen-
dants, and reestablished by Noah, the first farmer of the new age.
The flood itself, which divides the old and new ages, is described by the
Yahwist from the perspective of this same agricultural setting. A common
ancient Near Eastern tradition, the flood narrative reflects in its various
tellings the environments of its narrators. The Mesopotamian version, for
example, describes the great deluge from the perspective of the urban soci-
ety practicing irrigation agriculture in the great Euphrates River valley. Its
hero, Utnapishtim, lives in a city surrounded by irrigation canals and con-
structs his ship from the reeds of the riverine marshlands.58 By contrast, the
Yahwist's hero is a highland farmer, and the flood is attributed to constant
heavy rains of the kind that sweep across the hill country of biblical Israel
during the winter wet season (Gen 7:4, 12; 8:2). Throughout the flood story,
the Yahwist focuses, as always, on arable land, 'adama, (Gen 6:7; 7:4, 23; 8:8,
13b). And the olive tree, from which Noah's dove tears off a branch, is a
characteristic species of Israelite agriculture.
The Yahwist may even envision Noah's ark coming to rest in the
Canaanite highlands following the flood. Upon opening the door of the ark,
the first thing Noah sees is the dried surface of arable land (pene ha'adama;
The Primeval Age 51
13b). By planting a vineyard, he establishes in the hill country a typical spe-

cies of highland agriculture. In the next major episode of the new age, the
Yahwist pictures the early postflood generations moving eastward (miqqedem)
to build the tower of Babel (Babylon) in Mesopotamia (11:1-2).
In these details, the Yahwist's flood story differs not only from its
Mesopotamian counterparts, but from the other Israelite account of the flood
attributed to the Priestly Writer. For the Priestly Writer the flood is a cosmic
event, not a heavy rain in the hills. The waters above and below the earth
rush out upon the world (7:11)—always designated by the general term
"earth" Ceres) for P—returning it to the chaos that preceded creation (1:1-2).
According to P, the orders established at the origin of the cosmos, according
to his account of creation (1: l-2:4a), disintegrate in this catastrophe. After-
ward, his hero disembarks on the distant mountains of Ararat (8:4; the
Assyrian Urartu) far to the northeast.
The Yahwist's version of the flood story illustrates a style of thought that
infuses his narrative of primeval time. His thinking always begins with his
own particular ecological niche and moves out from this local, concrete, and
familiar terrain. Even in J's enumeration of animal life this style is apparent.
Whenever he lists animals—whether those that were created (2:19), died in
the flood (6:7, 7:23), found refuge in the ark (7:2-3), or were offered to the
deity after the flood (8:20)—the Yahwist begins with the animals that live
nearby in the field and that creep on the ground and concludes with the birds
in the sky. This stance toward the world is just the opposite of the Priestly
Writer's, which views nature from a divine, cosmic perspective. P's lists always
proceed in the other direction, from cosmological space to the inhabited
world, from the animals of the distant sky to those that live with humans on
the land (1:20-27, 6:20, 7:21, 8:17, 9:10).
This style of thought makes it almost certain that the first phrase of the
Yahwist's epic reflects this localized way of looking at the world. When
describing creation, the Yahwist places earth before sky: "In the day Yahweh,
God, made earth and sky" (2:4b). According to the Priestly Writer, who
assumes the position of God above the cosmos, the sky precedes the earth:
"When God began to create the sky and the earth" (Gen 1:1, 2:4a). Thus,
the first words of each great biblical narrative contain the deliberate expres-
sion of two vastly different stances toward nature: the Priestly Writer's cos-
mic point of view, and the Yahwist's particularistic orientation, the orienta-
tion of the farmer eking out a living on the arable land of the Israelite hill
country.
The Garden of Eden

The Mediterranean hill country with its mixed agricultural economy of dry-
land farming and stock raising is portrayed by the Yahwist as the environ-
ment in which humans lived during the primeval age before the flood. Yet
the Yahwist's epic actually begins in a different environment. This environ-
ment is the luxuriant Garden of Eden. Here the world takes shape and the
first life comes into being. The ecology of this garden is distinct from the Medi-
terranean highlands, and this difference must be examined in order to deter-
mine the character of the unique landscape represented in the Yahwist's Eden
narrative.
The ecology of the garden Two features in particular distinguish the gar-
den in Genesis 2-3 from the highland agricultural environment that was
to become the norm for human society. One is its vegetation: the garden is
described as a grove of trees, an orchard. Only three kinds of trees are spe-
cifically identified, and these primarily because of narrative concerns: the
common fig because its large leaves were especially suitable for clothing Adam
and Eve (3:7), and the two trees bearing the fruits of knowledge and of eter-
nal life, from one of which the humans eat, and therefore gain knowledge,
and from the other of which they do not eat, and thus remain mortal (2:9,
3:22). At the same time the narrator makes it clear that the garden contains
many varieties of trees that are both beautiful and fruit-bearing (2:9). Though
fruit production is customarily one aspect of the grain-based, diversified
agriculture of the hill country, it is not the predominant activity it is pictured
to be in this garden.
A second feature distinguishing this garden from agriculture in the hills
is its water supply. The garden is dependent not on rainfall (2:5), but on irri-
gation. Its source of water is a spring, 'ed, which rises out of the earth ('eres;
2:6).59 Also referred to as a river (nahar; 2:10), this spring irrigates (hisqa)
the arable land ('adama) of the garden. The verb sqh (Hiphil: literally "give
to drink;"), employed twice by the Yahwist in this narrative (2:6, 10), is the
customary term in biblical Hebrew for irrigation agriculture. 60 By contrast,
dry farming in the highlands depends entirely on direct rainfall. While the
hill country of biblical Israel was dotted with numerous small springs, these
are either ephemeral or insufficient to provide water for extensive irrigation
over and above the immediate needs of the humans and animals who settled
near them.
The Garden of Eden is thus a unique landscape in the epic. This fact,
together with the insatiable human interest in the notion of paradise, has led
to much speculation and a multitude of proposals for the source of the
Yahwist's picture of Eden. One common approach has been to lift Eden out
of ordinary time and space and to understand it as a mythical place, to claim,
in essence, "that a real locality answering to the description of Eden exists
and has existed nowhere on the face of the earth."61 The garden does in fact
exhibit a number of characteristics of a dwelling place more suitable for gods
than humans. The Yahwist himself refers to Eden as a divine garden, "the
garden of Yahweh" (13:10). Its trees are planted by God, and two bear fruit—
the fruit of knowledge and the fruit of life—which upon consumption give
one divine attributes (2:9, 3:23). Its spring of subterranean water is the cus-
tomary location in ancient Near Eastern mythology for divine dwellings, tra-
ditionally located at the sources of the deeps.62 Adding to this "mythical" aura
is the fact that the geography of Genesis 2:10-14 is difficult to synchronize
with the actual topography of the ancient Near East.
The Primeval Age 53
Yet despite its "mythical" aura, Eden's landscape contains many real-
world features. It contains springs and rivers, orchards, and people to culti-
vate, prune, and harvest them. Its waters provide the sources of the great rivers
of the ancient Near East, including the Tigris and Euphrates. Because of this,
other interpreters have concluded that "the author is obviously trying to locate
a definite place"; and they have attempted to identify the actual geographi-
cal setting that provided the details for the garden scene.63 The starting point
for this line of interpretation has invariably been the description of the four
rivers issuing from Eden in Genesis 2:10-14. Places from India in the East to
Spain in the West have been proposed, but the location that has become most
popular among scholars in the last century is Mesopotamia.64 Two primary
considerations have led to this view. First, two of the four rivers that origi-
nate in the waters of Eden are the great rivers of the Mesopotamian flood
plain, the Tigris (hiddeqel) and the Euphrates (perat; 2:14). Second, the fact
that the Yahwist's primeval narrative contains parallels with Babylonian lit-
erature—the flood story, for example—and that the Yahwist locates the ori-
gin of Israel's ancestors in the Mesopotamian city of Ur (Gen 11:31, 15:7)
have suggested the theory that the bulk of these early traditions, including
the Eden narrative, were imported from Mesopotamia. Irrigation agriculture
like that in the Eden narrative is in fact characteristic of the flood plain of
the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia.
Yet there are difficulties with locating Eden in Mesopotamia. The
Yahwist's reference to the headwaters (ra sim; 2:10) of the Tigris and
Euphrates originating in Eden would require a location in Anatolia where
these rivers have their sources rather than in the Mesopotamian river val-
ley.65 Furthermore, the other two rivers that originate from Eden's subterra-
nean waters, the Pison and Gihon, are placed by the Yahwist south of Israel
in the area of Arabia and Ethiopia (2:11-13), and have been identified by
some as the headwaters of the Nile.66 No single location for the sources of
the Tigris and Euphrates in Anatolia and the sources of the Nile in Ethiopia
and central Africa is possible, of course. To make things even more compli-
cated, the second river, Gihon, is the name of the spring in the Kidron Valley
that was Jerusalem's major source of water, and it is hard to imagine an Isra-
elite not making this association.67 To find a location for Eden on the basis
of the river geography in Genesis 2:10-14—their exact identification and
common source—is hence a confusing and precarious project, as the bewil-
dering array of proposals illustrates.
A more promising approach to understanding the source of the Yahwist's
picture of Eden is to follow a clue provided by the Yahwist himself. In his
only mention of the garden outside the Eden narrative, J compares it to a
setting within his own environs, the Jordan Valley. This comparison is made
in one of the early narratives of the postflood era, the story of Abraham and
Lot (Gen 13, 18, 19). To explain Lot's attraction to the Jordan Valley where
he subsequently moves, the Yahwist provides the following description of it:
Lot raised his eyes and saw that the whole region of the Jordan, all the way to
Zoar, was entirely irrigated like the garden of Yahweh, like the land of Egypt—
this was before Yahweh destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. (Gen 13:10)68
The comparison of the Garden of Eden to the Jordan Valley in this state-
ment can only be understood in light of the Yahwist's conception of the natural
history of the Jordan Valley as it is described in this verse and in the
Abraham-Lot narrative as a whole. The great rift valley at the southern end
of the Jordan River and along the Dead Sea is today an arid, desert landscape,
as it was in the biblical period and for thousands of years before.69 Yet the
Yahwist believed this arid valley ecology had originated in more recent times,
during the lifetime of his own ancestors. According to his description of it in
this verse, the valley Lot saw was an extraordinarily luxuriant scene. As far
south as Zoar, southeast of the Dead Sea, the entire valley floor was irrigated
(sqh, Hiphil), presumably by the Jordan River, by the waters of the Dead Sea,
which were still fresh, and by the rich springs at the base of the mountains
on both sides of the valley. As such the Jordan Valley could be compared by
the Yahwist to the "land of Egypt." The Nile Valley, in which 98 percent of
Egypt's people live, is a lush oasis ecosystem. Dependent entirely upon Nile
water delivered through an extensive network of irrigation canals, an inten-
sive and abundant agricultural landscape covers the valley floor right up to
the desert bluffs on either side.70
According to the Yahwist, this primitive Jordan Valley environment was
drastically altered in the days of his ancestor Abraham by a single, catastrophic
event, a great firestorm that engulfed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah
(13:10, 19:24-28). In the description of this event, the Yahwist is concerned
not only to explain the end of these cities and their inhabitants but also to
account for the new valley environment. According to his story, flaming
asphalt (goprit) fell from the skies and struck the entire valley, wiping out its
arable land ('adama) together with its vegetation (semah; 19:24, 25). As a
result, the once fertile terrain was turned into a desert marked by deposits of
the same asphalt (goprit) that had fallen from the skies and continued to
smoke (19:24, 28), and by outcroppings of salt, forever to be identified with
the figure of Lot's recalcitrant wife (19:26). This is in fact a precise descrip-
tion of the southern valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea as the Yahwist
knew it and as it still exists today. 71 The story of Lot thus serves as an etiol-
ogy not only of the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah (19:25) and the origins of
Moab and Ammon (19:37-38), but of the desert ecology of the southern rift
valley.
Destruction in the well-watered valley was not total, however. Zoar, the
small settlement where Lot was allowed to take refuge (19:18-23, 30), and
which the Yahwist considered to be the southern limit of the original ver-
dant valley (13:10), was spared. Likely to be identified with one of the south-
ernmost oases of the valley just southeast of the Dead Sea, the oasis of Zoar
was viewed by J as a small, isolated remnant of the rich agricultural environ-
ment that had once characterized the entire valley.72 Presumably the other
oases scattered throughout the southern end of the Jordan Valley and along
the Dead Sea—such as Jericho and En Gedi—were understood to be other
solitary remains of the once luxuriant ecology of the valley as a whole. Con-
sidered the only survivors of an earlier environment, these valley oases—
The Primeval Age 55
small, fertile outposts in a desert landscape—provide the basis for the Yahwist's
image of the ecology of the entire Jordan Valley in its pristine, pre-Lot, state.
And since this pristine valley could be compared to the garden of Yahweh
(13:10), these same oases, the remnants of that valley, represent the real set-
ting in the Yahwist's own world of a terrain he considered comparable to
Eden's ecology. By virtue of the Yahwist's own analogy, these valley oases
should be the starting point for an investigation of Eden's environment. 73
Though they have never been considered for this purpose in any detail,
the similarities between an oasis in the Jordan Valley and the Yahwist's de-
scription of Eden are quite striking and obvious. Eden, like the valley oasis,
is entirely dependent on irrigation rather than rainfall for agricultural pro-
duction. Because of their southern location and the "rain shadow" cast by
the mountains on the west, the valley oases lie in a desert zone that receives
less than six inches of rain per year. They exist only by irrigation from rich
perennial springs that discharge water from aquifers below the rain-fed
mountain ranges on either side of the valley. The Garden of Eden, by com-
parison, is planted before the advent of rainfall (2:5). It is sustained entirely
by irrigation (sqh, Hiphil) from a spring ('ed) rising from the ground (2:6).
The term "garden" (gan) itself is the common designation in biblical Hebrew
for irrigation-supported agriculture (e.g., Num 24:6; Deut 11:10).
A second obvious similarity between the Jordan Valley oasis and the
Yahwist's garden lies in their characteristic vegetation. Eden, like the valley
oasis, is distinguished by its fruit trees. A valley oasis, like modern Jericho,
while containing land under grain cultivation, is predominantly known for
its production of fruits and vegetables. Its fruit trees, in particular date palms,
provide a beautiful visual contrast to its arid environs. These trees today pro-
duce fruits from biblical times—e.g., dates, figs, pomegranates—as well as
varieties introduced more recently—oranges, grapefruit, bananas, apricots.
Due to the tropical climate in the Jordan Valley, crops can be grown year
round and marketed in the highlands long after highland harvests have ended.
Like Jericho, Eden is characterized by its trees, which were both visually strik-
ing and full of edible fruit (2:9). The cultivation of these trees is the agricul-
tural task assigned to the first human being (2:15).
With its perennial water source and bountiful orchards, the valley oasis
was a setting in which the major difficulties of hill country agriculture were
substantially diminished. For this reason, the valley oasis would have pro-
vided an appropriate image for the comfortable existence in Eden that pre-
ceded the rigors of dryland farming. For highland agriculture, the essential
threat is lack of water. Crops are completely dependent on direct rainfall,
which is unpredictable in its timing and amount, and is often insufficient to
produce adequate harvests. Drought and famine are constant dangers (12:10;
42:1-2). By contrast, the rich spring at an oasis like Jericho provides a plen-
tiful and stable supply of water year around. Its produce is not at constant
risk from the vicissitudes of rainfall.
The character of oasis agriculture moderates other hardships of dryland
farming. In the highlands, the terrain itself is an obstacle, its steep hillsides
requiring the laborious work of terracing to be cultivable at all. Grain-based

agriculture is extremely labor intensive as well, especially during plowing,
planting, and harvest. Only a single growing season exists because of the long
summer drought. The oasis, by contrast, is on the broad plain of the valley
floor. The care of its orchards, once established (Eden's are planted by
Yahweh, 2:8), require less work than cereal cultivation. 74 Its perennial water
source and temperate climate allow food production year round. This rich
and productive agricultural scene is reflected in the name of the garden,
"Eden," which must be derived from a West Semitic root, 'dn, meaning
fertility. 75
The history of human settlement in the Jordan Valley illustrates the
attractive character of the favorable ecological conditions of the valley oasis.
The mountain range that becomes the heartland of biblical Israel was his-
torically a lightly settled frontier zone. Its formidable obstacles to intensive
agriculture inhibited any extensive settlement until the influx of pioneers in
the early Iron Age (1200-1000 B.C.E.) who eventually made up the tribes of
ancient Israel.76 Earlier cultures were located primarily in the valleys and
along the coastal plain, which flanked the Canaanite highlands, where fer-
tile soil and flat terrain made farming easier. The oasis at Jericho in the Jor-
dan Valley has attracted settlers from earliest times. Its ancient tell contains
the remains of a sedentary community that archaeologists have called the
oldest city on earth (c. 9000 B.C.E.). 77
The Yahwist's comparison of this valley oasis ecology to the Garden of
Eden (13:10), the obvious similarities between the two, and the appropri-
ateness of the oasis as an image of a more comfortable existence than high-
land farming suggest that the Jordan Valley oasis may well have provided
the concrete model and specific details from which the Yahwist drew for the
portrait of Eden. An oasis ecology of this type is therefore the kind of envi-
ronment most likely represented in the Eden narrative. The Yahwist's paro-
chial perspective, his description of the primeval age in terms of Israel's own
agrarian highlands, makes it all the more likely that his portrait of Eden too
would have been drawn largely from the local phenomena with which he was
familiar.
All of this raises intriguing questions: did the Yahwist think the Garden
of Eden was actually located in the Jordan Valley, destroyed perhaps in the
great catastrophe of Abraham's day? Was there any tradition of a valley Eden
in ancient Israel? These are questions we do not have enough evidence to
answer with great certainty. The Yahwist, after all, compares Eden to the
Jordan Valley before its catastrophe; he does not equate the two. Yet there
are hints of the conception of a valley Eden in J's narrative that deserve
mention.
In the first place, the Yahwist represents the primeval age outside of Eden
with the local color of the biblical hill country, and therefore it would be in
character to represent the garden itself within these same environs. Placing
Eden in a distant, foreign terrain would be in some tension with the local,
native backdrop of the preflood narrative as a whole. Moreover, details within
The Primeval Age 57
the narrative may imply that the primeval garden was wiped out in the catas-
trophe that reduced the valley to a desert. J's description of the valley's demise
in Genesis 19, for example, evokes his earlier description of Eden. The ter-
minology used to describe the vegetation destroyed in the catastrophe—semah
ha'adama, "the growth of the arable land" (19:25)—echoes and reverses the
language of the birth of Eden—"Yahweh, God, made grow (yasmah) from
the arable land (ha'adama) every tree" (2:9). Only in the Eden narrative and
here does the Yahwist employ the root smh (cf. 2:5, 3:18), until he uses it
once more for the trees in the Nile Valley (Exod 10:5). Furthermore, the
theme of expulsion is prominent in both narratives, the expulsion of Lot and
his wife paralleling that of Adam and Eve. Both couples are forced to leave
the comfortable oasis environment (in the valley) and seek refuge in the neigh-
boring hill country with its difficult agricultural demands. One wonders
whether these two stories of the transition from valley, oasis agriculture to
hill country farming might not reflect in archetypal fashion the actual move-
ment of populations from the old centers of civilization in the plains and
valleys to the highland frontiers in the early Iron Age, a population shift that
provided the basis for the new Israelite kingdom and for those new neigh-
boring kingdoms in the Transjordanian hills, Ammon, Moab, and Edom.78
A Jordan Valley Eden suits the Yahwist's location of the garden "to the
east" (miqqedem) as does a Mesopotamian Eden, in defense of which this
phrase is usually put forward. 79 From the perspective of the heartland of bib-
lical Israel in the hills west of the Jordan, a valley Eden would be properly
designated "to the east." Yahweh plants the Garden of Eden to the east
(miqqedem, 2:8). After Adam and Eve are expelled, presumably to the hills
west of the Jordan, Yahweh stations the cherubim to the east near the Gar-
den of Eden (miqqedem legan-'eden, 3:24) to guard the way to it. After mur-
dering his brother, Cain is exiled to a nomadic existence east of Eden (qidmat-
'cden, 4:16), presumably the great Arabian desert east of the Jordan and
Transjordanian hill country.
The Yahwist's traditions about the ecological transformation of the Jor-
dan Valley are known by other biblical authors as well (e.g., Deut 29:21-22
[Eng vv 22-23]; Zeph 2:9). The most interesting references to this tradition
are those in prophetic collections that anticipate, as part of Israel's ultimate
redemption, the return of the Jordan Valley to its pristine Edenic state. Apoca-
lyptic supplements to the prophecies of Joel and Zechariah speak of a river
rising from the temple mount in Jerusalem, certainly with its source in the
Gihon spring (one of Eden's rivers), and flowing eastward to irrigate the
Jordan Valley (Joel 4:18; Zech 14:8). Most explicit in this regard is a text from
Ezekiel's program of restoration that evokes images of Eden in its picture of
the valley's renewal (Ezek 47:1-12). According to Ezekiel's vision of the
future, a stream flows eastward from the temple mount and the Gihon spring,
becoming deeper and deeper as it descends into the Jordan Valley (vv 1-6).
Upon its arrival, it turns the waters of the Dead Sea back into fresh water (vv
8-10), though a few salt areas are preserved for human needs (v 11). Along
the banks of the river spring up all varieties of fruit-producing trees just as
in Eden (v 12; cf. Gen 2:9). As in the valley oases and the primeval Eden,
these trees produce fruit year round, and their fruit bears special healing, life-
giving powers (v 12).
Behind these images of renewal may lie the same tradition, of which there
are hints in the Yahwist's epic, that life began in a valley Eden. As is common
in apocalyptic thought, the time of the end and the time of the beginning
coalesce; in the end the world returns to its beginnings. Final restoration and
salvation are thus pictured with the archaic imagery of creation. In this case,
the ecology of the Jordan Valley, as the home of the primeval garden, will be
restored in the day of salvation by the same subterranean waters that first
irrigated Eden. The subterranean flow will rise with extraordinary force from
one of its four Edenic sources, the Gihon spring at the base of the temple
mount in Jerusalem, and return the entire floor of the Jordan Valley to its
primeval state.80
A Garden of Eden in the Jordan Valley does not, of course, solve the geo-
graphical problem of its four rivers (2:10-14), at least in the terms of which
this problem has traditionally been posed. Nor will any other location, for
that matter, as long as Eden's spring is interpreted as providing a single loca-
tion on the earth's surface for the source of these four major rivers. At this
point it is tempting to excuse the Yahwist from modern concerns with scien-
tific cartography, or to set aside Genesis 2:10-14 as a secondary addition.81
Aside from inventing an imaginary geography to explain this text, the only
explanation for the relationship between such varied watercourses as the
Tigris, Euphrates, Gihon, and Pison may lie in the ancient conception of a
subterranean sea linking all fresh water sources. According to this view, a
deep fresh water current ran below the surface of the earth, and all springs
and rivers flowing with fresh water were believed to have their origin in this
underground stream.82 Eden's waters may thus be viewed by the Yahwist not
as a single surface waterway dividing into four, but rather as the flow of
the same subterranean deep from which the earth's great rivers draw their
waters.
This conception of the earth's rivers having a common origin in the same
subterranean source of Eden's spring may be reflected in the language of the
narrative. The waters that rise out of the earth to irrigate Eden are referred
to with the unusual term 'ed (2:6), most likely alluding to the subterranean
fresh water deep, for which nahar (2:10) can also be a proper designation.83
The term ra sim, "heads," for the headwaters into which Eden's waters divide
(2:10) likely refers (as the Akkadian cognate does) to the springs that repre-
sent the sources of Middle Eastern rivers, such as the Tigris and Euphrates
(2:14).84 The names of the two other rivers in the Eden narrative derive, in
fact, from Hebrew roots that mean to issue forth, as do the waters of a spring:
Pison from pws, "spring up" (2:11); Gihon, from gwh or gyh, "burst forth"
(2:13).85
Locating Eden is, of course, a precarious project. The Yahwist does not
provide enough information—perhaps purposely—to place it exactly. J may
intend Eden to possess some element of liminality. Yet the suggestions above
The Primeval Age 59
are intended to call attention at least to several basic traits of the Yahwist's
approach to origins. J's treatment of the primeval era is concrete and down-
to-earth, drawing its details from ordinary human experience. J is not con-
structing an otherworldly, "mythic" realm within this narrative. Moreover,
the specific earthly setting for this age is not a universal landscape or a foreign
terrain, but it is full of the details of the environment of the storyteller, as is
further illustrated by the analysis of human life in the garden that follows.
Agriculture in the garden Even in this well-watered place, in the protected

and favorable conditions of the oasis ecology of Eden that was the humans'
first home, the Yahwist's view of the human as farmer is prominent. The agri-
cultural character of human life is laid out in detail in this narrative, even
before the first family is sent out to take up dry farming in the hill country.
As has been noted, the first human, 'adam, is made from the particular kind
of soil that is cultivable, adama (2:7). The task God immediately assigns adam
in the garden itself is the work of cultivation ('abad), the same work that is to
be his lot outside of Eden (2:15, 3:23). From its very inception, even in Eden,
human life is equated with farming.
The Yahwist's account of the creation of the first forms of life in the Eden
story is shaped by this agricultural perspective. In his description of the ori-
gin of 'adam, of the animals, and of hawwa, Eve, the Yahwist draws upon the
role each plays in a typical agrarian village. This is so, in the first place, for
the first human, 'adam, who is based on the male role in a traditional agricul-
tural family. This interpretation of 'adam as male in the garden narrative,
particularly before the first woman is created from him, has been strongly
challenged in recent scholarship.86 Since the Yahwist can employ adam as a
collective term for the human race (e.g., Gen 6:1), the more general mean-
ing "human being" or "earth creature" (possibly androgynous) has been pro-
posed for its use in Genesis 2. According to this line of interpretation, the
Yahwist employs adam with the general meaning, "human being," in Gen-
esis 2 before the first woman is created, and then uses adam for the man in
particular after the woman's creation (e.g., 2:22, 23; 3:8; etc.).
However, the Yahwist's characterization of adam, when viewed against
the backdrop of common gender roles in traditional agricultural societies,
resembles a male from the very beginning of the garden story. In ancient Israel,
as in the subsistence agricultural economies of the Mediterranean highlands
more generally, the primary work of the male is the cultivation of the family's
fields. Such a pattern is present in contemporary villages and is reflected in
biblical texts as well. Men plow the fields, sow the seed, harvest the grain,
and tend the family's orchards or vineyards. Women, while providing some
assistance in the field at peak labor times such as the grain harvest, work
primarily in and near the home, raising the children, preparing the food, and
growing vegetables in a family garden.87 Within this picture of the Mediter-
ranean agricultural family, the Yahwist's adam is quite clearly the male. The
role assigned to adam, both inside the garden and outside of it, is cultivation
(2:15, 3:23). The very origin and substance of his being reflects his role, cre-
ated as he is out of the cultivable soil he is destined to farm, adam from adama
(2:7). Furthermore, the divine decrees that impose the constraints for human
life outside of Eden prescribe for 'adam the specific pains that accompany
field cultivation, the painful labor of growing grain from ground prone to
producing thorns and thistles (3:17-19). With its particular masculine mean-
ing in this narrative and its inclusive sense elsewhere (e.g., Gen 6:1), 'adam
appears to be used by the Yahwist in the same sense "man" has traditionally
been used in English, to refer to the male and/or the human species as a whole.
The animals are created to assist adam in his agricultural tasks. When
the Yahwist describes God's concern that 'adam not remain alone (2:18), he
is less concerned with the feeling of loneliness or existential isolation than
with the magnitude of labor involved in subsistence agriculture. J states that
God wished to provide for adam a "helper" ('ezer; 2:18). Since God has just
made 'adam a farmer, this is the obvious task for which 'adam's creator believes
a helper is necessary. Understood in this light, the creation of animals as
helpers is not such a humorous mistake or naive solution to the first man's
isolation as it might first appear.88 Created from the same cultivable soil,
adama, from which the man was made (2:19), and designated with the same
name, nepes hayya, "livingbeing," these animals included the domestic species
that played a major role in Mediterranean agriculture. The sense of domes-
ticity among the animals here brought into being is highlighted by adam's
naming the animals (2:19-20) and by the Yahwist's mention of behema, "live-
stock" (2:20; cf. 3:14, 6:7, 7:2-3, 8:20), along with the "animals of the field"
and "birds of the air." By assisting in the most arduous tasks of plowing,
threshing, and carrying loads, cattle and donkeys immeasurably lightened
the burden of farm labor. By providing dairy products for food and wool for
clothing, sheep and goats provided essential products for the subsistence
economy.
The account of the first woman, like those of the man and the animals,
reflects her particular role in the agricultural family. When the Yahwist says
the man could not find a helper like himself (2:20), the emphasis should be
placed on the term "like himself" (kenegdo) rather than "helper" ('ezer). The
animals just created did contribute to the agrarian economy and were indeed
helpers. But none was sufficiently like the man (kenegdo) to be a suitable
sexual partner. As a consequence, God makes the woman from the substance
of the man himself (2:22, 23). This allows the two to reunite, to become "one
flesh" (2:24), and thereby to establish the family unit that was the basis of
agricultural society. The designation "one flesh" (basar ehad) refers to both
physical and social aspects of the marriage bond. It designates the sexual
union that produces children and also the contractual establishment of a new
kinship unit within society.89 With the creation of the woman, the family is
thus brought into being.
Within this family structure, the first woman's role reflects the female
role in the traditional Mediterranean agricultural family. Her primary activ-
ity is the bearing and raising of children. This role is introduced in the narra-
tive of her inception, which focuses on the sexual union of male and female
The Primeval Age 61
(2:23-24). The childbearing role is also the basis of her name, hawwa, Eve,
which the Yahwist understands to mean "mother of all the living" (3:20).90
The divine prescriptions for the life of the woman outside Eden focus on this
role too. Just as the male work of cultivation is to become painfully labori-
ous for him ('sb; 3:17), so the female role of childbearing is to become pain-
fully laborious for her ('sb; 3:16). As childbearer and fellow worker, the
woman takes her place within the family as a helper of her husband. Both,
together with their children and animals, are necessary for survival in the
life of subsistence agriculture on the highland frontier. 91
The view that the garden is a royal domain, as some have argued, 92 is
not supported by this agricultural portrait of Eden. 'adam is not presented
by the Yahwist as a primeval royal figure but as a cultivator of the ground, as
was the typical Israelite farmer. Nor is Eden described as a royal estate. Such
a reading of the garden story is overly influenced by Mesopotamian paral-
lels, which do describe the first humans as monarchs, representing as they
do a highly urbanized, centralized, royal culture. It may also be influenced
by the preceding Priestly account of creation in which the human being is
described in decidedly more royal and hierarchical terms.93 This interpreta-
tion does not take seriously enough the thoroughly indigenous nature of the
Yahwist's primeval narrative overall, reflecting as it does the life-style of the
typical Israelite farmer.
Throughout the primeval era, from the first generation of Adam and Eve
to the generation of Noah and his family, the Yahwist describes the world
from the point of view of the highland farmer. The landscape of the first
human beings is the hill country on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the
very landscape of biblical Israel and of the Yahwist himself. The Yahwist, just
like the epic narrators of neighboring cultures, has in effect created the world
in his own image, in the image of the land and culture with which he was
familiar. He has envisioned archetypal reality—its world and its people—in
terms of his own society and environment. J has thereby founded his own
society and environment in the orders brought into being at the creation of
the world.
In so doing, the Yahwist has incorporated into his landscape each of the
major ecological regions of his world. At the center is the Mediterranean hill
country with its dry farming land, its humid climate, and its mixed agrarian
economy of cultivation and herding. In this region live all of the Yahwist's
primeval heroes—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Lamech, and the flood sur-
vivor Noah. Alongside this region is the steppe, with its pasture and sporadic
farming land, its semiarid climate, and its specialized economy of semi-
nomadic pastoralism. In such environs live the descendants of Lamech's son
Jabal, the tent-dwelling sheep herder (4:20). In the distance lies the desert,
with its lack of pasture and arable land, its arid climate, and its inhospitable
terrain. It is, for the Yahwist, a hostile and uninhabitable place. To be ban-
ished into it, as was Cain, means to assume an existence unbearable for
humans and to be expelled from the very presence of God (Gen 4:13-14).
Finally, nearby in the Jordan Valley lie the small isolated oases with their
tropical climate and vegetation. Their unusually favorable ecological condi-

tions provide the Yahwist with the nostalgic image of a once existent Eden
in which human life was easier and better than that of his fellow Israelites
struggling to survive on the highland frontier.
The first age of the world and of human culture is thus described by the
Yahwist in terms of his own highland agricultural environment. It is within
the contours of this indigenous setting that the Yahwist's attitudes toward
nature and society in the primeval narrative must be examined.
The Yahwist's Conceptual World: Agriculture and Religion

Agriculture, like all other basic activities, is no merely profane
skill. Because it deals with life, and its object is the marvelous
growth of that life dwelling in seed, furrow, rain, and the spirits
of vegetation, it is therefore first and foremost a ritual. It was so
from the beginning and has remained so in farming communities,
even in the most highly civilized areas of Europe. The husband-
man enters and becomes part of a sphere of abundant holiness.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative
Religion
In talking about topsoil, it is hard to avoid the language of

religion.
Wendell Berry, Home Economics
The most important result of the foregoing analysis of the Yahwist's prime-
val narrative is the discovery that he does not view the world of nature in a
general, universal, or abstract sense. Rather, J writes about the natural world
in terms of a precise, distinctive environment. That environment is the Medi-
terranean hill country in which the typical family practiced a mixed agricul-
tural economy combining cultivation and herding to meet its subsistence
needs. Only in the context of this concrete setting can the Yahwist's orienta-
tion to nature and the human place within it be properly understood.
At the center of the Yahwist's agricultural setting is arable soil, 'adama.
As such, 'adama represents the Yahwist's point of orientation, the point from
which the world as a whole is brought into focus, organized, and understood.
It is therefore the most appropriate point to enter the Yahwist's world of
thought and to search for clues to the attitudes and ideology that shape his
stance toward the environment.
Nature
As that from which all life is derived—plant, animal, human—arable soil is
the key to the Yahwist's conception of the structure and essential character
of the natural world. Arable soil provides the organizing principle behind J's
The Primeval Age 63
understanding of space, the relationship among nature's various parts, and

metaphysics, the nature of being and reality.
The Yahwist's claim that the earth and its various forms of life, includ-
ing human life, are made of the same stuff reflects the view that they are all
in possession of the same essential nature and are thereby part of one, single
reality, the essential element of which is arable soil. No terminology in the
primeval narrative places any ontological distinction between the forms of
life or considers them apart from their physical existence in relation to arable
land. The inherent connection between human life and the earth in particu-
lar is made by J with special emphasis: the first human shares in his name
('adam) the name of the soil ('adama) and human death is described as a return
to the soil. The breath of life (nismat hayyim) that God breathes into this first
human to bring him to life does not give him a soul or spiritual being differ-
ent from other animate beings. The breath 'adam receives from God is the
physical breath upon which all animate life depends (7:22).94
The common lot of humans and animals is a conspicuous feature of the
Yahwist's creation narrative. A clear line distinguishing the essential nature
of one from the other is difficult to detect. Human and animal alike are called
nepes hayya, "animate creature" (2:7, 19). As with the breath of life, nepes
hayya is used by J for both, and this term also attributes to neither a soul or
spiritual being separate from their physical life.95 This point has been muddled
for centuries in English translations by a succession of translators determined
to draw a distinction between human beings and animals where none exists
in the Hebrew text. In the King James Version (1611), nepes hayya was ren-
dered "living creature" when used of the animals (2:19), but "living soul"
when used of the human being (2:7). While retreating from such an obvious
distinction and misuse of the Greek idea of soul, the translators of up-to-date
and widely used versions such as that of the Jewish Publication Society (1962)
and the New Revised Standard Version (1991) nevertheless preserve the dis-
tinction in a subtler fashion. In both translations, nepes hayya is translated
in two different ways: "living creature" for animals (2:19) but "living being"
for human life (2:7).
Even such traits as knowledge, acquired by eating the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, and language, exercised in naming the animals, do not really set
humans apart. It is true that only humans are actually described as eating
the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and this act does make them unique in
one specific sense. It endows them with the self-consciousness that makes
them the only animal uncomfortable with their nakedness (3:7). But animals
in J's narrative also possess wisdom and intelligence, as does the snake in the
garden, who is distinguished from other animals not because he alone was
wise but because he was the wisest of all of them (3:1). Balaam's donkey, at
the end of the Yahwist's epic, is another example (Num 22:22-35). The cen-
tral point of J's narrative about Balaam's donkey is that the donkey had more
intelligence than her owner, an acclaimed seer, when she was the first to
recognize the messenger of Yahweh in their presence. Both of these animals
possess speech as well as knowledge, and both are in a certain respect more
cognizant of divine realities than their human companions. 96
The relationship between J's God and this world, this unified metaphysi-
cal realm, is closer and more complex than has been suggested for the God
of the Bible by biblical theologians, who have customarily perceived a sharp
division between creator and creation. To accommodate a second and sepa-
rate divine sphere of reality, scholars have attributed to ancient cosmologies
the conception of a two- or three-tiered universe. According to the former,
the world can be divided between heaven and earth, the divine and human
realms.97 According to the latter, the earth is flanked above and below with
other realms, both usually associated especially with divine power.98
There are suggestions in the Yahwist's narrative of just such a layered
view of reality. It is characteristic of J to describe God as "descending" (yarad)
to investigate affairs on earth or to make contact with human beings (e.g.,
Gen 11:5, 18:21; Exod 3:8, 34:5). Moreover, the mountaintop and the tree,
both symbols of contact between earth and sky, are typical points of revela-
tion in the Yahwist's narrative (e.g., Gen 12:6-7; Exod 19:20). Even symbols
of a subterranean realm, such as the spring welling up in Eden, mark sacred
space in J.
But the most striking characteristic of J's cosmology is the insignificance
of these other spheres and the significance of the terrestrial sphere as the realm
of divine activity. J provides no details at all about a heavenly realm, nor does
he describe any activity in this realm, of God or of God's messengers who
frequently meet Israel's ancestors on earth. When J begins his epic with the
phrase," In the day Yahweh made earth and sky . . . ," he is more likely refer-
ring to the sky as a part of the terrestrial realm than designating two distinct
spheres of reality. Nor does J talk about the underworld. When people die
they go not to Sheol nor to any realm of the dead but back to the soil. That is
all J tells us.
In fact, when God is described by J, God is pictured as a participant in
the terrestrial sphere. It is the Yahwist's concrete, agricultural terrain that J's
deity inhabits and in which he appears to be largely at home. J's God, a
strongly anthropomorphic figure, lives a very earthly life. He plants the Gar-
den of Eden, walks in it, and talks to its residents whom he has fashioned
from the ground. He meets Cain in the field, closes the door of the ark behind
Noah, smells the fragrance of his offering, and eats dinner with. Abraham.
The line between divine and human beings is so indistinct at points that divine
beings appear wholly human (e.g., Gen 18:2, 32:24).
Knowledge and immortality might be thought of as setting the creator
apart from creation, since these are divine qualities that God places off-limits
to humans in the garden. But even these qualities are not part of another order
of being for J. They are understood in terms of this same physical world, where
they are in fact available to humans in the actual substance of the fruit of two
of Eden's trees. When the first couple eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
the two of them actually acquire divine knowledge and become like God
(3:22, 23). For divinity and humanity alike, this knowledge was bounded by
the parameters of time and space in the physical world. God, like people,
had to investigate events for which he was not present (3:9-11, 11:5-6, 18:21).
The Primeval Age 65
Immortality is the key quality, according to the Eden narrative, that sets
God off from humans. One might in fact read the Eden narrative as an expla-
nation of the ways in which humans are like God and different from God.
Humans are like God in that they possess knowledge. Humans are unlike
God in that they are mortal. But even immortality was not located by J in
another metaphysical order. It too was available to the humans for the eat-
ing. To keep it from humans, in fact, God had to expel them from the garden
where the tree of life was located, and God had to place guards to protect it
(3:22-24). Had humans attained it, immortality would have consisted of
ongoing life in J's own concrete world, not life in another."
In summary, J views the world of nature as a single metaphysical reality,
the central and defining feature of which is adama, arable land. Nature's
constituent parts, the earth and soil and its various forms of life—plant, ani-
mal, human—are distinct features of the same organic system, sharing a
common essence derived from the soil. Even the character and activity of J's
deity are narrated largely in terms of this same metaphysical realm. How-
ever one might wish to define or explain the ontological difference between
God and humanity in J's epic, it can hardly be put in the categorical terms of
the absolute transcendence of nature customarily employed for the Bible's
God. J's deity is primarily a participant in the same agrarian realm inhabited
by all other life.
The Yahwist's unitary view of reality does not mean that all of its parts
were granted the same status, that none was valued over others, or that no
sense of hierarchy is to be found in J's epic. It does mean, however, that
whatever special valuation or hierarchy does exist among created life derives
not from a conception of different orders of being or inhere in different innate
natures. The values placed on different natural phenomena and the sense of
hierarchy among nature's constituent parts derive rather from the simple
realities of subsistence agriculture. Arable soil, with its humid climate where
dry farming is possible, is home for humans and other forms of life and thus
the standard in relation to which other types of environmental regimes are
evaluated. The neighboring deserts, for example, are abhorred. With their
uncultivable soil and meager rainfall, they were hostile to the forms of life
that typified Mediterranean agriculture and were thus viewed with consid-
erable horror and fear. For J the desert is a wasteland, unsuitable terrain for
human and divine beings alike (Gen 4:13-14). By contrast, the ecology of
the oasis—with its stable source of water, temperate climate, and tropical
vegetation—is viewed in a truly nostalgic light. Life in such a setting is pic-
tured by J, as the Eden story illustrates, as the first human environment
unaffected by most of the risks and rigors of dryland farming in the Israelite
hills.
Within inhabitable space, the arable soil, as the basis for all life, holds a
kind of fundamental and indispensable position in the order of things. A sense
of this vital power of the land over its creatures is almost certainly reflected
in the language J employs for the human cultivation of it. The term for cul-
tivation in J is 'abad, the customary verb in biblical Hebrew to express servi-
tude. It is used by J, for example, to describe the servitude of a servant to his

master (Gen 12:16) or of one people to another (Gen 27:40; Exod 5:9). It is
also used for Israel's service to God in its worship (e.g., Exod 4:23; 7:16, 26).
While 'abad may have acquired a technical connotation somewhat removed
from its root meaning—as for example, the English "cultivation" does not
always call to mind its linguistic connection with "cult" and "culture"—there
can be no doubt that at some level the use of 'abad, "serve," for "cultivate"
represents the Israelite sense of the dependence of human life on the land.
Cultivation was an act of service to that which held absolute power over one's
survival and destiny.
Among the forms of life dependent upon 'adama, their relationships
reflect their roles in an agricultural society. Plant life is described in terms of
those domestic varieties cultivated by highland farmers for food: grain (2:5,
3:18), fruit trees (2:9, 16; 3:1, 7; 8:11), and vines (9:20). Animals are consid-
ered the farmer's "helpers," the purpose for which J believes they were cre-
ated (2:18). As such the animal kingdom is viewed primarily in terms of the
domestic species that played such a large role in the mixed economy of Medi-
terranean agriculture as sources of food and goods and as work animals in
the fields. These animals, of course, take orders from the farmer. Thus it is
appropriate for the human, who trains, harnesses, and cares for these ani-
mals, also to name them. But J's Eden narrative says little beyond this about
the relative superiority of human beings, since naming does not in and of
itself represent the act of one in a superior position.100
Human beings, while granted no special status by virtue of a unique
innate nature, are nevertheless the center of J's interest. The environment,
the land and its various forms of life, is described according to the needs of
the subsistence farmer. Furthermore, the human drama determines the shape
of the epic narrative from beginning to end. J's creation story illustrates this
pattern well. The formation of human life is the first divine act in the epic,
preceding even the creation of plants and animals on the earth (2:7). The
climax of the creation account is the elaborate formation of a second human
being, the woman, and with her creation the establishment of human pro-
creation, marriage, and kinship structures (2:21-24).101
One could certainly call this perspective on nature anthropocentric, since
it views and values nature from the experience of the human farmer. Yet J's
anthropocentrism is an extremely humble kind, bounded strictly as it is by
the realities of subsistence farming. It lacks any exalted view of human beings,
since they possess no unique essence that sets them apart from and above
other creatures. Furthermore, humans are regarded as subservient to the soil
upon which their survival depends. The human being is viewed more as an
ordinary member of the community of life than as a privileged being set apart
from it.
The position assumed by God in J's "hierarchy" is, together with 'adama,
certainly a premier one. Both are "served" (abad) by human beings. And to
God belongs the ultimate power to produce and sustain life. Human exis-
tence thus depends upon the presence and favor of God. Yet J's deity is east
The Primeval Age 67
in the shape of his human heroes and stands very close to them. In a real
sense, God is the divine farmer. His place is on the adama (2:7, 8; 4:14). He
plants the garden on it (2:8), puts humans to work on it (2:8, 15), inspects
their work (3:8), meets Cain in the fields (4:8-9), and above all controls the
productivity of arable soil (3:17-19, 4:11, 8:21-22). His activity is seen in
the success and failure of the agricultural enterprise. Like J's human farmers,
J's deity is a limited figure whose human qualities have long been recognized
as a hallmark of J's theology.
The distinctiveness of these conceptions of J may be highlighted by con-
trasting them with the perspective of the Priestly Writer. While P also sub-
scribes to the view that the world is a single metaphysical reality defined by
physical existence on earth, he regards this scene in quite different terms. In
the first place, P's view of the world is much broader than J's. While J de-
scribes life and its beginnings entirely within the context of a highland farm
on arable soil, P assumes a more cosmic stance in his creation account,
dividing the universe carefully into three distinct regions: sky, sea, and earth
Ceres; 1:6-10). Forms of life do not all originate from adama as in J's account,
but have their origin in the specific environment to which each is distinc-
tive: plants and land animals on the earth ('eres; 1:11-12, 24-25), sea crea-
tures in the waters, and birds in the sky (1:20-23). For the Priestly Writer,
this precise tripartite structure of the universe and its life forms at creation
appear to explain and legitimate certain features of the distinction between
clean and unclean animals that underlie the dietary and sacrificial regula-
tions over which priests preside.102 Thus, whereas J's conceptions of the
environment and its forms of life reflect the experience of the farmer, P's
representation of the world reflects the interests and concerns of a priestly
party.
The Priestly concern for categories of life and the hierarchical relation-
ships among them is particularly clear in relation to human life. Whereas J's
first human shares an origin in the soil with all of the other forms of life, P's
first humans have a more distinctive beginning and a more powerful posi-
tion in the world. For other forms of life, the region of the globe to which
each life form is related is commissioned to produce it: in other words, "Let
the earth produce vegetation . . . " (1:11-12; cf. 1:20, 24). This is not the case
with humans. Instead, God alone creates them in the divine image (1:26).
Simultaneously, humans are commissioned to rule (rada) over all other crea-
tures, and to subdue (kabas) the earth ('eres; vv 26, 28). Behind the Priestly
conception of humans ruling over nature in God's image appears to be the
setting of kingship and royalty with which Israel's priesthood was closely
allied.103
As is the case with J, P's deity shares many of the characteristics of his
human heroes. Like P's humans, P's deity assumes a particularly exalted stance
in the natural hierarchy, a stance reminiscent of the elite position of priest
or king whose images and interests are so apparent in P's creation narrative.
P's deity's place is in the sky above the earth, as his creative acts indicate.
They proceed from the sky (1:3-8, 14-19), to the waters (1:9-10, 20-23),
and then to the earth (1:11-13, 24-25). Within this universe, he establishes
the boundaries by which the priest may distinguish clean from unclean. P's
God creates by royal decree: orders are issued and carried out. He exercises
dominion over the cosmos as humans do on earth. P's deity thus shares the
royal and priestly traits of P's first human beings.
From two biblical authors, sharing the same basic landscape and meta-
physical worldview, come two distinctive portraits of the arrangement and
relationship of nature's constituent parts. And these different images appear
to be closely related to two distinct social situations within ancient Israel,
the role of the priest presiding over Israel's religious institutions and prac-
tices and the role of the typical Israelite farmer battling the odds of subsis-
tence agriculture.
Culture
It has been customary to treat J's primeval narrative as an account of the
growth of sin in the earth, so that, after the first act of disobedience, each
episode of the narrative escalates the human capacity for evil until God is
forced to wipe out the human race with the flood. This record of human fail-
ure in the primeval age, including also the attempt to build a city and tower
after the flood (Gen 11:1-9), are then regarded as the backdrop against which
God moves to select Abraham and his descendants for a special covenant
relationship. Illustrative of this traditional approach is Gerhard von Rad's
assertion that "the one basic notion which the writer has here taken for his
theme [is] the growing power of sin in the world." 104 Claus Westermann, to
cite just one other example, finds in J's primeval narrative a motif of "crime
and punishment" designed to document the human revolt against God. 105
The effect of such interpretations of the primeval narrative has been an almost
exclusive interest in the divine-human relationship in these stories and the
attention to human society in isolation from its natural surroundings.
Largely left out of—or at least of only secondary interest in—this "grow-
ing power of sin" approach to the primeval age is an important motif that
appears in each of the major episodes of this age: the curse on arable soil.
The motif of the soil's curse is in actuality neither a minor nor an ancillary
concern of the narrator's. It occurs prominently at the narrative climax of
each of the individual episodes, and these appearances together provide nar-
rative and thematic cohesion for the primeval narrative as a whole. The soil's
curse is an element around which narrative tension is built, and it is the only
issue ultimately resolved by the flood. The Yahwist's primeval narrative might
be described, without exaggeration, as a drama of the soil, a narrative designed
to explain and define the relationship between arable land and its farmers.
Just how this is so can be seen by a brief review of the theme of the soil
in the primeval narrative's primary episodes. It should be recalled, in the first
place, that the first sentence of the Eden story—and of the primeval narra-
tive itself—focuses the composition that follows on arable soil. The pre-
creation state, spelled out in the sentence's opening subordinant clauses, is
The Primeval Age 69
described in terms of arable land, that is, its unproductive character due to
the lack of rain and of a farmer to till it. And the first act of creation, described
in the sentence's main clause, is the shaping of a farmer from the soil who
will be able to till it. The Eden narrative itself, builds through a divine com-
mand and human disobedience toward a set of divine pronouncements
(3:14-19), which are at once the consequence of human disobedience and
the prescription for life outside of the garden.106 The lengthiest of these pro-
nouncements, and their climax, given as much attention itself as the preced-
ing ones regarding the snake and the woman combined, places a curse on
the soil. This curse introduces a theme that is to become the leitmotif of the
primeval narrative, the relationship between human morality and the soil's
productivity. From this point on, the primary consequence of immorality will
be the soil's sterility and the disruption of the relationship between farmer
and land.
The story of Cain and Abel moves toward the same climax. This account,
too, builds through a divine command and a human act of disobedience
toward a divine pronouncement at the culmination of the narrative. And the
pronouncement on Cain mirrors the preceding one delivered to his father in
the Eden narrative. As it was for the first man, the consequence of Cain's
immorality is the soil's sterility, and this sterility is expressed in the same
language of curse introduced in the garden. In Cain's case the relationship
between farmer and arable land is severed completely, so that should Cain
till the soil it would not produce at all (literally, "no longer provide its power,"
(lo'-tosep tet kohah; 4:12). For his crime, Cain is banished from arable land
into the arid desert, a fate he considers comparable to death (4:13-14).
The relationship between human morality and the soil's productivity is
brought to a final climax and a new resolution in the flood story, the last epi-
sode of the primeval narrative. The ultimate result of the immorality-sterility
equation that has operated throughout the primeval era is the complete sev-
erance of the primal link established at creation between farmers and arable
soil, between adam and adama. On account of the pervasive immorality of
the entire human race, God strikes the land with a deluge that destroys all of
its life, returning it to its lifeless state before creation (6:5-7; 7:4, 22-23).
Having come to an end in the flood, the relationship between farmer and
land is placed on a new footing through Noah the flood hero, who, with his
family and the animals on the ark, survives the deluge. That Noah was to
restore the farmer-land relationship was announced at his birth, when his
life's mission was described as providing "relief from our work, from the
painful labor of our hands, from the arable land ( adama) that Yahweh has
cursed" (5:29). Following the flood, Noah completes this mission with two
acts. First, he builds the first altar mentioned in the Yahwist's epic and pre-
sents an offering, in response to which God promises to lift the curse on arable
soil and guarantee, in the postflood era, the soil's productivity and its annual
harvests (8:20-22). Second, Noah plants a vineyard on arable land (9:20),
now freed from its primeval curse, thereby reenacting creation when God
planted a garden in soil free from the curse.
Thus Noah is instrumental in reestablishing the relationship between

farmer and arable soil and also in placing this relationship on a new founda-
tion in the postdiluvian age. This new foundation established by God, through
lifting the curse and promising regular seasons and harvests, does not elimi-
nate the rigors of dry farming in the Mediterranean highlands nor the occa-
sional failure of their annual harvests, on account of which Israel's
postdiluvian ancestors are forced to find grain in Egypt or Philistia (12:10;
26:1; 42:2, 4-5). But the relationship between the farmer and the soil has
taken on a new character in two respects. In the first place, the productivity
of the land is set on its own footing; it is no longer linked absolutely and irre-
vocably to human morality. God acknowledges that sin is part of the human
condition and that, if the human race is to survive, the fertility of arable soil
on which it depends must be exempted from the consequences of its sin. "I
will no longer curse arable land on account of human beings," God tells Noah,
"since the thoughts of the human heart are evil from childhood; and I will
never again destroy every living thing 1 have made" (8:21). The occasional
famines with which Israel's ancestors must deal in the postflood era are in
fact not linked by the narrator to human sin.
A second way in which the farmer—land relationship takes on a new shape
in the postflood era lies in the moral character of the Yahwist's heroes. In
contrast to the prediluvian heroes Adam and Cain, who disobey God's com-
mands, J's postdiluvian heroes, Noah and Abraham in particular, obey God's
commands and find favor in God's eyes. Noah is in fact the first hero to be
called "righteous" by J (7:1). Unlike Adam and Cain before him, he does
everything God commands (7:5). Abraham, like Noah, is righteous and obe-
dient (12:4, 15:6, 18:19, 26:5), and both are blessed with agricultural wealth
(9:20-21, 13:2, 24:34).
The relationship between arable soil and its human farmers is thus sta-
bilized in the new age. This is accomplished on the one hand by granting the
land an autonomy by which it would maintain its productive powers even in
the face of human immorality. It is accomplished on the other hand by the
appearance of righteous heroes whose obedience brings agricultural bless-
ings to themselves and their descendants.
A brief survey of other ancient Near Eastern traditions about the prime-
val age—that is, the time before the flood—will be useful to illustrate the
distinctive character of J's agricultural focus in the primeval narrative as well
as the fact that prediluvian traditions are commonly aimed, as are J's, at
describing the development of selected key traits of the culture that produced
them. Sumerian traditions, for example, of which the Sumerian flood story
and the first section of the King List are the primary examples, have as their
central concern the description of the origins of Sumer's major political and
social institutions, its first cities, irrigation canals, and kings. The aim of these
traditions is described succinctly by Jacobsen: "The myth thus celebrates—
reflecting quite accurately and realistically the economic possibilities of South-
ern Mesopotamia—the potential of irrigation agriculture and the dependence
of the latter on strong governmental organization for its success. It is accord-
The Primeval Age 71
ingly—if we would wish to use Malinowski's term—a 'charter' for the state,
specifically for the city state."107 Thus the Sumerians, as does J, claim their
own social and economic way of life to have been founded within the events
of the primeval era. For the Sumerian traditions, this was the establishment
of the city state with its irrigation agriculture. For J, this was the rural dry-
land farming characteristic of Israelite society.
The Old Babylonian account of the primeval age, preserved in the
Atrahasis Epic, reflects a different cultural interest. This primeval narrative
focuses not on the development of dryland agriculture nor on the develop-
ment of the city state and its irrigation agriculture, but on the issue of human
reproduction. 108 Its drama is found in the unrestrained growth of human
beings, made originally by the gods to do their farming for them. The gods
respond to the outlandish numbers and noise of the human race by destroy-
ing it in a flood (with a single family surviving) and by instituting a series of
new measures for the postdiluvian age that will control human reproduc-
tion and keep it within limits. These new measures—for example, barren
women, female cultic personnel who do not marry, demons who snatch babies
at birth—explain various factors in the author's own world that inhibit human
procreation.109 In Atrahasis and J alike, a basic cultural issue is highlighted
within a narrative drama of the preflood age. In both, original problems
encountered during the preflood age are resolved by the establishment of a
new order instituted for the postflood age. In Atrahasis this issue is human
reproduction, in J's epic it is agricultural production.
The theme of human procreation is certainly not absent in J's primeval
narrative. Human fertility actually represents a clear parallel to the land's fer-
tility. J's creation narrative first establishes the production of the soil, with
the creation of the farmer and the garden (2:7-17), and then goes on to bring
into being the reproduction of the human species, with the creation of the
first woman (2:18-25). Just as the fecund ground and womb are brought into
existence in Genesis 2, so they are both imperiled by human disobedience in
Genesis 3. Reproduction of offspring just as production of crops will be pos-
sible henceforth only through painful labor, 'issabon, the characterization of
childbirth and cultivation alike (3:16, 17). Later references to the theme of
human fertility include Eve's naming of the first human child to emphasize
the marvel of human (pro)creation (4:1) and the brief reference to the mul-
tiplication of the human race and the limitation of the individual's lifespan
before the flood (6:1,3). Taken together, these references to human repro-
duction may represent for J something of the same etiological aim of the
Atrahasis epic to explain the limitations that have been placed by God on
human procreation and population growth. But they do not represent for J
the central problem of the primeval age. Though a concern to J, the issue of
human fertility is not developed in the consistent and central way in which
the issue of the land's fertility is.
Those parts of the primeval narrative that derive from the Priestly Writer
share the interest in human procreation present in the Atrahasis epic. Yet in
contrast to Atrahasis, procreation and population growth are viewed by P as
positive phenomena without restraints, both before and after the flood. The
God of P commands procreation as a human responsibility: it is the first
command delivered to the human couple at creation (1:28), and the first one
delivered to Noah and his sons after the flood (9:1). It remains the mandate
for P's heroes throughout the postdiluvian era (e.g., Gen 17:2, 35:9, 47:27;
Exod 1:7).110
When viewed against the background of these comparative primeval tra-
ditions, the Yahwist's unique interest in agricultural production stands out
with particular clarity. For J, the chief cultural issue around which the pri-
meval narrative is shaped is the nature of the relationship between human
society and the arable soil, which provides the basis for its agrarian economy.
It is this human—soil relationship that is stabilized with the new measures
instituted by God after the flood. In light of its serious interest in the dynam-
ics of the relationship between people and land, J's primeval narrative can-
not be characterized as an "historical" account concerned about humans alone
or about the divine-human relationship in particular. The agricultural set-
ting of this drama is not a mere stage upon which the events of the divine-
human relationship unfold. It is rather the theme of the drama itself, providing
the terms by which culture is defined and the relationship between human-
ity and God is played out in the world.
Religion
Just as the Yahwist conceived of society in terms of the agrarian landscape
on which it depended, so God also is understood in terms of this agricul-
tural environment. Divine activity in J's epic is associated particularly closely
with the two natural phenomena most crucial to agricultural production,
rainfall and fertile soil.
The paradigmatic illustration of God's association with rain occurs in
the primeval narrative's opening sentence.
Before any pasturage was on the earth,
And before any field crops had sprung up;
Since Yahweh, God, had not made it rain on the earth,
And there was no man to cultivate the arable soil. (2:5)
The connection of God with rain here stands in parallel relationship to the
connection of man with cultivation, thus suggesting that rain defines God's
activity in the same basic way that cultivation defines man's activity. Fur-
thermore, these statements about God and man appear among a series of
phrases listing the most fundamental facts of existence, the absence of which
signify the state of the world before creation. The connection between God
and rain is thus just as foundational to the Yahwist's view of the world as the
connection between man and cultivation.
The Yahwist's conception of the Mediterranean rainstorm as a manifes-
tation of God's activity in the world may be illustrated with several further
examples. As commentators have noted, the rainstorm is a unique aspect of
The Primeval Age 73
J's version of the flood story.111 The Priestly writer by contrast describes the
flood as the complete disintegration of the cosmic orders established in his
account of creation (Gen l:l-2:4a), with the earth's boundaries collapsing
and the waters above and below them engulfing the land (Gen 7:11, 8:l-2a)
and returning the universe to its watery, precreation status (1:2). But for J,
the flood is the result of torrential Mediterranean rains delivered by God (Gen
7:4, 12; 8:2b). In the final, third movement of the epic, J's association of God
with the Mediterranean rainstorm is particularly apparent in the rain and hail
storm that devastates the Egyptians (Exod 9:13-34), in the storm that destroys
Pharaoh's armies at the sea (13:20-22; 14:19-20, 24-25), and in the great
storm theophany at Mt. Sinai (19:9-15, 18, 20-25).
In this regard, J's God shares many of the essential characteristics of the
ancient Near Eastern storm god. The closest comparison is with the Canaanite
storm god, Baal, whose manifestation in the thunderstorm and whose con-
trol of rain and fertility are celebrated in the mythic literature from Ugarit.112
The prominence of the storm god, Baal, in the Canaanite pantheon and J's
characterization of Israel's deity as a storm god are neither coincidental nor
unrelated to the dryland farming on which the agricultural economies of both
societies were dependant. More will be said about J's deity as a storm god in
the analysis of the southern narratives of Egypt and the desert (chapter 4),
where the ancient Near Eastern motif of the battle between storm god and
sea is employed as a fundamental structural scheme.
Just as rain is considered a manifestation of divine power, so is the ger-
mination of seeds in fertile soil. The paradigmatic illustration of God's asso-
ciation with arable land is a text in the story of Cain and Abel, in which Cain
laments his banishment from the family estate.
You have driven me today from the face of the arable soil (pene ha'adama),
And from your face (paneka) I will be hidden. (4:14; cf. v 16)
The close association between arable land and the presence of God is empha-
sized in Cain's complaint by the parallel placement of land in the first phase
and God in the second, and by the use of the word/ace for both. In this play
on the word/ace, referring to "surface" or "landscape" in the first phrase and
to "presence" in the second, the Yahwist has identified God directly with
arable land.
This association of God and arable soil is, of course, frequently made in
the primeval narrative. At creation, God produces from it the trees of the gar-
den and the animate species, animal and human alike, that live upon it.
Throughout the narrative, God controls the soil's fertility, restricting it in
response to the deeds of Adam and Cain, but calling it forth at creation and
at the beginning of the postdiluvian age. The divine promise that begins the
postdiluvian age guarantees the soil's capacity to produce the regular har-
vests of the Yahwist's landscape (8:22).
On the basis of the close association between J's deity and both rain and
the soil, it would be entirely proper to describe nature as the realm within
which God's activity is observed and God's presence is made known in the
world. God is also revealed, of course, within the boundaries of human soci-
ety in direct encounters with human beings, so that the realm we refer to as
culture or history can be described as the realm of God's activity as well. But,
it would be improper to separate these realms distinctly or to assign them
different values as modes of God's revelation. Of course, God is not to be
equated with the rain or the soil, any more than God is to be equated with a
human being. But by functioning as the media of divine presence and activ-
ity, nature and history alike assume the sacred status that contact with the
divine bestows.
The conception of nature as a sacred sphere, full of divine activity and
presence, is enhanced by the Yahwist's depiction of it as the realm within
which the worship and service of God is performed. The prime illustration
of this is the first ritual act of the primeval narrative, in which Cain and Abel
present offerings to the deity (4:3-4). The content of their offerings is the
first and finest produce of the mixed agricultural economy in which they are
involved: Cain presents the produce of the soil, while Abel presents the first-
born of the flock. Religious ritual is therefore based in the agricultural life-
style of the first human family.
The significance of Cain's and Abel's religious ritual lies not in the divine-
human relationship alone, but in its effect on the success of agriculture as
well. This ritual presentation appears to represent the recognition on the part
of the farmer that the land's productivity is a sacred phenomenon bestowed
by divine power, and the belief that a gift of the produce will dispose the deity
favorably to insuring fertility in the future. 113 The term by which J designates
Cain's and Abel's offerings is minha, "gift," (Gen 4:3-4). When employed
elsewhere by J in noncultic contexts, minha designates a present delivered to
a superior to gain his favor (e.g., Gen 32:14, 19; 43:11, 15).114 Thus the reli-
gious ritual in the story of Cain and Abel reflects at once the human grati-
tude for the produce of their agricultural economy and a plea for healthy
harvests in the future. It is a ritual whose source and purpose derive from
the dependence of society on the land's productivity.
Not far behind the Yahwist's description of the first farmers and their
religious ritual lies a common ancient Near Eastern tradition, present in
Sumerian and Babylonian literature alike, that the human race was created
to farm for the gods and to feed them with the results of their harvests.115
Such an explanation for the creation of humans and for their offerings of
agricultural produce is not explicitly made by J, nor for that matter denied
or criticized. But it is echoed in certain details of J's narrative. God plants a
garden with trees bearing divine fruits, in which he likes to walk; then God
makes the first human to cultivate and care for it. Furthermore, the image of
God inhaling (wayyarah; 8:21) the soothing odors of Noah's offering is, as
commentators have noted, vividly reminiscent of the gods gathering to dine
on the offering of the Babylonian flood hero, Atrahasis.116 Since the Yahwist
neither affirms nor denies this old understanding of human agriculture, it
is impossible to decide conclusively whether he assumed it to be the case,
or whether he no longer thought in quite these terms.117 Whatever position
The Primeval Age 75
one takes, one cannot deny the formative role Israel's agricultural econ-
omy played in the shaping of its ritual and of its understanding of religious
devotion.
The Biblical View of Beginnings

The Yahwist's account of the beginning of the world in his primeval narra-
tive, as it has been described here, challenges the two most influential modes
of thought for the understanding of nature in the Bible. One is that nomadic
pastoralism and sedentary agriculture were practically distinct styles of life
in antiquity and that Israel conceived of its origins in terms of the former.
The other is that nature and history were separate spheres in biblical thought
and that Israel valued the latter and devalued the former, even in its concep-
tion of the creation of the world. Both of these traditional modes of thought
have been fully characterized in chapter 1. The challenges J's primeval nar-
rative represents for them may be summarized here.
The Desert versus the Sown

According to J's primeval narrative, the world's first humans are not easily
classified in terms of the traditional dichotomy between pastoralism and agri-
culture, shepherds and farmers. Rather, their livelihood derived from a way
of life in which herding and cultivation were both essential components. The
first human is created from arable soil to cultivate it and is provided with
domestic animals as "helpers" in his agricultural pursuits. The sons of the
first couple are engaged in the same mixed agricultural economy, cultivat-
ing the ground and herding sheep. The flood hero begins the new era involved
both in viticulture and the care of domestic animals, some of which he offers
to God as his first act of worship after the flood. Only Jabal, one of Lamech's
sons who represent different specializations within this archetypal mixed
agrarian economy, may be described as a specialized pastoralist.
The emphasis actually falls on cultivation rather than herding in J's pri-
meval economy. Arable soil, 'adama, provides the focal point of J's primeval
landscape. J's major figures, Adam, Cain, and Noah, are specifically described
as cultivators, a fact directly founded in the creation of the first human from
cultivable soil, 'adam from 'adama. Throughout the primeval period, the pro-
ductive capacity of arable land is a major concern, resolved finally by Yahweh's
promise of agricultural stability in the postflood era. A. M. Khazanov, in his
monumental work on nomadic pastoralism, saw this more clearly than most
biblical scholars have: "In this connection I must point out that the Bible gives
chronological priority not to pastoralism, and certainly not to pastoral
nomadism, but to agriculture (cf. Genesis 4.2 and, particularly, 4.20). Neither
Cain, nor even his younger brother Abel, 'a keeper of sheep', but only 'Jabal:
he was the father of such as dwell in tents and of such as have cattle.'" 118 In
sum, J does not describe beginnings from the perspective of a nomadic
pastoralist. His primeval society reflects the diversified rural economy typi-
cal of the Mediterranean hill country from ancient to modern times, in which
grain-based agriculture is combined with sheep and goat herding to meet
subsistence needs and reduce the risks inherent in this environment.
History versus Nature

J's primeval narrative also challenges the traditional notion that, even in its
conception of creation, biblical thought distinguished clearly between nature
and history, and in the process devalued nature and raised history to the level
of ultimate concern. This view, which has attracted many articulate supporters
over the last century of biblical scholarship, is already found in classical form
in the writings of Julius Wellhausen. In spite of his unusually deep apprecia-
tion for J's interest in, and closeness to, the natural world, he had this to say
about J's primeval narrative: "It is true that the Jehovist also placed these eth-
nic legends at the entrance to his sacred legend, and perhaps selected them
with a view to their forming an introduction to it; for they are all ethical and
historical in their nature, and bear on the problems of the world of man, and
not the world of nature." 119
To isolate the "world of man" from the "world of nature" in this way
and to emphasize the "historical" character of these stories runs counter to
J's mode of thinking. Human life and the earth itself are part of a single sphere
of reality for J and may be severed from one another only by doing violence
to the Yahwist's conception of the world. To begin with, 'adam, the first
human, and adama, the ground, are composed of the same substance, as their
names make clear. They share a single metaphysical reality, the concrete
world of the hill country in which physical survival and well-being were
the fundamental challenges. The common distinctions in Western thought
between matter and spirit, body and soul, material and supernatural, and this
world and the next, by which human life is given a distinctive essence and
separated off from the rest of nature, were not part of J's conceptual universe.
Furthermore, human activity is primarily oriented toward nature in the
primeval age. Made from arable land, the first human is given the archetypal
vocation of cultivating it. Religious ritual consists of offering to the deity the
results of one's agricultural labors, the first fruits of the harvest, and the first
born of the flock. All human behavior in fact reverberates in the natural world.
The primary consequences of Adam's and Cain's disobedience lie in the threat
posed to the connection between farmer and soil. And the result of Noah's
obedience was the divine promise of agricultural stability. Primeval society
is understood fundamentally in terms of its agricultural character and its
dependence on the productivity of arable soil.
Finally, J's images of God reflect this close bond between nature and
society. Yahweh is not assigned to the sphere of nature or of society alone,
but is pictured in terms of both. Yahweh is described by J, as is commonly
noted, in clear anthropomorphic language: he breathes, plants trees, speaks
Hebrew, walks in the garden, changes his mind, and perhaps even consumes
the food offered to him. He is imagined, in fact, according to the human
society with which J was familiar, as a divine farmer. At the same time,
The Primeval Age 77
Yahweh's activity and presence in the world is expressed in terms of natural

phenomena: rainfall and the processes of fertility in particular. The realm of
agriculture was a sacred sphere full of divine presence and power.
Nature and society are thus conceived by J as part of a single reality, and
they can hardly be discussed meaningfully apart from one another. Nor can
they be played off of one another according to their relative value. To argue
for the primacy of one over the other, of the farmer over arable soil or of arable
soil over the farmer, would certainly have been a puzzling proposition for J.
Their inherent bond, their absolute interdependence, is a foundational fact
of the order established at the origin of the world. J, of course, looks at the
world entirely from the perspective of a human being engaged in highland
agriculture, and his epic may thus be called anthropocentric or seen as pre-
occupied with human experience. But J's perception of the human is so com-
pletely grounded in its physical setting that the human cannot be understood
apart from it. Arable land is not just a stage for the human drama, but the
very source of human life. The drama of the primeval age is not at all merely
human. It involves the delicate interplay and eventual resolution of the rela-
tionship between human behavior and productive soil, between culture and
nature.
The Universal versus the Particular

The interpretation of J's primeval narrative presented here, while aimed at
working out in systematic fashion J's orientation to his natural environment,
challenges several other modes of thought that have become axiomatic in
understanding the biblical conception of origins. One of these is the desig-
nation of the primeval age as an era of universal history, to be distinguished
from the following age as an era of national history depicting Israel's past in
particular. According to this point of view, the episodes in J's preflood nar-
rative are to be read as stones about humanity as a whole. Wellhausen, for
example, believed that "the materials of the narratives in question have not
an Israelite, but a universal ethnic origin;" and Gunkel spoke of "their local-
ity being remote and their sphere of interest the whole world." 120 Of more
recent commentators, George Coats's remarks are representative: "The first
major unit of the OT contains a narrative description of events from long
ago and far away. The principles in the narratives thus have no immediate
contact with the culture or times of historical Israel. They are the subjects of
world history in a primeval period." 121 This description of the beginning of
Genesis is so common that it has become a truism in biblical scholarship.122
Yet the preceding analysis of J's primeval narrative presents quite a dif-
ferent picture. The setting for these stories is the distinctive and particular
environment of biblical Israel, not some general setting or distant terrain. And
its major characters are the kind of hill country farmers typical of the major-
ity of the population of biblical Israel. They are not generic representations
of the human race. Furthermore, the natural environment and the social world
of J's primeval era is essentially the same as that in the ancestral narratives
that take place in the biblical hill country after the flood. J has thus described
creation not in terms of the world as a whole and of humanity in general but
in terms of the precise environment and culture of which he was a part. As
far as J was concerned, adam was the first Israelite farmer and lived on hill
country soil. To describe the primeval period in J's narrative as concerned
with universal human issues, as is the rule, takes no account of the particu-
larity of the narrative and represents a misleading picture of J's view of origins.
In his rendition of the antediluvian age as the beginning of his own world
and culture, J reflects the normal practice in ancient Near Eastern treatments
of origins. Each tradition is designed to provide a foundation narrative for
its own culture and the local realities with which its audience is familiar. The
Sumerian creation tradition documents the founding before the flood of irri-
gation agriculture, the city state, and its royal government. The Atrahasis epic
explains the pattern of human reproduction and the particular social limita-
tions upon it with which Babylonians were familiar. With just such an indig-
enous perspective, J describes in his primeval narrative the origins of his own
highland agricultural setting, its distinctive environment, and its kinship-
based agrarian society. In this regard, the primeval age is just as "national"
in character as the events that follow it.
This sense of the integrity and distinctiveness of each origin tradition
has often been lost on account of the enthusiasm for the parallels between
them. J's flood story in particular has many points of contact with its
Mesopotamian counterparts, and this has led to the view that Israel "bor-
rowed" these traditions from its neighbors. 123 Consequently, the accounts
of the flood and other primeval events have customarily been considered non-
Israelite, a fact that has played into the notion that Israel's origin narrative
reflected a broader sweep of ancient culture than Israel itself and was more
universal in tenor. These traditions, including the interest in creation itself,
have even been considered extraneous to Israel's own theology and a late and
somewhat peripheral addition to J's epic literature. Such was the influential
view of Gerhard von Rad. He held the view that J's primeval traditions "derive
from a totally different sphere of culture and religion" than the rest of J's epic,
and he proposed in his ground-breaking essay on the development of hexa-
teuchal traditions that J's primeval material was the last to be added to Israel's
epic narrative. 124 When Martin Noth composed his monumental History of
Pentateuchal Traditions he did not even include the primeval narrative among
the major themes of pentateuchal literature. Such views of the universal or
nonindigenous character of the biblical account of the creation of the world
and the origin of human society cannot be sustained in the face of the thor-
oughly Israelite character of J's primeval narrative brought to light in the
foregoing analysis.
Myth versus History

Another traditional approach to biblical origin narratives that is challenged
by this interpretation of J's primeval traditions is the characterization of them
as myth. According to traditional views, the primeval narrative is considered
The Primeval Age 79
distinctively mythical, to be distinguished in this regard from the following

material—the traditions about the ancestors, Egypt, and the desert. Hermann
Gunkel, who set out the parameters for twentieth-century discussions of myth
in the Hebrew Bible, separated the stories of the primeval era from the leg-
ends of the patriarchs because he saw in them "a more decidedly 'mythical'
character."125 Since Gunkel, the term myth has been widely used in one sense
or another to attribute to the Bible's origin narratives a special status. 126 This
is a rather complicated issue to evaluate because the term myth has taken on
so many different meanings. Yet in none of its major senses is it a useful cat-
egory for attributing to J's primeval stories a distinctive character that would
set them apart from the stories which follow. Two examples should serve to
illustrate this.
According to one traditional definition, which is primarily philosophi-
cal and literary in character, and which was employed by Gunkel in his work,
myth is a story about gods.127 In the primeval stories, according to Gunkel,
the divinity is the leading actor, while in the legends of the patriarchs, humans
are the real actors. Though he recognized this distinction as a relative one,
Gunkel's views can hardly be maintained on the basis of the picture of J's
primeval narrative presented here. J's major characters, Adam and Eve, Cain
and Abel, and Noah and his family, are real individuals and actors. They play
the same roles in the world and in society that are played by their immediate
descendants in J's epic itself, and that would have been played by the mem-
bers of Israelite society at the time of J. Moreover, God relates to them in the
same way in which he relates to human beings after the flood. The roles
assumed by humans and by God in the primeval narrative are typical of, rather
than different from, their roles in J's epic as a whole and in his own society.
It is therefore misleading to label J's account of origins as myth in this sense.
According to a more phenomenological definition common in the com-
parative study of religion, a myth is a narrative of origins. It has a founda-
tional function, recounting founding events that explain the origins of things
in the world and in society.128 There can be no doubt that this is exactly the
function of J's primeval narratives. They explain and establish the realities
of Israel's environment and its agrarian society down to its smallest details.
At the same time, this function does not set these stories apart from the fol-
lowing ones in J's epic that play the very same role. Like the primeval narra-
tives, the stories of Israel's postdiluvian ancestors describe foundational events
that bring into being the natural realities, for example, the desertification of
the Jordan Valley in the Lot stories, and the social realities, for example, the
power balances between Israel's tribes in the Jacob and Joseph stories, which
are part of J's own world. On the basis of this understanding of myth, J's entire
epic must be identified as myth, or another designation must be discovered
for it. The primeval narrative cannot be distinguished from its larger setting
in J's work in this regard.
One dimension of this second phenomenological understanding of myth
that appears at first to distinguish J's primeval narrative from what follows is
the concept that myths describe primordial time, a time before all history.
They occur in illo tempore, to use the designation of Mircea Eliade.129 In the
sense that J's primeval events take place before the flood that ends the first
age and necessitates a new beginning, these happenings are set off from the
era that follows and in which J and his audience live. At the same time, it
would be incorrect to identify J's primeval events as timeless, as loosened from
history and sequence, or as occurring in a time other than that of everyday
reality. Adam and Eve begin a sequence of generations that, through Noah,
continue throughout the remainder of the epic. The character of time for J's
primeval heroes, their position in the historical flow of human culture, in
every way corresponds with the character of the epic as a whole. While the
flood divides the eras, it does not alter in any basic way the character of time
and the flow of events that comprise human history.
This rejection of the concept of myth as an adequate definition for J's
narrative of origins in the antediluvian period is in no sense a claim that J
has "demythologized" older myth or that J's narratives represent "broken
myth."130 In the manner in which J presents the interaction between divine
and human in the primeval age, in his conception of time, and of the foun-
dational character of antediluvian events, J is no more or less "mythical" or
"historical" than the ancient Near Eastern traditions most comparable to J's
preflood narrative that have been previously discussed. If we have to choose
between myth and history as designations for J's narrative as a whole, it is
most appropriate to call J an historian, as John Van Seters has characterized
him, and to refer to the genre of his narrative as historiography.131 Yet histo-
riography in our age is quite a different phenomenon from what J's narrative
represents.
The most useful approach may be to use terminology that avoids the
ambiguity of myth and the modern connotations of history in order to de-
scribe the character of J's narrative as a whole including its primeval open-
ing. I prefer the term "epic," which has been widely employed for the great
narratives of antiquity that chronicle the deeds of gods and heroes who gave
shape to national cultures. This is the terminology that Frank Cross has
defended for some time as particularly appropriate lor Israelite literature and
its early narrative traditions, J and E in particular. J's primeval narrative, as
J's entire epic, fits well Cross's understanding of epic as "a traditional narra-
tive cycle of an age conceived as 'normative,' the events of which give mean-
ing, self-understanding to a people or nation," a cycle in which the divine
and the human are both participants. 132
The End of the Primeval Age

Finally, the interpretation presented here challenges the scholarly custom of
including in the primeval era everything in Genesis 1-11 until the call of
Abraham in Genesis 12:1.133 According to J, the primeval age actually ends
with the flood. Noah, his sons and their descendants, the tower of Babel,
and Terah's journey from Ur to Haran all belong to the same postdiluvian era
The Primeval Age 81
inhabited by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It will be useful here in conclusion

to pull together the evidence already noted that points in this direction.
The key datum is the adama, the focal point of J's primeval landscape.
In the antediluvian period, as a consequence of the behavior of J's primeval
citizens, it lies under the curse. The growing threat of this curse provides the
leitmotif and drama of the primeval age. The power of the curse reaches its
climax in the catastrophe of the flood and is resolved immediately afterward
by God's decision to lift the curse and promise to ensure the land's produc-
tivity in the postflood era. J never again refers to the curse on arable soil.
Immediately following the flood, the theme of divine blessing, a central
concern of J, is introduced for the first time. It is bestowed upon Noah's son
Shem (9:26), as it will be upon his descendants Abraham (12:2), Isaac (26:3),
and Jacob (28:14, 32:30 [Eng v 29]). The blessing includes in its purview
the land on which Israel's agricultural economy flourished (e.g., 12:2, 7; 26:3),
a large population (e.g., 22:17), and the political hegemony of Israel over its
neighbors (e.g., 9:26-27, 12:2-3, 27:28-29). The divine curse, when it reap-
pears in the postflood era, has only this latter political intention, placing under
its power those peoples who threaten Israel's security (e.g., 12:3, 27:29).
The distinct political orientation of both blessing and curse following
the flood highlights the fact that it is with the descendants of Noah in the
postdiluvian age that J initiates the genealogical etiologies that explain the
national identities and their balances of power that make up the political land-
scape of J's own day. These begin with the blessing of Shem's line (9:26), from
whom Israel's ancestors descend, and the cursing of Canaan's line (9:26),
whose land Israel's ancestors are granted (e.g., 12:6-7) and whose practices
they are prohibited from following (Exod 34:11-16). Such political concerns
and etiologies are not a part of the antediluvian age.134
A second key datum pointing to the flood as the end of J's primeval age
is the behavior of J's heroes, which precipitated the curse on 'adama on the
one hand and led to its resolution on the other. J's major antediluvian fig-
ures, Adam and Cain, are disobedient, acting against explicit divine com-
mands (2:17, 4:7), as are their descendants whose behavior leads to the flood
(6:5-7). Noah by contrast is J's first obedient hero, doing everything Yahweh
commands (7:5). He "finds favor in the eyes of Yahweh" (6:8) and is called
righteous (saddiq, 7:1), the first to be so characterized by these typical J
phrases. His descendants among Israel's ancestors will exhibit these same
traits. Abraham too is obedient to God's commands (12:4), finds favor in God's
eyes (18:3), and is called righteous (15:6).
Noah's behavior is thus contrasted with that of J's antediluvian charac-
ters, who represent a negative image of human living, and presented as para-
digmatic of Israel's ancestors in the postdiluvian era. His first two acts in the
new age only underline his role as the initiator of a new era. Upon disem-
barking from the ark he builds the first altar to God (8:20), an act to be
repeated by Abraham (12:7, 8; 13:8) and Isaac (26:25). Next, Noah plants
a vineyard (9:20), reenacting Yahweh's planting of the garden at creation and
reestablishing highland agriculture as the fundamental pursuit of Israel's

ancestors who descend from him.
J's understanding of the flood as the division between the first and sec-
ond eras of Israel's history has to commend it the common-sense recogni-
tion that the destruction of all life necessitates the beginning of a new age.
This was in fact the view of Mesopotamian traditions of the flood. In the
Sumerian King List, for example, the flood represents the point at which the
institution of kingship, founded first at the beginning of the antediluvian era,
must be lowered from heaven a second time to reconstitute human society.135
In the Atrahasis epic, to cite another case, the pattern of reproduction and
the social constraints to it with which its audience was familiar, were insti-
tuted first immediately after the flood, which brought to an end the imbal-
ances present in the primeval era.136
On this basis, J's antediluvian narrative should be viewed as a distinct
and unified section within his epic of Israel's origins as a whole. It should be
read as a unified literary complex describing creation, early history, and flood,
the kind of literary complex represented in other ancient Near Eastern pri-
meval traditions.137 What is distinctive about J's primeval narrative is the way
it founds, at the origin of time, the natural landscape and social structures
typical of the agricultural society of biblical Israel.
3
The Ancestors in Canaan
They themselves emerge from the antique gloom of consecrated
tradition with forms molded by generations of recital. . . . They
are full of incident and character; and they are firmly rooted in
the soil.
J. Estlin Carpenter, The Hexateuch
The second major section of the Yahwist's epic begins in Genesis 9 with the
family of Noah, the only human survivors of the flood, and concludes with
the emigration of Jacob's family to Egypt in Genesis 45-50. Its narratives are
dominated by stories of Israel's ancestors residing in the Canaanite hill coun-
try that made up the heartland of biblical Israel. Of these ancestors, the fami-
lies of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are given by far the most attention. The
stories of these three families in the hills of Canaan reveal most about the
Yahwist's environment and his attitudes toward it in this part of the epic.
This one section of the Yahwist's epic accounts for more than half of its
total length, and by the simple virtue of size it dominates the epic as a whole.
Some, including the father of the documentary study of the Pentateuch, Julius
Wellhausen, have considered it the very heart of J's narrative. "The story of
the Patriarchs, which belongs to this document almost entirely, is what best
marks its character; that story is not here dealt with merely as a summary
introduction to something of greater importance which is to follow, but as a
subject of primary importance, deserving the fullest treatment possible."1 The
same conclusion has been reached in a recent study of J by the literary critic
Harold Bloom, who considers these stories of Israel's ancestors the "narra-
tive center" of the epic, framed by the primeval and exodus stories that take
their significance from these ancestral narratives. 2 Peter Ellis, while believ-
83
ing that the Yahwist's epic reaches its climax with the Sinai covenant, recog-
nized the dominant place of the ancestral narratives. "Structurally viewed
the saga bulges in the center. Even if there had been an account of the con-
quest joined to the Exodus and Numbers sections of the national history, the
800 verses given to the patriarchal history would still seem long. Any analy-
sis of the saga as a whole, therefore, must take this imbalance into account."3
Yet no such central significance has been attributed to the accounts of
Israel's ancestors in this part of J's epic by most biblical scholars over the past
century. The prevailing view has been, in fact, to regard the ancestral narra-
tive as an introduction or prologue to a more important event to follow. That
event has by most been identified as the exodus from Egypt. This point of
view was put into classical form for the last generation of biblical scholars by
Gerhard von Rad. According to von Rad, the ancestral narratives are for J in
no sense crucial in themselves; they are only significant as they point toward
the exodus and settlement traditions that follow. In J's hands, "the whole
patriarchal period has ceased to be regarded as significant in itself; it is now
no more than a time of promise pointing to a fulfillment outside itself. . . . In
this way the whole relationship between God and the patriarchs is presented
as a preparatory stage, which reached its fulfillment only in the divine rev-
elation, and in the appropriation of it by the community descended from the
patriarchs."4 This judgment that the center of J's interests lies outside the
ancestral narratives and that the ancestral narratives are preparatory in char-
acter is reflected in Martin Noth's influential study of Pentateuchal traditions,
Claus Westermann's monumental Genesis commentary, and by most who
have recently taken up the study of J in particular, including Peter Ellis, Robert
Coote, and John Van Seters.5
In spite of this more recent tradition of scholarship, Wellhausen's early
sense of the strategic importance of the ancestral narratives in J's ideology
still has much in its favor. In the first place, the heavy reliance of the "prepa-
ratory" school on external literary models for assessing the structure and focus
of J's epic should be pointed out. This is particularly true for von Rad and
the many who have been influenced by him. Rather than starting with J's epic
itself, von Rad read and analyzed it through the lens of a set of "historical
creeds"—especially Deuteronomy 26:5b-9, and 6:20-24, and Joshua 24:2b-
13—which he believed to be older than, and the sources of, J's traditions,
both problematic presumptions.6 Since these creedal texts highlight the exo-
dus and settlement motifs, von Rad took these events to be central for the
Yahwist as well.
A second external literary lens through which J has been interpreted is
the later Priestly Writer, who aimed through a series of additions to J to re-
orient the perspective of the old traditions. P's major reorientation of the older
Yahwistic traditions was to shift their focus to Mt. Sinai, where the cult was
instituted, a reorientation P accomplished by the insertion into the narra-
tives of a series of covenants (Gen 9:1-17, 17:1-27, Exod 31:12-17) culmi-
nating at Sinai, and by the incorporation into the Sinai narrative of a massive
corpus of cultic and social law. While there can be no doubt that the center
The Ancestors in Canaan 85
of the Priestly Work into which J was incorporated lies at Mt. Sinai, the ques-
tion must be raised whether P's perspective is also J's.
When the Yahwist's epic is considered on its own merits, a number of
its features point to the central position of the ancestral narratives. First, of
course, is the sheer size of the ancestral materials when compared to the rest
of J's narratives. One does not expect the longest and central movement of
the epic narrative to be devoted entirely to preparatory matters. Second is
the manner in which the ancestral narratives provide the focal point for the
narratives that precede and follow them. The primeval narrative is the pro-
logue to the ancestral narratives, founding in the first age of world history
the environmental and social realities that will be the basis for the ancestral
stories which follow. And the Egypt, desert, and Sinai experiences are pre-
sented as a temporary exile from the hill country in which the ancestral nar-
ratives take place. J's southern narratives in Exodus and Numbers are con-
stantly and thoroughly oriented toward the Canaanite hill country, a fact that
will be addressed in detail in chapter 4.
Furthermore, the Yahwist's interest in explaining Israel's place in the
world, its relation to its land and its neighbors, is worked out more fully here
than in any other section of the epic. The manner in which this is accom-
plished is in large part the aim of the following analysis. At the outset of this
analysis of the ancestral narratives, it is important not to dismiss them as
possessing a merely preparatory or subsidiary character. The view of the land
and the relationship of people to it in these stories is in no way a secondary
concern to J. J's views disclosed in the ancestral narratives lie at the very heart
of his sense of place and theology of nature.
The Environment of the Ancestral Age:

Israelite Highland Agriculture
The lives and movements of Israel's ancestors in the book of Genesis have
been taken to provide some of the strongest evidence for the Bible's pastoralist
orientation. The herds and tents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have suggested
a nomadic existence for these patriarchs and their families, a suggestion only
strengthened by their frequent migrations across the countryside. In its clas-
sical form, shaped substantially by Albrecht Alt, this approach connected
Israel's ancestors with a kind of pure pastoral nomadism, which originated
in the desert away from settled areas and maintained a distinct economy and
set of social norms, until it slowly evolved with sedentarization into the agri-
cultural life characteristic of biblical Israel.7
As has been noted in chapter 1, such a pure form of autonomous desert
pastoral nomadism—based as it is on outdated views of the ecological set-
ting, social structure, and history of societies in the biblical environs and time
frame—can no longer be used as a model for understanding Israelite origins
or its social organization. 8 Yet the image of Israel's ancestors as pastoral no-
mads, completely distinct in their economy and customs from sedentary
Canaanite farmers, has been in the past century the most common lens for
reading the ancestral narratives. Both Gerhard von Rad and Martin Moth relied
heavily on Albrecht Alt's reconstruction of patriarchal origins and life-styles.9
And many readers before and since would not quarrel with Julius Well-
hausen's image of the patriarchal families: "They are all peace-loving shep-
herds, inclined to live quietly beside their tents."10
Because of the serious problems new scholarship has raised about the
kind of pure, desert-based pastoral nomadism posited for Israel's ancestors
by most scholars in the first half of the twentieth century, several modified
pictures of Israel's ancestors have been proposed. An early one, argued in
one form or another by both W. F. Albright and C. H. Gordon, explained the
ancestors' nomadic activity as linked to their occupation as traders and to
the donkey caravans they employed in this pursuit.'' Such mercantile nomad-
ism was seen as the explanation for the frequent movement of Israel's ances-
tors in Canaan and for their contacts with Syria and Egypt as well.
A more recent modification of the traditional understanding of Israel's
ancestors as pastoral nomads is developed by Robert Coote and David Ord
in their study of the Yahwist. 12 According to Coote and Ord, J's society was
made up almost entirely of "peasants," small farmers in the Canaanite hill
country, yet J portrayed their ancestors as nomadic pastoralists, as Bedouin
such as inhabited the southern deserts in the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula.
This was done, according to Coote, not because nomadic pastoralism repre-
sented the origin of the majority of Israel's population or because it was still
preserved in the customs or ideology of sedentary Israelites, but primarily
for a strategic reason. David needed the loyalty of the southern Bedouin as a
buffer to protect his state from Egyptian threats. The Yahwist, David's court
historian, therefore wrote his epic for the ears of the Bedouin sheikh in atten-
dance at David's court, casting the history of Israel in terms of his culture to
invite and solidify Bedouin support for David's kingdom. In this case, the
ancestors are in fact interpreted as pastoral nomads just as in traditional schol-
arship. But the purpose of this portrayal has been radically revised.
A third modification of the traditional view has exerted by far the great-
est influence on recent understandings of the economy of Israel's ancestors.
This modification springs largely from recent investigations undertaken by
M. B. Rowton, J. T. Luke, and V. H. Matthews into the relationships between
pastoralist and urban populations at the Syrian site of Mari during the early
second millennium B.C.E. 13 According to these studies, pastoralism in the
Levant, including that practiced by Israel's ancestors, needs to be reconceived
as "seminomadic" or "enclosed" (Rowton) pastoralism. In this type of herd-
ing, pastoralists are involved in a symbiotic relationship with sedentary areas
as part of a "dimorphic" (Rowton) society. They are neither isolated from
urban areas nor self-sufficient. They dwell rather in semiarid zones contigu-
ous with their sedentary neighbors and rely on the trade of pastoral for agri-
cultural goods. They may even practice some cultivation themselves to
supplement their herding economy. Their mobility is transhumant, follow-
ing a rather regular movement from pasture to pasture dictated by the sea-
sonal year.
Such an economy of seminomadic pastoralism has now been taken over

widely as a model for understanding the ecological orientation of the ances-
tral narratives. It has been employed by Rowton, Luke, and Matthews them-
selves to illuminate the stories of Genesis.14 And it is being adopted by biblical
scholars as well. William Dever, for example, employs it in his reconstruc-
tion of the patriarchal period of Israelite history, as does Claus Westermann
in his commentary on the patriarchal narratives.15
The new understanding of Israel's ancestors as specialized, seminomadic
pastoralists interacting with their sedentary neighbors in a dimorphic soci-
ety has many advantages over the older view of them as isolated desert
pastoralists. Yet even here a rather sharp distinction between nomadic pas-
toralism and sedentary agriculture is maintained that does not deal precisely
enough with all of the details in J's portrait of his ancestors. Some details in
the ancestral narratives identify them as residents of the arable land itself who
are involved in its cultivation. Moreover, certain features of these stories often
connected with nomadism, especially herds and movements, may not in the
end reflect nomadism at all. As was the case with the Yahwist's primeval
narrative, his ancestral narrative must be carefully reexamined to discover
the ecological setting it assumes before the Yahwist's attitudes toward the
environment in this section of the epic can be properly understood. 16
Sedentary Agriculture in the Ancestral Narratives

The Yahwist's portrait of Israel's ancestors contains numerous details that
associate them directly with sedentary agriculture and point to this setting
as the perspective from which their stories are told. One of the most impor-
tant of these is the divine gift of land to Israel's ancestors and their descen-
dants, a distinctively prominent theme in J and one that provides a key uni-
fying motif to the epic's entire postflood era. 17 According to J, Abraham is
the primary recipient of the promises of the land. The first promise is deliv-
ered to him at Shechem (Gen 12:6—7), the second in the vicinity of Bethel
and Ai (13:14-17), and the third at Hebron and its environs (13:18,15:7-21).
To Abraham's grandson Jacob the promise of land is repeated at Bethel
(28:13-16), and to his son Isaac it is delivered in the area of Beersheba and
Gerar (26:2-5, 23-25, 32-33).
The crucial fact that emerges from this series of land grants is that they
cede to Abraham and his descendants the agricultural heartland of biblical
Israel. Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron are the old centers—in the north, cen-
ter, and south—of the Canaanite hill country. They mark out a line along
the top of this mountain range, where the humid climate is conducive to
intensive agriculture and where the choicest arable tracts in these highlands
are located. The ancestors are thus linked, not to the semiarid zones to the
east and south of this territory that were conducive to specialized pastoral-
ism and in which the modern Bedouin still reside, but rather with the richest
agricultural land of the Israelite highlands, traditionally inhabited by seden-
tary farmers. Ownership of land, a fixed asset, is characteristic of sedentary
societies, but less so of nomads, whose primary capital rests in their mobile
herds.
The residents of the semiarid and arid zones close to the hill country are
not Israel's ancestors but the ancestors of Israel's neighbors. Ishmael, father
of the Ishmaelites, is the best example. Banished from Abraham's household
into the semiarid or arid territory (midbar) south of Hebron, his mother Hagar
receives there an announcement of Ishmael's birth that destines him to re-
side in this area, moving across it like the wild ass (pere) and living in ten-
sion with his sedentary neighbors (16:7-12). The only exception to this pat-
tern that links Israel's ancestors with the humid highlands lies in the grant
of land between Beersheba and Gerar to Abraham's son Isaac. While cultiva-
tion is practiced in these areas, their semiarid climate makes them more con-
ducive to an emphasis on stock raising within the mix of cultivation and
herding that characterizes Mediterranean agriculture. The sites of Beersheba
and Gerar will be taken up in more detail when the pastoral aspects of ances-
tral farming are examined.
In all of these accounts of Yahweh's gift of the land, J consistently uses
the general term 'eres instead of the more particular adama, arable soil. There
appear to be two reasons for this. First, the land in the Canaanite highlands
promised to Abraham and his descendants was in J's time composed not only
of arable tracts but also of grazing and forested areas that made up a consid-
erable portion of these hillsides. For such terrain with diverse land uses, the
general eres is a more adequate and inclusive designation.18 Second, one of
J's interests in the postdiluvian period is to describe the origins of the actual
political units that comprised his world and thereby to explain and legiti-
mate their relationships and the balances of power between them. For this
purpose the term eres, employed characteristically by J to designate a coun-
try or political territory, is the appropriate one.19
Not only are Israel's ancestors granted possession of the hill country with
its prime arable land, they are also pictured as residents at home in it. One of
the ways in which J achieves this is through a precise use of the vocabulary
for residential status. An expression J consistently avoids using for Israel's
ancestors as residents of the hill country is the word ger, "resident alien," an
individual who lived outside of his own landed property and outside the
protection of his own kinship structures. 20 J reserves this term only for those
instances when Israel's ancestors travel outside the hill country and take up
temporary residence away from home: in Egypt (Gen 12:10, 15:13, 47:4),
Philistia (Gen 21:34, 26:3), or Syria (Gen 32:5). For their residence in the
hill country, J employs the verb yasab, "live, dwell" (e.g., Gen 13:7,18; 22:9;
24:3; 34:10). Thus J does not present his ancestors in the highlands as an
unlanded, transient folk, whether foreign immigrants or nomadic pastoralists.
For J, they are firmly rooted in the hill country and are temporary, alien resi-
dents only when outside of it. This point of view is reinforced by the naming
of the hill country as Jacob's own land (Gen 30:25, 32:10) or the land of his
ancestors (Gen 31:3), when he is temporarily residing in Syria. Furthermore,
J's ancestors purchase no property from others in the hill country as they are
pictured as doing by the Elohistic (Gen 33:19—20) and Priestly writers (Gen
23:1-20).
J's perspective contrasts clearly with the Priestly Writer's in this regard.
According to P, Israel's ancestors aregenm, resident aliens, in the hill coun-
try itself. In fact, one of P's characteristic expressions for the hill country,
the heartland of biblical Israel, is eres megurehem, "the land of their sojourn-
ing/alien residence" (Gen 17:8, 28:4, 36:7, 37:1; Exod 6:4; cf. Gen 23:4, 35:27).
P's terminology may have less to do with an understanding of his ancestors
as seminomadic pastoralists residing temporarily among their native, seden-
tary neighbors than with his interest in distinguishing sharply between the
stages of Israelite history. The promise alone was delivered to the ancestors,
according to P, and the actual possession of the land was not accomplished
until a later period. These two aspects of the ancestors' alien status in the hill
country may not be unrelated. In any event, they provide a clear contrast to
the view of J on this matter.
J's portrait of Israel's ancestors as landed people at home in the Israelite
highlands appears to be challenged by the occasional reference to them liv-
ing in tents, because such are characteristic of nomadic populations in the
surrounding semiarid zones. Yet J describes the kinds of homes inhabited by
Israel's ancestors in a variety of ways. In some cases, they are pictured living
in houses (battim; Gen 27:14, 29:13, 33:17) rather than in tents (ohalim).
Moreover, the common Hebrew idiom for the extended family, bet ab, "house
(hold) of the father," which is related to the Israelite multiple-family village
compound, is employed by J for ancestral households (e.g., Gen 7:1, 12:1,
15:3, 18:19, 30:30, 38:11, 46:31).21 In certain instances, when tents are men-
tioned, the contexts rule out nomadic life-styles. Noah, a tender of vineyards
(Gen 9:20), which demand long-term sedentary farming, lies down in his tent
( ohel; 9:21). In other instances, references to tents carry idiomatic rather than
literal meanings. For example, when Jacob is contrasted to his brother Esau,
a man of the field ('issadeh), as one sitting in tents (yoseb ohalim), the phrase
likely carries the simple sense of "staying at home," a homebody (25:27).22
The occasional references to tents in J's ancestral narratives thus do not
necessarily depict Israel's ancestors as seminomadic pastoralists.23 Two ex-
planations for their mention appear most likely. First, tents may be employed
for specialized tasks within the mixed agricultural economy typical of bibli-
cal Israel. For example, they may be used in the field during peak work periods
such as the harvest or by members of the family watching the household's
flocks some distance from home. Second, many of J's references to tents occur
in the course of his account of Abraham's initial journey through Canaan from
north to south (12:8; 1.3:3, 18; 18:1), a journey that has as its purpose the
granting of land to Abraham and his descendents and his laying claim to it,
and does not reflect the patterns of transhumant pastoralism typical in the
environs of the Israelite hill country. The nature of such ancestral travels will
be taken up in more detail later in the discussion of pastoralist aspects of
ancestral narratives.
The sedentary character of J's ancestors is also illustrated by their close
association with the urban areas of the hill country. Of course, pastoralists
may have close and repeated contact with urban populations, as is charac-
teristic of the societies in Mari and its environs.24 But the behavior of J's ances-
tors goes somewhat beyond this. Abraham builds altars at Shechem (Gen
12:6-7), Bethel (12:8, 13:3-4), and Hebron (13:18), which are certainly
understood by J to legitimate Israel's worship at these cities in his own day.
Isaac builds an altar in the city of Beersheba, thus founding its sanctuary (Gen
26:23-25). In this case, by the digging of a new well, Isaac even founds the
city itself, or at least provides it with a new name (26:25, 32-33). Such activ-
ity hardly suggests a pastoral orientation for Israel's ancestors or for the
Yahwist who placed their narratives at the heart of Israel's epic.
Descriptions of Israel's ancestors actually cultivating their land adds
further evidence to J's portrait of them as sedentary farmers. Taken together,
these descriptions outline the same kind of grain-based, dryland farming
founded in the primeval age as the typical pursuit of human society. One of
the clearest portrayals of this agricultural setting is found in Isaac's patrimo-
nial blessing of his son Jacob, granting him the family's inheritance:
Oh, the scent of my son
like the scent of the field
which Yahweh has blessed.
May God grant to you
the dew of the skies
and the plenty of the earth,
an abundance of grain and wine. (Gen 27:27-28)25
Such a blessing requests for Jacob the same divine powers associated with
Yahweh in the primeval age: the production of rain in the skies and fertility
in the earth. First and foremost, it bestows the hope for an abundance of grain
(cf. 27:37).26
A grain-based agricultural economy such as this is reflected in the prac-
tice of Isaac himself, who is described as sowing grain (wayyizra') and reap-
ing an abundant harvest (Gen 26:12). It can be seen as well in the story of
Joseph, whose brothers travel to Egypt for the express purpose of buying
grain, their supplies having been exhausted because of a lack of rainfall in
the hill country causing drought and crop failure (Gen 43:1-2, 44:1-2). Vig-
nettes of cereal cultivation can also be seen in the Elohist's work, a docu-
ment with an ecological orientation similar to the Yahwist's, when Reuben
returns from the wheat harvest (qesir hittim; 30:14) and Joseph dreams of
his brothers binding sheaves in the field (37:5-8). It may be that the Yahwist's
distinctive image for the ancestors' multitude of descendants, ka'apar ha ares
"like the soil of the earth" (Gen 13:16, 28:14), was intended to recall the
creation of the farmer from the soil he was destined to farm (Gen 2:7, 3:19).
The diet of Israel's ancestors illustrates this reliance on cereal produc-
tion. In the meals of Israel's ancestors, of Abraham (18:5-6) and Lot (19:3),
of Isaac (27:17) and his sons Jacob and Esau (25:34), and of Jacob's sons
(37:25), bread is the staple. 27 In fact, bread (lehem) is so basic to the ances-
tral diet that, in J's diction, bread becomes almost synonymous with "food"
(e.g., 47:12, 15) and "eating bread" synonymous with partaking of a meal
(e.g., 37:25; 43:25, 32). The ancestral diet also included lentils ('adasim), the
primary ingredient of the stew Jacob prepares for Esau, thereby attributing
the cultivation of legumes along with grain to Israel's ancestors.28
As was typical of agriculture in biblical Israel and has been typical
throughout the Mediterranean highlands until today, grain production was
combined by Israel's ancestors with horticulture and viticulture, the grow-
ing of trees and vines for their fruit. For the Yahwist, this aspect of ancestral
agriculture is described primarily in terms of the cultivation of vineyards and
the production from them of wine. Vineyards are mentioned specifically in
relation to Noah, the first farmer after the flood (9:20-21), to Isaac and Jacob
in Isaac's patrimonial blessing (27:27-28), and finally, to Judah in the bless-
ing of Jacob (49:11-12) that concludes the ancestral narratives. 29 Wine is a
typical beverage at ancestral meals (9:21, 19:32-34, 27:25). While cereal
cultivation can be practiced as a supplemental activity by seminomadic
pastoralists, as it is by the modern Bedouin, tending vineyards is a sedentary
occupation, demanding a long-term investment in the land before its fruits
can be harvested.30 This aspect of ancestral farming, together with the rest of
the data surveyed above, points to the conclusion that J pictured his ances-
tors engaged in the sedentary agriculture typical of biblical Israel in his day.
Pastoralism within a Mixed Agrarian Economy

According to the Yahwist, Israel's ancestors were pastoralists. They raised
and owned livestock, an activity that plays a major role in a number of J's
narratives. It is this occupation that is noticed first by most readers of these
stories and, as has been noted, has come to define the economy of Israel's
ancestors in an exclusive sense. Given the evidence for the ancestors' involve-
ment in sedentary agriculture just described, their herding of livestock must
be looked at anew and reevaluated. When this is attempted, key features of
the ancestors' pastoralism may be recognized as fitting best into the mixed
agrarian economy typical of biblical Israel, in which the raising of animals
was one aspect of sedentary village agriculture based on the cultivation of
grains and fruits.
The ancestors' livestock The kinds of animals owned by J's ancestors is one
important factor that points in this direction. The animals J attributes to the
ancestors—sheep and goats (so'n), cattle (baqar), donkeys (hamorim/'atonot),
and camels (gemallim)—are the same domestic species characteristic of sed-
entary sites from the biblical period for which archaeologists have analyzed
faunal remains. At Iron Age sites in the hill country and its immediate envi-
rons, based on numbers of bones found, sheep and goats were the most numer-
ous, making up on average about two-thirds of the animal population; cattle
were next, normally at a third or less of the population; and donkeys and cam-
els accounted for much smaller percentages.31 This population pattern in the
livestock of sedentary agriculturalists is reflected exactly in the order by which

Israel's ancestors' animals are listed. Sheep and goats always precede cattle in
J's lists of animals, and these two types of animals are often mentioned alone
without reference to other species (e.g., Gen 12:16, 26:14, 50:8).32 When don-
keys and camels are included in J's enumerations, they regularly follow flocks
and herds (e.g., Gen 12:16, 24:35, 32:6).33 Thus, in the kinds of animals J at-
tributes to Israel's ancestors, as well as in the order in which they are enumer-
ated, the ancestral livestock mirror the domestic animal populations known
to have made up the pastoral component of sedentary agricultural towns and
villages in the Iron Age, the period of biblical Israel.
Particular attention must be directed to the place of cattle in J's ances-
tral narratives. Not only are they regularly listed with sheep and goats among
the ancestors' possessions, they occur at other important points in the narra-
tive as well. A heifer ('egla) is one of the animals ritually killed in the cov-
enant ceremony God initiates with Abraham (15:9—10). And a calf (ben-baqar)
is slaughtered for a meal Abraham provides for a party of guests who visit
him at Hebron (18:7-8). Of all of the animals attributed to Israel's ancestors,
cattle are the clearest indicator of a sedentary society. They are primarily
raised in the hill country as draft animals, being used to plow the fields for
the production of grain. Thus their high profile among the ancestors' pos-
sessions most likely reflects an economy involved in intensive cultivation. 34
The sheep and goats owned by Israel's ancestors are not directly involved
with cultivation. Just the opposite: they are raised as a supplement to the
growing of crops in order to diversify the economy and thereby limit the risk
of subsistence farming. They supplement the agrarian diet with dairy prod-
ucts and, to a lesser extent, meat and they provide wool for clothing. Through
their supplementation of the diet and their exploitation of pasture lands, a
different environmental niche than arable land for crops, they give the sub-
sistence farmer a broader, more stable base for survival.35 As such, sheep and
goats represent one part of a mixed agricultural economy.
One indicator that sheep and goats play this complementary role in a
sedentary agricultural economy is J's reference to the herdsmen of Israel's
ancestors. Both Abraham and Lot have shepherds (ro'im) working for them
(13:7-8), as do Isaac and Abimelech, king of Gerar (26:20). Specialized herds-
men such as these are typical of agrarian societies in which the care of a
family's or village's flocks are entrusted to professional shepherds who make
up a minority of the population. Such professionals may graze their employ-
ers' herds near the village or take them to distant pastures for extended peri-
ods. By contrast, specialized herdsmen are uncharacteristic of nomadic soci-
eties in which the majority of the population is involved in the maintenance
of the herds and in the periodic mobility demanded by seasonal changes in
pasturage.36 In both the Abraham-Lot and the Isaac-Abimelech narratives,
quarrels and conflict are initiated by the shepherds, a narrative detail that
likely arises from the low estimation of such specialized herdsmen in settled
agrarian societies. 37
In this context, Joseph's presentation of his family to Pharaoh deserves

consideration (Gen 46:28—34, 47:1—6), because it appears to contradict the
picture that has just been described. When introducing his brothers to the
king of Egypt, Joseph instructs his brothers to tell Pharaoh they have all been
shepherds since their youth, and not only themselves but their ancestors as
well (46:34). This would appear to define all of the ancestors exclusively as
specialized pastoralists, rather than as farmers involved in a mixed agricul-
tural economy. Such in fact is the interpretation commonly derived from this
account.38
Yet the details of the story suggest just the opposite. In the first place,
Joseph's need to instruct his brothers carefully about their occupation as
specialized pastoralists would hardly have been necessary if this in fact is what
they were (46:34). His emphasis on this occupation—"from our youth until
now, and not only we but our ancestors as well" (46:34, 47:3)—is suspect in
the same sense. Such precise and overly stated instructions are best under-
stood if such a profession had not been theirs, or if this were only one aspect
of a mixed agricultural economy in which they were involved.39 In the sec-
ond place, Joseph's instructions are presented not as an identification of the
traditional occupation of his family but as a strategy for their settlement in
foreign territory: "Say, 'your servants are herders of livestock' . . . in order
that (ba'abur) you may live in the land of Goshen" (46:34). Because shep-
herds were regarded with disdain by the Egyptians, Israel's ancestors would
not in such an occupation threaten their Egyptian hosts, and they would be
allowed to exploit a specialized and undesirable economic niche (46:34). In
fact, the Pharaoh even places his own livestock in Jacob's care (47:6).
One final point deserves mention regarding J's presentation of the live-
stock of Israel's ancestors. Because of J's special interest in the southern tribe
of Judah and because his narratives place Israel's ancestors for the most part
in the south, in Hebron and Beersheba and their environs, J has customarily
been thought of as a southerner. Due to poorer soil and less rainfall, the south-
ern hill country does not have the quantity of choice arable land found in
the north. Conversely, the south has a greater quantity of grazing land, more
suitable for raising livestock than intensive cultivation. As a result, the pas-
toral aspects of the mixed economy of Mediterranean farming have gener-
ally been given greater emphasis in the south.40 If J's models for Israel's ances-
tors were the wealthy southern farmers with whom he was familiar, it is not
surprising that J would take special delight in extolling their wealth by list-
ing the herds they possessed (e.g., 12:16, 24:35, 32:15). Such a practice may
reflect the balance of herding to cultivation in the south rather than any ex-
clusive pursuit of a pastoralist economy. 41
Indeed, it is misleading when speaking of the Israelite hill country and
its environs to separate herding from cultivation. It is better to think in terms
of a continuum between them. The question is not which one is practiced
but in what combination and with what balance in the economy. For J, Israel's
ancestors were wealthy southern farmers, with an economy based in the sed-
entary cultivation of grains and fruits, and supplemented with the extensive
herding possible on the pastures of the southern hill country.
The ancestors' journeys One further aspect of the ancestral narratives de-
serves specific attention because it has played such a major role in the assess-
ment of J's ancestors as pastoral nomads. That is their mobility, their move-
ment from place to place, a feature of their life-style that has been almost
automatically identified with nomadism.42 Indeed, J's ancestral narratives are
full of migrations. Following the flood, Noah's descendants move east into
the Mesopotamian river valley (Gen 11:1—2). From here, Abraham's family
moves west via Syria to the Canaanite hill country (11:28-30; 12:l-4a, 6).
After taking up residence in these highlands, the ancestors take trips to Egypt
twice, once by Abraham (12:10—20) and once by Jacob (46:28—34), to Philistia
(by Isaac, 26:1-33), and to Syria (by Jacob, 27:41-45). In addition, they move
within the hill country itself, locating at its major towns, Shechem, Bethel,
and Hebron, as does Abraham upon his initial arrival (Gen 12:6-9, 13:18).
The key question that must be asked in order to determine the signifi-
cance of these movements is the purpose for which they were undertaken.
Jacob's trip to Syria, for example, was motivated by his brother's plot to kill
him, not by any pastoralist demands. In fact, the pattern of movement de-
scribed in the ancestral narratives bears little resemblance to the kind of trans-
humance or regular seasonal migration practiced by specialized pastoralists
in the vicinity of the Canaanite highlands. Such transhumant pastoralists in
general exploit the semiarid grazing lands in the eastern hills, the Negev to
the south, and the Judean Desert. Their movement in these areas between
the rainy and dry seasons normally covers a range of only thirty-seven miles
in the Negev and twelve in the Judean Desert, and then in a rather regular
annual pattern. 43 Regular transhumance in these areas and over these dis-
tances does not characterize the ancestors, who instead travel between dif-
ferent countries and within the humid agricultural zones in the heart of the
biblical hill country.
The real purpose of the movements of Israel's ancestors in J's narratives
has to do with the basic etiological aim of the epic. In this regard, the major
characters function as eponymous ancestors; they represent the national
groups of J's own world whose names they carry. Their interactions with one
another are narrated to explain and legitimate relationships and balances of
power, ideal or real, which J wished to validate. Their activities are described
primarily in order to show the origins of and to legitimate circumstances with
which J's audience was familiar.44 In this sense, J's ancestral narratives carry
forward the etiological goals already encountered in the primeval narrative.
It is within this context that the ancestors' movements in J must be pri-
marily understood. In regard to the ancestors' travels within Canaan itself,
Wellhausen understood this very well: "The patriarchal journeys up and down
in JE are not designed to represent them as wandering nomads, but serve to
bring them in contact with all the sacred places with which they had special
associations." 45 Such is exactly J's intent in narrating the stops of Abraham
at Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron. J uses this itinerary for two purposes. At
each site Abraham and his ancestors are granted the land and its environs,
thus establishing possession of the entire hill country; and at each site
Abraham builds an altar, thus founding and legitimating the Yahwistic sanc-
tuaries at the hill country's major urban centers. It is first and foremost to
claim the land and to establish its major sanctuaries that J's Abraham
moves from place to place, not to respond to the demands of transhumant
pastoralism.
When the ancestors travel outside the hill country, into the territories of
other ancient Near Eastern governments, the ultimate etiological goal of these
travelogues in J's epic is to define the nature of the relationship between the
Israelite descendants of its ancestors and the descendants of these neighbor-
ing peoples. Jacob's trip to Haran, for example, provides a historical expla-
nation for features of the Israelite-Aramean relationship in J's day. Jacob's
marriage to Laban's daughters signifies the ancient connections Israel believed
to exist between itself and the Arameans (29:1-30), and the treaty between
Jacob and Laban establishes the border between the lands of these two peoples
(31:49).46 A story such as this is not about pastoral nomadism but about
political alliances. Even at the surface level of the narrative, pastoral nomad-
ism is not an obvious feature. While Jacob does herd sheep and goats as a
youth (25:27, 30:25-43), his travels are not related to this. He goes to Laban
to escape his brother's rage and save his life (27:41-45), moving in the pro-
cess from one town to another (26:33, 27:1, 29:4).
By far the most significant relocation of Israel's ancestors outside of the
hill country occurs at the end of Genesis when Jacob's family moves down
to Egypt. This important journey is prefigured in an earlier story about
Abraham's trip to Egypt (12:10-20), a narrative that has many parallels to
the subsequent account of Jacob and his family. 47 In the case of Jacob's fam-
ily, the initial trip to Egypt is undertaken not as part of a regular pattern of
seasonal transhumance but as a result of extraordinary climatic conditions
that produced a serious drought. Moreover, the trip is motivated not by de-
creasing pasturage but by a dwindling supply of grain and increasingly se-
vere famine conditions (42:5, 43:1-2). On the initial trip, the entire family is
not involved. Only the sons are sent to purchase grain while the household
head, Jacob, remains at his residence in the hill country. The final move is a
major relocation, requiring numerous wagons and pack animals (45:16-28).
These details are less characteristic of a seminomadic society whose entire
population is involved in a regular pattern of transhumance to maintain their
herds than they are of an agricultural family in the southern hill country whose
crops have suffered repeated failure and who have become refugees emigrat-
ing in the hope of survival. Such is the portrait of J's ancestors at the surface
level of the narrative.
At the etiological level, the ancestral move to Egypt is designed by J to
explain and define the relations between Egypt and Israel in his own day.
These relations, in light of J's treatment of them, are unusually complex and
paradoxical. On the one hand, Egypt is a haven preserving the lives of Israel's
ancestors. On the other hand, by enslaving its ancestors (Exod 1:8-12) and
nearly wiping them out at the sea (Exodus 14-15), it represents the greatest
threat to Israel's existence. The character of this complex relationship will
be analyzed in greater detail in chapter 4. Even this brief survey should make
it clear, however, that the movement of Israel's ancestors to Egypt in J's epic
is narrated not in the context of seminomadic pastoralism but with the aim
of defining the relationship between two agricultural societies.
Isaac's journey to Gerar in the land of the Philistines (Gen 26) is, of all
the ancestral movements in J, the one that might best be explained in terms
of seminomadic pastoralism and seasonal transhumance. 48 It takes place
within the semiarid zone south of the hill country that was particularly con-
ducive to such an economy and it involves disputes over water sources for
Isaac's herds. Yet as the conclusion of the narrative clearly indicates, its ulti-
mate purpose is to bring Isaac into contact with the Philistines in order to
establish the city of Beersheba and its water supply as ancient Israelite prop-
erty (vv 23—25, 32-33), to lay claim to various water sources between
Beersheba and Gerar (vv 17-22), and to validate those claims through a treaty
agreed to by Isaac and the king of Gerar (vv 26—31). Territorial claims such
as these, all characteristic of a landed kingdom such as the Israel of J's time,
lie behind this story and the movements of Isaac depicted in it. Even in its
narrative details, some of which have already been referred to, Isaac is pic-
tured as a southern farmer, cultivating grain (v 12) and having in his house-
hold specialized herdsmen (v 20), just as does Abimelech of Gerar.
One other ancestral journey deserves attention, Abraham's move from
Ur in the Mesopotamian river valley to the Canaanite hill country (11:28—30,
12:l-4a, cf. 15:7). According to one influential school of thought, which held
that Israel's ancestors could be located historically at the beginning of the
second millennium, at least a thousand years before J's epic, Abraham's migra-
tion was associated with the movements of the Amorites, an important group
at this time believed to be nomads from the desert fringes.49 However, in the
face of serious challenges to the early second millennium dating of the patri-
archs and to the traditional interpretation of the Amorites, such a nomadic
background for Abraham's journey can no longer be defended.50 In tact, ac-
cording to J, Abraham leaves an urban area, Ur, and immediately locates in
other urban areas, Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron. For J, Abraham's travels
have nothing to do with nomadic behavior. J's interest in locating Israel's
ancestry outside of the hill country is likely associated, as Kyle McCarter has
suggested, with a process of ethnic boundary marking by which the Israelite
community of J defined itself over against the local Canaanites. 51 In fact, the
sharp difference between Israel's ancestors and those of the Canaanites is one
of the most elemental concerns of the Yahwist throughout the epic.52
Thus the movements of Israel's ancestors are employed by J to explain
the origin and current legitimacy of the territorial, political, and cultic reali-
ties of his day. These are travels shaped primarily by the etiological and ideo-
logical concerns in the service of which the narratives are told. Norman
Gottwald, in his critique of the traditional nomadic interpretation of ances-
tral travels, refers to their ideological tenor as the motif of "migrations as

preparations for religious destiny."53 Such concerns, rather than a concep-
tion of his ancestors as seminomadic pastoralists, lie behind J's narration of
their travels. Indeed, when the details of these travel narratives, together with
those of the ancestral narratives as a whole, are closely examined, they re-
flect a view of Israel's ancestors as hill country farmers practicing the diver-
sified agricultural economy typical of the Israelite populace.
The environmental setting of the Yahwist's ancestral narratives is there-
fore the same setting presumed in his primeval narratives. Israel's ancestors
following the flood are involved in the same agricultural economy established
at creation in the primeval age as the lot of humankind, and reestablished by
Noah after the flood. They practice the mixed farming that has been typical
of the Mediterranean highlands for millennia, in which grain-based cultiva-
tion is supplemented with fruit crops and animal husbandry to meet the
demands and to limit the risks of subsistence agriculture. This is the setting
within which the Yahwist's views of nature, of the human place within it,
and of its relationship to the divine in the ancestral narratives have been
shaped. Only by examining the Yahwist's thought within the context of this
environment can it properly be understood.
The Place of Nature in the Ancestral Narratives

The modern dichotomy between nature and history has affected twentieth-
century interpretation of the ancestral traditions in significant ways. Perhaps
the most important consequence of such dualistic thinking has been the sharp
distinction commonly drawn between the primeval and patriarchal ages, link-
ing the former to nature and the latter to history. According to this approach,
the primeval narrative concerns itself with creation. Its horizon is the world
(of nature), its character mythic, and its treatment of humanity abstract and
universal. By contrast, the ancestral narrative concerns itself with human
culture. Its focus narrows to follow the affairs of an actual people, a single,
distinct family whose experiences inaugurate a particular history, the national
history of the people of Israel. In the ancestral narrative, the biblical narra-
tor thus leaves behind the realm of nature and myth and enters the world of
history proper.
Many statements from recent scholarship could be gathered to show the
broad influence of this stance toward the ancestral traditions. A few repre-
sentative comments may be mentioned by way of illustration. A good example
to begin with comes from the most detailed modern commentary on Gen-
esis. Its author, Claus Westermann, speaks of the Yahwist "setting the story
of primeval events before the historical section proper," by which he means
the stories of Israel's ancestors and their descendants in Genesis 12—50 and
Exodus. These patriarchal stories "present the history of Israel" while the
primeval narrative possesses "a far wider horizon," presenting "what Israel
has to say about God the creator." 54
Remarks from two other recent commentaries on Genesis provide fur-
ther illustrations. E. A. Speiser argues that the break between the primeval
and patriarchal stories "is sharper than is immediately apparent." The call of
Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 signals
the beginning of the integral history of a particular group as opposed to background

episodes in the prehistory of the race as a whole. The story commences with one
individual, and extends gradually to his family, then to a people and later still to
a nation. Yet it is not to be a tale of individuals or a family or a people as such.
Rather it is to be the story of a society in quest of an ideal. Abraham's call, in
short, marks the very beginning of the biblical process.55
A similar tone is set by Walter Brueggemann in his introduction to the ances-

tral narratives: "The one who calls the world into being now makes a second
call. This call is specific. Its object is identifiable in history. . . . The God who
forms the world is the same God who creates Israel."56 These views are com-
patible with, if not in some sense directly dependent on, the view that bibli-
cal literature can best be described as Heilsgeschichte, or "salvation history,"
one of whose most eloquent spokesmen was Gerhard von Rad.57 According
to von Rad, the history of redemption began with Abraham. His call in Gen-
esis 12:1-3 was "the opening of redemptive history with its promise of a bless-
ing for Israel and, through Israel, for all the races on earth."58 Abraham thus
represents not only the beginning of history proper but the beginning of the
history of human redemption as well.
A consequence of this assessment of the ancestral narratives as especially
historical in character, when compared to the primeval story, has been a major
effort in the last century to establish the historicity of the ancestors.59 On the
basis of emerging archaeological data from the second millennium B.C.E.,
various proposals have been constructed to locate the patriarchs in specific
settings, ranging from the Middle Bronze Age at the beginning of the second
millennium to the Early Iron Age at its end. No commentary of Genesis nor
introduction to the Hebrew Bible is complete without an extended treatment
of this debate on the historical veracity and context of Israel's ancestors.
The treatment of the ancestral narratives as history proper and the spe-
cial interest in their social and political character that have characterized
biblical scholarship have led to the neglect of those aspects of these stories
that ground them in specific environmental contexts, even though these
contexts are more often than not determinative for the structure and aim of
the narrative. Such an approach has contributed substantially to the sharp-
ening of the dichotomy between nature and history and to the theological
judgment that nature is subordinate to history in biblical thought.
Nature and Society

A major problem the Yahwist's epic poses for this common assessment of the
ancestral narratives as distinctively historical when compared to the prime-
val story has already been addressed in the interpretation of the primeval
traditions in chapter 2. There it was pointed out that by whatever standard
one wishes to differentiate history from myth—whether by the balance of

divine and human agency, or by the conception of real or mythic time, or by
the "founding" intent of the narrative—no clear line can be drawn between
the primeval and ancestral periods within J's epic.60 The narratives of both
ages are designed to explain the origin of the natural and cultural realities
that defined Israelite society at the time of the Yahwist.
A second problem the Yahwist poses for a narrowly historical appraisal
of the ancestral age arises more directly from the character of these narra-
tives themselves. As was the case in the primeval story, human culture in the
ancestral narrative is largely defined in relation to its environmental context.
No individual, family, or clan is of interest to J apart from its specific, con-
crete environmental milieu. And no event is narrated by J that is not moti-
vated by, or does not have a major impact upon, the natural settings in which
its main characters live.
The interrelationship between culture and nature in these narratives has
already been illustrated in detail in the first part of this chapter. In the sto-
ries of Israel's ancestors, as in the primeval narrative, land plays a crucial and
foundational role. And, as in the primeval narrative, the land at the center of
the ancestral landscape is the arable terrain in the heartland of the Israelite
hill country. It is this land on which Noah, first patriarch of the new era,
reestablishes agriculture as the archetypal human vocation in the postflood
age (9:20). And it is this land that is ceded to Israel through Abraham, the
next great patriarch of this era and its archetypal figure for J (12:l-4a, 6-9;
13:14-17; 15:7-21).
The culture of Israel's ancestors, as it is described at the beginning of
this chapter, is in substantial respects shaped by their adaptation to this
environment. Their way of life is rural and agrarian, their livelihood depen-
dent on a mixed agricultural economy based on dryland cultivation of grains
and supplemented with fruit crops and the herding of sheep and goats. The
character of ancestral society thus represents a direct continuation of the ar-
chetypal agricultural nature of human existence established with the creation
of Adam and reestablished by Noah after the flood. Their work, their resi-
dence, their migrations, and as will be seen, their social conflicts and reli-
gious rituals, all reflect the realities—the demands and challenges—of this
highland agricultural economy.
Two further observations may be made about the role of the land in J's
particular treatment of the ancestral age. The first regards the prominence
of land within J's theology of promise. The promise motif, with its divine
blessing, represents the unifying theme in J's presentation of the ancestral
era, in much the same way that the curse on arable land was the unifying
concept in the primeval era. The theme of promise, as Kurt Galling once put
it, is "the red thread through the whole work."61 Expressed in formulaic lan-
guage to each of Israel's ancestors, the promise includes the divine gifts of
land, descendants, nationhood, and blessing. 62
Particularly conspicuous within J's theology of promise is the gift of the
land. In each of its occurrences in the promise formula, land stands first in
the list of divine gifts (12:1-3, 7; 13:14-17; 26:2-5; 28:13-15). Furthermore,

the promise of land is singled out as the special focus of the covenant be-
tween God and Abraham; it is the single promise guaranteed within this cru-
cial covenant ceremony (Gen 15:7-21). In addition, land alone, of all of the
elements of the divine promise, is retained by J in the narratives of Egypt
and the desert as a leitmotif running through these stories and uniting them
with the great body of ancestral legends at the heart of J's epic (Exod 3:8,
16-17; 13:5, 11; 33:l-3a; Num 11:12; 14:23).
Here, as in the primeval narrative, J's preoccupation with the land as the
primary context for understanding human society takes thematic precedence
over the ancient primal concern for human procreation itself. Procreation
is, of course, a major theme in J's ancestral narratives, especially highlighted
by the continual threat of the barrenness of Israel's matriarchs (11:30,16:1-2,
25:21, 29:31), by God's repeated response in the granting of heirs (18:10,
25:21, 29:31), and by the inclusion of descendants in J's promise theology
(e.g., 13:16, 22:17). Yet within J's promise formula, whenever the promises
of land and descendants occur together, land always takes precedence. The
distinctive emphasis on land in J's development of the promise theology may
be brought into clearer focus by contrasting it with the Priestly perspective.
The Priestly Writer, in the spirit of his theology in the primeval narratives,
focuses primarily on procreation in the ancestral age, presenting descendants
as the foremost blessing bestowed on Israel's ancestors (17:1-8, 35:11—12,
48:3-4; cf. 1:28, 9:1). Offspring are always the first element in the divine
promise in Priestly texts.
A second observation about the role of land in J's ancestral narrative
regards its political significance. Not only does the particular land Israel's
ancestors inhabit play a defining role in their agricultural way of life, it also
provides the territorial base for their ethnic and national identity. Together
with land in J's promise theology is the guarantee of nationhood (12:2; cf.
18:17-19, 25:23).63 Abraham resides and establishes religious sanctuaries at
major urban centers—Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron—of the Israelite nation
(12:6—8, 13:18). And in the promise of land expressed in the Abrahamic
covenant, God defines the land of Abraham's descendants according to the
ideal boundaries of the Davidic Kingdom (15:18—21).64
In J's ancestral narratives, as in his primeval narrative, the arable land of
the Israelite highlands plays a foundational role in his understanding of
human society and history. It defines the contours of the agricultural economy
of Israel's ancestors and prescribes the territorial base for the nation of Israel
composed of their descendants. The close link within J's theology between
these meanings of land is expressed well in the view of land held by the cur-
rent inhabitants of Baytin, a contemporary village at the site of ancient Bethel.
"As in all landed societies, there is a strong attachment between the villager
and the land he owns," writes Abdulla Lutfiyya in his anthropological study
of Baytin. "The land is much more than just a source of income: it is a status
symbol. The land is also a sacred border that links the villager with the past
and the future. He inherits the land from his ancestors and expects to pass it
on to his own children. Land ownership signifies a mystical relationship

connecting the individual with the nation state. From this new interpreta-
tion (sic) has sprung the widely quoted saying 'man la arda lah la watana
lah,' or 'he who possesses no land, has no fatherland.'" 65
Just as the Yahwist's understanding of the origins of Israel is influenced
in major ways by Israel's own specific environment, so are his views of the
origins of Israel's neighbors. Together with his account of Israel's beginnings
through the line of Shem, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Yahwist narrates
the beginnings of Israel's closest neighbors—the Ishmaelites, Moabites,
Ammonites, and Edomites—through stories of their first ancestors. In these
etiological narratives, as in those of Israel's origins, the environment plays a
prominent role in J's perception of culture.
One of the clearest examples is J's description of the origin of the
Ishmaelites, Israel's neighbor on the desert fringes (Gen 16:7—14). The scene
in which Ishmael's birth is announced is designed primarily to explain the
association of the Ishmaelites with the desert through which their trading
caravans passed (37:25, 28b; 39:1). The annunciation of Ishmael's birth takes
place, not within the household of Abraham in the hill country at Hebron
where Isaac's birth is announced (18:1,10), but in the desert (midbar) to the
south where his mother Hagar was driven by Isaac's mother Sarah. This desert
setting is highlighted by the literary framework of the narrative, which twice
specifies (w 7, 14) the exact desert oasis in the western Negev at which these
events occur. 66 The birth announcement itself focuses particularly on
Ishmael's desert habitat.
He will be a wild ass of a man;
His hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand against him,
And in front of all of his brothers he will encamp. (16:12)
This announcement describes Ishmael as a wild ass (pere; v 12), a migratory
species that inhabits the arid regions in which the narrative is set. With this
animal metaphor, J evokes a number of characteristics of Ishmaelite culture:
its desert environs, its trading economy (for which the domesticated don-
key, along with the camel, was a primary beast of burden), and its—to the
mind of the sedentary farmer—"uncivilized" temperament. This uncultured
portrait of the Ishmaelites, typical of the attitude of sedentary societies to-
ward the more transient populations at their margins, is continued in the
following lines, which describe Ishmael (and thus his descendants) living
outside the settled zone and as more prone to violence than his sedentary
neighbors (v 12).67 J's account of Ishmael's origins thus has been largely
shaped, in its narrative form and in its oracular content, by geographical con-
siderations, which J thought essential for understanding Ishmaelite culture.68
J's account of the origin of the Moabites and Ammonites in the Trans-
Jordanian hills is just as strongly influenced by environmental factors. In fact,
the story of their origins is inseparable from a narrative once characterized
by Hermann Gunkel in his taxonomy of legends as a "geological legend," a
legend undertaken to explain the origin of a locality. 69 This is the narrative
of the devastation of the southern Jordan Valley in Genesis 19, which has
already been discussed at length in the analysis of the Garden of Eden in
chapter 2. From its beginning, the story of Lot, father of Moab and Ben-ammi,
is driven by environmental contingencies. Lot moves out of the hill country
west of the Jordan because of a dispute between his and Abraham's shepherds
over grazing land (13:7-lla). Settling in the verdant Jordan Valley, he is
forced to move again to escape the natural disaster that reduced the valley
floor to a desert (19:24—28). This time he settles in the hills to the east. Like
Israel's first ancestors, Adam and Eve, who were forced from the oasis ecol-
ogy of the Jordan Valley into highland farming in the Israelite hill country
west of the Jordan, so Moab's and Ammon's first ancestor Lot, together with
his daughters, is driven out of this valley ecology to the hill country east of
the Jordan. In these highlands, in the heartland of the nations of Moab and
Ammon, Moab, "the father of Moab to this day," and Ben-ammi, "the father
of the Ammonites to this day," were conceived and born (19:30-38). Again
their natural setting is seen by J to have played a defining role in the cultures
of Moab and Ammon.
A third example of J's propensity for thinking of cultures in terms of their
natural settings is his etiological narratives of the Edomites, descendants of
Jacob's brother Esau, who inhabited the highlands southeast of the Dead Sea
in the biblical period. Two motifs, characteristic of Edom's first ancestor and
of its land, are introduced at Esau's birth and run through the narratives about
him. They are the motifs of redness ('dm) and hairiness (s 'r), both traits pos-
sessed by Esau at his birth. He emerges from the womb a ruddy, reddish color
(admoni; 25:25), the same color (adom) of the lentil stew for which he later
sells his birthright (25:30-31). On this account, he receives the name Edom
('edom, v 30), "red." The choice of redness as a motif in these stories—for
Esau's complexion at birth and the stew by which he loses his social status as
firstborn—is certainly to be seen as J's etiological embellishment of the geo-
graphical and political designation Edom, deriving ultimately from the red-
dish color of the Nubian sandstone characteristic of the mountains of Edom
east of the Arabah. 70
Esau is also born with a thick mantle of hair ('adderet se'ar; 25:25). This
feature, too, becomes crucial in Esau's disenfranchisement. Considered by
his blind father Isaac as the key to his identity (27:21), Esau's hairy physique
is "usurped" by Jacob when he covers his skin with sheep's wool to pass him-
self off as his brother (27:11-17, 21-23). On account of this hairy appear-
ance, he receives the name Esau (esaw; 25:25), a name not linguistically
related to se'ar, "hair," but close enough in sound for J to connect the two by
his typical penchant for folk etymologies, se'ar, "hair," is actually related to
the alternate name J employs for Edomite territory, Seir (se'ir; 32:4), a name
likely originating from the wooded ("bushy") mountains of Edom.71 The two
central motifs employed by J to describe the appearance of Esau and the loss
of his familial status are thus etiological elaborations on two natural features
that typified the land of the Edomite people.
J's understanding of the Edomites in terms of their environment is no-

where more clearly illustrated than in Isaac's blessing, the climax of the nar-
ratives in Genesis 25 and 27 about Jacob and Esau as youths. In Isaac's bless-
ings of both sons, productive land is the prime concern. To Jacob (and his
descendants) is granted the inheritance of the firstborn, the fruitful soil of
the Israelite hill country, blessed by Yahweh, where abundant rainfall sup-
ports grain farming and vineyards (27:27-28). To Esau (and his descendants)
is granted by contrast the Edomite plateau where less productive land and
less rainfall place greater demands on subsistence economies (27:39).72 It is
here that Esau is residing when Jacob returns with his family and possessions
from Haran and is reconciled to his brother (32:4; 33:14, 16).
Esau's hunting, as one might expect, is the story's detail that has elicited
from commentators most remarks in an environmental vein. In this case, too,
outmoded dichotomies are painfully apparent, in particular the nineteenth-
century "tripartite theory" that separated hunting, herding, and agriculture
and saw civilization advancing from one to the other.73 According to this
scheme, Jacob represents the shepherds who supersede the hunters repre-
sented by Esau. To Westermann, for example, the story of the lentils
(25:29—34) "is originally a 'civilization' myth about the shepherd who gained
supremacy over the hunter, and could well have had its origin in the
Transjordan where the conditions existed for such a transition." 74 This view
of social development, however, is no longer accepted by anthropologists,
nor was it J's way of thought, which considered highland agriculture to have
been instituted as the lot of humankind at creation. Faunal remains docu-
ment the fact that hunting was a common practice of the sedentary villages
in the Canaanite and Israelite hill country. 75 The story of Jacob and Esau thus
fits properly into the subsistence agricultural environment that character-
izes J's primeval and ancestral narratives overall. The extent to which J wished
to evoke an element of uncouthness among the Edomites by portraying their
ancestor as a hunter, as has been suggested, is difficult to say.76 While the
hunter can be viewed as somewhat uncivilized because of the time he spends
in the wild, it is just this talent of Esau's that his father Isaac particularly
admires (25:28). At the same time, Isaac's reference to Esau's living by the
sword in the "blessing" he delivers (27:40), together with the characteriza-
tion of him as a hunter, may signal J's conception of the Edomites as poten-
tially violent, a view not dissimilar to his portrait of the Ishmaelites.
The Philistines, Israel's neighbor in the coastal plain to the southwest,
are not derived by J from the line of Shem, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as are
the Ishmaelites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites. They are rather the
descendants of Ham, Egypt, and Caphtor, a genealogical placement reflect-
ing their origin outside of Palestine, in the Aegean, and their associations with
Egypt to the south.77 While the origin of the Philistines is not described within
a narrative as are the origins of Israel's other close neighbors, J's account of
them in the story of Isaac and of their king, Abimelech, in Genesis 26 is as
absorbed with the relationship between a society and its environs as are his
ethnological etiologies. The story of Isaac and Abimelech is basically about

natural resources: land claims and water rights in the semiarid zone in the
environs of Beersheba, southwest of the hill country. The aim of the narra-
tive is to legitimate, through the agreement reached by Isaac and Abimelech,
Israel's claim to Beersheba and to certain lands and wells to the west, and the
Philistines' claims to Gerar and the lands and wells in its vicinity (26:1—5,
17-33). Here again J's account of his own society, as well as that of his neigh-
bor, is motivated and shaped by the realities of the natural environments that
defined not only the subsistence economies of these societies but their na-
tional identities and the political relationships between them.
Nature and Religion

In the treatment of the patriarchs the interest of ] plays largely
around the scenes of their life, their family relations, and the
localities hallowed by their worship. . . . its conceptions of the
early cultus cannot be ignored, for in them is partly to be sought
the real clue to its origin.
J. Estlin Carpenter, The Hexateuch
What is of importance is the theophany in and for itself, its

occurrence on that particular place. It must not be regarded as an
isolated fact, but rather as the striking commencement of an
intercourse between God and man which is destined to be
continued at this spot, and also as the first and strongest expres-
sion of the sanctity of the soil.
Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to
the History of Ancient Israel
The religion of Israel's ancestors, as the Yahwist describes it in these narra-

tives, is infused with the same outlook that is present in the Yahwist's con-
ception of the origins of his and his neighbor's societies: a people and its
history cannot be understood apart from its physical context, apart from the
environment that plays such a major role in defining its economy, its politi-
cal status, and its way of life. In fact, J's accounts of divine appearances to his
ancestors and of the ancestors' religious behavior serve primarily to demon-
strate that the bond between Israel's ancestors and the land they inhabit and
farm is not a profane relationship but one that possesses a deep and sacred
character. In the ancestral narratives, as in the primeval story, the arable land
of the Israelite hill country stands at the center of J's landscape and at the
core of his theology.
Traditional approaches This portrait of ancestral religion as grounded in

the land presents a different perspective from the one that has dominated
the discussion of ancestral religion within scholarly circles for the last gen-
eration. Initiated by Albrecht Alt's influential article "The God of the Fathers,"
this discussion has been predicated on the sharp dichotomy between pasto-
ral nomadism and sedentary agriculture, which provided the context for Alt's
reconstruction of ancestral religion.78 According to Alt, two distinct types of
deities, and the religions related to them, are to be discerned behind the
Yahwist's ancestral narratives, where they later came to coexist in a less than
harmonious relationship. One of these was the religion of sedentary Canaanite
farmers. It involved the worship of local numina, anonymous deities (elim)
whose only important characteristics were their associations with particular
holy places in the land of Canaan. Thus, 'el bet- 'el was worshiped in Bethel,
el 'olam in Beersheba, and 'el ro'i in a desert sanctuary in the Negev.79
The other religion, according to Alt, arose outside the sphere of civiliza-
tion in the nomadic life of the desert. It involved the worship of the "god of
the father," a deity who had no connection with a specific sanctuary but who
entered into a relationship with a particular person, an individual after whom
the god was named and who was considered the originator of that deity's cult.
Such a deity, the God of Abraham, for example, was not the numen of a place
but the patron of a family or a social group, moving with it on its journeys.
In this reconstruction of ancestral religion two dichotomies join and
mutually reinforce one another. On the one hand are the sedentary farmers
with their stationary deities linked to nature, to specific sacred sites in their
environment. On the other hand are the nomadic pastoralists with their
mobile deities associated with the historical process, with a society as it moves
through space and time. The sharp distinction between natural and histori-
cal religions to which such thinking leads is particularly apparent in Alt's
comments about the origin of this second type of religion:
The seeds of a completely different development from that of local and nature
gods were implanted at the very inception of the cult: the god was not tied to a
greater or lesser piece of earth, but to human lives, first that of an individual, and
then through him to those of a whole group. . . . The gods of this type of religion
show a concern with social and historical events which most other primitive numina
either lack altogether or possess only to a much more limited degree. This makes
it even more appropriate to the way of life of nomadic tribes, and explains why
their migration and settlement did not involve its rapid disappearance.80
Alt considered this second, historical type of religion the genuine reli-
gion of Israel's own ancestors, whom he assumed were nomadic tribespeople
from the desert. Even when this desert religion later came to be combined,
according to his view, first with the Canaanite gods of the local sanctuaries
when Israel's ancestors settled down, and then with Yahwism when the Isra-
elite nation was formed, this religion of history left its characteristic stamp
on Israelite religious thought and on the epic narratives of J and E. The his-
torical orientation, present in the desert deities of Israel's nomadic ancestors,

thus became the defining feature of Israel's religious consciousness. To Alt,
the religion of the God of the fathers was "a religion which had one essential
mark of the later religion of Yahweh. For it stressed above all the relation-
ship between God and man, and between God and whole groups of men,
without any fixed association with one place. . . . The idea that Yahweh rules
over the nation as a whole and over its history, is clear and precise from the
beginning, and is the most distinctive characteristic of the religion of Israel."81
Alt's assessment of the religion of Israel's ancestors has exerted a major
impact on subsequent scholarship. Both Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth,
in their influential studies on the Pentateuch, believed Alt had said "what is
essential concerning the origin and nature of the patriarchal tradition" and
had thereby laid the foundation for further study.82 In his recent work on
Genesis and its ancestral traditions, Claus Westermann has adapted Alt's
model for his presentation of ancestral religion. He, too, sees two strains in
ancestral religion, a religion associated with the social group arising out of
the seminomadic, pastoralist way of life practiced by Israel's ancestors, and
a religion associated with the local shrines of sedentary Canaanites with whom
these ancestors later came into contact.83
A fundamental problem with this dualistic reconstruction of ancestral
religion, potentially fatal in its own right for Alt's hypothesis, is the implau-
sibility of the underlying environmental scenario. As has been noted in chap-
ter 1, sheep and goat pastoralists cannot exist as desert nomads but only as
seminomads within the semiarid zones contiguous with sedentary agricul-
tural society. Nor can they exist in such splendid isolation from their neigh-
bors as Alt assumed; they can only specialize in pastoralism to the extent that
they are integrated into a larger sedentary economy. Thus the very condi-
tions necessary for Alt's reconstruction cannot have existed in the biblical
period, or in any period of ancient Near Eastern history.84
A second problem for Alt's hypothesis lies in the inscriptional evidence
he presents to support his distinction between divine titles related to people,
in other words, gods of the fathers, and those related to places, the local
numina ( elim). Frank Cross has reexamined the inscriptional data and shown
that neither in the Nabatean sources, upon which Alt argued, nor in other
comparative data, are el designations, which Alt connected with local shrines,
and "the god of the father," which Alt connected with nomadic tribes, mutu-
ally exclusive or distinct.85 In the inscriptional corpus, as in the Bible—for
instance, el 'elohe yisra el, "El, God of (the patriarch) Israel" (Gen 33:20, E)—
the two are identified from earliest times.
A third problem is presented by the biblical text itself and by the J epic
in particular, the pentateuchal source that carries the bulk of Israel's ances-
tral traditions. J's narratives do not present in their portrait of Israel's ances-
tors the data for the kind of reconstruction of ancestral religion Alt attempted.
As has already been demonstrated, the Yahwist considers Israel's ancestors
to be hill country farmers, practicing the same kind of mixed agricultural
economy instituted for humankind at creation. The pastoralism practiced by
the ancestors was one aspect of an economy based on cereal cultivation in

the arable highlands. Nothing in J's narratives of these families can be con-
strued as the remnants of, or used to reconstruct, an archaic stage of autono-
mous nomadic pastoralism practiced by desert tribes.
J's primary concern in the ancestral narratives, in fact, is to show how
Israel's ancestors are united with the hill country, the heartland of biblical
Israel, and to explain their relationships with their neighbors, each linked to
their own environs in distinctive ways. Thus in J's political conception of
Israelite society, as in his depiction of its basic agricultural economy, the
Israelite hill country plays a central and definitive role.
Theophany When the overtly religious aspects of J's ancestral narratives are
examined, a picture emerges that is in complete harmony with this portrait
of the relationship between the ancestors of Israel and the arable zones of
the Israelite highlands they inhabit. J's accounts of divine appearances, of the
sanctuaries of Israel's ancestors, and of the ancestors' ritual behavior are fo-
cused primarily on the interrelationship between the ancestors and the land
in which they live. This can be best illustrated by a survey of the appearances
of Yahweh in J's ancestral narrative and the ritual behavior of Israel's ances-
tors that accompanies these theophanies.
The key divine encounters in the Yahwist's ancestral narratives involve
Abraham, J's archetypal patriarch, and follow a clear pattern encompassing
four regular elements brought together to define the event. God's appearance
to Abraham at Shechem, described in Genesis 12:6—7, is the first of these
divine encounters in the hill country, and as it is also the briefest, provides a
good point to introduce J's formulaic narratives of these special sacred en-
counters. Upon his arrival in the Israelite highlands, the first experience
Abraham has is a theophany of Yahweh (12:6-7). God's appearance is de-
scribed with a reflexive form of the verb ra'a, "see"—"he made himself vis-
ible," or "he appeared" to Abraham (v 7)—J's customary manner of describ-
ing divine manifestations (Gen 18:1; 26:2, 24; cf. 46:29 with a human
subject).86 The theophany takes place at a site marked by a natural feature,
in this case a particular oak tree, located at an important hill country city,
Shechem (v 6 ). The point of the theophany is the divine gift of the land in
Shechem's environs to Abraham and his descendants (v 7). Abraham's re-
sponse is to construct an altar (mizbeah) to commemorate the deity's appear-
ance and to identify the site at which that appearance occurred as a sacred
place (v 7).
These four elements of J's divine encounters—the theophany, a feature
of the landscape, a divine land grant, and the construction of an altar—char-
acterize the experience of Abraham at his next residence, Bethel (12:8—9;
13:1—5, 7—1 la, 12b—18). Here, too, Abraham builds an altar at a site marked
by a natural feature, in this case a mountain located near the city of Bethel
(12:8). At this site, God appears to Abraham, granting him and his descen-
dants once again the land in all directions as far as his eyes can see (13:14-17).
The Yahwist twice describes Abraham's worship at this site with the formula
he employs throughout the epic to describe the worship of God: "There

Abraham called on the name of Yahweh" (12:8, 13:4; cf. 4:26, 21:33, 26:25;
Exod 33:19, 34:5-6).
At Hebron, Abraham's third and primary residence in the hill country,
the same fourfold pattern characterizes his encounter with the deity. At a
grove of oak trees in Hebron, Abraham constructs an altar to God (13:18; cf.
18:1). To this sacred site J relates a series of divine appearances. Two con-
cern the promise of heirs (15:1-6, 18:1-5) and one the fate of the citizens of
Sodom and Gomorrah (18:16-33). But the most elaborate theophany, and
the only one in which a covenant is forged between God and one of Israel's
ancestors in this section of J's epic, occurs to validate the bond between
Abraham and this land (15:7-21).
One other divine encounter conforms to this pattern established in the
narratives about Abraham at Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron. This is Isaac's
experience at Beersheba (Gen 26), located at the southern edge of the Judean
foothills where they meet the semiarid Negev. Here God appears to Isaac
(reflexive of ra a; vv 2, 24), and in response Isaac builds an altar and calls on
the name of Yahweh (26:25). The site of this theophany and Isaac's altar is
marked by a tamarisk tree, planted by Isaac's father Abraham (21:33), and
by a well dug by Isaac's servants (26:25, 32-33). The divine address that
accompanies the theophany grants Isaac both this land on which it occurs
and a multitude of descendants (26:2-5, 24).
Two other vivid theophanies occur in J's ancestral narratives, Jacob's night
encounter at the Jabbok (Gen 32:23-33) and Hagar's encounter at the desert
oasis on the road to Shur (Gen 16:7-14). Both occur at the margins of the
Israelite hill country, and in neither instance is an altar built or a divine prom-
ise about the land made. At the Jabbok, Jacob's name is changed to Israel; at
the desert oasis, Hagar's son is named and his destiny defined. Both stories
relate the appearance of God to specific natural features, a river in one case
and a spring in the other, and thereby mark these sites as sacred. Yet their
peripheral locations, their lack of altars, and the absence of a divine promise
of land place these encounters at the margin of J's sacred landscape.
In association with the four major theophanies and their land grants,
Israel's ancestors construct an altar (mizbeah) at Shechem, Bethel, Hebron,
and Beersheba. These sites are thus rendered sacred not only by the appear-
ance of the deity, but also by the ritual installations with which the ancestors
construct a sacred space. As scholars have long recognized, these accounts
of altar building are etiologies for the religious sanctuaries in these towns
where the worship of Yahweh was conducted on a regular basis in the day of
the Yahwist.87 Such stories serve to legitimate Israel's worship at these places
by connecting them with a primitive appearance of God and by attributing
the altars in their sacred precincts to Israel's first ancestors. J's conception of
these sites as active sanctuaries is disclosed not only by their altars, but also
by his use of the term maqom, which here must carry its technical sense of
"shrine, sanctuary" (12:6; 13;3,4,14; 28:16), and by his reference to Israel's
ancestors as "calling on the name of Yahweh" in worship (12:8, 13:4, 21:33,
26:25).88 There is no reason to suppose, as is common among interpreters,

that these altars were temporary installations built outside these towns by
pastoral nomads camping in their vicinity.89 The oak of Moreh where Yahweh
appears and Abraham builds an altar is in the sanctuary of Shechem (meqom
sekem; 12:6), just as the sacred oaks at which Abraham builds his third altar
are located in Hebron proper (behebron; 13:18).90
The only other theophany that accompanies the construction of an altar
in the Yahwist's ancestral narratives occurs immediately after the flood at the
very beginning of the second age of world history. After disembarking from
the ark, apparently on the highlands of Canaan in J's tradititions, Noah con-
structs the first altar in the epic. In the theophany to Noah, God promises
the land's productivity in the new era. Thus the first divine appearance after
the flood and Noah's altar itself are archetypal for the experiences of revela-
tion and for the altars constructed later by Abraham and Isaac. All serve to
establish the enduring relationship between the descendants of the Yahwist's
heroes and the arable lands they inhabit.
A most remarkable fact about these divine revelations in J's ancestral
narrative is that they occur in association with a concrete feature of the natural
landscape, a feature the Yahwist is concerned to identify precisely. 91 At both
Shechem and Hebron, the oak tree ( elon) marks the site of the divine appear-
ance (12:6, 13:18, 18:1).92 The most stately and impressive of the trees that
provided natural forest cover in the Israelite highlands, some oak species
reach a height of twenty-five meters and a crown circumference of twenty
meters, attaining an age of several hundred years. The majestic oak is revered
by biblical writers as a symbol of power and longevity (cf. Amos 2:9, Isa 2:13),
and is associated with the presence of divinity (Gen 35:8 [E];Judg 9:6, 37;
Hos 4:13).93 Its name, 'elon, appears to be related to the Hebrew word, 'el,
"deity."94 The oak at Shechem is called by J 'elon moreh, a designation with
two possible meanings. As it stands, the term moreh is a participle of the verb
yara, "teach, instruct," and this points to a literal translation, "the oak that
instructs," that is, the oracular oak, or the oak at which divine oracles are
received. At the same time, J's use of the verb ra a, "see," twice in the next
verse to describe God's appearance at the oak suggests that J may have been
playing on the similarity in sound between the oak's title moreh and the verb
ra'a, in order to signify the tree as the oak of revelation. 95 In either case, the
oak is viewed by J as a medium lor the appearance and communication of
Yahweh. In addition to his appearance at oaks in Shechem and Hebron,
Yahweh's appearance at Beersheba is marked by the tamarisk tree ( esel; Gen
21:33, 26:23—25), a tree adapted to the sandy soil and more arid conditions
of the Beersheba area.96
The revelation of God at Bethel is marked by another natural feature,
the mountain (har; 12:8; 13:3-4, 14-17). Since this location, on which
Abraham builds an altar, is identified by J as a precise site between Bethel
and Ai, har is more appropriately translated "mountain" than the general "hill
country" preferred by most translators (e.g., NRSV, JPSV, NEB). From this
particular height, Abraham is able to view in all directions the land God grants
to him (13:14-15). The mountain, as the tree, is associated with the self-
disclosure of God in ancient Israel. It is in fact the predominant natural fea-
ture marking the presence and communication of Israel's God, as the impor-
tance of Mount Sinai and Mount Zion in the biblical record illustrates.97 As
will be seen in the next chapter, the Yahwist's narrative of Egypt and the desert
in the third and final part of the epic is structured around two crucial revela-
tions at Sinai, the southern mountain (Exod 3:2-4a, 5, 7-8,15-22; 19:7-15,
18, 20-25).98
To Isaac, Jacob, and Hagar, God appears at sites marked by water sources.
These are the well (be er) at Beersheba (26:25); the Jabbok, a stream (nahal;
32:23-24 [Eng vv 22-23]) flowing into the Jordan from the Transjordanian
highlands; and the spring ('ayin) and well (be 'er) at Beer (be 'er)-lahai-roi on
the road to Shur (16:7, 14).99 The point at which fresh subterranean waters
make contact with the earth's surface is thus also viewed as especially con-
ducive to divine encounters. The spring marking Eden's location has already
been discussed in such a sacral context.100
Mircea Eliade has described these natural features—the tree, the moun-
tain, the water source—as traditional symbols of a cosmic or world axis (axis
mundi), which breaks the plane of ordinary earthly space allowing the pen-
etration of divine presence and power from above or below. The tree's
branches reach into the heavens, its roots into the underworld. The moun-
tain likewise rises into the sky and is founded deep in the earth. The spring
issues from subterranean regions. At such points of intersection, these aper-
tures in the world, the divine powers behind the cosmos break through or-
dinary space in a special and decisive fashion. Such places are thus sacred
locations, points where communication between divine and human is par-
ticularly and permanently possible.101
Behind the Yahwist's association of divine revelation with such specific
features of the natural landscape lies the recognition of a close bond between
divinity and the natural world. In these major ancestral theophanies, divine
communication is mediated directly through natural phenomena. Nature
therefore cannot accurately be described as desacralized, inert, or profane in
the Yahwist's epic. It is the realm through and within which God becomes
present in the world. And the sites of divine appearances—with their sym-
bols of the world axis and their ancestral altars—assume a particular sacred-
ness within the natural landscape.
Thus it is misleading to speak too exclusively of human history as the
realm of divine revelation and activity in the Yahwist's narrative. God is, of
course, described in form and in speech with human images (18:1-2, 32:25
[Eng. v 24]). And God can appear to Israel's ancestors anywhere, even out-
side the boundaries of the hill country (12:1, 31:3), without any specific
natural feature to mediate the revelation. Yet in the primary theophanies in
which the promise theology of J is articulated, natural phenomena represent
an authentic means of divine self-disclosure. For J, the phenomenal world
plays as signficiant a role as the medium of divine revelation as does the his-
torical event.
The close association between nature and revelation in these ancestral

theophanies is only strengthened by the importance of land in the divine
communication itself (12:7, 13:14-17, 26:2-5). The aim of the ancestral
covenant in J's account, ratified by the ritual ceremony in which God and
Abraham—J's archetypal ancestor—are both participants, is to establish the
bond between Abraham, Abraham's descendants, and the land of biblical
Israel (Gen 15:7—21). The encounters between God and Israel's ancestors are
thus not exclusively focused on bringing into being a new divine-human
relationship but are also intended to establish a social union between a people
and the environment within which they live. 102
Sacred geography The relationship between nature and the divine in the
Yahwist's worldview can be illustrated further by considering the way in
which divine appearances order the spatial world of the ancestral narrative.
As has been noted above, four of the theophanies to Israel's ancestors are
invested with particular significance by J, because they are commemorated
by the construction of an altar, which establishes the site as a religious sanc-
tuary. These theophanies occur at Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Beersheba.
Each theophany, as the preceding analysis has shown, is associated with
a traditional symbol of the axis mundi, or cosmic axis: the oak tree at Shechem
and Hebron, the mountain at Bethel, and the tamarisk tree and well at
Beersheba. The cosmic axis is not just a point within ordinary space condu-
cive to divine revelation, but a center around which the cosmos itself is or-
ganized, to employ once more Eliade's language of sacred space. Such a cen-
ter marks the point of divine manifestation and the location around which
the inhabited world is ordered and organized. Outside this familiar space is
a dangerous realm, the desert or the world of the foreigner where life is
precarious.103
The cities of Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron, in fact, lie along the central
spine of the biblical hill country that makes up the Yahwist's landscape.
Shechem in the north, Bethel midway from north to south, and Hebron in
the south were social, economic, political, and religious centers around which
Israelite society in these areas of the hill country was oriented throughout
the biblical period. Only Beersheba to the southwest, at the border between
hill country and Negev, does not hold such a central position within J's land-
scape. The only sanctuary established by Isaac, rather than Abraham, it is no
doubt included among this elite group because of its function as the south-
ern boundary of the Yahwist's Israel and because of its significance for the
southern population from which the Yahwist undoubtedly came. l04
The manner in which these sanctuaries function as sacred centers can
be seen in the Yahwist's epic itself not only by the ancestors' close relation-
ship to them but also by the role they play in the movements of Israel's ances-
tors. These sanctuaries function as sacred portals for the journeys of Israel's
ancestors outside the land, and thus anchor even these migrations to the hill
country itself. Abraham enters the land through the sanctuary at Shechem
(12:6-7). The sanctuary at Bethel provides the point of departure and point
of return for Abraham's trip to Egypt. This is clear in the Yahwist's itinerary
of the trip, and is particularly emphasized by J's repeated reference to the
sanctuary (maqom) at Bethel to which Abraham returned as the same from
which he had departed (12:8—9, 13:1—4). The hill country sanctuary as por-
tal is also illustrated by Jacob's trip to Syria, where again Bethel provides the
point of departure and return. At the Bethel sanctuary, on Jacob's way to Syria,
God appears to Jacob, renewing the promise of land, descendants, and bless-
ing, and promising to protect him and return him to the very spot of this
divine encounter (Gen 28:13-16).105
When God does appear to Israel's ancestors outside of a sanctuary at the
sacral center of J's landscape, it is invariably to direct them toward it. This is
the case for Jacob in Syria, where God encounters him to urge him to return
to his homeland (31:3). It is the case for Abraham, when God first speaks to
him in Syria, directing him to the Israelite hill country (12:1—3). In the final
section of J's epic this is characteristic of God's appearances to Moses and
Israel in Egypt and the desert, where theophanies focus primarily on Israel's
return to the land of its ancestors (e.g., Exod 3:7-8, 33:1—3).
The archetypal religious events in J's ancestral narrative, the theophanies
in the center of the Israelite hill country and the altars constructed by Israel's
ancestors to commemorate them, serve primarily to bestow a sacred charac-
ter upon the interrelationship between Israelite society and its particular
terrestrial setting. The appearances of God are mediated through concrete
phenomena typical of J's landscape, and they are motivated by the divine word
linking Israel's ancestors to the arable zones at the heart of the Israelite high-
lands. The altars built by Israel's ancestors insure the permanent sanctity of
these sites and order J's landscape around these sacred centers. Even the
movements of the ancestors are governed by this sacred geography centered
in the hill country of biblical Israel. Such a religious consciousness cannot
be labeled as narrowly historical but must be recognized as possessing a pro-
found sense of the intimate and defining relationship between people and
land. It is a consciousness that considers space, as well as time, as a sacred
category.
Ancestral Traditions in Biblical Thought

Most of Israel's traditions about its ancestors have been preserved in the
Yahwist's epic. Of the ancestral narratives in Genesis 9-50, J's account encom-
passes more than the Elohistic and Priestly works combined. The Elohist's
traditions are considerably fewer, making up only a fourth of the whole, while
the Priestly Writer's additions represent merely a sixth of the entire ances-
tral story. Aside from the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 17 and the pur-
chase of Machpelah in Genesis 23, the Priestly Writer is primarily respon-
sible tor genealogical supplements and occasional chronological notices. Our
image of Israel's ancestors is thus derived primarily from the Yahwist's epic.
This image, in the first place, is not well served by the traditional dichot-
omy between nomadic pastoralism and sedentary agriculture nor by the
designation of Israel's ancestors as nomadic pastoralists on the fringes of

Canaanite agricultural society. Israel's ancestors, in J's narrative, are granted
the arable land in the heart of the Israelite highlands and are described as
residents of it, establishing Yahwistic shrines at its major population centers.
Within this land they practice the mixed agricultural economy typical of
biblical Israel. In addition to the cultivation of grain, they grow vines and
orchards, crops that demand a long-term investment in the land. Judged by
the mix of animals they own and by their use of specialized herdsmen, the
pastoralist activities of the ancestors are best understood as part of a mixed
agricultural economy practiced by sedentary hill country farmers. The jour-
neys of these figures are not typical of nomadic or seminomadic pastoralists
in the semiarid zones in the vicinity of the highlands but are employed by J
to lay claim to Israelite land, to validate its sacred spaces, and to explain and
legitimate Israel's relationships with its neighbors. Furthermore these trips
are all framed by the sacred centers of Israel's own terrain. Just as in the pri-
meval narrative, so here in the postflood age, J presents the ancestors of Israel
as archetypal Israelites, putting into effect and practicing the agricultural
economy and agrarian way of life typical of the Israelite society that com-
prised J's audience.
J's image of Israel's ancestors is also not well served by the traditional
dichotomy between nature and history that has come to define the interpre-
tation of the family narratives in this part of the biblical story. What is dis-
tinctive about these traditions is neither a new historical consciousness nor
a specific, selective interest in human society that marginalizes the value and
significance of the natural environment. What is especially characteristic
about these narratives is the interplay between societies and their environ-
ments. The etiological aim that underlies these family narratives is not his-
torical in a narrow sense, the explanation of the political world of J's era and
the interrelationships between its societies. Rather J aims to demonstrate the
origin and nature of the relationship between these societies and their envi-
ronmental settings. Whether for Israel in the highlands west of the Jordan,
for Edom in the mountains to the southeast, or for the Ishmaelites in the desert
fringes, the Yahwist conceives of a society's origin and character in terms of
its precise geographical setting. Just as Israel's own agricultural way of life is
founded in creation itself and practiced by its ancestors, Noah, Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob after the flood, so are the transient lives of the Ishmaelites
grounded in their desert origins, and so are the mixed economies of Moab,
Ammon, and Edom derived from their highland settings east of the Jordan.
In light of J's understanding of human experience as shaped by its envi-
ronment, the common claim that the ancestral narratives initiate a new de-
parture in historical literature and the historical consciousness must be ques-
tioned. This claim has usually been made in terms of a narrowing of the
biblical horizon: the world of creation in the primeval age gives way to the
experience of a single family and its particular and distinctive historical jour-
ney. Thus Israel's interest in history and backgrounding of nature become
even more prominent in these stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
There can be no doubt that the political shape of J's world is a major,
even distinctive, concern in the postflood portion of the epic. Only after the
flood does J commence his etiological accounts of the actual political land-
scape of his day. By means of the segmentary genealogies beginning with
Noah's sons, J maps out the relationships between the cultures of Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine (from Noah's descendants in Gen 9-11),
and finally, the relationships among the tribal elements within Israel itself
(from Jacob's sons in Gen 29-50). The establishment of such political enti-
ties and their relationships are not the concern of the primeval narrative.
The special political character of the postflood age can also be seen in J's
description of the origins of Israel itself. Only after the flood, beginning with
the curse on Canaan and blessing on Shem (9:20-27), and continuing with
the promise of nationhood, land, and descendants to Abraham (e.g., 12:1—3),
are Israel's ancestors described in terms of a political entity. While such a
national identity is presupposed for Israel's first ancestors in the primeval
age, it does not become an explicit part of J's narrative until the postflood
age. In the primeval narrative, the arable land in the hill country west of the
Jordan functions primarily as the basis for the agricultural economy and way
of life of Israel's antediluvian ancestors. In the ancestral narrative, this same
land, the focal point also of J's postflood landscape, now also is regarded as
the territorial base for the Israelite state composed of the descendants of these
ancestral figures.
This new political orientation in J's ancestral narratives of the postflood
era is undeniable, yet it does not support the traditional view that with these
narratives the horizon of the biblical story has been narrowed from the realm
of creation to the realm of Israelite history proper. On the contrary, J's ances-
tral narratives represent a broadening of narrative scope. Whereas the pri-
meval narrative focuses exclusively on Israel's ancestors in the hills between
the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea,106 the ancestral narratives of the post-
flood era expand their purview to encompass the peoples and lands in the
larger ancient Near Eastern world, primarily those closest to Israel—for in-
stance, the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites in the highlands east of the
Jordan—but also the more distant cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And
whereas the primeval narrative focuses on the relationship between land and
people in terms of the agricultural realities of subsistence agriculture for the
village family, the ancestral narrative enlarges the perspective to include
within this relationship the concept of land as the basis for the territorial state.
Properly speaking, J's ancestral narratives represent an expansion, both in
the meaning of land for Israel itself and in the spatial sweep of ancient Near
Eastern geography brought into the epic vision.
In the context of this widening perspective, J's sense of the vital bond
between a culture and its environment is nowhere eroded. The peoples of
the ancestral age—the forebears of Israel and its neighbors—are thought of
only in concrete contexts. Their characteristics—their ways of life, the shape
of their economies, their wealth or poverty, the relations with one another—
are considered by J to be inseparably linked to their distinctive environs. Such
an understanding of human societies as grounded in natural contexts, while

expressed from the human point of view and thus of course "anthropocen-
tric," is predicated upon a sense of the profound connection between cul-
ture and nature. No dichotomy between nature and history, such as biblical
scholars have become comfortable with, can be extracted from J's epic or the
conceptual world that underlies it.
The religion of Israel's ancestors, in J's understanding of it, functions
above all to give sacral significance to the affiliation between the ancestors
and the land in which they live. The major divine revelations are mediated
through sacral elements of the landscape itself—tree, mountain, well—and
are concerned in the first place to signify the hill country as a sacred trust
bestowed upon Israel's ancestors and their descendants. The sacred spaces
the ancestors construct in response to these revelations provide permanent
centers in which this sacred bond between people and land can be renewed
and reenacted. Such a religious consciousness is so thoroughly grounded in
the Israelite hill country that to reconstruct a different origin for Israel's reli-
gion, which eschews this sense of place, as have Albrecht Alt and others,
involves speculation that runs directly counter to the character of Israelite
religion as it is described in the texts we now possess.
Throughout the ancestral narrative, as in the primeval narrative, land
looms as a major theme in the theology of J, a much larger and more impor-
tant theme than has often been acknowledged by biblical theologians preoc-
cupied with the divine-human relationship. There have always been those
to remind us how crucial land is in biblical thought, among them Walter
Brueggemann in a recent "Overture to Biblical Theology" entitled The Land.107
This useful study illustrates at once the inadequacies of biblical theologies
that have omitted this theme and the amount of reconceptualization that is
still required of us to understand the biblical point of view. At the outset of
his study, Brueggemann makes the claim that "land is a central, if not the
central theme of biblical faith" (Brueggemann's emphasis).108 He goes on to
say that "it will no longer do to talk about Yahweh and his people but we
must speak about Yahweh and his people and his land. Preoccupation with
existentialist decisions and transforming events has distracted us from seeing
that this God is committed to this land and that his promise for his people is
always his land"(Brueggemann's emphasis).109
Yet in the title of the chapter in which these sentences occur, "Land as
Promise and as Problem," Brueggemann expresses his uneasiness with the
concept of biblical society's real rootedness in the land. Israel is most Israel,
so to speak, when it is on the move: "Israel's faith is essentially a journeying
in and out of land, and its faith can be organized around these focuses . . .
Israel is a landless people when we meet it earliest and most often in biblical
faith. . . . Israel is embodied in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the earliest presen-
tations as sojourners on the way to a land whose name it does not know"
(Brueggemann's emphasis). 110 Behind such a presentation of land is an en-
during belief in the especially historical character of biblical faith, a faith not
so much nourished by the spaces in which it grows as by its restless move-
ment into the future. While exile from the land is certainly a crucial aspect
of biblical experience, as the Yahwist's own epic attests, the arable land of
the Israelite hill country is the starting point for biblical thought. At least this
is the case for J, whose ancestors are not sojourners but sedentary Israelite
farmers with a religious faith grounded in the sacred sites of the hill country
in which they live.
The high profile of land in J's ancestral narrative becomes all the more
significant in light of the fact that this narrative represents the main body
and theological center of the epic as a whole. The connection developed here
between Israel's ancestors and the land and the establishment of its sacred
centers focus the entire epic on the arable soil of the Israelite highlands. This
is the context from which the creation of the world in the primeval age is
narrated. And it is the context as well for narratives of Egypt and the south-
ern deserts, with which J's epic concludes, and to which we now turn.
4
The Southern Narratives
The Yahwist's ancestral narrative concludes with the resettlement of the family
of Jacob in the Egyptian delta, to which it had moved in response to a severe
famine that struck broad areas of the ancient Near East (Gen 37-50). After a
hiatus, in which the descendants of Jacob had become numerous and their
cordial relations with Egyptian authorities had cooled (Exod 1:8-12), the
narrative is resumed by J. Three significant events dominate the remainder
of the Yahwist's epic and bring it to a close: the escape from Egypt, the
encounter with God at Mt. Sinai, and the journey through the southern desert
toward the homeland of their ancestors in the Israelite hill country.
It is with events in this final part of J's epic that the climax of the entire
narrative has generally been associated. No one has been more influential
in this respect than Gerhard von Rad, who, in his 1938 article, "The Form-
Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," argued that the core around which J con-
structed his epic was to be found in the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt
and their settlement in Canaan. In this he was influenced strongly by several
"creedal" statements elsewhere in the Bible that focus on these two events
(Deut 26:5b-9, 6:20-24;Josh 24:2b-13), each of which he judged to be an
archaic, archetypal summary of Israel's formative experiences, "a Hexateuch
in miniature" as it were.1
In one form or another, many have followed this tradition and have been
strongly influenced, as was von Rad, by these "creeds." In his analysis of the
development of pentateuchal tradition, Martin Noth came to the conclusion
that the theme "Guidance out of Egypt" was "the kernel of the whole subse-
quent Pentateuchal tradition. . . . The narrative of the deliverance from Egypt,"
he wrote, "constitutes the point of crystallization of the great Pentateuchal
117
narrative in its entirety."2 Such a position is now taken commonly. 3 Claus

Westermann's remarks are typical: "The central part of the Pentateuch tells
the story of the rescue at the Reed Sea, Ex 1-18. This event was the basis of
the history of a people. It gave both parts of the book of Genesis the charac-
ter of an introduction. "4 In their study of the Yahwist, Robert Coote and David
Ord take a similar position. For them, the exodus is the event in terms of
which the entire epic must be viewed.
The one story in J that has the most bearing on all others is the story of the revolt
and escape of a bond of disenfranchised, oppressed laborers from Egypt. If J
represents the cardiovascular system of the Pentateuch, then this episode, often
referred to as the exodus, represents its heart. It is this which gives vitality and
meaning to the rest of J and to which we must repeatedly return if we are to keep
the whole of J in perspective. Every story in J, insofar as it is a part of a larger
whole, must be understood as it relates directly to this pivotal event. 5
An alternative view, that the theophany and covenant at Sinai are the
highpoint of the pentateuchal story, is represented by Peter Ellis. In his study
of the Yahwist, he concludes that "the Sinai covenant may rightly be termed
the climax of the Yahwist's saga."6 In this opinion, Ellis appears to be too
strongly influenced by the Priestly point of view. Such a judgment must cer-
tainly be defended for the Priestly Writer whose work and interests are
reflected in the final shape of this material. According to P, the revelation at
Mt. Sinai was the definitive event in Israel's history. Through a series of cov-
enants—through Noah (Gen 9:1-17), Abraham (Gen 17), and Moses (Exod
31:12-17)—P orders Israelite history to reach its defining moment at Mt.
Sinai. By the positioning at this point in the narrative of the great body of
priestly legal traditions (Exod 25-31, 35-40; Leviticus; Num 1:1-10:28), the
Priestly Writer has firmly established Sinai as the culmination of Israel's
ancestral traditions. From Sinai came all of the regulations that were to gov-
ern the life of Israel as a sacral community centered in its cultic institutions,
the priesthood and the tabernacle.
Whether the covenant at Mt. Sinai, or the exodus from Egypt, may be
seen as the center of the older Yahwistic epic is another matter, especially
when this final section of the epic is viewed in light of the extensive ances-
tral narrative that precedes it. From the perspective of the preceding ances-
tral narrative, J's southern stories assume a peripheral position within the
structure of the epic as a whole. One indication of this is the relative brevity
of these narratives. No story in its own right—the exodus, the revelation at
Sinai, or the desert journey—takes up more than a third of the narrative space
J devoted to Israel's ancestors' lives in the Israelite hill country. Combined,
these narratives are only 70 percent of the length of the ancestral narrative
and just over a third of the epic's entire length. For the Egyptian sojourn, a
period of four generations according to J (Gen 15:16), no details at all are
provided. Peter Ellis, while maintaining the Sinai event as the climax of the
epic, recognized this narrative "imbalance" and asserted that any analysis of
the saga as a whole must take it into account.
The Southern Narratives 119
Narrative magnitude alone does not of course determine the literary

or theological center and periphery of a work. Yet there are other features of
J's epic that subordinate these southern narratives to the more substantial
ancestral narrative which precedes them. One of these features is J's presen-
tation of the Egyptian sojourn as an ancestral journey. As has been shown in
the preceding chapter, ancestral migrations outside of the hill country are
viewed by J as movements away from the center. Such trips outside the high-
lands are motivated only by extraordinary environmental or social threats,
as when Abraham traveled to Egypt because of famine, or when Jacob fled
for Syria because of conflict with his brother. During their temporary resi-
dence in these foreign locations, J refers to the ancestors as gerim, resident
aliens. Each journey is anchored in the hill country by locating its point of
departure and return at one of the sacred centers within this terrain. In the
theophanies experienced at these geographical portals, the permanent union
between the ancestors and the hill country is reaffirmed in the face of the
temporary separation effected by the journey.
These characteristics of the earlier ancestral journeys are all a part of the
journey to Egypt initiated by Jacob at the end of Genesis and completed by
his descendants in the narratives of Exodus and Numbers in the final sec-
tion of J's epic. The journey outside the hill country in this final section of
the epic is thus not a new story, as far as J is concerned, but an elaborate
narrative expansion of a common theme in the postflood era, the temporary
dislocation of the ancestors from the sacred center of their landscape, the
arable highlands west of the Jordan.
The extent to which the southern narrative conforms to J's formula of
the ancestral journey can be seen by comparing it to Abraham's trip to Egypt
in Genesis 12:10-20.7 Both journeys are motivated by a severe famine (Gen
12:10, 43:1, 47:4) and result in the temporary relocation of the ancestors in
foreign territory as gerim, resident aliens (12:10, 47:4). As aliens on foreign
soil, death is a serious threat (Gen 12:11-13; Exod 1:22). After God inter-
venes with a series of plagues (ng'; Gen 12:17; Exod 11:1), Israel's ancestors
depart for their homeland with great possessions (Gen 12:16, 13:2; Exod
12:35—36). Abraham departs from Bethel and returns to it by stages through
the Negev (12:8-9, 13:1-4), and Jacob leaves Hebron and his descendants
return to it by stages through the Negev (Gen 37:14; Num 13:17, 22-24).
The more elaborate travel narrative describing the Egyptian and desert
sojourns is viewed by J, just as the earlier ancestral journeys were viewed, as a
movement away from the center and into the periphery of J's landscape. The
epic's concluding narrative, therefore, does not shift the focus or recenter the
epic. This can be illustrated further by considering the theophanies at the south-
ern mountain. As J describes these appearances, they are primarily concerned
to recall and renew God's prior promise of the Israelite hill country to Israel's
ancestors. In them, Yahweh is identified as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob and commits himself to reuniting their descendants with the land he gave
to them (Exod 3:7-8,16-17; 33:l-3a; 34:11). These divine revelations them-
selves thus point back to the ancestral narratives that precede them.
This treatment of the Mosaic period is distinctly different from the later
Priestly Writer's, who located in this era the origins of true and proper Isra-
elite worship. According to P, Moses was the first to learn of the divine name
Yahweh (Exod 6:2-9), and Moses mediated the cultic and social law that was
to govern Israelite life. According to the Yahwist, by contrast, the origins of
Yahwism go back to the beginning of time, when the divine name Yahweh
was known and when Israel's ancestors called upon it (2:4b, 4:26). Proper
worship was initiated with the flood hero, Noah, the first obedient ancestor
and the builder of the first altar in the Yahwist's epic. It was established for
Israel by the archetypal ancestor Abraham, whose obedience brought bless-
ing to his descendants and whose altars marked out the sacred centers of the
Israelite hill country.
When considered in light of this evidence, the southern narratives that
conclude J's epic are decidedly peripheral, not because they are unimpor-
tant or of little consequence, but because they do not represent the focal point
of the Yahwist's landscape or theology. The stance from which the southern
narrative is composed and from which its events are viewed and interpreted
is the arable land of the Israelite hill country, which marks the focal point of
J's landscape in the primeval and ancestral narratives. It is in the mountains
inhabited by Israel's ancestors that the center of J's sacred geography and the
sources of his theology are to be found, rather than in the temporary and
peripheral sojourn in the south. This point is substantially reinforced by a
reexamination of the environmental context presupposed in the narratives
of this third and final part of the Yahwist's epic.
The Environmental Perspective in the Southern Narratives

Perhaps nothing has contributed more to the image of Israel as a nomadic,
pastoralist society in origin than the narratives of Israel's ancestors wander-
ing through the desert on the way to the promised land. In these narratives,
found today in the books of Exodus and Numbers, the Israelites spend an
entire generation, according to J (Num 14:20—25), living in the great desert
of the Sinai Peninsula south of the Israelite hill country after their departure
from Egypt and before their settlement in the highlands of Canaan. The simple
narrative logic of such an account suggests that before the Israelites became
Canaanite farmers they were desert nomads and that these nomadic origins
must have placed an indelible mark on the Israelite psyche.
Such a view is only enhanced by the story, found within these narratives,
of the remarkable encounter between God and Israel at Mt. Sinai, tradition-
ally located deep in the Sinai Desert.8 This vivid theophany, together with
the claims of the Elohist and the Priestly Writer that the divine name Yahweh
was first revealed to Israel at this time, have suggested a peculiar and special
relationship between Israel's deity and the desert.9 Israel appears to meet its
God in the desert and acquire thereby a religion with desert origins.
These plain facts of the desert narrative have led to the conception that
the Bible possesses a nomadic or desert ideal. According to this viewpoint,
initiated by K. Budde and reaching a high point in the works of John W. Flight
and Samuel Nystrom, biblical writers held the wilderness in particularly high
regard, considering it the matrix for the formation of Israelite society and
the setting in which was born Israel's distinctive religious genius.10 Such an
orientation was perceived not only in the pentateuchal narratives but in the
preexilic prophets and in other biblical authors as well. 11 This view that
Israelite theology is shaped in a foundational way by the desert is a major
component of the work of H. and H. A. Frankfort referred to in chapter 1,
from which a few sentences may be repeated by way of illustration. "The bond
between Yahweh and his chosen people had been finally established during
the Exodus," write the Frankforts. "The Hebrews considered the forty years
in the desert the decisive phase in their development. And we, too, may under-
stand the originality and the coherence of their speculations if we relate them
to their experience in the desert. . . the desert as a metaphysical experience
loomed very large for the Hebrews and coloured all their valuations." 12 More
general treatments of Western religious and cultural values, such as George
Williams's Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought, Herbert Schneidau's
Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition, and Max Oelschlaeger's
The Idea of Wilderness, have disseminated to a wider audience this belief
among biblical scholars that the Bible presents its readers with a nomadic or
desert ideal. 13
While there have always been skeptics about this emphasis on the desert
as a formative influence on Israelite thought, the most substantial critique
has been delivered by Shemaryahu Talmon in a work entitled "The 'Desert
Motif in the Bible and in Qumran Literature." 14 In his analysis of the stories
of the desert in the Pentateuch and of references to it in other biblical litera-
ture and in texts from Qumran, Talmon challenges the theory of a desert or
nomadic ideal among biblical writers on two counts: that biblical sources do
not present desert life as a social ideal or the desert period as the ideal era of
Israelite history, and that the existence in biblical society of a reform move-
ment that advocated a return to a nomadic ideal is based on questionable
historical and sociological judgments.
The Desert
The Yahwist, by providing the earliest extensive treatment of the desert jour-
ney from Egypt to Canaan, represents a particularly crucial piece of evidence
for the consideration of the arguments in this debate. When the Yahwist's
southern narratives are examined as a whole, they reveal themselves to be
no more partial to the desert nor shaped by its environment than are J's ear-
lier narratives of the primeval and ancestral ages. Like these earlier portions
of the epic, the southern narratives reflect the orientation of the sedentary
farmer in the Canaanite highlands. Though they describe Israel's ancestors
passing through the desert, they reflect a narrator who is not at home in the
desert but in the farming villages in which lived the majority of the popula-
tion of biblical Israel. 15
Numerous details of J's desert stories, indeed their whole atmosphere,

illustrate the sedentary agricultural perspective from which they have been
composed. To begin with, Israel is represented by J not as residing in the desert
but as journeying through it from one sedentary agricultural area to another,
from the Nile Valley to the Canaanite highlands. The goal of the exodus jour-
ney from the beginning is the cultivable land granted to and inhabited by
Israel's ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Exod 3:8, 17; 33:1; 34:11-12;
Num. 10:29,14:15-16). God says of Israel when he first appears to Moses, "I
will come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring
them up from that land to a good and broad land, to a land flowing with milk
and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites,
Hivites, and Jebusites" (Exod 3:8). J's characteristic use of the verb 'ala, "to
go up," to describe the departure of Israel from Egypt points toward the cul-
mination of the journey as an ascent into the hill country of biblical Israel.
Israel's journey through the desert is thus presented by J as a relocation of a
sedentary people, not as a movement typical of the seasonal migration or
regular transhumance of the seminomad. This relocation would have involved
a direct, straightforward trip through the inhospitable Sinai, according to J,
had it not been for the Israelite fear of the hill country's inhabitants upon
their arrival. Only as a result of divine punishment, when they refuse to go
forward into the hills, are they banished to the desert until the unfaithful
generation dies there (Num 13:27-31, 33; 14:lb, 4, 20-25).
J's description of the Canaanite hill country, in the narrative of the Isra-
elites' arrival at it, bears the perspective not of a desert nomad who is a stranger
to it but of a farmer at home in it. Moses' instructions to the spies reflect the
concerns of the hill country farmer: he tells them to determine whether the
land is rich or poor and whether it has orchards, and he asks them to bring
back some of its fruit (Num 13:17-20). They return with a single cluster of
grapes so large it is carried on a pole by two men, and with some pomegran-
ates and figs (13:23). This special interest in vineyards and orchards reflects
a particularly sedentary perspective. While grain can be cultivated by
seminomadic pastoralists on an annual basis on marginal land, vineyards and
orchards are a strictly sedentary enterprise, demanding good land, plentiful
rainfall, years of investment in the land, and thereby the permanent settle-
ment of their cultivators. Indeed, this little story is situated in the agricul-
tural year of the sedentary farmer by a detail familiar to those who practice
viticulture: it occurred at just the time when the grapes first ripen (13:20).
At one level, the tale actually serves as an etiology for the name of a valley
near Hebron, the Wadi Eshcol (eskol, "cluster of grapes"), known to the sed-
entary Israelites living in the area for its production of grapes (13:23-24).
None of these features of the narrative would be of natural interest to the
nomadic pastoralist whose investment is not in land and long-term cultiva-
tion but in mobile herds. They are rather characteristic of the Israelite agri-
cultural society who made up the audience of J's epic.16
Just as J's depiction of the Israelite hill country in these desert narratives
reflects the stance of someone at home there, so his depiction of the desert
reflects the stance of one for whom the desert is alien and hostile terrain. For
Moses, after he kills the Egyptian taskmaster, as for Israel, when it flees from
Egyptian control, the desert is not a home but a place of temporary refuge, a
place of escape only when life in sedentary society becomes unbearable. The
desert is a last resort. In this regard, the desert in these narratives plays the
role it plays in the story of Hagar (Gen 16:1-2, 4-14). Hagar too flees to it
only when Sarah's oppression becomes intolerable. To the people of Israel
who enter it, the desert is foreign territory. Moses is forced to prevail upon
his Midianite brother-in-law Hobab to accompany Israel as a guide. Hobab
the Midianite, not Moses the Israelite, knows the desert and its camping places
and can keep Israel from losing its way and perishing in the wilderness (Num
10:29-32).
The desert is portrayed by J as a place in which human life is constantly
threatened. J's narratives about the desert repeatedly call attention to the
precarious plight of Israel there. Israel in the desert is normally in peril, either
because of the scarcity of water, as at Marah (Exod 15:22-23, 25a), or because
of the scarcity of food (Num 11:4-6). Indeed, the desert is compared con-
stantly and unfavorably, in Israel's complaints, to cultivable land and its agri-
cultural produce, either in the Nile Valley that Israel has left (Num 11:5, 18)
or in the Canaanite hills to which it is headed (Num 16:12-14).17 In the final
analysis, J connects the desert with death. Israel is afraid it will die in the
desert, a fear that is realized when God punishes the faithless generation for
refusing to enter Canaan by death in the wilderness (Num 14:22-23,16:13).
This is a most telling aspect of J's desert narratives. Life in the desert is
above all a sign of divine punishment. Had Israel been obedient and entered
the Canaanite hill country willingly, their time in the desert would have been
a brief journey, not a lengthy banishment. Just as for Cain, whose punish-
ment meant exile from arable land—a punishment, in his words, too great
for a human to bear—so Israel is punished by banishment to the desert until
the faithless generation is dead. Once they recognize the punishment that
faces them, they change their minds—anything to escape the desert. But it is
too late (Num 14:20-25, 39-45).
None of these aspects of J's desert narratives reflects the point of view of
a society familiar with the desert and accustomed to living in it. Israel's stay
in the desert does not follow the patterns of a nomadic culture adapted to
desert life. Nor does Israel's behavior give evidence of a people whose atti-
tudes and values are shaped by the contours of the wilderness environment.
The picture is just the opposite: J's narratives depict the desert as an alien
and frightful place. Throughout, these stories reflect details and attitudes
deriving from the sedentary agricultural society that typified biblical Israel
and of which the Yahwist was a member.
The episode in the Yahwist's southern narratives that may appear to run
against the grain of this generally negative orientation to the desert is the story
of the revelation of God at Mt. Sinai. In the final form of the Pentateuch, which
reflects Priestly interests and aims, the encounter between God and Israel at
Mt. Sinai is the definitive divine-human encounter. It defines the relation-
ship between God and Israel for all time and establishes the character of Israel
as a religious community. Even though the Yahwist's traditions about this
desert mountain are much briefer, they include an account of a vivid
theophany (Exod 19:2b, 9-13a, 14-16a, 18, 20-25), a code of ritual law (Exod
34:17-26), and a covenant ceremony (Exod 34:1-16, 27-28).
Yet the Yahwist's account of the revelation of God at Mt. Sinai does not
depict Israel's deity, who becomes manifest here, as a desert deity, nor does
it depict Israel as a desert people who inhabit the environs of this desert sanc-
tuary. J's description of the mountain and of Israel's experiences there are
shaped by the same highland agricultural perspective present in the rest of
the epic. The imagery for Yahweh's theophany (Exod 19:9,16a, 18) is drawn
from the phenomenon of the thunderstorm typical in the mountains on the
eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea. And the legal code that God delivers
to the people at this theophany prescribes a liturgical calendar appropriate
for a sedentary agricultural society rather than for nomadic pastoralists (Exod
34: 17—26). Thus, the Yahwist's account of Mt. Sinai in no way mitigates the
fearfulness of the desert environment in the southern narratives, nor does it
connect Israel's religious ritual with the desert experience. Robert Cohn has
suggested that Israel's experience in the wilderness and at Sinai be under-
stood in terms of "liminality," a state at once negative and positive, danger-
ous and creative; above all, a state of transition between a separation from
and a reincorporation into secure space and time.18 More will be said below
about the evidence for the biblical hill country as the environment from which
the Yahwist's account of the Sinai theophany and its ritual legislation
originate.
Egypt
In the biblical story of the exodus, the land of Egypt is synonymous with
oppression and death. According to the narratives at the beginning of the Book
of Exodus, Israel's ancestors are forced into slavery and their children killed
by the Egyptians among whom the family of Jacob had settled. In the Yahwist's
traditions of these events, the tensions and conflict between Egypt and Israel
are prominently featured. Yet the negative view of Egyptian political and social
policies in the Yahwist's exodus narrative should not be taken as completely
representative of the Yahwist's attitude toward the land of Egypt and the
Israelite sojourn there. J presents the land of Egypt in a number of favorable
ways. By comparison to J's negative attitude toward the desert, J's view of the
environment of the land of Egypt—that is, of the Nile Valley where its popu-
lace and agricultural land are almost entirely located—is noticeably positive.
As a matter of fact, J describes Egypt's environment in terms that rival
and surpass those employed for his homeland in the Israelite hill country. In
his first reference to Egypt, J compares the Nile Valley to the paradisaical
ecology of the Garden of Eden and of the southern Jordan Valley before its
desertification following the disaster in the days of Abraham and Lot (Gen
13:10). During the ancestral era, Egypt is a regular refuge when the precari-
ous enterprise of dry farming in the Canaanite mountains fails because

of insufficient rainfall and subsequent famine. In each generation, Israel's
ancestors—Abraham (Gen 12:10), Isaac (26:2), and Jacob (Gen 43:1—2,
46:28-31)—either move, or consider moving, to Egypt to escape a period of
severe drought and crop failure in the Israelite hills. The land of Egypt is thus
an environmental haven that is able to preserve the lives of Israel's ancestors
even when their own land fails to do so (Gen 43:8, 47:12).19 In the desert,
the imperiled Israelites are, according to J, more interested in returning to
Egypt than in pressing on into their ancestral homeland, primarily because
of its bounteous agricultural produce (Num 11:4-5, 14:4). The cliche J
reserves for praising the unusual agricultural wealth of his homeland—"a land
flowing with milk and honey" (Exod 3: 8—17, etc)—is used by these Israel-
ites as a suitable description of Egypt (Num 16:13).
The Yahwist's positive view of the Egyptian environment reflects cer-
tain basic realities about the differing environments of Israel and Egypt. As
their own records indicate, the ancient Egyptians regarded Canaan as a rich
agricultural area, with abundant grain, fruit, and livestock, which they occa-
sionally exploited as a result of military campaigns or political control.20 Yet
Canaanite agriculture, based as it was on dryland farming, was always more
vulnerable to the vagaries of ancient Near Eastern rainfall than was Egyptian
agriculture. Due to the huge catchment area in eastern and central Africa,
the sources of the Nile supplied a flow of water that was generally abundant
and reliable. The Egyptian farmer, himself living in an area with little rain-
fall, could count on the rising of the Nile for sufficient water to irrigate his
crops year after year. And the rising water brought with it alluvial deposits
that regularly replenished the soil's nutrients. 21 By contrast, the dryland agri-
culture of the Canaanite hill country was always completely at the mercy of
direct rainfall, which is notoriously irregular in its range, timing, and amount.
It was not uncommon throughout history, therefore, for the citizens of Pal-
estine to purchase grain from Egypt during times of famine, which could be
brought about by the failure of the rains in any one year. 22 Israel's ancestors,
as J describes them, are simply a few examples of an ancient phenonemon:
environmental refugees, people forced to relocate because of the failure of
their native environment to support human life. Such were the facts with
which J was familiar and which lay behind his positive view of the ecological
character of the land of Egypt.
In the details of J's description of the Egyptian environment, accurate
knowledge of Egyptian society and its environmental setting is blended with
other features that reflect the Yahwist's own environment, the Israelite hill
country. A good example of this is J's most elaborate plague narrative, the
account of the destructive hail storm (Exod 9:13—34). A massive thunder-
storm such as this is rare in Egypt, as J twice asserts (vv 18, 24). The country
of Egypt is nearly rainless and is characterized by an arid or desert climate,
except for a semiarid narrow coastal belt along the Mediterranean. 23 The vivid
description of the torrential rain, the hail, and the lightning flashing in the
clouds and striking the earth (vv 23-25) is based on the characteristics of
this phenomenon in the Israelite hill country where it was not an uncom-
mon occurrence.
J's characterization of the vegetation affected by the hail also reflects the
epic's source in the grain-based agricultural economy of the Israelite highlands.
The Yahwist focuses particularly on grain, 'eseb hassadeh (vv 22, 25), the field
crop that is also the center of interest in the creation narrative (Gen 2:5,
3:18-19).24 In a detailed explanation of the result of the hail storm on Egypt's
crops, J identifies the species that were and were not damaged. Flax (pista; a
fiber crop) and barley (se'ora), which mature early, were wiped out, while
the wheat varieties, durum (hitta) and emmer (kussemet), which mature later,
were spared (Exod 9:31-32).25 J's characterization of Egyptian agriculture as
grain-based, and his description of the relative maturation of these crops in
the climate of the Nile Valley are accurate, yet one detail, the mention of hitta,
betrays his Canaanite orientation. Durum (hitta) and emmer (kussemet) wheat
were cultivated side by side in Canaan from earliest times, while durum was
not introduced into Egypt until the time of the Ptolemies, centuries after J.26
Here, too, in his description of Egypt's grain economy, J describes the Egyp-
tian environment in precisely the terms with which an Israelite farmer would
be familiar. J's narrative of the Egyptian sojourn, as the other narratives of his
epic, is firmly rooted in the soil of the Israelite highlands.
Ritual and Law

Within the narratives of Israel's stay in Egypt and at Mt. Sinai in the south-
ern desert, the Yahwist has embedded accounts of the divine establishment
of certain specific religious rituals. This does not mean for J, as it does for
the Priestly Writer, that religious ritual and proper worship were first estab-
lished at this period. According to J, Yahweh was worshipped by name and
sacrifices were made to him by the first family before the flood (Gen 4:3-5,
26). Yet a number of particulars for worship are laid out in these narratives,
particularly in a body of legislation represented by J as part of a covenant
between God and Israel at Mt. Sinai (Exod 34:1-28). This ritual legislation
provides an illuminating text for exploring further the Yahwist's environmen-
tal perspective within his southern narratives.
It has long been recognized that the great body of legislation now asso-
ciated with the promulgation of the law at Mt. Sinai pertains to sedentary
life in the Canaanite hill country rather than to the practice of desert nomad-
ism.27 This is especially apparent in the Yahwist's own legal and ritual tradi-
tions preserved in Exodus 34. In the details of these regulations can be seen
the same mixed agricultural economy reflected elsewhere in J's southern
narratives and indeed in the epic as a whole.
Prominent in J's ritual legislation are the three festivals (haggim) at which
all Israelite males were required to be present, to appear before God (Exod
34:23).28 First mentioned is the hag hammassot, the festival of unleavened
bread (v 18). J identifies this festival as a commemoration of the exodus, yet
it is apparent that it is also closely associated by J with the harvest of barley,
the first harvest in the Israelite hill country. The hag hammassot is celebrated
in the month of abib (the end of March and beginning of April), which takes
its name from the term for the ripening ear of barley (abib). Indeed, J links
the times of the barley harvest and the exodus explicitly in the narrative of the
plague of hail that destroys the mature barley crop immediately before the
escape (9:31-32). The festival of unleavened bread as a commemoration of
the barley harvest, together with the exodus, is preserved and made explicit
in both Deuteronomic (Deut 16:1-10) and Priestly legislation (Lev 23:9-
16).29 The second festival of J's ritual code, hag sabu'ot, the festival of weeks,
commemorates the wheat harvest (qesir hittim) a month or two later in May
or June (Exod 34:22). At this festival the worshipper presented to God the
first sheaves (bikkurim) from the year's crop of wheat. The third festival, hag
ha'asip, the festival of ingathering, is held at the end of the agricultural year
(tequpat hassana; 34:22). It celebrates the gathering of the fruit harvest—
grapes and olives in particular—in the fall.
The Yahwist's religious calendar marked out by these three major festal
occasions is based entirely on, and gives sacred meaning to, the agricultural
year of sedentary farmers in the Israelite highlands. Each of the great har-
vests, of grain in the spring and fruit in the fall, becomes the occasion of a
sacred festival to celebrate the new produce and present its finest specimens
to God. Such a ritual calendar sacralizes the major events of the very agricul-
tural year that God stabilized for Noah and his descendents as his first divine
act following the flood (Gen 8:22). It reflects the life of the farmer, not of the
nomadic pastoralists in the desert.
A fourth festival mentioned in J's legislation, the hag happasah (34:25),
the festival of the Passover, has inspired a great amount of discussion and
debate about its nature and origin. It does not appear to be associated in this
code with the three major festivals, but it is linked in Deuteronomistic and
Priestly legislation with the festival of unleavened bread (Deut 16:1-8; Lev
23:4-21).30 Julius Wellhausen's explanation has shaped the terms of the
debate and remains the starting point for most theories. According to
Wellhausen, the Passover, which involves the sacrifice of a lamb, originated
in a pastoral nomadic society that had nothing to do with agriculture or its
harvests. It involved the presentation to the deity of the first offspring of the
flocks in the spring. Because he regarded the Israelites as seminomadic
pastoralists in origin, Wellhausen considered the Passover the oldest and only
authentic Israelite festival. It was then later combined with the agricultural
festivals Israel adopted from the Canaanites as Israel settled down, during
their "metamorphasis of shepherds into peasants," as he put it.31 Such a
nomadic pastoral background for Passover is still widely assumed in discus-
sions about its origin and its relation to the festival of unleavened bread. This
view has been developed in detail by L. Rost, who considers Passover a rite
celebrated by seminomadic pastoralists at the time of change of pasture to
insure protection for themselves and their flocks.32
Behind the whole history of this analysis of Passover and its relation to
the other festivals lies the old dichotomy that was assumed to exist between
.128 The Yahwist's Landscape
nomadic pastoralists and sedentary farmers, which in its classic form is

reflected neither in ancient societies nor in the perspective of the ] writer.
The setting of Passover is more likely to be discovered within the context of
the mixed agricultural economy of biblical Israel depicted in J's epic and in
this ritual legislation in particular. In the first place, the Passover's "second-
ary" status, outside the three great harvest festivals, reflects properly the
subsidary role of pastoralism in the agricultural economy of ancient Israel.
Second, the association of Passover with the feast of unleavened bread, loosely
made by J and described more directly in Deuteronomic and Priestly tradi-
tion, is to be explained ultimately by their roughly simultaneous occurrence
in the agricultural year of the Israelite highlands. 33 Whether Passover was
celebrated at lambing time to present God with the flock's first born, as
Wellhausen suggested, or whether it coincided with the movement of flocks
from distant marginal winter pasturage to the stubble of harvested fields
nearby, as Rost has proposed, it would have been practiced by highland farm-
ers at roughly the time of the barley harvest festival, hag hammassot, the feast
of unleavened bread. This rough chronological coincidence of the festivals
of Passover and unleavened bread appears to have been formalized in Deu-
teronomistic and Priestly legislation, which were concerned to a greater extent
than ] with standardizing and centralizing cultic practice in Israel.34
Just as the major festivals of J's religious calendar reflect a mixed agri-
cultural economy, so also do the prescriptions about first fruits. According
to J's code, the first of all produce is to be offered to God. This includes the
first harvested produce of the arable land, adama (34:26; cf. v 22), and first-
born male sheep, goats, and cattle. Firstborn male donkeys, considered
unclean, as well as firstborn male humans, are to be substituted with lambs
(vv 19—20). The offering to God of the produce from both sectors of the mixed
agrarian economy, its crops and herds, is the very ritual practiced by the first
family, when Cain and Abel brought to God the fruit of the arable land (perl
ha'adama) and the firstborn of the flock (bekorot so'n; Gen 4:3—4). These
prescriptions reflect once again the practices of an agricultural society, which
supplements its cultivation of cereals and fruits with the herding of sheep
and goats.
A final detail in this ritual legislation reveals the agricultural orientation
of J's traditions in a particularly striking way. It occurs in the sabbath regu-
lation (Exod 34:21), a decree paralleled in the decalogues preserved by the
other pentateuchal authors (Exod 20:8-11 and Deut 5:13-15; cf. Exod 23:1.2).
In each case, the author or editor has chosen to explain the observation of
the sabbath in terms of a theme unique to his own perspective and theologi-
cal goals. The Priestly Writer, lor example, explains sabbath rest as the imi-
tation of the deity at creation (Exod 8:11, Gen 2:2—3), thus founding cultic
observance in the very structure of the cosmos itself.35 Deuteronomic tradi-
tion, by contrast, is particularly concerned with the welfare of the less fortu-
nate in society, admonishing Israelites to allow their slaves to rest on the
sabbath, by reminding Israel that they too were once slaves in Egypt (Deut
5:14—15). 36 By contrast, J's concerns about the sabbath are dictated by the
rhythm of the agricultural year. "Six days you shall work/cultivate (ta'abod), 37
but on the seventh day you shall rest, (even) during plowing and harvest you
shall rest" (34:21). J's specific concern about the rite is that it be observed
even in the busiest seasons of the agricultural year, seedtime and harvest,
when the demands of grain production were particularly work intensive and
when the proper timing in seeding or harvesting could spell success or fail-
ure. In this brief detail regarding the sabbath, especially when compared to
treatments of it in the other pentateuchal sources, the strong influence of
J's agricultural milieu on his view of life and religion becomes particularly
apparent.
In the Yahwist's legal and ritual traditions, as in his narrative discourse
regarding Israel's experiences in Egypt and the desert, the environmental
orientation is consistent. Though describing experiences of Israel's ancestors
outside the hill country of biblical Israel, these traditions are all told from
the perspective of the typical Israelite farmer in those hills, involved in grain-
based dryland agriculture, supplemented by the cultivation of fruit crops and
by the herding of sheep and goats. Ritual observances are rooted in the vari-
ous sectors of such a diversified agricultural economy. And both Egypt, a
source of grain during famine in Syria-Palestine, and the desert, a domain of
aridity and death, are described from the perspective of the biblical heart-
land and its village farmers. No desert or nomadic ideal can be gleaned from
J's southern narratives. On the contrary, these desert stories depict a tempo-
rary, precarious sojourn that possess as its goal and as its narrative point of
view the hill country of biblical Israel.
Nature and Religion in the Southern Narratives

The opening episode of the southern narratives, the Israelite exodus from
Egypt, has been regarded above all as a social and political event, as a para-
digm of human freedom for later generations. This perspective has only been
strengthened by the recent adaptation of the exodus as a foundational text
for liberation theologies. Within such an interpretive context, the historical
dimensions of the exodus narrative are naturally highlighted and emphasized.
Indeed, the exodus event has been commonly regarded as the very starting
point of Israel's historical religious consciousness.
A few influential proponents of such an approach to the exodus narra-
tives may be cited by way of illustration. G. Ernest Wright, one of the pre-
eminent spokesmen for the historical character of Israelite religion, argued
in the following way.
The most probable supposition regarding the origin of Israel's preoccupation with
history is that it arose in the earliest days of the nation's history as the only possible
explanation available to the people of the manner in which God had made himself
known to them. . . . At the center of Israelite faith lay the great proclamation that
the God of the fathers had heard the cry of the weak, oppressed people in Egypt.
. . . The knowledge of God was an inference from what actually had happened in
human history. The Israelite eye was thus trained to take human events seriously,
because in them was to be learned more clearly than anywhere else what God willed
and what he was about. Consequently, in all that happened subsequently the
Israelite simply interpreted the meaning of events by recognizing and acknowl-
edging in them the God who had formed the nation by the remarkable events at
the Exodus and in the wilderness.38
In a similar vein, Walther Eichrodt makes the claim that
the roots of this peculiar viewpoint, by which Israel clearly is to be differentiated

from all other Near Eastern Peoples, doubtless lie in those happenings of the early
time, which gave the impulse to the genesis of the Israelite people, in the events
of the time of Moses. . . . This first experience of a Divine encounter was decisive
for the fundamental conception of the Divine revelation in Israel. Here one learned
to understand the being of God from history and to exhibit his works in the forms
of history. 39
Nahum Sarna introduces his study of the book of Exodus from the same
perspective. He too regards history as the realm of God's action and the exo-
dus as the point of crystalization for this theological perspective:
History is the arena of divine activity, and the weal and woe of the individual and
of the nation is the product of God's providence, conditioned by human response
to his demands. It is no wonder that the Exodus is the pivotal event in the Bible,
and that the experiences connected with it—the slavery of the Israelites, their
liberation from Egypt, the covenant between God and His people at Mt. Sinai,
and the journey in the wilderness toward the Promised Land—all constitute the
dominant motif of the Scriptures in one form or another. 40
In a similar fashion, Emil Fackenheim, in his monograph, God's Pres-

ence In History, identifies the exodus as a "root experience," an historical event
so foundational as to shape a new faith, "affecting decisively all future Jew-
ish generations."41
Such claims regarding the historical, social, and political features of the
exodus story have been adopted as foundational in recent liberation theolo-
gies. "The Exodus is the key event that models the faith of Israel," writes
J. Severino Croatto. "Unless we begin from this central event, neither Israel's
faith nor the formation of its religious traditions and sacred books are under-
standable." 42 Such paradigmatic history is contrasted by Croatto to the
rhythms of the cosmos, deemed static, tyrannical, and bound to the oppres-
sive structure of the status quo. "Mythic persons are not free," asserts Croatto,
they are subject to the cosmos. . . . Israel had the experience of a personal God
who acts in history, who is independent of nature. . . . On the basis of this
experience, Israel elaborates the idea of a God different from the world that he
creates. . . . Now human beings do not need to associate themselves with the
rhythm of the cosmos in order to imbibe the sacred. God, different from the world,
manifests himself in the events of history. The Exodus event was indicative in
this respect [Croatto's emphasis].43
Against the backdrop of such a distinctly historical and political approach
to the exodus story, the world of nature assumes a secondary place. At best,
it represents a rather insignificant background for the human drama of lib-

eration; at worst, it represents a paradigm for the static, tyrannical powers of
oppressive governments like the Pharaoh's court. Neither representation of
nature, however, takes into account the substantial way in which the Yahwist's
agrarian perspective, detailed in the preceding analysis, has shaped the nar-
rative of events and the code of religious law contained in these southern
stories. Nor do they reflect the significant influence of traditions about the
storm god in the narratives. When the southern narratives are reread in light
of these concerns, the role of nature in these stories and the character of divine
activity in the world can be more fully appreciated.
God and the World

An appropriate starting point for reexamining the relationship between nature
and history in the Yahwist's southern narratives is an observation by Frank
Cross that these narratives draw heavily—in their details and overall form—
on a conventional ancient Near Eastern literary cycle describing the estab-
lishment of the orders of the cosmos.44 The core of this conventional cycle is
the conflict between two deities, a storm deity and a sea deity, in which the
defeat of the sea by the storm subdues chaos and establishes the orders of
nature that make life possible.
Examples of such a narrative are available from a broad spectrum of
ancient Near Eastern literature. The classic example from Mesopotamia is
its great creation epic, Enuma Elish, in which the divine warrior Marduk,
who fights with the weapons of the thunderstorm, subdues Tiamat, "Sea,"
and out of her body shapes the world and establishes its natural orders.45 A
Canaanite version of this same conflict, the Baal Cycle from the ancient city
of Ugarit, describes the conquest of Prince Sea, alias Judge River, by the storm
god Baal, thereby establishing his power over chaos and death and guaran-
teeing bounty and fertility in the world.46 In Israelite literature, this narra-
tive form is reflected most clearly in a corpus of archaic poems that picture
Israel's deity as a storm in conflict with sea (e.g., Exod 15; Pss 18, 68, 77;
Hab3). 47
Underlying these particular versions of the story are a set of shared fea-
tures that point to a conventional narrative pattern. This pattern is a drama
composed of two, paired movements. In the first movement, the Divine
Warrior, accompanied by the manifestations of the thunderstorm, marches
into battle and conquers Sea. At the storm god's advance into battle, nature
is shaken and thrown into disarray. In the second movement, the victorious
divine warrior returns to his holy mountain to be enthroned as sovereign ruler
in the universe. At the storm god's return from battle, nature is restored to
order and made fertile and productive. 48
Cross's observation that this conventional cycle has shaped the selection
of events and the overall structure of the Yahwist's southern narrative can be
substantiated by examining key details of the Yahwist's story. Action in the
first movement of the traditional conflict cycle is initiated when a challenge
to the divine warrior's authority is delivered to the residence of the god, in

Baal's case, to Mt. Zaphon north of Ugarit. 49 In the Yahwist's exodus drama,
divine action also begins at God's sacred mountain, where God first appears
to the hero Moses (Exod 3:2-4a, 5).50 In God's speech to Moses at this initial
theophany, God describes the challenge to his authority represented by
Pharaoh's oppression of God's people, whose cries have reached his ears. And
he describes his intention to go into battle to subdue the Egyptians and deliver
Israel (3:7-8, 15-22).
The Yahwist's divine warrior, like the traditional hero of the conflict cycle,
marches into battle accompanied by the phenomena of the thunderstorm. 51
God's first appearance to Moses is symbolized by a bolt of lightning (labbat
es), which does not consume the tree it sets ablaze (3:2).52 In the plague
narratives, which relate God's mighty acts against the Egyptians on behalf of
his people, the most elaborate episode describes God's assault on Egypt in a
great storm, with thunder and lightning, which strikes the earth with rain
and hail, devastating the land (9:13-34). At the climactic battle between God
and the Egyptians at the sea, God appears above the Israelites in a pillar of
cloud ('ammud 'anan; 13:21-22), the towering thunderhead typical of the
Mediterranean storm front. At night the storm cloud appears as a "pillar of
fire" ('ammud es; v 21), a great column of cloud filled with lightning that
illuminates the contours of the cloud and the land beneath. 53 From this storm
cloud, and with its winds, God attacks the Egyptians and destroys them in
the midst of the sea (14:19, 20, 21b, 24-25, 27b).54
The disintegration of the orders of nature, which accompanies the divine
warrior's march into battle in the traditional conflict cycle, is dramatically
portrayed in the series of natural disasters recounted in the plague narratives
(Exod 7-11). Natural patterns are reversed when water turns to blood (7:14-
18, 20b-21a, 23-25) and day becomes night (10:21-26). Nature's limits and
balances disintegrate, as frog and insect populations rage out of control (7:26-
29;8:3b-lla, 16-28) and epidemics spread unchecked (9:1-7). "The whole
land of Egypt," says the Yahwist, "lay devastated" (8:20). In his analysis of
the natural and political implications of the plague narratives, Terrence
Fretheim has characterized these catastrophes as the complete reversal of the
created order.55
In contrast to the comparative examples of the conflict cycle, in which
the storm god's adversary is a rival deity, Sea, God's adversary in the Yahwist's
narrative is a human figure, the Egyptian Pharaoh. Yet by virtue of the fact
that the Yahwist's narrative places the climactic conflict between God and
Pharaoh at the sea, and in light of the actual description of the sea in the
portrayal of that conflict, the sea takes on much of the character and signifi-
cance it possesses in the traditional conflict cycle. It assumes a kind of sym-
bolic adversarial role. This can be illustrated, in the first place, by the way in
which the sea becomes associated with Pharaoh in the climactic conflict with
the storm god. At Pharaoh's demise, his armies and the sea coalesce. In pur-
suit of Israel, Pharaoh enters the dried sea bed, where his chariots sink into
the soft sea bottom (14:24-25). When the sea waters return at dawn, the
Egyptian armies perish within them, their corpses littering the seashore (vv
27b, 30). Furthermore, the imagery with which J describes the sea's response
to the storm god's attack shares many features with the description of the
sea in comparative literature. Like Tiamat, "Sea," who is pierced by Marduk's
storm winds—including north, south, east, and west winds—in Enuma Elish,
so the sea in J's epic is driven back by God's powerful east wind (14:21b).56
Like Prince Sea (yamm), who vanishes when Baal consumes him in the Baal
Cycle, so the sea (yarn) in J's narrative disappears when God dries it up and
turns it into dry ground (v 21b).57 The victory of the divine warrior in J's
epic portrays his power and authority over human governments, represented
by Pharaoh, and natural orders, represented by the sea, alike.
God's victory at the sea concludes the first movement of the conventional
conflict cycle. The second, paired movement begins with the procession of the
victorious deity back to the sacred mountain to assume sovereignty over the
world by virtue of his conquest over the forces of chaos.58 In the Yahwist's epic,
this movement is initiated when Israel's victorious deity moves before the people
in the storm cloud (Exod 13:21-22), leading them from the sea to Mt. Sinai,
the sacred mountain where he had first appeared to Moses. At this holy moun-
tain, God's sovereignty over the world is confirmed through a covenant be-
tween God and Israel and through the issuance of a code of law by which the
worship of God is to be conducted. In this code, absolute allegiance to Israel's
God is demanded (Exod 34:11—16). And a liturgical calendar is prescribed that
recalls in ritual not only of God's control of the political realm, such as the
deliverance from Egypt (Exod 34:18), but also of God's control of the seasonal
cycles that produce Israel's harvests (34:18, 22, 26).
The second movement of the conventional conflict cycle concludes with
the restoration of nature, when the victorious God reappears as the thunder-
storm, brings nature to life, and prepares a banquet from the earth's produce.59
In the Yahwist's epic, God's return to Mt. Sinai is marked by a spectacular
display of storm phenomena: the dark cloud, thunder, and lightning (Exod
19:9, 16a, 18; 34:5).60 On either side of the narrative of this great theophany,
immediately before and after it, occur narratives in which the desert comes
to life and Israel feasts on food provided by God. In the story of Marah, God
turns bitter (mara) water into sweet, drinkable water for the Israelites (Exod
15:22-25a).61 And in the story of Kibroth-hattaavah, God provides bread and
meat to satisfy Israel's hunger (Num 11:4-13, 15, 18-23, 31-35).62 These
accounts of God's provision of water and food for his people, even in the life-
less wilderness, draw heavily, as William Propp has shown, on traditional
imagery from the second movement of the ancient Near Eastern conflict
cycle.63
Having illustrated the influence of the ancient Near Eastern conflict cycle
over the form and content of J's southern narrative, we are in a position to
reconsider the relationship between history and nature in this narrative. The
narrative contains an account of a unique history, Israel's experience of
deliverance from Egyptian slavery and covenant making at Mt. Sinai. At the
same time, the kinds of events narrated and the sequence in which they oc-
cur have been substantially affected by a conventional transcultural pattern

designed to describe the establishment of universal cosmic orders. An ap-
praisal of the Yahwist's orientation to nature and history rests ultimately on
the way in which the interrelationship between these two features of the
Yahwist's narrative is perceived.
The relationship has commonly been described in terminology that
reflects the traditional dichotomy between nature and history as well as the
association of Israelite religion with history and the religions of its neigh-
bors with nature. While scholars have recognized the presence of elements
of the old conflict cycle in biblical texts, they have argued that the narrative of
cosmic conflict has been "demythologized" or "historicized" at the hands of
biblical writers. This viewpoint is stated clearly by Dennis McCarthy. Bibli-
cal writers, he argues, appropriated the conflict drama in a manner which
shows that there was little feeling of a religious reality behind it. Rather it was
simply a convenient source of tropes. . . . The evidence is that such "demytholog-
ization" was there from the first because Israel was interested in historical, not
cosmic origins, and so it could use mythic themes without hazard. . . . So many
motifs are crowded together here: mountain god, storm god, warrior god,
Chaoskampf; but they are all symbolic, impressive figures of speech and thought
for picturing the way Yahweh controls events among men. The point is always
political or social order.64
In such an approach, the cosmic dimensions of the conflict cycle are
discounted, and the natural imagery associated with it is seen as merely instru-
mental to another purpose: the social and political. Thus the plague narra-
tives, while rooted in a natural phenomena characteristic of the conflict cycle,
can be interpreted theologically as "instances of God's harnessing the forces
of nature for the realization of His own historic purpose."65 Occasionally the
assessment of cosmic elements in biblical narrative is even negative; they are
regarded as possessing "an alien spirit," a purpose that runs against the grain
of the Bible's historical aims.66 According to this position, the cosmic dimen-
sions of the conflict cycle appropriated by biblical writers are recognized,
but they are rejected as theologically significant for biblical writers themselves.
If the traditional dichotomies between nature and history and the reli-
gions of Israel and its neighbors are set aside for a moment, however, the
relationship between the conventional conflict cycle and Israel's own history
can be seen from the opposite point of view. From this perspective, the ancient
Near Eastern cycle of cosmological conflict and ordering is not an empty shell
to be discarded, nor an alien conceptual scheme to be superceded, by Israel's
new historical consciousness. Rather, as the source of the larger framework
within which the exodus and Sinai stories are narrated and of central images
of God and the world contained in these stories, the conflict cycle is employed
to provide cosmic depth for historical events. Israel's experiences of libera-
tion and covenant are, by virtue of their narration within the structure of the
conflict cycle, grounded in the orders of the cosmos.
Human history is thereby viewed as neither distinct from nor superior
to natural orders but rooted in them. And the natural world is viewed as
neither a mere instrument nor an alien conception for historical narrative

but its foundation and ground. In his analysis of Israel's appropriation of the
ancient Near Eastern conflict genre in its archaic poetry, Cross has recog-
nized this type of interrelationship between cosmic ("mythic") and histori-
cal themes:
Israel's early religious evolution was neither simple nor linear. It will not do to
describe the process as a progressive historicizing of myth. . . . The power of the
mythic pattern was enormous. The Song of the Sea [Exodus 15] reveals this power
as mythological themes shape its mode of presenting epic memories. It is proper
to speak of this counterforce as the tendency to mythologize historical episodes
to reveal their transcendent meaning. 67
Such an interpretation of the biblical appropriation of the conflict cycle
and its cosmological purposes has precedent in the uses of this cycle in com-
parative literature. The conflict cycle's classic exemplar in Mesopotamian
literature, Enuma Elish, provides a useful example. This narrative is certainly
about cosmic ordering. After conquering Tiamat, "Sea," Marduk constructs
the universe from her body. But Marduk's conquest of Sea is not the basis for
the establishment of cosmic orders alone. It is also the basis for the estab-
lishment of the city of Babylon and its preeminent political position in the
world. Following Marduk's construction of the cosmos, the gods build
Babylon and within it, Esagila, the great temple to be Marduk's abode. On
this throne in this temple in the city of Babylon, Marduk takes his place as
his sovereignty in the cosmos is proclaimed by the deities at the conclusion
of the epic.68
Noting the brevity of the account of creation, when compared to
Marduk's battle with and conquest of Tiamat, and the length of the procla-
mation of Marduk's names as ruling sovereign in Babylon, Alexander Heidel
claims that Enuma Elish, as much as a creation story, is a tribute to Marduk's
city Babylon. "Next to the purpose of singing the praises of Marduk comes
the desire, on the part of the Babylonian priests, who were responsible for
the composition of this epic, to sing the praises of Babylon, the city of Marduk,
and to strengthen her claim to supremacy over all the cities of the land."69
Thus cosmic and political orders are conceived as dimensions of a single
reality established and sustained by Marduk.
In this vein, Thorkild Jacobsen has argued that Marduk's adversary,
Tiamat, "Sea," represents not only a natural or cosmic phenomena but also
an historical one, the "Sealand" (mat tamti, "land of tamti/'Sea"') the terri-
tory of ancient Sumer near the Persian Gulf in southern Mesopotamia and
Babylon's chief antagonist in the first half of the second millennium.70The
conquest of Tiamat thus signifies Marduk's control over the powers of the
cosmos and over the political powers of southern Mesopotamia as well. This
blending of the cosmic and historical in the representation of Marduk's
adversary provides an instructive parallel for the coalescence of the Egyp-
tian armies and the sea in God's climatic battle in the Yahwist's exodus nar-
ratives. In both narratives, natural and political orders alike are placed under
the control of the soverign deity.
Within this interrelationship between cosmological and political themes

in Enuma Elish, Jacobsen recognizes "a unifying concept of existence" in
which divine orders pervade both nature and society. In this single system
of order, in which cosmos and history share a common design, the cosmo-
logical sovereignty of Marduk provides "cosmic scope" for the historical and
political sovereignty of Babylon.71 In the same fashion, the Yahwist's narra-
tion of Israel's particular history within the context of the conventional ancient
Near Eastern genre of cosmological conflict and ordering provides cosmic
scope to these events. It locates them within the orders of the universe itself,
granting them transcendent meaning.72
Within such an interpretive approach, the cosmological motifs in the
Yahwist's southern narratives are not alien to Israeite thought or merely con-
venient tropes for Israel's historical narrative. They reflect a conception of
the natural world as the foundation of human existence and the ultimate
context within which human history must be regarded. They reflect a con-
ception of reality in which the arenas we speak of as nature and history are
dimensions of a single ordered realm under the sovereignty of a deity who
guarantees life in the world and to his people.
Religious Ritual and Worship

It has been suggested by Jacobsen that the ultimate origin of the ancient storm-
sea conflict drama, which influences the shape J's southern narratives, is the
hill country along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.73 In this envi-
ronment, during the rainy season, great thunderheads build up over the
Mediterranean and come sweeping in over the sea and into the hill country,
where life depends on the rains these storm fronts bring. Thus, in the liter-
ary shape and primary images of the southern narratives are reflected the
cosmological phenomena native to the biblical highlands that provide the
perspective for the Yahwist's epic as a whole.
The same can be said of the legal codes preserved in this part of the epic
and of the prescriptions for religious ritual and worship they contain. Just as
J's view of God's activity in the world is expressed through the form and
imagery of a literary cycle indigenous to the Canaanite highlands, so his
understanding of the worship of that deity is expressed in a code of rituals
arising from that same milieu. As has already been shown in detail above, J's
"decalogue" in Exodus 34 contains a set of prescriptions for Israelite wor-
ship that reflect the same mixed agrarian economy presumed throughout the
epic. It is necessary now to consider, in conclusion, how these rituals repre-
sent the relationship between society and nature.
There can be no doubt that the collection of laws in Exodus 34 is regarded
in the Yahwist's epic as Israel's supreme religious obligation to Yahweh. The
laws are presented as the code of conduct required of Israel by the covenant
drawn up between Yahweh and Moses on Mt. Sinai (w 1-11). Whereas the
Elohist's record of the covenant with God at the mountain in Exodus 24:1-15a
included the familiar "ten commandments" in Exodus 20:1-1 7 as the basis
of Israel's obligations, so Exodus 34 reflects the Yahwist's own record of the

Sinai covenant and Israel's obligations therein. 74
The most distinctive aspect of J's covenant code is the manner in which
it reflects the agricultural economy and calendar of biblical Israel. The pri-
mary religious festivals mandated by J's code, at which all adult males were
required to be present, are harvest festivals: the festival of unleavened bread
at the barley harvest (v 18 cf. 9:31), the festival of weeks at the wheat harvest
(v 22), and the festival of ingathering at the fruit harvest (v 22). If the ex-
plicit instructions of the festival of weeks is any indication, these festivals
required the presentation to Yahweh of the first produce of each of these major
crops (v 22). In any case, other regulations make it clear that a primary duty
of all is the contribution to Yahweh of the first produce of the entire agricul-
tural economy, from the firstborn of the herds—cattle, sheep, donkeys
(vv 19-20)—to the initial harvest of the arable land (adama; v 26). These regu-
lations represent the heart of J's covenant code, which contains in addition
several key prescriptions found also in the Elohist code—the exclusive wor-
ship of Yahweh (v 14), the prohibition of images (v 17), and the observation
of the sabbath (v 21; even, according to J, at seasons of peak agricultural
labor!).
The first observation that can be made about J's conception of worship
on the basis of these ritual regulations is that Israel's service to God was ren-
dered through its agricultural economy. Israel's primary religious responsi-
bility was the offering to God of the first returns of its investment in its fields
and herds. Such a pattern of worship does not derive ultimately from the
experience of divine activity in historical or political events, but from a sense
of divine involvement in the orders of nature, in the processes of fertility that
produced crops and offspring in particular. The realm of nature is regarded
by such ritual not as emptied of divinity and thereby "desacralized" but as
the very arena within which human society fulfills its service to God.
To probe more deeply into the purpose of these agricultural rituals, into
the human intentions that lay behind them, is not as simple an investigation
as it might at first seem. While the offering of first fruits is a common prac-
tice around the world in various types of societies—food gatherers, pastor-
alists, agriculturalists—no single interpretation of the ritual has been accepted
by anthropologists and comparativists.75 Many, however, find in such ritual,
including its biblical version, two interrelated motives: the expression of
gratitude on the one hand and the interest in gaining the favor and aid of the
deity on the other. 76 This twofold intent of the first fruits offering is aptly
captured in the term minha, employed for it by J in the story of Cain and
Abel (Gen 4:3,4). minha, as its usage in the Jacob and Esau story clearly shows
(Gen 32:14, 19, 21; 33:10), is "a present made to secure or retain good will."77
As the contents of Israel's offering to God—the first fruits of field and
herd—indicate, the gratitude expressed and the aid desired have both to do
with the processes of fertility in ground and womb. The contribution to God
of the first results of such fertility in the field and in the herd signify the
community's thankfulness to the deity. (The possibility that J conceived of
this contribution as actually feeding the deity has already been examined in
chapter 2.) By this act, the worshipper also hoped to influence favorably the
divine powers responsible for fertility in the future. Such powers are closely
associated with God by J throughout the epic. From its opening sentence
identifying God as the source of rain to its elaborate theophany of God as the
thunderstorm in these southern stories, from its identification of God with
arable land in the Cain and Abel story to its accounts of the victorious storm
god's making the desert bloom, the Yahwist's epic has associated the divine
with the fertility of the land. Repeatedly, the fertility of the womb is also attrib-
uted by J to the work of God (e.g., Gen 4:1, 16:2, 20:18, 29:31-35).
The foundation of Israel's cult in the natural cycles of fertility and pro-
duction is reflected plainly in J's prescriptions about the altar on which these
sacrifices are to be made (Exod 20:22-26).78 In each sanctuary (maqom) in
which Yahweh is worshipped, the altar is to be constructed of arable soil,
'adama (v 24). Alternatively the altar may be constructed of field stones, but
stones, if used, must remain in their natural state. The touch of human tools—
the contact with technology—was regarded as profaning the cultic structure
(v 25). adama, the preferred material for the Israelite altar, is of course the
basis of Israel's agricultural economy. It is the land from which the worship-
pers' offerings have been produced and the land regarding which the offerer
desires Yahweh's future aid. It is the land that defines Israelite society. It
represents the focal point of J's landscape and signifies the character of human
life, composed as it was from arable soil. Israel's central cultic installation,
its altar of arable soil, grounds Israelite worship firmly within its agrarian
mode of life.
Having surveyed the natural phenomena that shaped the Yahwistic cult,
we must also examine the references to history and politics in J's ritual code.
While two of the three major harvest festivals, the festival of weeks at the
wheat harvest and of ingathering at the fruit harvest, are exclusively agricul-
tural in nature, the third, the festival of unleavened bread at the barley har-
vest, includes the commemoration of Israel's escape from Egypt (Exod 34:18).
Participation in this festival thus reflects human gratitude both for the first
grain harvest of the spring and for Israel's deliverance from Egyptian oppres-
sion. Yahweh's activity in both natural and historical realms, so ably expressed
by J's use of the conflict genre as the basis for the southern narrative, is here
acknowledged in a single religious ritual. This blending of the natural and
historical is beautifully symbolized in the key element of this festival, the
consumption of unleavened bread. The exclusion of leaven, which has its
roots in the eating of the first produce in its original state, untouched by
leaven, or in the association of leaven with fermentation, deterioration, and
death, is also provided with an historical explanation by J: the haste with
which Israel left Egypt did not leave time for its use (Exod 12: 33-39).79
A second reference to political realities within J's list of ritual regulations
calls to mind a theme of J's ancestral narratives in Genesis: the gift of land as
the basis for Israelite nationhood.80 J's code specifically states that careful
observation of its regular rituals will ensure possession of the land God ceded
to Abraham, secure borders, and a stable national existence (Exod 34:11, 24).
But here, too, the natural and historical are blended in the worshipper's pro-
pitiation of the deity. By fulfilling the agricultural obligations prescribed by
J's covenant code, the offerer hoped to secure God's continued sovereignty
over the soil, regarded as both the foundation of Israel's agricultural economy
and physical survival and of its national identity and political security.
One final element in J's legislation deserves attention because it has occa-
sionally been employed in the argument for Israel's exclusive historical ori-
entation and desacralization of the world of nature. This is the prohibition
of images for the deity (Exod 34:17; cf. 20:23). According to this proposal,
argued eloquently by Gerhard von Rad, the veto on images in Israelite worship
rose ultimately from Israel's refusal to associate divinity directly with the
world. Since God acted in history rather than in nature, no natural object
could represent his presence. As von Rad summarizes the argument, "Nature
was not a mode of Jahweh's being; he stood over against it as its Creator. This
then means that the commandment forbidding images is bound up with the
hidden way in which Jahweh's revelation came about in cult and history."81
Israel's aniconic tradition, more and more confirmed by archaeological
excavation, has been explained with a variety of theories, none of which has
gained a consensus among scholars.82 The close association between this
prohibition and the command for the exclusive worship of Yahweh, within
the various codes in which it appears (Exod 34:11—17, 20:3—5; cf. Deut
5:7—10), suggests that the prohibition of images may have most to do with
preserving the worship of Yahweh alone and the discouragement of syncre-
tism, to which the use of images may have made worship susceptible (Exod
34: 13-14). Whatever the case, J's thoroughgoing identification of Yahweh
with natural phenomena does not justify von Rad's claim that "nature was
not a mode of Jahweh's being." For J nature and history alike represent modes
of divine being, and Israel's aniconic tradition in no way contradicts this fact.
Throughout Israel's worship, as J conceived it to be, the world of nature
plays a foundational role. It is within this realm that Israel serves its God.
From this realm are taken its offerings to God and within this realm it desires
God's goodwill and blessings. Related integrally to the recognition and cele-
bration of God's presence in this realm is the recognition of God's presence
and activity in the historical and political arena as well. When both realms are
present in the ritual of worship they are so completely intertwined in the cen-
tral religious symbols, whether they be land or unleavened bread, that they
cannot be separated according to the modern dichotomy signified by the terms
nature and history. For J, Israel's religious ritual reflected a single world reve-
latory at once of Yahweh's presence within it and sovereignty over it.
5
The Bible and Nature

Ancient Israelite Views and Modern
Environmental Theologies
The detailed survey of the Yahwist's landscape in chapters 2,3, and 4 pro-
vides us with a new set of measurements—of J's physical terrain and intel-
lectual perspective—with which to reassess the larger issue that prompted
this survey. This is the common belief, widespread in traditional biblical
scholarship and recent environmental writing alike, that nature poses a prob-
lem for biblical thought. It is a belief, in its scholarly version at least, based
solidly on two interrelated concepts: the idea that biblical religion is an his-
torical religion for which the world of nature is of only peripheral interest,
and the idea that this viewpoint derived largely from Israel's desert origins.
This traditional and familiar representation of nature in the Bible has been
illustrated and analyzed at length in chapter 1, where its theoretical basis in
nineteenth-century anthropology and theology has already been documented
and critiqued. Throughout the subsequent interpretation of the three major
movements of the Yahwist's epic, the text of J has been analyzed in light of
the two key themes—the desert and history—that have shaped traditional
scholarship. And these key concepts have proven unworkable, as character-
izations of the environment of the Yahwist's epic and of the representation
of nature and culture expressed within it. In order to bring the results of this
reinterpretation of the Yahwist's epic into sharper focus, the Yahwist's per-
spective on nature and on the human position within it will be summarized
below under three headings. Under the first, "Agriculture as Culture: The
Human as a Farmer," the issue of the Yahwist's formative environment will
be reconsidered. Under the second and third headings, "Creation as Redemp-
140
The Bible and Nature 141
tion: The Human as a Citizen of the Earth," and "Nature as Measure: The
Human as a Servant," the Yahwist's conception of the relationship between
nature and society will be reviewed. In each of these cases, the Yahwist's
perspective will be explored for its major implications, both for a recon-
ceptualization of the religion of ancient Israel and for a more genuine and
authentic treatment of biblical traditions within current discussion of envi-
ronmental values.
Agriculture as Culture: The Human as a Farmer

A brief review of the concrete details of the Yahwist's landscape, as these have
come into focus in the preceding chapters, shows that J's native environment
is the agrarian terrain of the biblical hill country, rising from the Mediterra-
nean Sea on the west and the deep Jordan rift on the east. These agricultural
highlands provide the scene in which J's epic of Israel's ancestors is, for the
most part, set and the point of view from which their story is, in its entirety,
told.
At the center of this landscape lies arable soil, the substance out of which
all life—plant, animal, human—is created and to which it owes its survival.
The Yahwist traces Israel's ancestors, and the human race as a whole, to "the
farmer," haadam, who was made from arable soil, 'adama, and assigned by
God to be its cultivator. His descendants—the epic's central characters: Cain,
Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob—are all landholders and farmers, at home in
the agricultural highlands of biblical Israel. It is these arable highlands that
figure most prominently in J's well-known theology of blessing and curse.
They bear the curse in the prediluvian age and become the primary element
of blessing in the postdiluvian era. In them are grounded the sacred shrines,
established by Israel's ancestors at the location of theophanies of Yahweh,
that mark the center of the Yahwist's world.
Israel's ancestors are also shepherds, raising sheep and goats on grazing
lands contiguous with the richer arable soils in the biblical hill country. Such
pastoralism, as it is described by J, is combined with cultivation by single
ancestral families to produce the mixed agrarian economy that has typified
the Mediterranean highlands since the domestication of plants and animals.
From the first family, in which Cain tills the soil—as did his father—and in
which his younger brother Abel tends the family's flocks, J's ancestral fami-
lies are largely sedentary, multipurpose households, seeking to ensure their
subsistence by the self-sufficiency such an integrated economy provides. Their
animal husbandry includes those species—sheep and goats, cattle, donkeys,
and camels—typical of rural Iron Age settlements in the biblical period; and
the family's flocks are cared for, as is customary in such agricultural com-
munities, by children and servants.
The desert, in which Israel's origins have more commonly been located,
is a real landscape close at hand, with which the Yahwist and his ancestral
characters must constantly deal, especially in the final movement of the epic.
Yet it remains spatially and intellectually at the periphery of the Yahwist's
world. The desert is regarded throughout the epic as a foreign and perilous
place, not the indigenous and formative environment of Israel's ancestors.
The prospect of life in it is as horrific to the Israelites at the end of the epic as
it was to their ancestor Cain at the beginning. When they experience the Sinai
theophany in this liminal place, it does not ground them in the desert nor
does it reflect a desert religion. At Sinai, Israel's ancestors, as the Yahwist
describes them, are encountered by a storm god who binds them by covenant
to a ritual life centered on the major harvests produced by the arable soil of
the biblical hill country.
The specialized, nomadic pastoralism, associated with the desert and
commonly believed to characterize Israel's own beginnings, is not the eco-
nomic style of life to which the Yahwist traces Israel's origins. While not
unknown to J, specialized pastoralism is ascribed in the epic to secondary
ancestral lineages (e.g., Jabal, Ishmael) and to Israel's own ancestors only
when they are forced to adopt it outside the biblical hill country (e.g., in Syria
and Egypt) when they must take up temporary residence as clients, gerim, in
foreign countries where they do not own property and cannot farm. Through-
out the sweep of J's ancestral narrative, there is no dichotomy between herd-
ing and farming, nor is there any evidence for the evolution of J's forbearers
from one to the other.
Thus, the Yahwist's epic furnishes no evidence for the traditional view,
built heavily on nineteenth-century anthropological theory, that Israel origi-
nated in the desert and in the culture of nomadic pastoralism associated with
it. Such a view of Israel's origins is rendered suspect, as has already been
pointed out in chapter 1, by the problems inherent in the early anthropo-
logical models on which it was based. It is also contradicted by the details of
J's own landscape. This is especially significant in light of the fact that J's epic
has been regarded as Israel's oldest, most extensive account of its origins.
To be in a position to correctly evaluate the biblical view of nature and
its place in biblical religion, the reader of the Bible must be resituated geo-
graphically, from the ancient Near East's deserts to its arable highlands. It is
within this agrarian environment that biblical values toward the natural world
arose and were shaped. Precisely, biblical values reflect the realities and de-
mands of an agricultural society, in which grain-based dryland farming was
supplemented with fruit and vegetable production and with animal hus-
bandry, the raising of sheep and goats in particular. It is this concrete envi-
ronment and the experience of the small farmers who inhabited it—not the
desert and nomadic pastoralists—that must provide the frame of reference
for describing the role of nature in ancient Israelite religion, and for recon-
sidering the significance of biblical values for contemporary readers, as well.
The most far-reaching consequence of such a reorientation is the undo-
ing of the environmental argument for the uniquely historical shape of bib-
lical religion. The claim that Israelite religion valued history while it deval-
ued nature can no longer be derived from a formative desert experience. It
cannot be argued, for example, that Israel lost its bond with the phenomenal
world, as the Frankforts put it, because of its beginnings in the stark solitude
of the desert. Nor can the claim be made that its deity was a god of people
and not of places, related as he was in Israel's infancy to its nomadic ances-
tors rather than to the natural terrain they traversed.1 The traditional claim
for Israel's historical religion is thus stripped of its major, classic support:
Israel's desert origins. And the question then logically follows as to what extent
the historical characterization of Israelite religion can be sustained without
its traditional ecological foundation. Without it, the imposing reconstruc-
tion of the historical character of Israelite religion and law assembled by Alt,
for example, would have to be completely dismantled. 2
When one situates oneself within the environmental location of the
Yahwist and views the world from the point of view of an ancient Mediterra-
nean agricultural society, one can see how deeply Israelite religion is bound
up with the dynamics of such a natural and social setting. As has been shown
in the preceding chapters, the worship of Yahweh in J's epic is closely asso-
ciated with the places and processes crucial to Israel's agricultural existence.
The cult centers established by Israel's ancestors, commemorating in each
case divine appearances in which land is bequeathed to them, are located at
the center of Israel's agrarian landscape. The liturgical year, mandated in the
covenant decalogue promulgated at Mt. Sinai, is based on the three primary
harvests of the Mediterranean highlands: barley and wheat in the spring and
fruit in the fall. The principal cultic ritual consists in the presentation to the
deity of the prime produce of the two sectors of Israel's mixed agricultural
economy: the first fruits of the ground and the firstborn of the flocks and
herds. Israelite worship as reflected in J's epic—in its location, in its seasonal
observance, and in the content of its ritual—has to do with the process of
fertility upon which an agrarian society such as Israel's was wholly depen-
dent for its survival.
Such a ritual and theological system is not one that sets God and people
apart from natural processes but formalizes through cultic acts their inter-
dependence. These rituals recognize the integral link between divine activ-
ity and the soil's fertility. They express thanksgiving to God as the source of
nature's bounty. They also enact and sacralize the connection between people
and soil. Made by God from arable soil and commissioned by God to farm it,
the worshipper offers the soil's produce as service to God, as an act, one might
almost say, of self-definition. The point of orientation behind all of this ritual,
and the understanding of the human and the divine that they entail, is the
recognition of the dependence of human survival on productive soil.
Israelite religion has frequently been distinguished from its neighbors,
the Canaanites in particular, in its not being an agrarian religion bound up
with the cycles of nature or concerned with the processes of fertility as was
Canaanite religion. In fact, the tension between Canaan and Israel in the Bible
is often represented as a conflict between two religious worldviews, one based
in the natural processes crucial to agricultural existence, the other based in
human history. "Settling down in Canaan involved all sorts of social and
religious problems," observes Helmer Ringgren in his study of Israelite reli-
gion. "The Canaanites were settled farmers; their religion was a fertility cult
appropriate to the needs of an agricultural civilization. The immigrating

Israelites, in contrast, were probably nomads or semi-nomads, their civiliza-
tion was primarily pastoral, and their religion was in no position to satisfy
the demands made by agriculture." 3 Such a perspective is attributed by Peter
Ellis to the Yahwist's epic itself. "While it is true that an anti-Canaanite
polemic runs through the saga," he writes, "it is equally true that the Yahwist's
specific polemic is religious not national. His animus is against the fertility
cult of the Canaanites not against the Canaanites as a people."4 In studies of
the Yahwist, as in analyses of Israelite religion more broadly, the tension with
Canaan has been associated with the Bible's problem with nature, with its
attempt to exclude nature from the realm of religious reality and ritual.
There is no doubt that the Yahwist draws a sharp distinction between
Israelites and Canaanites throughout the epic. In the very first narrative of
the postflood age, Canaan is cursed by Noah for his father's indiscretion, and
he is placed under the rule of his brothers. Alone among all of the indigenous
peoples of Syria-Palestine who figure prominently in J's epic—the Israelites,
Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Arameans—the Canaanites are traced
through the line of the delinquent Ham rather than through the line of Shem
from whom Israel and its neighbors descend. Later, Abraham and his descen-
dants are granted the land of the Canaanites, and Israel is forbidden to inter-
marry with the Canaanites or to participate in their worship.
This clear boundary between Israel and Canaan, however, is never for-
mulated by J in terms of different orientations toward nature in their respec-
tive religions, or in terms of contrasting environments or economies in which
these religions were shaped. Rather, Canaan's distinct lineage and subservi-
ence are part of the epic's elaborate political agenda, developed in genealo-
gies and genealogical narratives, by which Israel's relationships with its neigh-
bors are mapped out and authorized. J's stories seek to legitimate ethnic
distinctions, claims to lands, boundaries between territories, and balances
of power between neighboring peoples. Such boundary marking in the
Yahwist's epic reflects no criticism of sedentary agricultural society or of
religious rituals associated with agrarian life, and it should not be employed
to characterize early Israelite religion as hostile toward such a point of view.
In the preceding analysis of the Yahwist's landscape, two ancient Near
Eastern environments have been of primary interest: the desert, because it
has so often been identified in traditional scholarship as the formative set-
ting of Israelite thought, and the agricultural highlands of biblical Israel, which
have been shown in this study to comprise the Yahwist's actual landscape.
Before concluding this case for the agricultural orientation of the Yahwist's
epic and of the religion of Israel it reflects, a third environment must be briefly
considered: the urban landscape. This is necessary in the case of the Yahwist
because of the common hypothesis that J's actual social location was not in
the rural countryside but in Jerusalem's royal establishment. J has been vari-
ously identified as an architect of the Solomonic enlightenment, a propagan-
dist for the Davidic monarchy, and a member of Israel's urban, intellectual
elite, all characterizations that would link] and his ideology with royal, urban
society rather than with rural agriculture. 5
There can be little doubt that the Yahwist's epic assumed its final form
in the age of the Davidic monarchy and that it represents, in certain of its
features, the ideology of the royal family and of a united Israel. Such a sce-
nario, as many have argued, is the only way to account for the preeminence
of David's tribal ancestor Judah in the epic and to explain the inclusion in
the single family of Jacob (Israel) of the ancestors of the twelve tribes united
in the Davidic Kingdom. A monarchic location accounts as well for the elabo-
rate political mapping of the balances of power between the Iron Age King-
dom of Israel and its neighbors—the Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites,
Arameans, and Philistines, in particular—which are worked out and autho-
rized in the genealogies and narratives of Genesis.
Yet the ideological claims of the Davidic monarchy are presented by the
Yahwist not in urban or royal categories, but in terms of the characters and
narratives typical of Israel's highland agricultural society. King David and the
ideology of covenant associated with him, for example, are prefigured in the
hill country agriculturalist, Abraham. 6 The archetypal ancestral figures, for
the Yahwist, are not kings but successful, astute farmers, heads of families—
perhaps even of clans or tribes—in whom rested power and prestige in Israel's
traditional agrarian culture. The distinctiveness of the agrarian orientation
in this representation of the ancestral hero as a farmer is highlighted and
brought into sharper focus when Israel's epic literature is compared with those
of the neighboring cultures of Mesopotamia and Greece. In these neighbor-
ing epics, the values of entrenched urban monarchies are reflected in the
characterization of ancestral heroes as kings, for instance, the kings of the
Sumerian King List and Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, and Agamemnon and
Odysseus in Greece. 7
Cities—in particular, Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Beersheba—repre-
sent a substantive feature of the Yahwist's landscape. Yet their significance
to J lies primarily in their religious precincts, precincts encompassing the
altars established by Israel's agricultural ancestors. These shrines, each linked
to a natural phenomenon—the oak tree, the mountain top, the water source—
that mediated the ancestral theophany, represent the sacred centers of the
Yahwist's agrarian landscape. They are the sites at which the great harvest
festivals mandated in the Yahwist's liturgical calendar were celebrated. As
such, these towns are represented by J as extensions of the agricultural
economy of the Israelite hill country rather than as centers of a distinct cul-
ture based on production or trade.
Such a characterization of the Yahwist's epic fits comfortably with the
traditional conception that J's epic traditions were not created de novo by a
monarchic scribe but originated in the tribal era of premonarchic Israel.8
When genealogical and narrative elements sympathetic to the Davidic mon-
archy entered these traditions as they assumed their final form in the Yahwist's
rendition, these new elements were presented in terms of older, sacred tra-
dition. In sum, the Yahwist's landscape and point of orientation to the world
is the agrarian countryside and culture in which biblical Israel originated and
that provided the basis for its economy into the monarchic age itself.
With these historical conclusions in hand, it is possible to return to the
larger issue of the role of the Bible in the formation of values in Western
culture and to make some suggestions about a more genuine and substan-
tive understanding of the relationship between biblical and contemporary
perspectives on nature. An awareness of the rootedness of biblical values in
the Yahwist's ancient agrarian landscape has implications both for assessing
the claims that have been made about the Bible in recent ecological litera-
ture, and for reaching an informed judgment on the possible value of bibli-
cal modes of thought for current theological and ethical reflection on the
proper human role in the natural world.
The first fact, surely, that strikes the modern reader about the Yahwist's
landscape is its remoteness from modern experience. The Yahwist's landscape
and orientation toward it predate the major social and economic revolutions
that have repositioned the human in the world and have substantially rede-
fined humanity's understanding of its relationship to the environment in the
modern era. J's characters and contemporaries were predominantly rural,
largely untouched—in spite of their small hill country towns—by the urban
revolution, which has in the United States, for example, pushed 97 percent
of the population into cities, leaving only a minuscule 3 percent of the popu-
lation on the farm. Furthermore, J's economy was agricultural, entirely un-
affected by the industrial and technological revolutions that determine the
shape of modern economies and that have industrialized modern agriculture
itself, introducing machines, fossil fuels, chemical pesticides, herbicides, and
fertilizers, and placing the control of production and marketing into the hands
of large agribusiness corporations. The operative, archetypal image of the
human in terms of which modern society defines itself and its goals is cer-
tainly not the Yahwist's primitive subsistence farmer. It has been replaced
by the image of the urban entrepreneur.
Even in the Yahwist's own day, when the ancient Near East was domi-
nated by the empires and economies of the great urban, river valley civiliza-
tions of Egypt and Mesopotamia, J's landscape was a remote, small, and
marginal one. Each aspect of J's economy—the specific kinds and combina-
tions of plants under cultivation, the precise types and numbers of livestock
raised, and the balance of these pursuits—was a refined adaptation of tradi-
tional Mediterranean farming practices to the particular facts of climate, rain-
fall, soil, and topography, and of the native flora and fauna of the narrow
spine of hills between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. And the key
features of the Yahwist's perspective on nature—the position of arable soil
at its center and the desert at its periphery, the attention to domestic plants
and animals and the fear of the arid wilderness—reflect the struggle for sur-
vival in this particular, small place. Israel's liturgical year is grounded in the
harvests of these hills. The Yahwist's account of the creation of the world itself
is constructed not out of the cosmologies of the great societies that preceded
and surrounded it—nor, of course, according to modern scientific theories

of the origins of the universe—but out of the concrete details of this little
hill country and its small farmers.
It would be difficult to describe, within the historical era, two landscapes
further removed from one another than the Yahwist's and the modern reader's.
They are so distinctive and the position of the human in them so different
that a measure of restraint and caution is required in any attempt to describe
their relationship. This is necessary for friends and foes of the Bible alike.
Great caution must be exercised whether one wishes to blame the Bible as
the source of modern views of humanity and its place in the environment or
to promote the Bible as a sort of guidebook for the environmental ethics of
modern societies. As a prerequisite for any disqualification of biblical values
or appropriation of them, they must be granted an historical authenticity in
their own right. They must be recognized as a genuine response to a specific
and ancient Mediterranean agrarian setting. Such a radical contextualization
of biblical values reflects not only a proper historical sense, but also a sound
ecological principle. Proper environmental values and behaviors are always
local, not general. They are precise adaptations and responses to precise
places. Each society must develop an appropriate response to its particular
landscape.
The Yahwist's image of the human as a farmer has in fact hardly been
present at all in recent discussions of the Bible and environmental values.
These discussions have been entirely taken up with another biblical model,
the Priestly Writer's conception of the human as made in God's image and as
commissioned to have dominion over the animals and to subdue the earth.
This is understandable. Such an image of authority and control is certainly
compatible with the modern experience of human power to manage and
manipulate nature with its new technological and industrial tools. Contem-
porary debate has centered not on the general appropriateness of this image
of the human being, but on the extent to which it unleashes or restrains human
power, or fosters responsible or irresponsible thinking. It is not surprising
that in the modern era of the urban entrepreneur, J's image of the human as
a small farmer would have little immediate appeal. And, given the vast dif-
ferences between the Yahwist's ancient rural landscape and the contempo-
rary urban environment just described, one might wish simply to leave it at
that, to set J's agricultural view of culture aside as of merely historical inter-
est or at most of only marginal value to modern society.
There are, however, cogent ecological reasons for rescuing the image of
the small farmer from relative oblivion, and not only for rescuing it, but for
reincorporating it into the self-concept of modern culture. This is the im-
port, at least, of a group of ecologists who would put agricultural concerns
at the very core of the environmental agenda. Among these are Wendell Berry
and Wes Jackson on the American scene, and Vandana Shiva, Miguel Altieri,
and Dean Freudenberger on the international scene.9 On the basis of the work
of individuals such as these, World Bank economist Herman Daly and theo-
logian John Cobb, in their economic blueprint for a sustainable future en-
J48 The Yahwist's Landscape
titled For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the
Environment, and a Sustainable Future, have arrived at the following conclu-
sion: "If economics is reconceived in the service of community, it will begin
with a concern for agriculture and specifically for the production of food." 10
Such a conclusion rests on two premises: first, that agriculture is the
major mode in which humans interact with the environment and the ulti-
mate basis of human survival, and second, that modern industrial agricul-
ture is not working—it is unacceptably destructive to the environment and
it is unsustainable. The first of these premises is, of course, a kind of truism:
people must eat to live, and farmers provide the food. "No matter how urban
our life," writes Wendell Berry, with language drawn partly from the Yahwist
himself, "our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to
it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in the flesh."11 But because the
actual practice of agriculture is such a distant practical reality for 97 percent
of Americans, the truth and significance of this first premise is seldom given
serious attention. Thus arises one of the dangerous ironies of modern cul-
ture. That upon which its survival is most dependent is that to which least
attention is given. "We now have more people using the land (that is, living
from it) and fewer people thinking about it than ever before," observes Berry.
"We are eating thoughtlessly, as no other entire society ever has been able to
do."12 Timothy Weiskel's reminder is particularly apt: "We live in a highly
industrialized, urban culture, but it is important to remember that there is
no such thing as a 'post-agricultural' society."13
The second reason for reconsidering agriculture, the failure of modern
industrial farming, is not a truism—far from it, given the financial and po-
litical power of the large agribusiness corporations that support the current
system. But a growing body of criticism has demonstrated that current agri-
cultural practices—dependence on oil, a nonrenewable resource, to drive
machines and to process and distribute products; the use of chemical pesti-
cides, herbicides, and fertilizers that contaminate water supplies; and the
cultivation of massive monocultures, making crops more vulnerable to pests
and diseases, while depleting and accelerating the erosion of agriculture's and
culture's final resource, topsoil—cannot be sustained. To survive, according
to these critics, modern society will have to change its basic approach to the
production of food. This is not the place to detail the compelling indictment
of industrialized agriculture, nor to outline the new policies that will be de-
manded. Suffice it to say that such changes will mean the reversal of current
trends—the United States "should give up most of the policies that have
operated in recent decades," say Daly and Cobb—and require the recovery
of an older, traditional way of farming. 14 This "new" sustainable agriculture
will have to be small-scale, local, organic, and more dependent on human
and animal labor and solar energy than on machines and fossil fuels—in other
words, more like agriculture used to be. Such proposals are based not on a
romantic view of primitive or rural life but on a sober, scientific assessment
of the damages of industrialized farming and the demands and limits of the
agrarian landscape.15
The inevitable rehabilitation of a more traditional kind of agriculture will

demand all of the scientific knowledge that modern society can muster to
develop biological alternatives to the toxic chemicals now in use, to develop
high-yield perennial polycultures in order to replace the till agriculture that
destroys topsoil, and to harness solar energy more effectively. But such a
change will also require a new cultural vision, a vision of human life as de-
pendent on small-scale agriculture, a vision, in a real sense, of the human as
a small farmer. To this end Wendell Berry has argued that society take as its
model for the human nurturer of the environment, in contrast to its exploiter,
"the old-fashioned idea or ideal of the farmer." 16
In such a situation, the Yahwist's conception of the human being as a
small farmer takes on a new value. It cannot be regarded as a quaint or mar-
ginal perspective, but it must be accepted as a perspective with which mod-
ern society must reacquaint itself if it is to restore and revitalize the agricul-
tural base upon which its survival depends. J's agricultural economy is not a
program, per se, though it shares many principles with "new" sustainable
models of agriculture. It does, however, provide an image of human iden-
tity, an image that is sacred and honored by many and that springs from the
roots of the Western religious tradition, that can be a resource for reimagining
the proper role of the human in the world.
Creation as Redemption: The Human as a Citizen of the Earth

As we have seen, the Yahwist's perspective on nature does not originate in a
desert environment but in the agrarian countryside at the heartland of bibli-
cal Israel. Consequently, it is within the context of an ancient agricultural
society that the larger theological and philosophical issues of nature and
history and of their relationship to one another in the Yahwist's epic and in
biblical thought must be reconsidered.
The implications of this are substantial, since the treatment of biblical
religion in the history of scholarship, as was pointed out in chapter 1, has
been so strongly influenced by assumptions about Israel's desert origins. In
fact, the common characterization of Israelite religion as an historical reli-
gion, in which the natural world was rendered peripheral and reduced ulti-
mately to a theological problem, has been derived largely from certain no-
tions about the character of desert life. According to this line of thought, the
worship of a deity associated primarily with human experience rather than
with natural phenomena was the natural outgrowth of desert nomadism, in
which neither families nor their patron deity could develop a close and last-
ing attachment to specific sites or phenomena within the physical environ-
ment. Common characterizations of Israelite religion that draw a sharp di-
chotomy between human history and natural phenomena, to the extent that
they are based on presuppositions of Israel's desert origins, have to be con-
sciously relinquished in order to recover the Yahwist's point of view on na-
ture and on history.
The clear-cut distinction between history and nature in these traditional
reconstructions of early Israelite religion is not in accord with the manner in

which J portrays the relationship between ancestral society and its agrarian
environment nor with J's characterization of divine activity within this set-
ting. There is certainly no sense of the detachment of society from its envi-
ronment in J. The picture is very much the opposite. The vital relationship
between Israel's ancestors and the arable soil that lies at the center of the
Yahwist's landscape is established in a variety of ways throughout the epic.
The first human is, of course, fashioned from this topsoil and charged with
its cultivation. Thus the agricultural economy of biblical Israel was at cre-
ation built into the orders of nature.
In the narrative of ancestral society that unfolds in the first, primeval
age, the relationship between these early farmers and their land—in particu-
lar, the link between human morality and the soil's fertility—is every bit as
important as the relationship between these farmers and their deity. Of course,
these relationships are inseparably bound up with one another; one can hardly
be characterized as the backdrop for the other. Furthermore, the great etio-
logical narratives of the postflood era, which explain and authorize the re-
alities (or alleged realities) of the Yahwist's age, are designed not just to vali-
date political orders and events, but also to establish bonds between people
and their environs. In Israel's case, the connection between its ancestors and
the arable highlands of biblical Israel is continually reiterated by these nar-
ratives. In fact, this land assumes a central role in the Yahwist's theology of
promise and blessing that dominates the postflood age. Outside of this set-
ting, the survival of Israel's ancestors is always in jeopardy, a fact illustrated
most vividly in the southern narratives of exile in Egypt and the desert that
conclude the epic. From the offerings presented to God by Cain and Abel in
the epic's first generation to the great liturgical prescriptions promulgated
to the epic's last generation, the agricultural economy of those highlands
provides the basis of Israelite worship, its cycles marking out the liturgical
year and its produce comprising the ritual service rendered to God.
The traditional, well-defined partition between history and nature is as
problematic for describing J's ancestral deity as it is for describing J's ances-
tral culture. J's God is not a figure whose character and activity can be satis-
factorily described within the flow of human history alone, solely in the terms,
that is, of the clans of families, social institutions, and political events of the
ancestral narratives. The Yahwist's deity is not altogether transcendent of
nature but is intimately associated with the epic's landscape and his pres-
ence is mediated through the natural phenomena that are particularly char-
acteristic of it.
The connection between God and geographical space in J's epic is illus-
trated best perhaps by the theophanies at Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and
Beersheba during which the ancestral blessings are bestowed. These divine
appearances, in which the relationship between Israel's ancestors and Israel's
arable highlands is reiterated, establish the sacral character of the land, of
the people's attachment to it, and of these sites of revelation in particular. J's
description of these sites—their theophanies, their natural images of the
center (e.g., the oak tree, the mountain top), and their ancient, ancestral al-
tars—suggests that J understood them, in the terminology of Eliade, as cos-
mic centers.17 They become axes around which the geographical and social
space of J's epic is ordered and organized, to which the lives and journeys of
Israel's ancestors are anchored, and through which the divine presence is
specially mediated. Thus particular spaces, the arable highlands in general
and these sacred precincts in particular, assume a unique relationship to the
deity and thereby a special sacral character. They become concrete media of
revelation.
Characteristically, natural and cultural metaphors blend together in J's
representation of God. The God of J is a very personal, anthropomorphic
figure, a manner of representing the divine that has become accepted as quint-
essential of the Yahwist's style and point of view. Sometimes J's God appears,
for all intents and purposes, as a man, as he does to Abraham at the oaks and
to Jacob at the river. But J's deity appears as well through a remarkable array
of natural forms: the tree, the mountain summit, and above all, the thunder-
storm, that without which Israel's dryland farming could not exist. Very often,
these modes of manifestation are intermingled in a particular theophany, so
that it is precarious to associate the revelation narrowly with the historical
process or with natural phenomena. God speaks, for example, in the thun-
der of the storm, or from the oak at Shechem. The lightning bolts are the
weapons of the divine warrior in Egypt. God walks in the wind of the Gar-
den. The soil bears and mediates the divine curse uttered to the first man.
Neither J, nor Israel, nor its ancient Near Eastern neighbors considered
the divine identical with its modes of manifestation, whether human or non-
human. God remained in the end distinct from, transcendent, if you will, of
all the forms, human and nonhuman alike, by which the divine was known.
Yet when J wished to emphasize this essential distinctiveness of the divine,
God in God's peculiar Godness—the character of the mysterium tremendum,
to use Rudolf Otto's phrase—J relied heavily on the language of nature. This
is especially true in the Yahwist's two covenant narratives (Gen 15, Exod 19),
the accounts of the establishment of a special relationship between the hu-
man and the divine. In both, the distance between the human and the divine
is carefully preserved: Abraham experiences deep terror, and falls into un-
consciousness, the very unconsciousness of 'adarn at creation (cf. Gen 2:21,
15:12). The Israelites are banned from Mt. Sinai because nearing the deity
would mean certain death (Exod 19:20-25). In both cases, the power and
mystery of God are stressed by the use of awesome natural phenomena: fire
and smoke while Abraham slept, and the frightening storm at the summit of
Mt. Sinai. In antiquity, the forces of nature, which lay outside of human con-
trol but on which human survival absolutely depended, provided the most
vivid images of the "other," of the mystery at the heart of the universe.
This brief summary of the results of the foregoing study of the Yahwist's
epic reviews just some of the evidence for the need to move beyond the older
reconstructions of Israelite religion based on a clear-cut conceptual dichotomy
between history and nature. This dichotomy, although linked to Israel's desert
origins, derives ultimately from the old idealistic dualism of spirit (human)
and matter (nonhuman) in Western culture that, in its Hegelian form, had
such a significant influence on early critical biblical scholarship. While old
in the West, such dualistic thought was foreign to the Yahwist as it was to
the other authors of the Hebrew Bible, and it must be consciously avoided to
grasp the complexities of biblical thought. The same must be said for the
cliches about Israelite religion—claims that it "historicizes," "demytholo-
gizes," "desacralizes"—that have spun off of such idealistic interpretations.
One final example might be retrieved from this study of it in order to
illustrate the problems with such dualistic terminology. It is still common to
make the claim that Israel "historicized" an older kind of Canaanite worship,
taking over what were once nature festivals and adapting them to celebrate
historical events. Here is how John Bright, for example, has described early
Israelite worship in his history of Israel: "Early Israel's cult, however, did not
center in a sacrificial system, but in certain great annual feasts. . . . All these
feasts were far older than Israel and, save for Passover, of agricultural origin.
Israel . . . gave them a new rationale by imparting to them a historical con-
tent. They ceased to be mere nature festivals and became occasions upon
which the mighty acts of Yahweh toward Israel were celebrated."18
In fact, the liturgical calendar preserved by J (Exod 34) is an agricul-
tural calendar. Its three great festivals celebrate Israel's three important har-
vests—barley, wheat, and fruit—and its structure is thereby established by
the seasonal cycle of Israel's agricultural economy. And this is so not only
for J but also in the liturgical calendars preserved by the Deuteronomist
(Deuteronomy 16) and Priestly Writer (Leviticus 23) as well. In two respects
"historical" concerns are present in J's annual liturgy. The first festival com-
memorates both the barley harvest and the departure from Egypt, which
occurred exactly when the barley ripened (Exod 9:31, 34:18). And the regu-
lar commemoration of these festivals was believed to insure not only agri-
cultural bounty but political security as well (Exod 34:24). But there is sim-
ply no evidence that such elements were "added" to rituals or traditions
without them. They occur here in the earliest levels of Israelite liturgical
practice. The "historicization" of this agricultural calendar does not occur
until postbiblical Judaism when its feasts all become connected with events
in Israelite history.19 In its biblical form, Israel's liturgical calendar celebrates
both of what scholars have referred to as the cyclical time of nature and the
linear time of history.
Within such a nonidealistic worldview, the separation of history from
nature or redemption from creation cannot be very useful or meaningful. For
the Yahwist, the idea of redemption is very much grounded in the world of
creation, specifically in the agricultural landscape to which humans were
intrinsically related at the beginning of the world. Redemption, well-being,
or salvation was conceived of entirely within the concrete agricultural envi-
rons in which J, his ancestors, and his contemporaries lived out their lives
on this earth. Redemption depended on this fertile and secure land. It con-
sisted of a lasting and stable relationship with this land and the bountiful
harvests it produced. The attempt to separate out historical experience from

natural phenomena within such an understanding of redemption, or the at-
tempt to elevate one over the other, introduces a perspective foreign to J's
thought.
The religion of the Yahwist's epic was thus a religion of the earth, more
precisely a religion of the agrarian highlands of biblical Israel. The world was
regarded as a single metaphysical unity, the only realm within which a mean-
ingful human existence was possible. By consequence, the earth, which de-
fined the character and contours of human life, assumed ultimate value in
Yahwistic thought. No philosophical or theological dualism is present by
which the world can be conceived in terms of two distinct ontological or-
ders—human and world, history and nature, spirit and body, mind and
matter—which may then be weighed against one another to determine their
relative value.
Almost in their entirety, the Hebrew Scriptures share the Yahwist's uni-
tary metaphysic. Only with the rise of apocalyptic thought, late in Israelite
history, is this unified conception of reality and its absolute valuation of
earthly existence modified. The apocalyptic worldview, whose clearest ex-
pression in the Hebrew Scriptures is the book of Daniel, despaired of life in
this world and conceived of human salvation only through a complete trans-
formation of the world's orders and/or as a new existence in another, super-
natural sphere of reality. 20 Apocalyptic thought included, for the first time
in biblical history, a clear statement of the notion of life after death. While
Jewish apocalypticism takes up and adapts the physical imagery of the earthly
worldview out of which it sprang, it nevertheless proposed the possibility of
human redemption apart from the world as it is. The earth was no longer the
true human home. Ultimate salvation for the faithful was to be found in an-
other world on another metaphysical plane.
Early Christian thought was deeply affected by this apocalyptic con-
sciousness, and the doctrine of two worlds became foundational in the Chris-
tian West. Combined in various ways, first with Neoplatonic thought that
separated soul from body and later with other forms of idealism, Christian-
ity developed at its heart a profound metaphysical dualism. Here, too, the
spiritual world assumed primary importance and the natural world took on
secondary or temporary significance. In its more extreme forms, Christian
dualism even perceived the material world as alien to authentic human ex-
perience and therefore dispensable, if not downright evil.
It is this later dualistic legacy, with its roots in apocalyptic thought and
in Greek Idealist philosophy, about which historians and theologians inter-
ested in Western environmental values have been primarily concerned. One
of the first major criticisms of the ecological values of the Western religious
tradition stemming from Judaism and Christianity was Lynn White's charge
that this tradition possessed a dangerous "dualism of man and nature."
Wendell Berry makes the same point with characteristic literary power. "This
separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the
fringe, no aberration," he writes, "but a fracture that runs through the men-
tality of institutional religion like a geological fault. And this rift in the men-
tality of religion continues to characterize the modern mind, no matter how
secular and worldly it becomes."
Not long after Lynn White's critique appeared, Gordon Kaufman took
up the issue of the dualistic character of theological discourse in an essay
entitled, "A Problem for Theology: The Concept of Nature." Again, the con-
cept of nature as a "problem" is prominent. "The conceptions of God and
man, as they have developed in Western religious traditions," wrote Kaufman,
"work hand in hand toward the distinguishing of man from (the rest of)
nature. Nature is not conceived primarily as man's proper home and the very
source and sustenance of his being, but rather as the context of and material
for ideological activity by the (nonnatural) wills working upon and in it."
Pointing out the philosophical and scientific untenability, by modern stan-
dards, of such classic dualistic philosophy, Kaufman urged "a theological
reconstruction going down to the deepest roots of the Western religious sen-
sibility and vocabulary," a reconstruction that would make it possible to gain
a more unified view "inclusive of what we now call nature and what we now
call history."21
In search of patterns of thought more in tune with the ecological reali-
ties of human life, its interconnections with and dependence on the entire
ecosystem of which it is a part, theologians are exploring new modes of dis-
course that emphasize divine and human integration with earthly reality.
Gordon Kaufman, for example, has recently described the nature of human
life as "biohistorical," a term by which he wishes to integrate within a uni-
fied view of the human, the recognition "of our interconnectedness and inter-
dependence with all other forms of life (on the one hand), and of our cul-
tural creativity in history, producing a thoroughly cultural form of existence
(on the other)." 22
Many other attempts to develop new conceptual models for overcoming
this entrenched Western dualism have been proposed. Father Thomas Berry,
a Passionist priest at the forefront of the environmental movement, has called
for a new creation story that would capture "the integrity and harmony of the
total cosmic order." He urges a more integral vision of the world in which we
would recognize that "we bear the universe in our beings as the universe bears
us in its being," a vision he regards as a "new paradigm of what it means to be
human.... Until the human is understood as a dimension of the earth," writes
Berry, "we have no secure basis for understanding any aspect of the human.
We can understand the human only through the earth."23 Sallie McFague has
employed the metaphor of the world as God's body in order to try to over-
come the ontological dualism between the divine and the world in Western
thought. 24 The World Council of Churches, in order to underline the need
for more holistic thinking in the church's vision, has chosen as the title for its
environmental program, "The Integrity of Creation."25
The Yahwist's perspective is important in the context of this contempo-
rary struggle with the dualistic orientation of Western theology because it
reminds us that this dualism has not been the sole model for understanding
the place of the human in the world. At its origin in biblical thought, West-
ern religion viewed humanity as part of a single realm of reality in which the
earth was considered the proper human home. Salvation was conceived as a
stable, healthy relationship with the earthly environment, not as the tran-
scendence of it. In this respect, Lynn White's early claim that Western dual-
ism has its origins in the biblical creation stories is misdirected. Even the
Priestly Writer, who had a rather more exalted view of the human as created
in God's image, did not see this as an ontological statement but as a func-
tional one, a point of view to which we will return in a moment.
This unitary mode of thought within the biblical point of view has been
noted by John Cobb. In a recent essay he withdraws his earlier criticism of
the Bible, based on the argument of Lynn White, in his early environmental
book, Is It Too Late? He now regards the "premodern" thought of the Bible
in "much richer continuity" with the "postmodern" thought he believes is
demanded to overcome the anthropocentrism, individualism, and dualism
of modernity. This is how Cobb describes his more recent position: "It was
modern biblical scholarship that had imposed on the Scriptures the dualism
of nature and history, derived not from them but from modern philosophy
and theology. Such dualism was as alien to ancient Israel as it should become
to us ... I have gradually learned that an honest return to the Bible can be a
positive resource rather than an obstacle to the kind of thinking and acting
now required." 26
John Cobb does not advocate an attempt to return to premodern thought,
and rightly so. It is impossible and, in certain respects, quite undesirable. But
it is important within the contemporary search for less dualistic modes of
thought to become reacquainted with those viewpoints at the origin of the
Western intellectual tradition that stress integration over separation. These
viewpoints, such as the Yahwist's, may serve to anchor and to empower
modern modes of thought and speech. They may also serve to remind us about
basic truths of existence that modern philosophy and technology have effec-
tively hidden from us. This is, of course, the enduring value of the past as a
mirror in which to see ourselves more fully.
Nature as Measure: The Human as a Servant

Within the Yahwist's agricultural landscape, the human being assumes a
position in relation to the natural world quite different from the one depicted
in traditional biblical scholarship. The original Israelite is not the desert
nomad whose social structures and religious experience are detached from
the (hostile) environment and conceived in terms of historical categories of
thought. Rather, the original Israelite, as was the first human being, is the
small farmer whose society and its well-being, and whose religious life itself,
are solidly rooted in the arable land of the biblical hill country and in the
rhythms of the agricultural economy that it sustained.
The Yahwist's view of the human position in the world contrasts not only
with the view in these traditional reconstructions of Israelite origins, but also
with the views of other biblical authors. Among these is the most famous of
all biblical images of the human, the view of humanity as created in God's
image and given dominion over the world, found in the Priestly account of
creation in Genesis 1. Of all biblical texts, none has been discussed more in
recent ecological literature than Genesis 1:26-28, in which this view of the
human is portrayed. Such widespread attention to a single image stems from
and contributes to the belief that this is the biblical view. And thus almost all
intellectual energy has been poured into the debate about whether this par-
ticular picture will work or not, whether it is an image of unbounded power
that must be abandoned or an image of responsible stewardship that must
be recovered.
The discussion of the biblical view of the human position within the
natural world would be broadened and enhanced if other views were enter-
tained and examined with greater interest. Of these, the Yahwist's is one of
the most important. J understands the human place within nature quite dif-
ferently from the Priestly Writer, a point that has been astutely recognized
and explored in some interesting directions by a nonbiblical scholar, J. Baird
Callicott.27 He attributes his insight, actually, to remarks once made by John
Muir about the Yahwist's account of creation in Genesis 2. The insights of
Muir and Callicott may be developed by drawing together here some of the
key details of the Yahwist's perspective.
The character and distinctiveness of the Yahwist's view of the human
place within the natural world can be seen most clearly by contrasting it point
by point with the more familiar Priestly perspective. For P, the quintessen-
tial fact about human nature is that it bears the image of God (Gen 1:26-27).
In all likelihood, given the lack of the dualism between spirit and matter, soul
and body, in Israelite thought, this image did not attribute to humans a spe-
cial ontological status in creation, but rather assigned to humanity a special
function, that of God's representative or steward over the created order. But
it does draw the human into a unique association with the divine and in this
regard it distinguishes the human clearly from all other forms of life. This
special status in relation to God is echoed in Psalm 8, a hymn with parallels
to Genesis 1, in which humans are placed between God and other life, "a little
less than God (or divine beings)," but with "everything under their feet"
(w 6-7; Eng w 5-6).
By contrast, the quintessential fact about human nature for J is that
it derives from the arable soil (2:7). Humans are made from this soil, they
return to it at death, and they cultivate it during their lives. In their basic
nature, therefore, humans are associated with the earth rather than with the
deity, with creation rather than with the creator. And in this regard humans
share the lot of all of life, since this life too—animals and plants alike—is
fashioned by God out of arable soil. The breath blown into the first human
by God gives humanity no special divine essence, since this is the breath by
which all animals live (2:7; cf. 6:3, 7:22).
These differing conceptions of human nature, as can already be seen, are
associated with different conceptions of the relationship between human and
animal life. P's view is conspicuously hierarchical. At creation humans are

commanded by God to rule (rada), to exercise dominion over other animate
life (1:28). Whether one wishes to construe such rule as benevolent or harsh—
and both are possible within the limits of the term in biblical usage—there
can be no doubt that rada represents control and power, since it is used cus-
tomarily of kings and always of those with authority over others.28 By con-
trast, J conceives of this relationship in more communal terms. As animals
and humans alike are made from the earth's topsoil, they possess no distinct
ontological status, both being referred to simply as living beings (nepes hayya;
2:7,19). Humans and animals share speech and knowledge, as the wise snake
reveals (3:1-2). Above all, animals are regarded as helpers (2:18), compan-
ions in the art of agriculture. This is the reason for which they were created
in the Yahwist's account. The act of naming them (2:19), as was argued in
chapter 2, is not employed in this account as a demonstration of power or
control but of identification and relationship. Only the long shadow cast by
the Priestly account, not the character of the Eden narrative itself, can ac-
count for the traditional attribution of power to this act.
The relationship between humans and the earth in the Priestly and
Yahwistic perspectives differs in striking respects as well. To the Priestly
Writer agricultural production is viewed as subduing (kabas) the earth (1:28).
The verb kabas is a powerful word, employed in the Bible to describe the
forceful subjection of another, the coercion into bondage and service. It is
used to describe defeating an adversary in war, making slaves, and raping
women.29 The land for P is, to all intents, an adversary to be pressed into
service. By contrast, agriculture is viewed by the Yahwist as serving ('abad)
the land (2:5,15; 3:23; 4:2). J's term for cultivation is the common Hebrew
word for service rendered to a superior, that is, to a human master or to God.
For J, therefore, the land is a sovereign to be served. Two opposite views of
the relationship between humanity and the earth are present here: for P the
human is the land's master, coercing it into service, while for J the human
is the land's servant, performing the duties demanded by its powers and
processes.
The issue of human reproduction and the population of earth by the
human species is also viewed from different perspectives by Priestly and
Yahwistic authors. For P, human reproduction is viewed as a human obliga-
tion upon which no limits are placed. Reproduction is the first command
delivered to the human couple at creation, and it is delivered in unrestricted
terms: "Be fruitful, become numerous, and fill the earth" (1:28). Following
the flood, this is the first command, according to P, that is delivered by God
to Noah and his family (9:1). For J, human reproduction is viewed as a more
complex and paradoxical phenomenon. On the one hand, descendants are
promised to Abraham in unimaginable numbers—like the dust of the earth
or the stars of the sky (13:16, 15:5). On the other hand, human reproduc-
tion is placed under severe restraints at creation. Conception and childbirth
alike are prescribed as precarious and difficult, as the experiences of the
matriarchs in J's narratives frequently attest.
These contrasting views of the position of humanity in the created order,

one of power and control, the other of humility and limit, are symbolized by
the altars that stand at the centers of Priestly and Yahwistic worship. The
Priestly altar, constructed according to detailed instructions delivered by God
to Moses at Mt. Sinai, is an elaborate artistic achievement (Exod 27:1-8,
38:1-7). It is a large square installation, ten feet on a side, constructed of acacia
wood and overlaid with bronze. It is accompanied by an array of vessels and
instruments, themselves forged from bronze, to be used by the Priests when
offerings are burnt upon the altar. Offerings are thus presented to the deity
by the Priests on an altar reflecting the most refined achievements of human
technology in wood and metal work, in the shaping of natural materials to
human use.
By contrast, the Yahwistic altar is to be built of earth alone, in particular of
the fertile topsoil ('adama) on which Israel's agricultural economy was based
(Exod 20:24). Field stones are also allowed, but should they be used they are
not to be dressed by the tools of the stonecutter. Any presence of human arti-
fice, the stroke of a metal tool on the stone, is considered a profanation of the
altar. It must remain in its pristine, natural form unshaped by human technol-
ogy (20:25). The altar thus symbolizes the material of nature on which people
are dependent rather than the achievements of people to shape those materi-
als to their ends. Wes Jackson, who has adopted the Yahwist's altar as a sym-
bol of human modesty in the modern age, has a fine sense of its archaic func-
tion. "This scripture must mean," he writes, "that we are to be more mindful
of the creation, more mindful of the original materials of the universe than of
the artist. The altar was to stand as a reminder that we could not improve on
the timeless purpose of the original material . . . that the scientist and the art-
ist must remain subordinate to the larger Creation."30
Two distinct postures within creation are assumed by the human being
in Priestly and Yahwistic perspectives. The Priestly human occupies a supe-
rior position within the created order. Created in God's image, humans are
distinguished horn the rest of creation and granted unique authority over it.
They are to exercise this authority by populating the earth, ruling its ani-
mals, and subduing its land. As was argued in chapter 2, this archetypal
human is in fact a priestly figure. The human of Genesis 1 shares many of
the characteristics of the priestly role itself. This was the role of a distinct,
elite party in Israelite society, closely allied to royalty, that regarded itself as
the mediator of divine rule to Israel and to creation itself. The ornate altar
on which its worship was conducted represented the greatest refinements of
human power and technological achievement.
By contrast, the human being in the Yahwist's epic occupies a subordinate
role within the created order. Created out of the arable soil, the Yahwist's human
is united with the rest of creation and placed in a subservient relationship to it.
This subservience is expressed in the image of the soil as the beginning and
the end of human life and in the depiction of the cultivation of the soil as "serv-
ing" rather than "subduing." In this agricultural task, the animals—made of
the same soil—are helpers and companions. As has been argued throughout
this study, this human is above all a typical Israelite farmer, the role of the
majority in Israelite society and the role attributed to its ancestors in the
Yahwist's epic. The altar on which their worship is conducted is composed of
the soil itself, deliberately untouched by human artifice. Basic to this image of
the human is the ancient farmer's sense of dependence upon the soil, of the
necessity of meeting its demands and cooperating with its processes, and of
the ultimate lack of control over nature's own orders and powers.
The title given by modern interpreters to the role played in nature by
the Priestly human is the "steward," an individual granted authority by a
superior to manage and supervise the estate placed under his control. To
identify the contrasting role played in nature by the Yahwist's human, I have
chosen the title of "servant," taking this designation from the Yahwist's own
vocabulary in which the cultivation of the soil—that central act that defines
for J the relationship between people and the earth—is described by the verb
"to serve," 'abad. In such a role, human responsibility is viewed not as the
administration and control of nature but as the respect for nature's orders
and compliance with its rules.
The recovery of the Yahwist's modest view of the human place within
the world from the very long shadow cast by the Priestly viewpoint in the
history of scholarship and in modern environmental theology broadens our
understanding of ancient Israelite thought. It provides an additional example,
from Israel's earliest reflections on its position in the world, of the modest
view of human life more commonly associated with the Book of Job. A major
point of God's great speeches from the whirlwind to Job, speeches full of the
wild powers of nature, is to convince Job of his miniscule position in the larger
scheme of things.31 These two works point to a tradition in Israelite thought
in which humanity is viewed as much smaller in creation than portrayed in
the well-known Priestly image of Genesis 1.
In several respects, the Yahwist's position can provide added perspec-
tive to current discussions about the resourcefulness of Western religious
traditions for a contemporary theology of nature. To begin with, the contrast
between the Priestly and Yahwistic views of the human role in creation illus-
trates the age and magnitude of a debate that continues to shape the contem-
porary discussion of environmental values. Many illustrations of these two
views of the human—the steward and the servant of creation—could be taken
from current writing on environmental issues. I have selected only two by
way of example, and these two because they represent to some extent the
same social locations, in modern form, reflected in the ancient Priestly and
Yahwistic perspectives.
One of these is the Passionist priest, Thomas Berry, a prominent reli-
gious leader in the environmental movement for many years. Thomas Berry
has argued that the West's traditional stories of creation be replaced with a
new creation story, a story expansive enough to incorporate the most recent
scientific knowledge about the spatial and chronological scope of the evolu-
tion of the universe and about the emergence of humanity as the culmina-
tion within that process. While Thomas Berry urges us, on the basis of this
new story, "to see the human itself as an integral member of the earth com-
munity, not as some lordly being free to plunder the earth for human util-
ity," his primary image of the human is a lofty one. Influenced deeply by the
philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, he regards the human as the climax of
evolutionary activity, "that being in whom the universe in its evolutionary
dimension became conscious of itself." Such a view represents for Thomas
Berry a new paradigm of the entire earth-human order—"a shift in earth-
human relations, for we now in large measure determine the earth process
that once determined us." Humans possess a special power and with it a
special responsibility: "While this capacity for self-formation is a high privi-
lege, it is also a significant responsibility, since the powers we possess also
give us extensive control over a wide range of earthly affairs." The modern
tragedy, for Thomas Berry—that is, the failure of the human race—has been
"to become not the crowning glory of the earth, but the instrument of its
degradation." 32 While Thomas Berry's story of creation and paradigm of the
human is certainly new as he claims it to be, it nevertheless reflects, in mod-
ern philosophical terminology, the ancient Priestly sense of the preeminence
of humanity in the scheme of creation.
To illustrate the opposite viewpoint, the Yahwist's conception of the
human occupying a subordinate position in creation, I have chosen Wendell
Berry, a writer and farmer from Henry County, Kentucky. "Good farmers,"
writes Berry, "have always . . . been careful students" of their environs, of
natural vegetation, soil depth and structure, slope, and drainage. They have
recognized with special clarity that in any biological system the first prin-
ciple is restraint and that to survive humans must live within the precise limits
nature has established. "We can make ourselves whole," in Wendell Berry's
opinion, "only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being
human. . . . The message seems essentially that of the voice out of the whirl-
wind in the Book of Job," he goes on to observe. "The Creation is bounteous
and mysterious, and humanity is only part of it—not its equal, much less its
master. . . . The Creation provides a place for humans, but it is greater than
humanity and within it even great men are small. Such humility is the con-
sequence of an accurate insight, ecological in its bearing, not a pious defer-
ence to 'spiritual' value." The current crisis, according to Wendell Berry, stems
in part from modern society's forgetfulness of this fact and its refusal to rec-
ognize human limits. To respond adequately to the contemporary crisis,
Wendell Berry asserts, "we must address ourselves seriously, and not a little
fearfully, to the problem of human scale."33
In a new industrial and technological age and in a contemporary philo-
sophical milieu, the contrasting views of the human position in creation held
by the ancient Priestly and Yahwistic writers continue to be discussed and
debated, critiqued and defended, reimagined and reused. Yet it is also the
case that, of these two, the Priestly point of view has attracted the most at-
tention, the most rigorous analysis, and the most spirited defense and ani-
mated criticism. This is certainly understandable. As the Bible's initial state-
ment—majestically and memorably phrased—on the place of humanity in
the world, the Priestly point of view has historically been accepted as the
normative biblical viewpoint.
Furthermore, the Priestly view of the human as possessing the status and
authority to rule and administer the world of creation appears to have gained
striking new support as a result of the power modern science and technol-
ogy have given humans to manipulate and change the natural environment.
Indeed, it is now no secret that humans are altering the environment—elimi-
nating diseases, rainforests, topsoil, and species; reconfiguring genes, rivers,
deserts, and the atmosphere—with a speed almost unimaginable within natu-
ral evolutionary processes. During the last century, humans have acquired
unparalleled power to intervene in natural processes and adapt them to
human use.
In such a climate, the Priestly image of superiority and control naturally
acquires a new legitimacy simply as a description of the contemporary human
place in the world. It resonates with modern experience. The Priestly view
has also come to be regarded by many, who endorse the idea of human pre-
eminence, as a positive and constructive model for the responsible use of
power.34 It has been properly pointed out by those who advocate the Priestly
image of stewardship that the exercise of human authority in Genesis 1 is
restricted by the divine creator who installed the human race and expects it
to mediate God's own creative will and design within the world. 35 In the
preindustrial agrarian world of the Priestly Writer, of course, humans had
precious little power or control over their environs. These limits necessarily
make of the Priestly Writer's claim a very modest proposal in practice.
At the same time, an old and significant tradition in the environmental
movement has argued that the image of human control, reflected already in
the Priestly perspective, is an inaccurate description of the actual position of
the human being in the natural world and that it is an improper model for
human behavior. Those who have taken this position believe that a suitable
environmental ethic must be based on a much more modest conception of
the human position in nature, a conception that resembles in many respects
the Yahwist's view of the human in a subordinate role, subservient to nature's
orders and requirements. This viewpoint can be seen, for example, in the
thought of the early environmentalist Aldo Leopold, whose new land ethic
envisioned the human not in a "conqueror role" within the biological com-
munity, but as a "plain member and citizen" of it.36 It is Leopold's model of
"citizenship" that J. Baird Callicott, in fact, believes best captures the Yahwist's
conception of the human posture in creation. 37
In order to illustrate the manner in which this alternative view of the
human posture in creation has influenced recent practitioners of a new en-
vironmental ethic, I have selected representatives from two sectors of the
American economy, agriculture and business. The first is Wesjackson, whose
Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, is attempting to create a new sustainable
agriculture based on information "learned from natural ecosystems and sub-
sistence human societies." A central component in the work of the Land In-
stitute is the recovery and development of native, perennial grains that, in a
diverse polyculture, would not require annual cultivation, which destroys

topsoil, nor the heavy application of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and
pesticides. When Wes Jackson discusses the philosophy that undergirds his
work, he contrasts it with the managerial approach of modern industrial
agriculture, and he calls for a perspective in which humans take nature as
the standard to which humans must subordinate themselves and their be-
havior. "What links our activities together," he maintains,
is the idea of using nature as our measure or guide in the search for sustainability.
The prairie ecosystem is what nature produced in the Great Plains of the United
States, and it is a near perfect example of sustainability . . . through our perennial
polyculture work we try to imitate the vegetative structure of the prairie. . . .
Ecosystem principles represent the 'nature's wisdom' end of the spectrum of
knowledge, and that's what we are thinking about and researching here at The
Land. It is this end which has to dominate the 'human cleverness' end of the
spectrum. None of us wants human cleverness to disappear. We just want to move
it once and for all into a subordinate role.38
A second representative of this alternative perspective on the human
location in nature is Paul Hawken, past chief executive officer of Smith and
Hawken. In a recent book on The Ecology of Commerce, Hawken outlines the
steps he believes business and industry will have to take to create a sustain-
able economy. In the course of laying out the specific political and fiscal
policies he believes are necessary for sustainability, Hawken returns repeat-
edly to the concept of nature as the measure by which the human economy
must be ruled and regulated if it is to be healthy and restorative. Business
must be reconceptualized, according to Hawken, not as the managerial enter-
prise it became with the industrial revolution, but as a "commercial culture
that is so intelligently designed and constructed that it mimics nature at every
step. . . . The restorative economy," argues Hawken, "unites ecology and com-
merce into one sustainable act of production and distribution that mimics
and enhances natural processes. It proposes a newborn literacy of enterprise
that acknowledges that we are all here together, at once, at the service of and
at the mercy of nature, each other, and our daily acts."39 Such literacy is, as
Hawken rightly observes "newborn." It is not new in itself, but rather an old
perspective on the human position in the world that should be born again in
an ecological age.
The paradoxical position of the human race today, with its new techno-
logical power and its old place as a single species in an immense and com-
plex ecosystem that it does not entirely understand and cannot control, means
that these two competing views of the human as steward and as servant will
undoubtedly be debated for some time to come. The power of the image of
the human as servant, already present in the Bible's oldest account of cre-
ation, is the insight that, however clever and powerful humanity may become,
it cannot survive if it does not subordinate itself to nature's own principles
and processes. Humanity cannot survive, that is, if it does not recover in some
fashion an old sense of humility, as old as the beginnings of the Western
religious tradition itself.
Appendix
Table A.1 Sources of the Pentateuch
This table provides a basic guide to the sources of the Pentateuch, so that readers
can identify those sections of the larger narrative that make up the Yahwist's work
and provide the basis for the analysis in this book. The Yahwist's work is found in
the J column, the Elohist's in the E column, and the Priestly Writer's in the P col-
umn. In the majority of cases, the division of sources outlined here reflects the gen-
eral consensus of source critics that has developed over the last one hundred years.
In its details, however, this source outline reflects the author's own judgments.
GENESIS J E P
Creation l:l-2:4a
2.4b-3:24
Cain and Abel 4:1-16
Cain's Genealogy 4:17—26
Adam's Genealogy 5:1-28
5:29
5:30-32
Heroes 6:1-4
Flood 6:5-8
6:9-22
7:1-5
7:6
7:7-8
7:9
7:10
7:11
7:12
7:13-16a
7:16b-17
7:18-21
7:22-23
7:24
8:l-2a
8:2b-3a
8:3b-5
8:6
8:7
8:8-12
8:13a
8:13b
8:14-19
8:20-22
(continued')
163
164 Appendix
Table A.1 (continued)

GENESIS J E P
Covenant with Noah 9:1-17
Curse on Canaan 9:18-27
9:28-29
Genealogy of Noah and Sons 10:1-7
10:8-19
10:20
10:21
10:22-23
10:24-30
10:31-32
Tower of Babel 11:1-9
Genealogy of Shem 11:10-27
Abraham and Nahor 11:28-30
11:31-32
Abraham's Migrations 12:l-4a
12:4b-5
12:6-9
Abraham in Egypt (wife/sister) 12:10-20
Abraham and Lot 13:1-5
13:6
13:7-lla
13:11b-12a
13:12b-18
[Special Source: Abraham
and the Kings] [14:1-24]
Covenant with Abraham 15:1-21 (15:13-16?)
Hagar and Ishmael 16:1-2
16:3
16:4-14
16:15-16
Covenant with Abraham 17:1-27
Three Visitors 18:1-33
Sodom and Gomorrah 19:1-28
19:29
Lot, Moab, and Ammon 19:30-38
Abraham in Gerar (wife/sister) 20:1-17
20:18
Isaac's Birth 21:l-2a
21:2b-6
21:7
Hagar and Ishmael 21:8-21
Abraham, Abimelech, & the
Beersheba Wells 21:22-31
21:32-34
Binding of Isaac 22:l-14a
22:14b-19
Appendix 165

GENESIS J E P
Nabor's Genealogy 22:20-24
Machpelah Cave 23:1-20
Rebekah 24:1-67
Keturah's Children 25:1-6
Abraham's Death; Ishmael's
Descendants 25:7-20
Jacob and Esau 25:21-34
Isaac in Gerar (wife/sister)
& Beersheba Wells 26:1-33
Esau's Wives 26:34-35
Blessing of Jacob & Esau 27:1-45
Jacob sent to Syria 27:46
28:1-9
Jacob at Bethel 28:10
28:11-12
28:13-16
28:17-18
28:19
28: 20-2 la
28:21b
28:22
Jacob, Leah, and Rachel 29:1-30
Jacob's Children 29:31-35
30:l-24a
30:24b
Jacob's Flocks 30:25-43
31:1
31:2
31:3
31:4-16
Jacob's Return 31:17-18
31:19-42
Treaty with Laban 31:43-43
31:49
31:50-54
32:1-3
Reunion with Esau 32:4-22
Wrestling with God 32:23-33
Shechem 33:18a
33:18b
33:19-20
Dinah 34:1-31
Jacob in Bethel 35:1-8
35:9-13
35:14
35:15
35:16-20
(continued')
166 Appendix
GENESIS J E P
Reuben and Bilhah 35:21-22a
Jacob's Sons & Isaac's Death 35:22b-29
Esau's Children 36:1-30
36:31-43
Joseph Sold 37:1-2
37:3-4
37:5-13
37:14ab
37:14c-17
37:18
37:19-22
37:23
37:24
37:25-27
37:28a
37:28b
37:29-30
37:31-35
37:36
Judah 6z Tamar 38:1-30
Potiphar's Wife 39:1-23
Butler's and Baker's Dreams 40:1-23
Pharaoh's Dreams, Joseph's
Elevation 41:1-57
Joseph and Brothers 42:1-3
42:4-5
42:6-25
42:26-28
42:29-37
42:38
43:1-34
44:1-34
45:1-2
45:3
45:4-5a
45:5b-15
Jacob Moves to Egypt 45:16-28
Jacob's Vision at Beersheba 46:1-4
46:5
Ancestors in Egypt 46:6-27
Meeting Pharaoh: Shepherds 46:28-34
47:1-6
47:7-11
Joseph Centralizes Control in
Egypt 47:12-26
47:27-28
47:29-31
Appendix 167

GENESIS J E P
Blessings on Ephraim &
Manasseh 48:1-2
48:3-7
48:8-22
[Old Poetry:
Blessings on All Sons] 149:1-28]
Jacob's Death 49:29-33
Jacob's Burial 50:1-11
50:12-13
50:14
Reconciliation; Joseph's Death 50:15-26
EXODUS
Family of Jacob 1:1-7
Oppression 1:8-12
1:13-14
1:15-21
Moses' Birth and Flight 1:22
2:l-23a
2:23b-25
Revelation at the Mountain 3:1
3:2-4a
3:4b
3:5
3:6
3:7-8
3:9-15
3:16-22
Moses' Protest 4:1-31
Pharaoh's Harsher Policies 5:1-23
6:1
Revelation of Name 6:2-13
Israel's Clans 6:14-25
Moses & Aaron before Pharaoh 6:26-30
7:1-13
The Plagues
Blood 7:14-18
7:19-20a
7:20b-21a
7:21b-22
7:23-25
Frogs 7:26-29
8:l-3a
8:3b-11a
8:11b
Flies 8:12-15
Swarms 8:16-28
(continued)
168 Appendix

EXODUS J E P
Pestilence 9:1-7
Boils 9:8-12
Hail 9:13-34
9:35
Locusts 10:1-19
10:20
Darkness 10:21-26
10:27
10:28-29
Death of Firstborn
Announced 11:1-9
11:10
Passover 12:1-20
12:21-27 (12:24-27?)
12:28
Death of Firstborn 12:29-39
12:40-51
Unleavened Bread and
Consecration of Firstborn 13:1-2
13:3-16 (13:3-16?)
Flight 13:17-19
Cloud 13:20-22
Sea 14:1-4
14:5-7
14:8-12
14:13-14
14:15-18
14:19-20
14:21a
14:21b
14:21c-23
14:24-25
14:26-27a
14:27b
14:27c-29
14:30-31
[Special Source: Old Poem] [15:1-18]
15:19
15:20-21
Water: Marah 15:22-25a
15:25b-26
Elim 15:27
Wilderness of Sin 16:1-3
16:4-5
Quail and Manna 16:6-36
Rephedim 17:1
Water: Massah and Meribah 17:2-7 (17:2-7?)
(continued)
Appendix 169

EXODUS .] E P
Fight with Amelek 17:8-14
17:15-16
Jethro and Appointment of
Judges 18:la
18:lb
18:2-7
18:8-11
18:12-27
Mt. Sinai: Theophany 19:l-2a
19:2b
19:3-8
19:9-13a
19:13b
19:14-16a
19:16b-17
19:18
19:19
19:20-25
Ten Commandments 20:1-17 (20:l-17[ed.])
Theophany 20:18-21
Altar 20:22-26
[Special Source: Covenant
Code] [21:1-23:19]
Canaanites 23:20-33 (23:20-33?)
Covenant at Sinai 24:l-15a
24:15b-18a
24:18b
Tabernacle, Sabbath, Tablets 25:1-31:18
Golden Calf 32:1-14
32:15-16
32:17-35
Departure Announced 33:l-3a
Tent of Meeting 33:3b-11
Theophany to Moses 33:12-23
Theophany & Ten
Commandments 34:1-28
Moses' Face 34:29-35
Construction of Tabernacle 35:1-40:38
LEVITICUS
Legal Material 1:1-27:34
NUMBERS
Census & laws 1:1-10:28
Departure with the Ark 10:29-36
Fire of God 11:1-3
Quail 11:4-13
Elders/Prophets 11:14
(continued)
170 Appendix

NUMBERS J E P
Quail 11:15
Elders/Prophets 11:16-17
Quail 11:18-23
Elders/Prophets 11:24-30
Quail 11:31-35
Miriam, Moses, and Aaron 12:1-16
Scouting out Canaan:
First Attack 13:1-16
13:17-20
13:21
13:22-24
13:25-26
13:27-31
13:32
13:33
People Refuse to Attack 14:la
14:lb
14:2-3
14:4
14:5-10
14:11-25
14:26-38
14:39-45
Laws about Sacrifice 15:1-41
Rebellion (P: Korah; 16:la
J: Dathan & Abiram) 16:lb-2a
16:2b-ll
16:12-15
16:16-24
16:25
16:26-27a
16:27b-32a
16:32b
16:33-34
16:35
Aaronids & Levites 17:1-18:32
Red Heifer 19:1-22
Water: Meribah 20:1-13
Approach to Canaan:
Skirting Edom 20:14-21
Aaron's Death at Mt. Hor 20:22-29
Defeat of Canaanites at Arad 21:1-3
Serpents 21:4-9
Itinerary to Pisgah 21:10-20
Defeat of Sihon/Amorites
and Og/Bashan 21:21-35
Balaam (parts: E and Old
Poems) 22:1-24:25 (parts)
(continued)
Appendix 171
GENESIS J E P
BaalPeor 25:1-5
Midianites 25:6-18
Census 26:1-65
Daughters of Zelophehad 27:1—11
Joshua Appointed 27:12-23
Laws About Worship 28:1-29:39
Women's Vows 30:1-17
Midianites 31:1-54
Tribal Allotments 32:1-42
Stations 33:1-49
Tribal Allotments 33:50-36:13
DEUTERONOMY = D 1:1-34:12
Table A.2 Sections with Hebrew/English Verse Number Differences

In a few places, the numbering system of chapters and verses in the Hebrew text
and in modern English translations differs. This is not true for the new English
translation put out by the Jewish Publication Society or for the Jerusalem Bible,
where chapter and verse numbers correspond to those in the Hebrew text. But for
many other modern English translations—the Revised Standard Version, the New
Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible among them—there are
occasional discrepancies between the numbering systems in the Hebrew and
English texts. The following instances are the places where the English number-
ing of some translations differs from the Hebrew:
GENESIS J E P
[end of] Treaty with Laban 31:50-55
32:1-2
Wrestling with God 32:22-32
EXODUS
Frogs 8:1-4
8:5-7a
8:7b-15a
8:15b
Flies 8:16-19
Swarms 8:20-32
NUMBERS
Aaronids and Levites 16:36-18:32
Laws about Worship 28:1-29:40
Women's Vows 30:1-16
Notes
Chapter 1
1. Gerhard von Rad, "The Theological Problem of the Doctrine of Creation,"
trans. E. W. Trueman Dicken, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays
(London: SCM, 1966) 131-43.
2. Ibid., 138-39.
3. Ibid., 135.
4. Ibid., 138.
5. G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM,
1952) 43.
6. Ibid., 38.
7. Ibid., 38, 43.
8. Ibid., 19.
9. Ibid., 19-21.
10. Ibid., 15-20.
11. H. and H. A. Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure
of Ancient Man (New York: Penguin, 1949) 237-62.
12. Ibid., 11-36, 237-62. Much of what Yehezkel Kaufmann had to say about
the distinctive character of Israelite religion and its rejection of mythic thought re-
flects categories and argumentation much like those in the Frankforts' analysis. See
Kaufmann's The Religion of Israel, trans, and abr. Moshe Greenberg (New York:
Schocken, 1972) 7-121.
13. H. W. Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1946) 2. Compare Luis I. J. Stadelmann's comment about Israel in The
Hebrew Conception of the World (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1970): "Their
contemplation of the world, then, begins with the experience of the facts of salva-
tion history" (p. 4).
173
174 Notes
14. Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship, vol. 1, trans. D. R.

Ap-Thomas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1967) 139.
15. U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, vol. 1, trans. Israel
Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1961) 8.
16. Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1989) xiv.
17. James Barr, "Revelation Through History in the Old Testament and in
Modern Theology," Interpretation 17 (1963) 193-94.
18. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History
(Princeton: Princeton University, 1954), esp. 102-12, 147-62.
19. Hans J. Klimkeit, "Spacial Orientation in Mythical Thinking as Exempli-
fied in Ancient Egypt: Considerations Toward a Geography of Religions," History of
Religions 14 (1975) 267, 269.
20. Robert L. Cohn, The Shape of Sacred Space: Four Biblical Studies (Chico,
CA: Scholars, 1981) 1.
21. Albrecht Alt, "The Settlement of the Israelites in Palestine," trans. R. A.
Wilson, in Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (Garden City, NJ: Archer
Books, 1968) 173—221. Originally published as Die Landnahme der Israeliten in
Palastina; Territorialgeschichtliche Studien (Leipzig: Werkgemeinschaft, 1925); re-
printed in Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel (Munich: C. H. Beck).
22. Albrecht Alt, "The God of the Fathers," trans. R. A. Wilson, in Essays on
Old Testament History and Religion (Garden City, NJ: Archer Books, 1968) 1-100.
Originally published as Der Gott der Vater; em Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der
israelitischen Religion, Beitrage zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament,
III, 12 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1929); reprinted in Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte
des Volkes Israel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1953) I. 1-78.
23. Albrecht Alt, "The Origins of Israelite Law," trans. R. A. Wilson, in Essays
on Old Testament History and Religion (Garden City, NJ: Archer Books, 1968) 101-71.
Originally published as Die Urspriinge des israelitischen Rechts, Berichte uber die
Verhandlungen der Sachsischen Academie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig.
Philologische-historische Klasse, 86, 1 (Leipzig: S. Llirzel, 1934); reprinted in Kleine
Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel (Munich: C. H. Beck).
24. Alt, "God of the Fathers," 54-55.
25. Ibid., 78-79.
26. H. and H. A. Frankfort, Be/ore Philosophy, 246, 247.
27. John Van Seters discusses the scholarly tradition of nomadic origins in
Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University, 1975) 9-10, and offers
a critique of it (13—38). Israel Finkelstein surveys the heirs of Alt's settlement theory
in The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society,
1988) 302-6, and presents his own adaptation of it (336-56). In his recent study of
nature in the Bible, World and Environment (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980), O. H. Steck
still relies heavily on Alt's reconstruction of early Israelite environment and religion
(63-64, 115-27).
28. Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, trans. John McHugh
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961).
29. Ibid., 3-4.
30. See also, by way of illustration, K. Budde, "The Nomadic Ideal in the Old
Testament," New World 4 (1895) 726-45; John W. Flight, "The Nomadic Idea and
Ideal in the Old Testament,"JBL 42 (1923) 158-226; Samuel Nystrom.Beduinentum
undjahwismus: eine soziologisch-religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Alten Tes-
Notes 175
lament (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1946); and Morris S. Seale, The Desert Bible: No-
madic Tribal Culture and Old Testament Interpretation (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1974).
31. Wright, God Who Acts 19-29.
32. J. Severino Croatto, Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 1981) 13, 34-35. A similar view is expressed by Dorothee Soelle in To Work
and To Love: A Theology of Creation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); see esp. chap-
ter 2, 7-21.
33. Harvey Cox, The Secular City, rev. ed. (Toronto: MacMillan, 1966) 19-21.
Cf. James Barr's description of this viewpoint and his critique of it in "Man and
Nature: The Ecological Controversy and the Old Testament," in Ecology and Reli-
gion in History, ed. David and Eileen Spring (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) 49-59.
Barr's essay was originally published in the Bulletin of the John Ryland's Library 55
(1972) 9-32.
34. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155
(10 March 1967) 1203-7; reprinted in Ecology and Religion in History, ed. David and
Eileen Spring (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) 15-31.
35. Ibid., 1205.
36. Thomas Berry, "Economics: Its Effects on the Life Systems in the World,"
in Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology, ed. Anne Lonergan and Caroline Richards
(Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1987) 5-26, esp. 15, 17; previously pub-
lished in Cross Currents 35 (Winter 1985-86) as "Wonderworld as Wasteworld;"
and The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988) 123—37.
37. George Hendry, Theology of Nature (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980)
18-19.
38. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of
Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) 1-3.
39. Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek (June 5, 1989) 70-72.
40. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., trans. E. B.
Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
41. Ibid., 2.128, 189.
42. Ibid., 2.199.
43. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. Black
and Menzies (New York: Meridian Books, 1957) 102-4, 437-38; for a recent brief
discussion of Hegel's influence on Wellhausen, see Joseph Blenkinsopp's comments
in The Pentateuch (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 8—11; and for an attempt to dis-
tance Wellhausen from Hegel, see Lothar Perlitt's Vatke und Wellhausen (Berlin: Alfred
Topelmann, 1965).
44. Wright, God Who Acts, 42.
45. Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 148.
46. Gerhard von Rad, "Some Aspects of the Old Testament World-View," trans.
E. W. Trueman Dicken, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (London:
SCM, 1966) 144; originally published as "Aspekte alttestamentlichen Weltverstand-
nisses" Evangelische Theologie 24 (1964) 57-73.
47. Ibid., 154-55.
48. Ibid., 154
49. Bertil Albrektson, History and the Gods: An Essay on the Idea of Historical
Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel (Lund: C. W. K.
Gleerup, 1967).
50. Barr, "Revelation Through History," 193-205.
176 Notes
51. Rolf Knierim, "Cosmos and History in Israel's Theology," Horizons in Bib-
lical Theology 3 (1981) 59-123; H. H. Schmid, "Creation, Righteousness, and Salva-
tion: 'Creation Theology' as the Broad Horizon of Biblical Theology," trans, and abr.
Bernhard W. Anderson and Dan G. Johnson, in Creation in the Old Testament (Phila-
delphia: Fortress, 1984) 102-17; see also H. H. Schmid's collection of essays,
Altorientalische Welt in der alttestamentlichen Theologie (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag,
1974), where this essay in its German original appears (9-30) together with others
related to this issue.
52. A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, trans. Julia Crookenden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1983) 1-14, 85-118; "Introduction," in Pasto-
ralism in the Levant: Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Ofer
Bar-Yosef and Anatoly Khazanov (Madison, WI: Prehistory, 1992) 1-6.
53. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in
Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley:
University of California, 1967) 6.
54. Among the most exhaustive recent treatments of pastoral nomadism are
A. M. Kazanov's broadly synthetic Nomads and the Outside World and the collection
of essays from archaeologists and anthropologists assembled by Ofer Bar-Yosef and
Anatoly Khazanov in Pastoralism in the Levant.
55. Bar-Yosef and Khazanov, Pastoralism, 5-6.
56. Richard Meadow, "Inconclusive Remarks on Pastoralism, Nomadism, and
Other Animal Related Matters," in Pastoralism in the Levant: Archaeological Materi-
als in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anatoly Khazanov (Madi-
son, Wl: Prehistory, 1992) 267.
57. Emmanuel Marx, "Are There Pastoral Nomads in the Middle East?" in Pas-
toralism in the Levant: Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Ofer
Bar-Yosef and Anatoly Khazanov (Madison, WI: Prehistory, 1992) 257.
58. Bar-Yosef and Khazanov, Pastoralism, 1-6; Khazanov, Nomads, 17-25; see
also Emmanuel Marx's studies of pastoralism: "Pastoral Nomads," 255—60 and "The
Tribe as a Unit of Subsistence," American Anthropologist 79 (1977) 343—63.
59. Bar-Yosef and Khazanov, Pastoralism, 1-6; Fredrik Barth, "A General Per-
spective on Nomad-Sedentary Relations in the Middle East," in The Desert and the
Sown: Nomads in the Wider Society, ed. Cynthia Nelson, Institute of International
Studies Research Series, No. 21 (Berkeley: University of California, 1973) 11—21.
60. Bar Yosef and Khazanov, Pastoralism, 3-4.
61. See, for example, the study by Oystein LaBianca on the historical fluctua-
tions between intensive agriculture and intensive herding in the vicinity of the
Transjordanian site of Hesbon, Sedentarization and Nomadization: Food system cycles
at Hesbon and vieinitjy in Transjordan (Berrien Springs, MI: Institute of Archaeology
and Andrews University, 1990).
62. George E. Mendenhall, "The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,"BA 25 (1962)
66-87; The Tenth Generation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1973), esp. chap-
ters 1, 5, and 7. Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Reli-
gion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979) 435-63;
"Domain Assumption and Societal Models in the Study of Pre-Monarchic Israel,"
VT Supp 28 (1975) 89-100.
63. Mendenhall, "Conquest," 66-71.
64. Gottwald, Tribes, 436.
65. A critique of Israel's nomadic origins has also been undertaken by John Van
Setcrs as part of another agenda, the argument for a late, exilic dating of the patriar-
Notes 177
chal traditions in the old epic sources, the Yahwist and Elohist, in Abraham in His-
tory and Tradition, 13-38.
66. Among the ablest early respondents to the criticisms of Lynn White was
Bernhard W. Anderson, who has addressed ecological issues in biblical literature in
a series of essays, including "Human Dominion Over Nature," in Biblical Studies in
Contemporary Thought, ed. Miriam Ward (Burlington, VT: The Institute; Somerville,
MA: distributed by Greeno, Haclden, 1975) 27—45; "Creation and Ecology," Ameri-
can Journal of Theology and Philosophy 1 (1983) 14—30, reprinted in Creation in the
Old Testament, ed. Bernhard W. Anderson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 152-71;
and "'Subdue the Earth,' What Does It Mean?" Bible Review (October 1992) 4,10;
Many of his essays on these issues have now been collected in From Creation to New
Creation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994). See also note 51 above.
67. In addition to Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena, see his Die Composition des
Hexateuchs und der historischen Bucher des alien Testaments (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1963). The most thorough presentation of the documentary hypothesis is still that
of J. Estlin Carpenter and George Harford-Battersby, The Hexateuch, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: Longmans, Green, 1902). Two recent introductions to the documentary hy-
pothesis are Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit Books,
1987) and Anthony F. Campbell and Mark A. O'Brien's Sources of the Pentateuch
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), which reflects broadly the perspective of
Martin Noth's classic, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, trans. B. W. Anderson
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972; reprint, Chico, CA: Scholars, 1981;
German Original, 1948).
68. Peter Ellis, The Yahwist: The Bible's First Theologian (Collegeville, MN: The
Liturgical Press, 1968).
69. Robert Coote and David Ord, The Bible's First History (Philadelphia: For-
tress, 1989); John Van Seters, Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Gen-
esis (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992) and The Life of Moses: The
Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox,
1994); Harold Bloom, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990).
70. E.g. Kare Berge, Die Zeit des Jahwisten (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990);
H. H. Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist: Beobachtungen und Fragen zur Pentateuch-
forschung (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1976), a study which actually calls the
traditional view of J into question; Christoph Levin, Der Jahwist (Gottingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 1993).
71. The new literary critics, such as Robert Alter, have criticized the "excavative"
approach of traditional scholarship and have advocated a more unitary reading. See
Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981); cf. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics
of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1985). Those who have
proposed new explanations for a composite Pentateuch include R. N. Whybray, The
Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study (Sheffield: JSOT, 1987); Rolf Rend-
torff, The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch, trans. John J. Scul-
lion (Sheffield: JSOT, 1990); and Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch. There have,
of course, been critics of the documentary hypothesis from the beginning, a promi-
nent representative of whom is Umberto Cassuto, The Documentary Hypothesis and
the Composition of the Pentateuch, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1961).
72. While scholars of late have usually placed J in the early monarchy, John
Van Seters has argued for an exilic date (Prologue to History; The Life of Moses). For
a defense of a date in the early monarchy, see Coole and Ord, The Bible's First His-
tory, 5—7.
178 Notes
73. Bloom, Boole of], 9.

74. Ellis, Yahwist, 21.
75. Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction, trans. P. R. Ackroyd (New
York: Harper & Row, 1965) 195. This view of nomadic and agricultural sources
behind J goes back to Rudolf Smend's Die Erzahlung des Hexateuch auf ihre Quellen
untersucht (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1912).
76. Georg Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Testament, trans. David Green (Nash-
ville: Abingdon, 1968) 165.
77. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1—11, trans. John H. Scullion (Minneapolis:
Augsburg, 1984) 187, 206, 267. For a similar approach to the Cain and Abel story,
see J. Maxwell Miller, "The Descendants of Cain: Notes on Genesis 4,"ZAW 86 (1974)
164-74.
78. Ellis, Yahwist, 127; cf. pp. 28-32, 61-65, 88-100, 140-41, 163-72.
79. This characterization comes out most clearly in Wellhausen's analysis of
the development of Israel's religious festivals (Prolegomena, 83-120). It is in some
tension with Wellhausen's analysis of J's narrative elsewhere, when he tends to
emphasize its interest in human affairs in contrast to the world of nature (303-15).
Wellhausen's view of the development of Israelite religion is indebted to Hegel, as
has been noted, as well as to his predecessor Wilhelm Vatke (Die biblische Theologie
wissenschaftlich dargestellt [Berlin: G.Bethge, 1835]), as he openly acknowledges (13).
Chapter 2
1. Paul Ricoeur, "Myth: Myth and History," ER 10.273. Compare the com-
ments on the Yahwist by Odil Hannes Steck, World and Environment (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1980) 65-66, 143-146.
2. Some major alternative treatments of creation in the Bible are Psalms 8,
19, 74, 89, 95, 104, 148; Isaiah 40, 51; Job 38-40; Proverbs 8.
3. Translations of the Bible are the author's unless otherwise indicated.
4. Harold Bloom has recently called attention to and inveighed against the
"strong misreadings of J" to which the work of later editors has led; see The Book of
] (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) 9—23. Joseph Blenkinsopp's recent argument
that the Yahwistic elements in the primeval narrative are later supplementary addi-
tions to a primary Priestly account—The Pentateuch (New York: Doubleday, 1992)
54-97—is to my mind less persuasive than the older and more widely held view that
J predates P.
5. The argument for interpreting 'adam, the first human, as male is developed
later in this chapter in the discussion of "Agriculture in the Garden." The Yahwist
actually employs 'adam as a common noun, not as a name, throughout the Eden
narrative and at the beginning of the Cain and Abel story, using it regularly with the
definite article, ha'adam, "the man." (One should, I believe, repoint the vowels in
2:20, 3:17, and 3:21, and add the definite article in 4:25.) I have tried to reflect this
accurately in the interpretation of the Garden of Eden narrative, but I have departed
from this careful practice later in the chapter where, for ease of discussion, I employ
Adam as a proper name (as the Priestly Writer seems to do in 5:1-5).
6. Not "to the east of the Garden of Eden" as most translators. The term
miqqedem means "to the east," that is, east of the couple's new home (cf. Gen 13:11;
also 2:8, 11:2). The phrase legan-'eden means "at the garden," reading the preposi-
tion le as expressing locality (BDB, 511). J uses the expressionqidmat-'eden for "east
of Eden" (Gen 4:16).
Notes 179
7. Julius Wellhausen thought the Yahwist must have said more about noth-
ingness, but that it was edited out by the Priestly reviser: "(It was all a dry waste]
when Jehovah formed the earth . .." Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New
York: Meridian Books, 1958) 299. John Skinner refers to the Yahwist's "conception
of the primal condition of the world as an arid, waterless waste," Genesis, 2 ed., ICC
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1980) 51. Gerhard von Rad believed J to be describing
the primordial state as a desert: "Whereas in ch. 1 creation moves from the chaos to
the cosmos of the entire world, our account of creation sketches the original state as
a desert in contrast to the sown," Genesis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972) 76.
Theodor H. Gaster sees J's opening clauses as a retrojection into cosmogony of the
climatic conditions that obtain in the autumn at the beginning of the agricultural
year, with the earth dry, no rain, and only the springs for water, "Cosmogony," IDE,
1.704-5; "Earth," IDE, 2.3.
8. The idea of a more detailed creation account preceding the Yahwist's open-
ing sentence was present during the formation of the classical outlines of the docu-
mentary hypothesis at the beginning of this century. See J. Estlin Carpenter and
George Harford-Battersby, eds., The Hexateuch (London: Longmans, Green and Co.,
1902) 1.97. This approach has become popular again in some recent treatments of
the Yahwist, for example, David Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University, 1987) 121; Bloom, Book of J, 28-31.
9. Translated by E. A. Speiser in ANET, 60-61. For another example of this
convention, see the preface to an incantation recited for the purification of Ezida,
the temple of Nabu at Borsippa in Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago, 1951) 61-63.
10. See Claus Westermann's useful discussion of this literary convention in
Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984) 43-47. The motif of
conflict between storm god and sea is appropriated by the Yahwist not at the begin-
ning of the epic but in its final section describing the Exodus and Sinai experiences,
as will be discussed in detail in chapter 4.
11. The use of 'adama as a special designation for arable land is unique to the
Yahwist. The Elohist uses it only twice, as a designation for the earth (Exod 32:12;
Num 1.2:3), and the Priestly Writer only six times, four of them in the cliche "that
which creeps on the ground," remes ha'adama (Gen 1:25, 6:20, 7:8; Lev 20:25), and
twice for a territory (Lev 20:24; Num 32:11). In only a few cases, out of its forty-two
uses—when the Yahwist employs it for the holy ground at the southern mountain
(Exod 3:5) and the ground that swallows Dathan and Abiram with their families
(Num 16:30-31), for the land flooded (Gen 6:7), and for the land of Israel (Gen
28:15) or the land of others (Gen 12:3)—could 'adama be translated more broadly,
but given its normal technical meaning, it probably maintains that sense in these
cases, too.
Both Luis J. J. Stadelmann in The Hebrew Conception of the World (Rome: Pon-
tifical Biblical Institute, 1970) 128-129, and Frank Crusemann in "Die Eigen-
standigkeit der Urgeschichte," in Die Botschaft und die Eoten, ed. J. Jeremias and
L. Perlitt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981) 11-29, esp. 17ff., have
noted the specific use by the Yahwist of 'adama for arable land, but neither has sug-
gested the consistent and thorough employment of 'adama in this way throughout
the epic.
12. Of its 195 occurrences in the Yahwist's epic, only 7 connect eres specifi-
cally with agricultural production, where the Yahwist might be expected to use
'adama (Gen 8:22; 26:12; 27:28, 39; 43:11; Exod 10:12; Num 13:20). Even in these
]80 Notes
cases, however, the more general sense communicated by 'eres may have been pre-
ferred by the Yahwist over the narrower 'adama.
13. Examples include Eve (Gen 3:20), Cain (Gen 4:1), Noah (Gen 5:29), Jacob
(Gen 32:29), Jacob's sons (Gen 29:31-35), and Moses (Exod 2:10). These are "folk
etymologies," that is, J sees a connection between the name and the Hebrew root
used to explain it not necessarily because the name can be linguistically derived from
the root, but simply because the name sounds like the root.
14. Westermann's observation is pertinent: "The wordplay . . . 'dm- 'dmh points
to the basic relationship between the soil and the person which in reality character-
izes agricultural life. . . . Soil and people are associated with each other in agricul-
tural life in such a way that each is determined by the other" (Genesis J—11, 199).
The Hebrew root 'dm can mean "red," and this sense may not be unrelated to the
terms 'adam and 'adama in the Yahwist's mind. For the Yahwist, 'adama must refer
primarily to terra rosa, the commonest and most fertile soil in the hills that made up
the heartland of biblical Israel. Derived from the limestone underlying these hills,
terra rosa is a vivid reddish-brown color, not dissimilar from the deep-reddish brown
Mediterranean complexion of the inhabitants of this part of the world for millennia.
This similarity in complexion between soil and skin may have provided the link
between 'adama and 'adam with an added nuance for the Yahwist. While the Yahwist
does not make the connection in this case, he does play on this sense of 'dm in the
story of Esau/Edom (Gen 25:30).
15. Translated, with restorations, by Thorkild Jacobsen in "The Eridu Genesis,"
JBL 100 (1981) 516-17, n. 7.
16. Yehuda Karmon, Israel: A Regional Geography (London: John Wiley & Sons,
1971) 27. The reference to the spring Ced) in v 6 anticipates the garden ecology and
is really part of that story rather than one in the series of details describing the author's
own world. The spring will be discussed further below in relation to the garden
ecology.
17. The meaning of 'eseb as "grain" may in fact also be indicated by the Priestly
Writer's use of it. P describes it as producing seed, as grain does in the head, in con-
trast to fruit, which contains its seed within it (Gen 1:11, 12). For P it is also the
primary food of human beings (Gen 1:29,30; 9:3), as bread in fact was in ancient
Israel's grain-based agricultural economy.
U. Cassuto, largely on the basis of the parallelism in Genesis 3:18-19 between
'eseb and bread (lehem), reaches the same conclusion that 'eseb must refer to the
grains, wheat and barley; see his A Commentary on the Book of Genesis I (Jerusalem:
Magnes, 1978) 102. 'eseb is also understood in this way by E. A. Speiser in Genesis,
AB (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964) 14; and Robert B. Coote and David Robert
Ord in The Bible's First History (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989) 42, 52. The transla-
tion "grasses" comes close to this sense (JPSV, NAB), but the misunderstanding that
this is wild vegetation still persists (NEB, JB).
18. On agriculture in Iron Age Israel, see Lawrence E. Stager, "The Archaeol-
ogy of the Family in Ancient Israel," BASOR 260 (1985) 1-35; Oded Borowski, Ag-
riculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987); and David C.
Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age (Sheffield:
JSOT/Almond, 1985). In biblical references to the produce of the Israelite hill coun-
try, the grains, wheat and barley, are regularly mentioned first (e.g., Deut 8:7-9).
19. Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1982) 72.
20. On the relationship between cultivation and herding in the ancient Israel-
ite agricultural economy, sec for example, Hopkins, Canaan, 245—50. While the
Notes 181
understanding of slab, as the wild vegetation of arid regions, as biblical usage im-
plies, is not uncommon (Skinner, Genesis, 54, Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 199;JB),
the connection with pasturage has not been suggested. Coote's and Ord's "fruit bear-
ing tree" is puzzling (First History, 42, 52).
The termsadeh, "field," in both expressions—'eseb hassadeh, "grain of the field,"
and siah hassadeh, "shrub of the field"—refers to the open areas outside the village
(cf. 4:8). Compare the clear distinction made between the inhabited village and the
surrounding countryside in Susan Freeman's study of the agricultural village of
Valdemora, Neighbors: The Social Construct in a Castilian Hamlet (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago, 1970) 182.
21. On the form and function of the typical Israelite farmhouse, see Stager,
"Archaeology," 11—24. For the key features of Israelite agriculture, see also Borowski
and Hopkins. Westermann sees much the same picture in Genesis 2:5: "These few
sentences . . . give us an outline of the world in which the narrative was conceived.
It is a world where people cultivate the soil surrounded by steppe and desert, where
life depends on the rain that gives growth to the shrubs of the steppe and to the seed
of the cultivated land. It is a world which corresponds to that of the Palestinian
farmer" (Genesis 1-11, 199-200). O. H. Steck also believes J represents the world in
his primeval narrative from the point of view of the "small farmer" or "Palestinian
peasant," but he combines this observation with an argument for J's universal per-
spective that goes considerably beyond the position taken here (World, 64-80). The
attempt to differentiate agricultural from nomadic elements within the Eden narra-
tive disregards both the literary integrity of the text and the character of biblical
agriculture. See Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 264-65, for a review of the debate.
22. Meron Benvenisti, The West Bank and Gaza Atlas (Jerusalem: West Bank
Data Base Project; Boulder: Westview Press, 1988) 25.
23. A widely held modern view, this interpretation was put into its classic form
by J. Wellhausen in Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bucher des
alten Testaments (1885; reprint, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963), 8—9; and Bernard
Stade, "Beitrage zur Pentateuchkritik. 1) Das Kainszeichen," ZAW 14 (1894) 250-
318. This view has been adopted in BDB (884) and by many commentators in the
twentieth century to explain at least one level in the history of the story. See, for
example, Baruch Halpern, "Kenites," ABD 4. 17-22. As Halpern notes (18-19), the
Kenites are described as a community in the wilderness south and southeast of Judah
in such biblical references as Numbers 24:21, 22, and 1 Samuel 15:6, with a pos-
sible branch in the north (Judg 4:11,17; 5:24).
Liturgical Press, 1968) 167, 199.
25. Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 292-96, 317-18; von Rad, Genesis, 104, 108-9;
Cassuto, Commentary, 203; E. A. Speiser, Genesis, AB (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1964) 31; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1989) 32.
26. See the critique of older views of the dichotomy between sedentary agri-
culture and nomadic pastoralism in chapter 1.
27. Laws of primogeniture in Israel guaranteed the major part of the family es-
tate to the firstborn son (e.g., Gen 27; Deut 21:15-17). The younger son customar-
ily had to watch the family's flock (e.g., 1 Sam 16:11). In modern anthropological
studies of the culture of Mediterranean villages with mixed subsislence economies,
cultivation is always more highly regarded than herding, a task consigned to chil-
dren and the elderly, or to specialists. See Abdulla M. Lutfiyya, Baytin: A Jordanian
182 Notes
Village (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 28, 30; Freeman, Neighbors, 175-87 (cf. Job
30:1). This understanding of the work of Cain and Abel is taken by Coote and Ord
(Firs( History, 68) and to some extent by Sarna (Genesis, 32). Coote and Ord, how-
ever, add to their interpretation a new version of the old dichotomy: Cain is the
archetype of Egyptian sedentary farmers; Abel is the archetype of the Bedouin iden-
tity that the Yahwist, according to them, imputes to Israel.
28. This is the kind of folk etymology typical of the Yahwist (see n. 13); it is
based on the similarity of sounds between qayin (Cain) and qana ("create") rather
than on an actual linguistic relationship between the terms. Cain and "create" stem
from different roots, Cain from qyn, "create" from qnh. On the basis of the Hebrew
term qayin meaning "spear" in 2 Samuel 21:16 and of cognate evidence connecting
the root qyn with metal work, commentators have generally linked the name Cain
with "smith" or "metalworker" (e.g., BDB, 883-84; Westermann, Genesis, 289), but
this is not the way in which J understands the meaning of Cain's name. Abel's name,
hebel, "vapor, breath, unsubstantialness," may point to his insignificance in the story.
29. The parallels between the stories of Adam in Genesis 2:4b-3:24 and of Cain
in Genesis 4:1—16 are so numerous and striking that these two accounts appear to
be composed as a kind of diptych, two pictures meant to be viewed side by side.
Some of the major similarities are surveyed by Westermann (Genesis 1-11, 285-86).
30. Exile is a common penalty for an infraction against the norms of behavior
expected in a kinship society. See Lutfiyya, Boytin, 92-100.
31. For example, Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1910) 43, The Folktale in the Old Testament (1911; Sheffield: Almond,
1987) 150—51; and J. Maxwell Miller, "The Descendants of Cain: Notes on Genesis
4" ZAW86 (1974) 169-70.
32. See n. 23. J. Maxwell Miller sees two narratives behind the Cain and Abel
story, a proshepherd-antifarmer tale (vv 1-8) and an etymology for the Kenites (vv
9-16; 169-70).
33. The relationship between the Yahwistic and Priestly genealogies has been
much discussed. See Westermann, Genesis 1-11, for a review of the debate (345-62).
34. See for example, Gunkel, Genesis, 51; Folktale, 151—52; von Rad, Genesis,
110-11; and Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 324, 330-37. A series of scholars since
Rudolf Smend published Die Erzahlung des Hexaleuch auf ihre Quellen untersucht
(Berlin: G. Reimer, 1912), 20-22, has attributed Cain's genealogy, in whole or in
part, to a separate Pentateuchal source more ancient than J with a pronounced no-
madic character, among them Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction (New
York: Harper & Row, 1965) 194-99; and Georg Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Tes-
tament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968) 111-12, 159-65, who has identified it as the
Nomadic Source Stratum (N).
35. Because the antecedent of the verbs in v 17b is unclear, scholars have dis-
agreed about the actual city builder: was it Cain or his son Enoch? For a summary
of the arguments, see Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 326-27, who opts in the end for
Enoch. Since the Yahwist gives so little attention to the city, the issue of the actual
builder does not appear to be crucial to him. Such suggestions regarding the city's
name as those made by Westermann (Enoch, from hnk, "dedicate"; 327) and Will-
iam W. Hallo ('irad, Enoch's son [v. 18], from Mesopotamian Eridu) in "Antidiluvian
Cities," JCS 23 (1970) 64, while of legitimate scholarly interest, do not appear to be
part of J's concern. When he wished to, as he frequently did, he provided explana-
tions for names.
36. G. Wallis, "Die Stadt in den Uberlieferungen der Genesis," ZAW 78 (1966)
Notes 183
133-35; Coote and Ord, First History, 66-73; and Frank. S. Frick, The City in An-
cient Israel (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1977) 205-6.
37. Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 327-28; Sarna, Genesis, 36; Hallo, "Cities," 64.
38. G. Wallis considers the book of Genesis to be always negative about city
culture, which was founded by the first murderer Cain, since early Israel was, in his
view, a nomadic, pastoral society ("Die Stadt," 133-48). Cf. Coote and Ord, First
History, 74-81; Harold Bloom, Book of J, 188; and Frick, The City, 205-7.
39. Hallo, "Cities," 57-68.
40. Jacobsen, "Eridu Genesis," 519, 526; Hallo, "Cities," 58-60.
41. Jacobsen, "Eridu Genesis," 518. The half-bushel baskets reflect the func-
tion of these cities as distribution points for the agricultural produce from the
surrounding territory (519).
42. Genesis 5:29 is universally recognized as a Yahwistic text that has been in-
corporated by the Priestly Writer into his genealogy in Genesis 5.
43. The cryptic phrases describing the occupations of Lamech's sons in w 20,
21, and 22 have occasioned some consternation and occasional emendation from com-
mentators. While the designations of the occupations are in general clear, the gram-
mar in which they are formulated is difficult at points. Here the terms ohel umiqneh
are probably to be understood as genitives of nearer definition (GKC, 116h, 358).
44. On the modern Bedouin, see Emmanuel Marx, "The Tribe as a Unit of Sub-
sistence: Nomadic Pastoralism in the Middle East,"American Anthropologist 79 (1977)
343—63. On pastoral nomadism in antiquity, see Lawrence E. Stager, "Archaeology,
Ecology, and Social History: Background Themes to the Song of Deborah," VTSup
40 (1988) 227-28; and Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 1979) 435-63.
45. Cf. NRSV, NEB. Most commentators describe the occupation of Tubal-Cain
as metalworking in general. See, for example, Sarna, Genesis, 38; Westermann, Gen-
esis 1-11, 332-333.
46. Iotes is one who sharpens or hammers metal (e.g., in 1 Sam 13:20 a plow-
share, in Ps 7:13 a sword), hence, a "blacksmith." hores is one who plows (Isa 28:24,
Amos 9:13), from a root that the Yahwist also uses for the plowing season, haris
(Exod 34:21). For the instrumental use of nehoset ubarzel, "with bronze and iron
(implements)," see GKC, 144m, 461.
47. On the structure and function of the Iron Age plow, see Borowski, Agricul-
ture, 48-51; Stager, "Family," 10-1!. On metalworking as a specialized occupation
in the agricultural villages of early Israel, see Joseph A. Calloway, "A Visit with
Ahilud," BAR 9, no. 5 (1983) 42-53.
48. The presentation by epic bards of their own occupation in their epic narra-
tives is a common feature of this art form. See, for example, Homer's interest in the
blind bard in Book 8 of the Iliad. The Homeric epic was performed to the accompa-
niment of a stringed instrument held by the singer, as are contemporary Eastern
European epic songs; see Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (New York: Atheneum,
1976) 13—29. The use of the kinnor, "lyre," for accompanying narrative song in an-
cient Israel is mentioned in Exodus 15:1 and Judges 5:1, 3; cf. 2 Samuel 6:5, 1 Kings
10:12. The translation of the other instrument attributed to Jubal, the 'ugab, is un-
certain. While some (BDB) have suggested "pipe," following the rendering in the
Targum and Vulgate, the parallel use of 'ugab with kinnor in other biblical texts (Job
21:12, 30:31; cf. Ps 150:4) as here may just as well point to a stringed instrument
similar to the kinnor, as the Septuagint and Syriac versions understood it.
49. Cf. Zohary, Plants, 26.
184 Notes
50. Franz Delitzsch, A New Commentary on Genesis, trans. Sophia Taylor (1888;
reprint, Minneapolis: Klock & Klock, 1978) 292-93; Skinner, Genesis, 183; Ellis,
Yah wist, 140-41, 168, 199.
51. This distinction is common: NEB: Genesis 9:20, "became drunk;" 48:34,
"grow merry;" JB: Genesis 9:20, "be drunk;" 43:34, "be happy;"JPSV: Genesis 9:20,
"become drunk;" 43:34, "drink one's fill."
52. Many commentators subscribe to one version or another of this notion of
development in the Yahwist's characterization of early civilization and its agricultural
practices. See for example, Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 487; von Rad, Genesis, 136.
53. A translation Cassuto attributes to Nahmanides (Commentary, 159). Cf., for
example, Speiser, Genesis, 60-61; Coote and Ord, First History, 83; NRSV; NEB; JPSV.
54. For the Yahwist's customary expression of "the first to . . ." with the Hiphil
of Ml and a second verb in the infinitive form preceded by the preposition le, see
Genesis 4:26, 6:1, 10:8, 11:6; Numbers 25:1. In only one other biblical text is hll
(Hiphil) linked by the waw consecutive to another verb (Ezra 3:8). There too the
second verb should not be rendered with the infinitive sense.
55. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1939) 55-68, 71-77; ANET, 265.
56. Benvenisti, West Bank Atlas, 66-67; Alison Powell, Food Resources and Food
Systems in Two West Bank Villages (Jerusalem: Arab Thought Forum, 1987) 69;
Lawrence E. Stager, "The First Fruits of Civilization," in Palestine in the Bronze and
Iron Ages, ed. Jonathan N. Tubb (London: Institute of Archaeology, 1985) 176.
57. Cf. Cassuto, Commentary, 2.160.
58. The Epic of Gilgamesh, XL 1-25, translated by E. A. Speiser in ANET, 93.
The flood story is in fact a global motif, representing in its different versions the
various environments of its narrators. See Alan Dundes, ed., The Flood Myth (Berke-
ley: University of California, 1988).
59. A rare word in biblical Hebrew, occurring only here and in Job 36:27, 'ed
is probably related to Akkadian id (Sumerian id), the subterranean fresh water stream;
see W. F. Albright, "The Babylonian Matter in the Predeuteronomic Primeval His-
tory (JE) in Gen 1-11,"JBL 58 (1939) 102-3; and P. Kyle McCarter, "The River Ordeal
in Israelite Literature," HTR 66 (1973) 403-12. The translation "spring," (already
adopted by the translators of the Septuagint, Vulgate, and Peshitta) is warranted by
this comparative evidence and by the description in Genesis itself of the waters ris-
ing ( ala) from the earth (2:6). For a discussion of the issues and alternatives, see
Howard N. Wallace, The Eden Narrative (Atlanta: Scholars, 1985), 73-74.
60. Cf. Deuteronomy 11:10; Isaiah 27:3; Ezekiel 17:7, 32:6; Joel 4:18; Psalm
104:13;Ecclesiastes 2:6.
61. Skinner, Genesis, 62. Many concur with his conclusion "that the resources
of philology and scientific geography are well-nigh exhausted . . . and that further
advance towards a solution of the problem of Paradise will be along the line of com-
parative mythology" (65). Cf. Westermann, Genesis 1—11, 210—11; Cassuto, Com-
mentary, 118; Wallace, Eden, 88.
62. For the comparative evidence for the Garden of Eden, with its extraordi-
nary trees and subterranean water source, as a divine dwelling, see Wallace, Eden,
70—88. On the residence of the Canaanite God 'El at a water source, see further Frank
Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge: Harvard University,
1973) 36-39. For comparative Mesopolamian (and Egyptian) data regarding water
sources and divinity, see W. F. Albright, "The Mouth of the Rivers," A/SI. 35( 1919)
161-95. The connection of trees and water sources with divinity is broader than
Notes 185
ancient Near Eastern mythology; see Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion
(New York: New American Library, 1958) 188-215, 265-330, 367-87.
63. W.F. Albright, "The Location of the Garden of Eden," AJSL 39 (1922-1923) 17.
64. Useful descriptions and evaluations of the Babylonian theory are provided
by Albright ("Eden," 15-18) and Skinner (Genesis, 62-66). It has been defended by
such scholars as Wellhausen (Prolegomena, 308), Gunkel (Genesis, 38—39), Stadel-
mann (Hebrew Conception, 11), as well as Speiser in "The Rivers of Paradise," in
Oriental and Biblical Studies, ed. J. J. Finkelstein and M. Greenberg (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 1967) 23-34, and Genesis, 20; and Richard J. Clifford,
The Cosmic Mountain in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1972)
98-103.
65. Albright, "Eden", 18. Anatolia has in fact been adopted by some as an al-
ternative to Mesopotamia for this reason; see Skinner's survey of the Anatolian op-
tion on pp. 63-65.
66. Albright, "Eden", 18-24; Cassuto, Commentary, I:115-120.
67. Because of Eden's association here with Gihon, Jerusalem's spring, and else-
where with Mount Zion (e.g., Ezek 28:11-19), Jon Levenson has argued that some
in Israel identified the Garden of Eden with Zion and the temple mount; see Theol-
ogy of the Program of Restoration of Ezekiel 40—48 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars, 1976)
25—36, and Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1985) 127-37.
68. While this verse fits well within the Yahwist's narrative, explaining Lot's
choice by referring to preceding and succeeding episodes, it has been dismissed by
some as overloaded and full of secondary glosses; see Skinner, Genesis, 253; and Claus
Westermann, Genesis 12-36 (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1985) 177-78.
69. Evidence from studies of plant and pollen remains suggests that the climate
and ecological character of the ancient Near East throughout the post-Pleistocene
Epoch, that is, the last twelve thousand years, have closely resembled present con-
ditions (Hopkins, Canaan, 99-108). Thus the Yahwist's tradition of a radical eco-
logical change occurring in historical times does not conform to the actual ecologi-
cal history of the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea. In much earlier periods, during the
Pleistocene Epoch (the age of the glaciers), the ecology of the ancient Near East varied
considerably, alternating between moist rainy periods and dry periods, likely to be
correlated with glacial and interglacial periods; see Yohanan Aharoni, The Archaeol-
ogy of the Land of Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982) 9-11.
70. For a brief description of the ecology of the Nile Valley, see Bruce B. Wil-
liams, "Nile (Geography)," ABD 4.1112-1116. Cf. Deuteronomy 11:10, which re-
fers to Egypt as an irrigated (sqh) garden (gan).
71. goprit refers to asphalt found in its natural state. It is highly combustible,
as its use for "kindling" in Isaiah 30:33 and its common association with fire (Ezek
38:22; Ps 11:16; Deut 29:22) as here in Genesis 19:24 indicate. In Isaiah 34:9 goprit
is paired with zepet, an asphalt-based substance used for waterproofing (Exod 2:3).
For the presence of natural asphalt deposits near the Dead Sea, see Ephraim Orni
and Elisha Efrat, Geography of Israel, 4th rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Israel Universities, 1980)
477, 479, 485.
Herein lies further evidence for the common attribution of Genesis 14 to a source
outside the major documents of the Tetrateuch, J, E, and P. Chapter 14 at least does
not fit properly into the Yahwist's narrative, since the asphalt pits that originate only
with the firestorm in Genesis 19 according to the Yahwist, are already present in
chapter 14's account of the war in the valley (14:10).
186 Notes
72. Zoar is probably to be identified with modern Safi, a large oasis with ample
water near the southeast end of the Dead Sea. See Michael C. Astour, "Zoar," ABD
6.1107; and Avraham Negev, ed. The Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land,
rev. ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1986) 412. For a map of the oases of the south-
ern Jordan Valley, see Zohary, Plants, 27. Martin Noth recognized these oases as
remnants of the "paradisical" ecology that covered the valley floor before the catas-
trophe: A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1981) 112.
73. The only suggestion of a possible connection between Eden and the Jor-
dan Valley of which I am aware was made by Jon Levenson in Ezekiel 40—48, 32:
"the stream of Ezek 47:1—12, which sweetens the Dead Sea, is probably related to
another Garden-paradise tradition in Israel, which located the "Garden of YHWH"
in the vicinity of Sodom and Gomorrah and believed it was diminished or obliter-
ated in the destruction of those cities (Gen 13:10)."
74. Hopkins, Canaan, 213-35.
75. The garden's name, 'eden, likely reflects this description of it as a place of
abundance and fertility. While 'eden has been related to Akkadian edinu (Sumerian
eden), "steppe, plain," it is more likely derived from the West Semitic root 'dn "luxury,
delight"; see A. R. Millard, "The Etymology of Eden," VT 34 (1984) 103-6; Howard
Wallace, "Eden, Garden of," ABD 2.281—82, and The Eden Narrative, 84. The name
may even carry more specifically the sense of fertility. This appears to be the pri-
mary nuance in the Yahwist's use of 'dn elsewhere to describe Sarah's pregnancy (Gen
18:12). To be compared to this usage are Isaiah 47:8 and possibly the use of 'dn in
an Old Aramaic text from Tell Fekheriyeh in Syria; see A. R. Millard and P. Bordreuil,
"A Statue from Syria with Assyrian and Aramaic Inscriptions," BA 45 (1982) 135-41.
The root 'dn is also employed in women's names where it appears to mean "fertil-
ity"; see Frank Cross's discussion of 'Abi'eden in "A Report on the Samaria Papyri,"
VT Sup 40 (1986) 23.
76. Stager, "Family," 3-11; Aharoni,Archaelogy, 158-59; Israel Finkelstein, The
Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988).
The hill country has been inhabited from earliest times but not as extensively settled
as during the early Iron Age.
77. Aharoni, Archaeology, 23.
78. The population explosion in the hill country during the early Iron Age re-
sults in part in the influx of settlers (Stager, "Family," 3). The source of these set-
tlers is debated: were they pastoralists settling down or urbanites moving to the fron-
tier, or some combination? For a recent survey of varying views, see Finkelstein's,
Archaeology, 293-314.
79. miqqedem means "to the east, eastward," not "from the east," as its usage
by the Yahwist in Genesis 13:11 clearly illustrates. The root qdm may be used with
a chronological sense to refer to the distant past (e.g., Mic 5:1; Isa 45:21), an attrac-
tive possibility for a narrative about primeval time; see Wallace, ABD, 2.283; Wester-
mann, Genesis 1-11, 210-11. Yet when used by the Yahwist in self-evident contexts,
its spatial, geographical sense is obvious (Gen 2:14; 13:11). This spatial usage is likely
the meaning intended by the term throughout the primeval narratives. Cf. n. 6.
80. Walther Eichrodt has recognized in Ezekiel's vision the idea of the trans-
formation of the world in the age of salvation as a return to the garden of paradise;
see Ezekiel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970) 585. When Ezekiel's vision is taken
up by the author of the book of Revelation, the vision of Eden becomes even more
strongly Jerusalem centered: the stream and the garden are shifted to the streets of
Jerusalem itself (22:1-2).
Notes 187
81. Levenson, Sinai andZion, 116. Many have suggested that Genesis 2:10-14
is a later addition to the Eden narrative. See Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 216-19.
82. W. F. Albright, "The Mouth of the Rivers;" Stadelmann, Hebrew Concep-
tion, 9-10; Exodus 20:4; Deuteronomy 5:8.
83. See n. 67; for nahar as a subterranean flow, see Job 28:11.
84. W. F. Albright, "The Mouth of the Rivers," esp. 172-73. This understand-
ing of rasim as the heads or sources of rivers is preferable to the common transla-
tion of the term in Genesis 2:10 as "branches" (Cassuto, Commentary, I.115; Wester-
mann, Genesis 1-11, 216; NRSV, JPSV, NEB).
85. Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 217: "Neither description [pison, gihon] is par-
ticularly suited to great rivers, but rather to springs like the spring of Gihon in
Jerusalem." Cf. Cassuto, Commentary, 1.166; Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 129, 130.
Wallace hints at the foregoing explanation of Eden's waters ("Eden, Garden of," 283).
86. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1978) 72-143; Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context
(New York: Oxford University, 1988) 72-94.
87. Powell, Food Resources, 16-17, 40-42, 64-75; Lutfiyya, Baytin, 20-35,
145-51; Freeman, Neighbors, 175-200.
88. Gunkel, Genesis, 11; Westermann, Genesis 1—11, 225-29; Skinner: "The
naivete of the conception is extraordinary" (Genesis, 67).
89. For the Yahwist's use of "flesh" (basdr) to refer to a kinship relation, see
Genesis 29:14, 37:27.
90. The name hawwa derives from the root hwh, one of whose meanings was
likely "to live" (=hyh). For the Phoenician use of hwh, "live," see KA1 10.1 and 89:1.
The Yahwist, of course, is basing the etymology of hawwa in Genesis 3:20 on the
similarity of sound with hay, "the living," not on its linguistic history.
91. Carol Meyers has argued that the prescription for the female role outside
Eden focuses on increased work as well as childbearing (Discovering Eve, 95—121).
92. 1. Engnell, "'Knowledge' and 'Life' in the Creation Story," VTSup 3 (1955)
103-19, esp. 110-14, 117-18; Walter Brueggemann, "From Dust to Kingship,"ZAW
84 (1972) 1-18; Manfred Hutter, "Adam als Gartner und Konig (Gen 2, 8. 15),"
Biblische Zeitschrift 30 (1986) 258-62; Coote and Ord, First History, 42-64; Borowski,
Agriculture, 101, 136. The fact that the figure in Ezekiel 28:12-19, another portrait
of Eden, is a king has strongly affected the reading of the Yahwist. For an argument
that J's human is not a royal figure, see John Van Seters, "The Creation of Man and
the Creation of the King," ZAW 101 (1989) 335-341.
93. See the contrast between Yahwistic and Priestly portraits of the human
below in the second part of this chapter under the topic "Nature."
94. Cf. Deuteronomy 20:16, Joshua 11:14, 1 Kings 15:29, and the discussion
of nesama by H. Lamberty-Zielinsi in TDAT 5.669-74.
95. The anachronistic and incorrect translation of nepes with "soul" has un-
fortunately been preserved generally in the New Revised Standard Version, though
not in this particular text.
96. See Hermann Gunkel's, The Folktale in the Old Testament, 51-54 for other
examples of this phenomenon in biblical literature. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz has
explored the close relationship between human and animal in Israelite thought by
examining the variety of ways in which Israelite society understood itself in terms
of the animal world; see "Israel in the Mirror of Nature: Animal Metaphors in the
Ritual and Narratives of Ancient Israel," journal of Ritual Studies 2/1 (1988) 1-30.
97. The universe as possessing two realms, the world of the gods and the world
188 Notes
of human beings, is a common formulation for describing ancient cosmologies, dis-

cussed recently in relation to the biblical view of nature by Rolf Knierim in "Cos-
mos and History," Horizons in Biblical Theology 3 (1981) 74-80. See Frank Cross's
discussion of this conception of the world in Greek and Hebrew epic in "The Epic
Traditions of Early Israel: Epic Narrative and the Reconstruction of Early Israelite
Institutions," in The Poet and the Historian: Essays in Literary and Historical Biblical
Criticism, ed. Richard Elliott Friedman (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1983) 13-19.
98. Particularly useful in describing the cosmology of P's creation account,
this model is employed for the study of traditional societies by among others Mircea
Eliade in Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1969) 27-56, and for the study of biblical cosmology by Luis I. J. Stadelmann
in The Hebrew Conception of the World.
99. The conception that immortality could be gained by humans through the
consumption of a concrete substance is widespread in the ancient Near East. The
plant Gilgamesh failed to gain possession of (XI.263-91; ANET, 96) and the bread
and water of life offered to Adapa (I. 60-70; ANET, 102) are examples. See H. and
H. A. Frankfort's comments in Before Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1949) 23. For
the conception of immortality in this text, see James Barr, The Garden of Eden and
the Hope of Immortality (London: SCM, 1992) 1-20.
100. This is illustrated in J by the fact that God can name humans (Gen 32:28—
29 [Eng. vv 27-28]) but that humans can also name God (Gen 16:13). On the topic
of naming in this text see George W. Ramsey, "Is Name-Giving an Act of Domina-
tion in Genesis 2:23 and Elsewhere?" CBQ 50 (1988) 24-35.
101. J's phrase "one flesh" (basar 'ehad, 2:24) probably refers both to sexual
union and to a kinship alliance since J uses the term basar elsewhere for relations
between kin (Gen 29:14; 37:27).
102. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1966) 41-57; Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, "Creation and Classification in Judaism:
From Priestly to Rabbinic Conceptions," History of Religions 26(1986/87) 357-81;
Robert B. Coote and David Robert Ord, In the Beginning (Minneapolis: Augsburg
Fortress, 1991) 57-66.
103. See Westermann's survey of the proponents of this interpretation of hu-
mans bearing the image of God in Genesis 1-11, 151-55, as well as alternatives
(147-58); and Phyllis A. Bird, "'Male and Female He Created Them': Gen l:27b in
the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation," HTR 74 (1981) 129-59.
104. Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Lon-
don: SCM, 1984) 64.
105. Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 47-56, 66-67. Cf. John Van Seters, Prologue
to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John
Knox, 1992) 189-91.
106. Gerhard von Rad regards these pronouncements as "the real goal and
climax toward which the narrative is directed in its present form" (Genesis, 92).
Westermann takes a different position (Genesis 1-11, 257).
107. Jacobsen, "Eridu Genesis," 526.
108. William L. Moran, "Atrahasis: The Babylon Story of the Flood," Biblica
52 (1971) 51-61. Cf. Anne Kilmer, "The Mesopotamian Concept of Overpopula-
tion and Its Solution as Reflected in the Mythology," Orientalia 41 (1972) 160-77;
and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, "The Atrahasis Epic and Its Significance for Our Under-
standing of Genesis 1-9," BA 40 (1977) 147-55.
109. Moran, "Atrahasis," 56-59.
Notes 189
110. Bird finds the phrase "male and female he created them" (Gen l:27b) to
be concerned neither with the nature of the image of God nor with the roles of men
and women in society, but rather with human reproduction ("Male and Female").
Frymer-Kensky contrasts this Priestly ideology of population in the primeval narra-
tive with the opposite view in Atrahasis ("The Atrahasis Epic").
111. For instance, Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 397.
112. The Baal Cycle is translated in ANET, 129-42. See also the translation by
Michael Coogan in Stories From Ancient Canaan (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978)
86-115 and his discussion of Baal as a storm god on pp. 75-85. On Yahweh and
Baal as storm deities, see Frank Cross's essay "Yahweh and Ba'l" in Canaanite Myth
and Hebrew Epic, 145-94.
113. For summaries of the gift theory of sacrifice see Gary A. Anderson, "Sac-
rifice and Sacrificial Offerings (OT)" ABD 5.871—72; and Joseph Henninger, "Sacri-
fice," ER 12.544-57, esp. 550-51.
114. On the understanding of the minha "offering," as a gift, see Anderson,
"Sacrifice," 873-75. The Priestly Writer used minha with the more specific mean-
ing, "cereal offering."
115. W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-Hasis: The Babylonian Story of the
Flood (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) 8-9, 12, 15.
116. Atrahasis, III.v.30-41. Cf. The Epic of Gilgamesh, XI.155-61. Scholars
have ordinarily been scandalized by this parallel: see Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 454;
and Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago, 1946) 256.
117. That J conceived of sacrifice as feeding the deity is accepted by Wellhausen
(Prolegomena, 62). Cf. Anderson, 872-78.
118. A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1984) 85-86.
119. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 315.
120. Ibid., 314; Gunkel, Legends, 13.
121. George Coats, Genesis (Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, 1983) 35. Cf.
Yehezkel Kaufmann's assessment of the primeval narrative: "The Hebrews . . . did
not extend Israel's past to primordial times. Neither the people, its religion, nor its
cities and temples are represented as primeval. The Babylonian antediluvian kings
became, in accord with Israelite conceptions, 'patriarchs.' These 'patriarchs,' how-
ever, are not the ancestors of Israel, but of mankind." Kaufmann, The Religion of
Israel (New York: Schocken, 1960) 200-1.
122. See for example, Noth, Pentateuchal Traditions, 237; Westermann, Gen-
esis 1-11, 4; Walter Brueggemann, "Genesis," in Books of the Bible, ed. Bernhard
Anderson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989) 30. O. H. Steck's treatment of
J's primeval world recognizes the particularity of it but still employs heavily the lan-
guage of universal humanity (World, 64-80).
123. See, for example, W. G. Lambert, "The Babylonian Background of Gen-
esis," JTS 14 (1965) 287—300; Sigmund Mowinckel, "The Babylonian Matter in the
Predeuteronomic Primeval History (JE) in Gen 1-11," JBL 58 (]939) 87-91, and
William F. Albright's response, 91-103; and Heidel, Gilgamesh, 224-69.
124. von Rad, Hexateuch, 63-67. Cf. Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 2.
125. Gunkel, Legends, 14.
126. Wellhausen already saw this distinction (Prolegomena, 3 14). Westermann
considers time in the primeval era as distinct from historical time in which events
happen only once (Genesis 1—11, 4, 9). Cf. Isaac M. Kikawada, "Primeval History,"
190 Notes
ABD 5.462; and Richard M. Maze, "In the Beginning: Myth and History in Genesis
and Exodus," JBL 109 (1990) 577-98.
127. Gunkel, Legends, 13-18. Cf. Brevard S. Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old
Testament (London: SCM, 1960) 15; and Kees W. Bolle, "Myth: An Overview," ER
10. 261.
128. Childs, Myth and Reality, 16-29; Robert A. Oden, Jr., "Myth and Mythol-
ogy," ABD 4.948-49; Bolle, "Myth," 261; Paul Ricoeur, "Myth," 273.
129. Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper, 1963) 5-6.
130. Childs, Myth and Reality; Ricoeur, "Myth," 281.
131. John Van Seters, Prologue to History, 1-44. Having identified J's work as
"antiquarian historiography," Van Seters continues to use the terms "myth," "his-
tory," "demythologizing," and "historicizing" in a manner that reintroduces the
problems he is rightly attempting to clarify. Cf. Meir Sternberg's treatment of bibli-
cal narrative as "historiography" in The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University, 1985) 23-34.
132. Frank M. Cross, "The Epic Traditions of Early Israel," 18.
133. Westermann's treatment of Genesis 1—11 in a separate volume in his three-
volume commentary on Genesis is paradigmatic of biblical scholarship. The two
scholars who have gone the furthest toward recognizing the epoch-making status of
the flood, but without accepting its definitive position in the end, are Malcolm Clark,
"The Flood and the Structure of the Pre-Patriarchal History,"ZAW 83 (1971) 204-10;
and Rolf Rendtorff, "Genesis 8,21 und die Urgeschichte des Jahwisten," Kerygma
und Dogma 1 (1961) 69-71.
134. On the putative exception to this, the Cain-Kenite hypothesis, see the dis-
cussion of the Cain and Abel story at the beginning of this chapter.
135. ANET, 265.
136. Moran, "Atrahasis," 56-61.
137. Gunkel (Legends, 123-44) and his form-critical heirs have always seen J
as a collector rather than an author, bringing together disparate, independent tales
in his narrative. Cf. von Rad, Hexateuch, 64. Some who have taken a more unified
approach to the primeval narrative include David Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant,
88—143; Kikawada, "Primeval History," ABD 5.461—66; and Tikva Frymer-Kensky,
"The Atrahasis Epic and Its Significance for our Understanding of Genesis 1-9," in
The Flood Myth, ed. Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California, 1988) 61-73.
Chapter 3
1. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (1883; New
York: Meridian Books, 1957) 7.
2. Harold Bloom, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) 32.
3. Peter Ellis, The Yahwist: The Bible's First Theologian (Collegeville, MN:
Liturgical Press, 1968) 33.
4. Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (1938;
London, SCM, 1966) 62.
5. Martin Noth,A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (1948; Chico, CA: Schol-
ars, 1981) 46-62; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-1]: A Commentary (Minneapolis:
Augsburg, 1984) 2; Ellis, Yahwist, 181; Robert Coote and David Ord, The Bible's First
History (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989) 9-10; John Van Seters, Prologue to History:
The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992),
331 (note the title of the book).
Notes 191
6. von Rad, Hexateuch, 1-78.

7. Albrecht Alt, "The Settlement of the Israelites in Palestine" (orig. pub. 1925)
and "The God of the Fathers" (orig. pub. 1929), trans. R. A. Wilson, in Essays in Old
Testament History and Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968) 1-100, 173-221.
8. See the discussion of "Reexamining Presuppositions: The Desert versus the
Sown" in chapter 1.
9. von Rad, Hexateuch, 57; Noth, Pentateuchal Traditions, 55; and The History
of Israel (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) 53-84, 121-27.
10. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 320. Cf. Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of
Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1960) 170, 201; Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961) 1-15.
11. W. F. Albright, "Abram the Hebrew: A New Archaeological Interpretation,"
BASOR 163 (1961) 36-54, and Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (1968; Reprint:
Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns) 64-73; C. H. Gordon, "Abraham and the Merchants
of Ura," JNES 17 (1958) 28-31, and "Abraham of Ur," in Hebrew and Semitic Studies
Presented to Godfrey Rolles Driver, ed. D. W. Thomas and W. D. McHurdy (Oxford:
Oxford University, 1963) 77-84.
12. Coote and Ord, First History, esp. pp. 15-41, 100-101, 201-30.
13. M. B. Rowton has explored the topic in more than a dozen articles in vari-
ous journals. The best basic presentation is in "Enclosed Nomadism,"Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974) 1-30. See also "Dimorphic Struc-
ture and Typology," Oriens Antiquus 15 (1976) 17-31 (a bibliography of his own
work is provided on p. 17, n. 4). J. T. Luke, "Pastoralism and Politics at Mari in the
Mari Period," (Ph.D. diss, University of Michigan, 1965). Victor H. Matthews, Pas-
toral Nomadism in the Mari Kingdom, ca. 1830-1760 B.C. (Cambridge, MA: Ameri-
can Schools of Oriental Research, 1978).
14. M. B. Rowton, "Dimorphic Structure and the Parasocial Element," JNES
36 (1977) 187-98; V. H. Matthews, "Pastoralists and Patriarchs," BA 44 (1981)
215-18; "The Wells of Gerar," BA 49 (1986) 118-26; J. T. Luke, "Pastoralism and
Politics at Mari."
15. William J. Dever, "The Patriarchal Traditions. Palestine in the Second Mil-
lennium B.C.E.: The Archaeological Picture," in Israelite and Judean History, ed. John
H. Hayes and J. Maxwell Miller (London: SCM, 1977) 70-119, and "Pastoralism and
the End of the Urban Early Bronze Age in Palestine," in Pastoralism in the Levant:
Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Ofer Bar-Yosef and
Anatoly Khazanov (Madison, WI: Prehistory, 1992) 83-92; C. Westermann, Gen-
esis 12—36: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1985) 74—79; cf. John Bright, A
History of Israel, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981) 80-83.
16. Both John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale
University, 1975) 13-38 and Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociol-
ogy of the Religion of Liberated Israel 1250-1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979)
435-63, esp. 451-53, have criticized traditional notions of Israel's ancestors as pas-
toral nomads.
17. For J's use of the theme, see Genesis 12:1, 6-7; 13:14-17; 15:7-21; 24:7;
26:2-5; 28:13-16; 31:3; 32:10; Exodus 3:8, 16-17; 13:4-5, 11; 33:l-3a; Numbers
11:12; 14:23. For the Elohist, divine land grant is not a major concern, being men-
tioned only twice (Gen 50:24, Exod 32:13), the latter possibly a J interpolation into
an E story. The Priestly Writer employs the theme, but with a lower profile and in
language characteristic of P: Genesis 17:8; 35:12; 48:4; Exodus 6:4 (cf Lev 25:2, 23-
24; Num 31:11). The Deuteronornistic Historian, of course, also gives this theme
192 Notes
prominence, casting it in his own distinctive language and placing it in the speeches
of his major characters (e.g., Deut 1:7-8; 6:10-11; 30:20; Josh 1:6).
18. Twice J uses'adama in the ancestral narratives within the expression mispehot
ha adama, "clans of the arable land," when he is describing the blessings Abraham
and his descendants will contribute to those with whom they come into contact (Gen
12:3, 28:14). By this designation J likely has in mind the typical rural neighborhood
made up of a village and its agricultural environs, as described by N. K. Gottwald
(Tribes of Yahweh, 316) and Lawrence E. Stager, "The Archaeology of the Family in
Ancient Israel," BASOR 260 (1985) 22. When speaking of larger national entities in
such blessing contexts,J employs the alternative, goye ha ares, "nations of the land,"
(Gen 18:18; 22:18; 26:4). Only twice elsewhere does J employ 'adama before the
ancestors move to Egypt, once to identify the soil to which Jacob will return from
Syria (28:15; possibly because of its mention in the phrase mispehot ha adama in the
previous verse, 28:14), and once to describe the devastation of the arable land in the
Jordan Valley in the Sodom and Gomorrah narratives (Gen 19:25); see the discus-
sion of this event in chapter 2.
19. See the analysis of' adama and eres in the discussion of "Adam and Eve" in
chapter 2.
20. For analysis of the ger as resident alien, see Lawrence E. Stager, "Archaeol-
ogy, Ecology, and Social History: Background Themes to the Song of Deborah,"
VTSup 40 (1988) 229-32.
21. On the relationship of the designation bet ab, "house of the father/household,"
to the actual structure of the family compound in the Israelite village, see Stager,
"Family," 18-23.
22. Such an idiomatic sense appears to be present in a text like 1 Kings 12:16
where the phrase "To your tents, O Israel" (le'ohalekayisra'el) must be understood
as "Back to your homes." The northerners at this audience with Rehoboam in Jerusa-
lem were not nomadic pastoralists.
23. Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 440-41.
24. See, for example, Rowton's "Dimorphic Structure and Typology," and "Di-
morphic Structure and the Problem of the 'Apiru-'Ibrim," JNES 35 (1976) 13-20.
25. The couplet "the dew of the skies/the plenty of the earth" (tal hassamayim/
semanne ha ares) is an archaic formula present also in Ugaritic literature. See Stanley
Gevirtz, Patterns in the Early Poetry of Israel (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963)
35-47.
26. Westermann: "It is a blessing typical of agricultural civilization" (Genesis
12-36, 441). Commentators are generally in agreement that Isaac's subsequent "bless-
ing" on Esau deprives him of these same agricultural bounties (27:39), though the
style is awkward. See Westermann, Genesis 12-36, 443; E. A. Speiser, Genesis AB
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964) 210; and Gerhard von Rad, Genesis (Philadel-
phia: Westminster, 1972) 279. Edomite terrain is certainly less conducive to agri-
culture than the hill country west of the Jordan.
27. lehem, common bread, is the usual term used in these contexts, though 'ugot,
"cakes" (18:6), and massot, "unleavened bread" (19:3), are also mentioned.
28. On this crop, see Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1982) 82; and Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987) 94-95.
29. Genesis 49:2-27 is clearly an archaic poetic composition that has been in-
corporated by ]. See F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedrnan, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic
Poetry (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975) 69-9.3.
Notes 193
30. Almonds, another hill country tree crop, were also cultivated (or their fruit
gathered) by Israel's ancestors (Gen 30:37; 43:11).
31. Salo (Shlomo) Hellwing, and Yitzhak Adjeman, "Animal Bones," in Israel
Finkelstein's Izbet Sartah: An Early Iron Age Site Near Rosh Ha 'ayin, (Oxford: B.A.R.,
1986) 141-52. This article also includes data from Beer-Sheba, Tell-Masos, Shiloh,
Lachish, and Tell Michal (151). Melinda Zeder, "Animal Exploitation at Tell Halif,"
in Preliminary Reports of ASOR-Spomored Excavations, 1983-87, ed. Walter E. Rast
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1990) 24—29. Lawrence T. Geraty and 0ystein
S. LaBianca, "The Local Environment and Human Food-Procuring Strategies in Jor-
dan: The Case of Tell Hesbon and Its Surrounding Region" in Studies in the History
and Archaeology of Jordan 11, ed. Adnan Hadidi (Amman: Department of Antiqui-
ties, 1985) 323-30. The same pattern of animal populations can also be observed in
the recent mixed agricultural economy of the West Bank: see Israel Finkelstein, The
Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988)
129-39 for data from the early 1970s. Note that the sedentary Shechemites (Gen
34:28) own the same animals as Israel's ancestors (flocks, herds, donkeys).
32. See also Genesis 13:15; 24:35; 32:6, 18; 33:13; 46:32; 47:1. The only ex-
ception is Genesis 32:6.
33. See also Genesis 30:43. Once donkeys (32:6) and once camels (32:18) ap-
pear earlier in the list.
34. Geraty and LaBianca, "Food-Procuring Strategies," 325-27; Paula Wapnish
and Brian Hesse, "Urbanization and the Organization of Animal Production at Tell
Jemmeh in the Middle Bronze Age Levant,"JNES 47 (1988) 88; Volkmar Fritz, "The
Israelite 'Conquest' in Light of Recent Excavations at Khirbet el-Meshash," BASOR
241 (1981) 70-71; Abdulla M. Lutfiyya, Baytin: A Jordanian Village (The Hague: Mou-
ton, 1966) 115, 119. Both Gottwald (Tribes of Yahweh, 452) and Van Seters (Abraham,
16) have called attention to the ancestors' cattle as an indication of a sedentary ex-
istence. Westermann tries to get around this data and preserve his view of the an-
cestors as seminomadic pastoralists by calling the references to cattle by J "interpo-
lations from a later perspective" and claiming that "the mention of cattle is a rare
exception" (Genesis 12—36, 76—77); both assertions are undermined by J's frequent
and patterned references to cattle.
35. David C. Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early
Iron Age (Decatur, GA: Almond, 1985) 245-50.
36. A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1984) 16-18; Lutfiyya, Baytin, 30, 119-21; Susan Tax Freeman, Neigh-
bors: The Social Contract in a Castilian Hamlet (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970)
175—87. Gottwald notes this implication of the ancestors' specialized herders
(445-46; 452-53) as does Van Seters (Abraham, 16, 18) who calls attention to par-
allels with Nabal in 1 Samuel 25.
37. Lutfiyya, Baytin, 28-34; Freeman, Neighbors, 175-87.
38. Coote and Ord, First History, 15-16, 197; Westermann, Genesis 37-50: A
Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986) 167-70; Matthews, "Pastoralists," 217.
39. Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910) 464,
and before him B. D. Eerdmans, Komposilion der Genesis (Giessen: A. Topelmann,
1908) 42, both noticed this implication of Joseph's instructions. Cf. John Skinner,
Genesis (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1930) 495-96. It should be noted that cattle, draft
animals for sedentary farmers, are among the ancestors' herds (46:32; 47:1).
40. Meron Benvenisti, West Bank and Gaza Atlas (Jerusalem. West Bank Data
Base Project; Boulder: Westview Press, 1988) 67-68; Stager, "Family," 17.
194 Notes
41. Nabal (1 Samuel 25) provides a good example. A wealthy southern seden-
tary farmer (v 2) Nabal cultivated grain, vineyards, and figs (v 18), yet his wealth is
first illustrated by the size of his herds (v 2).
42. For instance, Westermann, Genesis 12-36, 78, 162, 172, 309; von Rad, Gen-
esis, 171; de Vaux, Ancient Israel, 3-15.
43. Emmanuel Marx, "The Tribe as a Unit of Subsistence: Nomadic Pastoral-
ism in the Middle East," American Anthropologist 79 (1977) 343-63.
44. For analysis of the patriarchal narratives as a reflection of tenth-century
realities and Israel's self-understanding in this period, see Benjamin Mazar, "The
Historical Background of the Book of Genesis," JNES 28 (1969) 73-83; and P. Kyle
McCarter "The Patriarchal Age: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," in Ancient Israel, ed.
Hershel Shanks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988) 1-29.
45. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 334, n.l.
46. The Elohist carries the more detailed account of this border treaty: Gen-
esis 31:43-48, 50-54.
47. Genesis 12:10—20 represents the entire Egypt experience in nuce. Abraham
moves to Egypt because of a famine in Canaan, becomes wealthy there but runs afoul
of the Pharaoh who, after a series of plagues, sends Abraham from Egypt back to the
land of Canaan. Baruch Halpern refers to 12:10-20 as "a doublet for the exodus";
see The Emergence of Israel in Canaan (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1983) 25.
48. In the Elohist source, the entire Gerar narrative is narrated with Abraham
as the hero: Genesis 20:1-17, 21:22-31.
49. Bright, History, 87-92.
50. See P. Kyle McCarter's critique in "The Patriarchal Age," 6-11. For a cri-
tique of the traditional Amorite hypothesis see also Dever, "Pastoralism," 83—92.
51. McCarter, "Patriarchal Age," 19, 21. Fredrik Barth, ed. Ethnic Groups and
Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969) contains further discussions of this phe-
nomenon.
52. Genesis 9:18-27; 10:15-19, 12:6; 13:7; 15:19-21; 24:3, 35, etc.
53. Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, 451-53.
54. Westermann, Genesis 1-11, 1-2.
55. Speiser, Genesis, liii, 87.
56. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982) 105.
57. For a brief summary of the Heilsgeschichte movement in biblical theology,
see Gerhard Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate (Grand
Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, 1972) 29-47. Cf. Henning Graf Reventlow's remarks in his
recent article "Theology (Biblical), History of," ABD 6. 497-98.
58. von Rad, Hexateuch, 65-67. Cf. John Bright's claim in his A History of Is-
rael: "As the Bible presents it, the history of Israel began with the migration of the
Hebrew patriarchs from Mesopotamia to their new homeland in Palestine" (23).
59. Perhaps the premier figure in this endeavor was W. F. Albright, who ad-
dressed this issue in many of his writings. See, for example, The Biblical Period from
Abraham to Ezra (1949; New York: Harper & Row, 1963) 1—9, and Yahweh and the
Gods of Canaan, 53-109. A good survey of the major scholarly positions that have
been taken may be found in William Dever's "The Patriarchal Traditions," 70—119.
Among those who have reopened the discussion in recent years are T. L. Thomp-
son, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1974); and
John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition. P. Kyle McCarter's recent article
represents a summary and critique of scholarly effort in this endeavor.
60. See the discussion of "Myth versus History" in chapter 2.
Notes 195
61. Kurt Galling, Die Erwahlungstraditionen Israels (Giessen: A. Topelmann,

1928) 56; cf. von Rad, Genesis, 166. The history of scholarship on the promises to
the patriarchs has been summarized recently by John Van Seters, Prologue to His-
tory, 215-26. J's treatment of the promise theme has been summarized by Norman
Habel, Literary Criticism of the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971) 43-64.
62. J's promise texts include Genesis 9:26-27; 12:1-3, 7; 13:14-17; 15:5, 18-21;
18:17-19; 22:16-18; 26:2-5, 24; 28:13-15.
63. On goy as "nation," see E. A. Speiser, "'People' and 'Nation' of Israel,"JBL
79 (1960) 157-63.
64. Cf. 1 Kings 5:1. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University, 1973) 262-63.
65. Lutfiyya, Bayt'in, 102.
66. Vv 7 and 14 both refer to the spring at which this divine annunciation took
place to provide the tale with a literary inclusio. While J had a specific oasis in mind
(note: "the spring," ha ayin), it is no longer possible on the basis of J's explanations
to locate it precisely. David R. Seely, "Shur, Wilderness of," ABD 5.1230; Dale W.
Manor, "Kadesh-Barnea," ABD 4.1-3; Rudolph Cohen, "Did I excavate Kadesh-
Barnea?" BAR 7.3 (1981) 20-33.
67. On the stereotypes of marginal populations, see Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups
and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969) 30-32. Cf. Freeman, Neighbors, 179-80,
201-204. 'al-pene, "in front of," may mean here "east of," which it usually does (BDB,
818), thus referring to the deserts east of biblical Israel.
68. In the Elohist's version of Ishmael's origins (Gen 21:8-21), a doublet of J's
account in Genesis 16, the child Ishmael and his mother are actually expelled to the
desert and take up residence there.
69. Flermann Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis (New York: Schocken, 1964) 34,
and Genesis, 214-17.
70. Efraim Orni and Elisha Efrat, Geography of Israel (Jeusalem: Israel Univer-
sities, 1980) 31; J. R. Bartlett, "Edom," ABD 2.287.
71. BDB, 973; Ernst Axel Knauf, "Seir," ABD 5.1072-73.
72. Speiser, Genesis, 196; cf. Gunkel, Genesis, 297-99.
73. Khazanov, Nomads, 85-90.
74. Westermann, Genesis 12-26, 417, cf. pp. 414-15. See V. Maag, "Jakob-Esau-
Edom," Theologische Zeitschrift 13 (1957) 418—29. The same dichotomy is presumed
by Gunkel (Genesis, 297-99), Skinner (Genesis, 361), and von Rad (Genesis, 265-66)
to cite just three examples.
75. Hellwing and Adjeman, "Animal Bones," 141-52; Zeder, Animal Exploita-
tion, 24-31.
76. The Hebrew syntax of v 39 is somewhat awkward, but the sense is clear.
77. Reading haptorim before 'aser in Genesis 10:14 (cf. Amos 9:7). On the
Philistines see Lawrence E. Stager, Ashkelon Discovered (Washington, DC: Biblical
Archaeology Society, 1991) 2-19, and "Merneptah, Israel, and the Sea Peoples: New
Light on an Old Relief," Eretz-Israel 18 (1985) 61-62. Compare Trude Dothan, "The
Arrival of the Sea Peoples: Cultural Diversity in Early Iron Age Canaan," and Moshe
Dothan, "Archaeological Evidence for Movements of the Early 'Sea Peoples' in
Canaan," in Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, Annual of
the American Schools of Oriental Research 49, ed. Seymour Gitin and William J.
Dever (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989) 1-22, 59-70; and Trude Dothan, The
Philistines and Their Material Culture (New Haven: Yale University, 1982).
78. Albrecht Alt, "The God of the Fathers." For a brief summary of commen-
196 Notes
tary since Alt on the religion of Israel's ancestors, see Westermann, Genesis 12—36,
105-108, 113-21.
79. Alt, "The God of the Fathers," 10-11; el bet-el, Genesis 31:13 (E), 35:7
(E); 'el 'olam, Genesis 21:33 (J); el ro'i, Genesis 16:13 (J).
80. All, "The God of the Fathers," 54-55. On the basis of this dichotomy be-
tween a sedentary, natural religion and a nomadic, historical one, Alt saw a distinc-
tion in J's promise theology between the guarantee of land, a theme of a sedentary,
natural religion, and the guarantee of descendants, a theme of a nomadic, historical
religion (84). A more nuanced but similar dichotomy is present in Westermann's
treatment of promise (Westermann, Genesis 12—36, 111—12).
81. Alt, "The God of the Fathers," 79.
82. Noth, Pentateuchal Traditions, 55; cf. von Rad, Hexateuch, 57; Genesis,
21-23.
83. Westermann, Genesis 12-36, 105-13, 575-76.
84. See "Reexamining Presuppositions: The Desert versus the Sown," in chap-
ter 1.
85. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 3—43; cf. 44—75.
86. The Niphal of ra'a employed with reflexive force, an interpretation dictated
by the related prepositional phrase 'el-'abram, "to Abram," and by the theophanic
context.
87. For example, Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 325; Gunkel, Legends, 27-34; Skin-
ner, Genesis, 246—47. Claus Westermann unfortunately rejects this traditional inter-
pretation, arguing that these religious centers do not include a temple, the cultic
characteristic of sedentary societies, and must therefore only represent the once holy
sites of small wandering groups (110-11, 153-57). The patriarchs are therefore not
cult founders in his view. Since the Yahwist source is fundamentally etiological, this
nonetiological reading is problematic from the start.
88. For maqom as sanctuary, see BDB, 880; Skinner, Genesis, 246.
89. For instance, Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 31 n. 1; U. Cassuto, A Commen-
tary on the Book of Genesis, II (1949. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1964) 324; Speiser,
Genesis, 86; Westermann, Genesis 12-36, 154.
90. In the case of Bethel, the sanctuary Abraham establishes does appear to be
located on a mountain outside the city to the east (12:8). In the case of Shechem,
Hebron, and Beersheba, the holy sites are the cultic centers of the cities themselves.
91. In a few additional cases, the Yahwist does not specify the location of the
divine appearance or audition in relation to a natural feature (12:1; 25:21-22; 31:3).
92. For elon as oak (Quercus), not terebinth (Pistacia), see Zohary, Plants,
108-11, who differs in this respect from older interpretations (e.g., BDB, 18).
93. While J regards trees as a legitimate medium of divine revelation, other
biblical authors such as Hosea (4:13) associate them with apostasy (cf. 1 Kings 17:10).
Whether these are criticisms of non-Yahwistic worship at these sites or of the sites
themselves is difficult to tell.
94. Zohary, Plants, 108, 110.
95. moreh, as the Hiphil participle of yara, "teach, instruct," is employed here
in customary attributive fashion: "The teaching oak." On the other hand, the possi-
bility that J is actually connecting moreh with ra'a, "see," as Cassuto has suggested
(Commentary, 327), is very good, since it is usual for J to employ folk etymologies
that rely on similar sounds rather than genuine linguistic derivations. J may also
connect the name of the oak at Hebron, mamre', with the verb ra'a (and divine rev-
elation), as the occurrence of these terms together in Genesis 18:1 might suggest.
Notes 197
The genuine etymology of mamre'may be impenetrable. For two attempts to un-

ravel its actual derivation, see Yoel L. Arbeitman, "Mamre," ABD 4.492-93; and
E. Lipinski, " 'Anaq-Kiryat 'Arba '-Hebron et ses sanctuaires tribaux," VT 24 (1974)
41-55.
96. Zohary, Plants, 115. The tamarisk at Beersheba was planted by Abraham
(Gen 21:33).
97. On the mountain and its significance in Israel and the ancient Near East,
see Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University, 1972); Shemaryahu Talmon, "har, gibh 'ah," TDOT, III,
427-47; Robert L. Cohn, The Shape of Sacred Space: Four Biblical Studies (Chico,
CA: Scholars, 1981) 25-41; Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jew-
ish Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985). Cf. Diana Eck, "Mountains," ER
10.130-34.
98. The mountain on which Abraham bound Isaac and encountered God (Gen
22:l-14a), which figures prominently in the Elohist's traditions, is also believed by
J to be a site of divine revelation, as his reference to this story indicates (22:14b-19).
99. The Jabbok is the modern Wadi Zerqa (Nahr ez-Zerqa), the northern
boundary, according to J, of Ammonite territory (Num 21:24). See Randall W.
Younker, "Jabbok," ABD 3.593-94.
100. See "The Garden of Eden" in chapter 2. Cf. Jean Rudhardt, "Water," ER
15.350-58.
101. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Meridian
Books, 1958) 367-87; Images and Symbols (New York: Search Books, 1969) 27-56.
102. The history of scholarship on Genesis 15 is surveyed briefly by Claus
Westermann (Genesis 12-36, 209-16). For the social and historical understanding
of the covenant assumed here, see Frank Cross's discussion in Canaanite Myth and
Hebrew Epic (272-73, cf. 265-71). To this perspective may be compared the detailed
studies of Genesis 15 by R. E. Clements, Abraham and David: Genesis XV and Its
Meaning/or Israelite Tradition (Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1967); and Norbert
Lohfink, Die Landverheissung als Eid: Eine Studie zu Gn 15 (Stuttgart: Katholisches
Bibelwerk, 1967). The same covenant ceremony and its signficance is mentioned by
Jeremiah when he accuses Israel and its leaders of transgressing the divine covenant
(Jer 34:17—22, esp. vv 18—19). For a discussion of the extrabiblical parallels, see
Speiser, Genesis, 112-14.
103. Eliade, Images and Symbols, 27-56.
104. On Beersheba as the traditional southern boundary of Israel, cf., for ex-
ample, Judges 20:1, 1 Samuel 3:20; Amos (5:5; 8:14) mentions it as an important
religious site.
105. In the Elohist's version of Jacob's departure and return, the use of Bethel
as a portal is worked out in an elaborate scheme of a dream at Bethel (28:11—12,
17-18, 20-21a, 22), a second dream in Syria in which Jacob is instructed to return
to Bethel (31:10-13), and Jacob's construction of an altar at Bethel upon his return
(35:1-7). Like Abraham in J's epic itinerary, so Jacob in E's epic stops at Shechem
first before proceeding on to Bethel when he returns from Syria (Gen 33:19-20,
35:1-7). Michael Fishbane has proposed a slightly different scheme in which Bethel
(Gen 28) and the Jabbok (Gen 32) represent the theophanic portals for Jacob's trip
providing "a certain spatial frame for the movement of the text as a whole"; see his
"Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle (Gen. 25:19-35:22)," JJS 26 (1975)
15-38, esp. 28-30.
106. This is a central thesis of chapter 2; for arguments against the story of
J 98 Notes
Cain and Abel as a political etiology explaining the origin of the Kenites, see the
discussion of "Cain and Abel."
107. Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).
108. Ibid., 3.
109. Ibid., 6.
110. Ibid.,6, 14.
Chapter 4
1. Gerhard von Rad, "The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," trans.
E. W. Trueman Dicken, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (London:
SCM, 1984) 1-78, esp. 8, 50-52, 60, 78.
2. Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, trans. Bernhard W.
Anderson (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1981) 46-50. Noth, who considered the books of
Deuteronomy and Joshua to be part of another historical work—the Deuteronomistic
History—and not the continuation of Genesis through Numbers, shifted the core of
Pentateuchal traditions from the settlement, where von Rad placed it, to the exodus
from Egypt.
3. See, for example, Norman K. Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary
Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) 144-47; and Bernhard W. Anderson, Un-
derstanding the Old Testament, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986)
9-14.
4. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (1974. Minneapolis:
Augsburg, 1984) 2.
5. Robert B. Coote and David Robert Ord, The Bible's First History (Phila-
delphia: Fortress, 1989) 9-10.
6. Peter Ellis, The Yahwist: The Bible's First Theologian (Collegeville, MN:
Liturgical, 1968) 181.
7. The parallel between these accounts has not gone unrecognized by schol-
ars. See, for example, U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, part II (1949.
Jerusalem: Magnes, 1964) 334—69. See also the discussion of "Sacred Geography"
in chapter 3.
8. The traditional identification of Jebel Musa, at whose base St. Catherine's
Monastery is located, as Mt. Sinai goes back only to the Byzantine era (324-638 C.E.).
Israel's old poetry and epic sources appear to associate the southern mountain with
Midianite territory in the Transjordan; see Theodore Hiebert, God of My Victory
(Atlanta: Scholars, 1986) 83-92.
9. According to the Elohist, the divine name is revealed to Moses at his first
theophany at the sacred mountain, Horeb (Exod 3:15). The Priestly Writer records
the revelation of the divine name to Moses in the land of Egypt preceding his mis-
sion to confront Pharaoh with the divine demands (Exod 6:2-9).
10. K. Budde, "The Nomadic Ideal in the Old Testament," New World 4 (1895)
726-45; John W. Flight, "The Nomadic Idea and Ideal in the Old Testament," JBL
42 (1923) 158-226; Samuel Nystrom,Beduinentum and Jahwismus: Eine soziologisch-
religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Alten Testament (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup,
1946).
11. Paul Humbert, "Osee, le prophete bedouin," Revue de I'Histoire et Philosophie
de la Religion 1(1921) 97-118, and "La logique de la perspective nomade chez Osee
et l'unite d'Osee 2, 4-22," in Vom Alten Testament (Karl Marti Festschrift), ed.
Notes 199
K. Budde (Giessen: A. Topelmann, 1925) 158-66; E. Sellin, Das Zwolfprophetenbuch,

vol I., (Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1920) 236.
12. H. and H. A. Frankfort, et al., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure
of Ancient Man (New York: Penguin, 1946) 246. Compare Robert Cohn's judgment:
"It is not at all improbable that the wilderness was the breeding ground lor a new
socio-religious movement. ... In the harsh environment of the wilderness, the air
was first cleared and the Israelite revolution began"; The Shape of Sacred Space: Four
Biblical Studies (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1981) 21-23.
13. George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New
York: Harper, 1962); Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and West-
ern Tradition (Berkeley: University of California, 1976); Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea
of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University,
1991) 31-67.
14. Shemaryahu Talmon, "The 'Desert Motif in the Bible and in Qumran Lit-
erature," in Biblical Motifs: Origins and Transformations, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1966) 31-63. Cf. M. Weber, Ancient Judaism (Glencoe: The Free
Press, 1952) 13; E. Voegelin, Order and History, I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University, 1956) 208-19; and H. P. Smith, Religion of Israel (New
York: Scribner, 1914) 12.
15. Writes Talmon: "The predominent aspects of midtar wilderness in the Bible
give additional evidence to the unfamiliarity with and the loathing of the 'desert'
which were typical of the ancient Israelite. It is the attitude of the city-dweller, the
farmer, the semisedentary shepherd, even of the ass nomad" ("Desert Motif," 42-43).
Cf. Norman K. Gottwald's analysis of the desert narratives in the Pentateuch as re-
flective of a sedentary rather than nomadic society in The Tribes of Yahweh: A Soci-
ology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1979) 453-63.
16. Cf. the Israelites' concern for fields (for grain production) and vineyards
when they confront Moses later in Numbers 16:14.
17. The murmuring tradition may be associated with the intolerable conditions
of desert life in the opinion of J, as Martin Noth has suggested in Exodus (Philadel-
phia: Westminster, 1962) 128. George Coats has argued against this view, consider-
ing the murmuring tradition to be a later tradition rising not from the desert milieu
but from anti-northern polemic in the Jerusalem cult; see Rebellion in the Wilder-
ness: The Murmuring Motif in the Wilderness Traditions of the Old Testament (Nash-
ville: Abingdon, 1968).
18. Cohn, Sacred Space, 7-23.
19. The Elohist also highlights the theme of the preservation of the life of Israel's
ancestors in Egypt (Gen. 42:2; 45:5b, 7, 11; 50:20).
20. See for example, "The Story of Si-nuhe" (ANET, 19) and the account of
Thut-Mose Ill's Campaign at Megiddo (ANET, 237-38). Oded Borowski reviews some
of this data on the Egyptians' view of Canaan in Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987) 3-5.
21. On the environment of the Nile Valley, see M. Y. Nuttonson, The Physical
Environment and Agriculture of Libya and Egypt with Special Reference to Their Re-
gions Containing Areas Climatically and Latitudinally Analogous to Israel (Washing-
ton, DC: American Institute of Crop Ecology, 1961) 244-452; John A. Wilson, The
Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951) 8-17; and Bruce B.
Williams, "Nile (Geography)," ABD 4. 1112-16.
200 Notes
22. Josephus, for example, describes Herod the Great, in response to the famine
of 24 B.C.E., using his private fortune—cutting up into coinage all the gold and silver
ornaments in his palace—to purchase grain from Egypt; The Works of Josephus, trans.
William Whiston (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1987) 417-18 (Book 15, Chap. 9).
23. Nuttonson, Physical Environment, 253-61.
24. See the discussion of "Adam and Eve" in chapter 2.
25. Both Martin Noth (Exodus, 81) and Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974) 159, consider Exodus 9:31-32 a secondary ad-
dition to the text. While these verses do break into the narrative of the confronta-
tion between Moses and Pharaoh, they reflect the characteristic interests of ] and
are directly related to the description of the following plague (Exod 10:5, 12, 15)
and of the festival of unleavened bread (Exod 34:18). For kussemet as emmer wheat
rather than spelt, see Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1982) 74-75.
26. Paula S. Hiebert, "Psalm 78: Its Place in Israelite Literature and History"
(Th.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992) 85-91.
27. Weber, Judaism, 13; Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of An-
cient Israel (1878; New York: Meridian Books, 1957) 83-120. Albrecht Alt, "The
Origins of Israelite Law," trans. R. A. Wilson, in Essays on Old Testament History
and Religion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968) 103-71.
28. The formulation of these festivals in Exodus 34 is closely paralleled in Exo-
dus 23: 14-17, a set of ritual regulations usually attributed to the Elohist.
29. The consumption of unleavened bread, while explained in biblical tradi-
tion as the result of the hasty departure from Egypt, has been associated from the
beginning of historical analysis of these texts with the consumption of the new bread
baked from the first new grain. See, for example, Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 87.
30. For an introductory bibliography and brief review of the history of the de-
bate over Passover's origins, see Childs, Exodus, 178-90; and Baruch M. Bokser, "Un-
leavened Bread and Passover, Feasts of," ABD 6. 755-65.
31. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 87-93. Examples of recent studies that reflect
Wellhausen's dichotomy, seeing the feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread aris-
ing from two distinct societies, one nomadic pastoralist and the other sedentary ag-
riculturalist, include Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, trans
John McHugh (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961) 484-93; Nahum M. Sarna, Explor-
ing Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken, 1986) 81-102; and
Bokser, 756.
32. L. Rost, "Weidewechsel und altisraelitischer Festkalender,"ZDPV 6 (1943)
205-16.
33. Several hints suggest an association in J's thought between pesah and massot:
(1) leaven is not permitted with the pesah sacrifice (v 25); (2) the legislation of the
offering of the firstborn of the flocks follows immediately upon the heels of the massot
legislation in J's code (vv 18—20); and (3) both massot (v 18) and pesah (12:21—23)
are linked to the exodus.
34. John Van Seters's analysis the festivals of Passover and Unleavened Bread
in the Yahwist also challenges the nomadic origins of Passover and the pre-lsraelite
Canaanite origins of Unleavened Bread. He finds in Deuteronomic tradition of the
seventh century the earliest statement on the Passover, and links J's emphasis on
Unleavened Bread and P's emphasis on Passover with historical developments in the
exilic period; see "The Place of the Yahwist in the History of Passover and Massol,"
ZAW 95 (1983) 167-82.
Notes 201
35. The decalogue in Exodus 20: 1-17 appears to be Elohistic tradition that
has undergone editing by the Priestly Writer.
36. Cf. Deuteronomy 14:27-29; 15:1-11; 24:14-22; 26:12-15.
37. This is the same term employed by J to mean "cultivate" in the creation
narrative.
38. G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM,
1952) 43-44.
39. Walther Eichrodt, "Offenbarung und Geschichte im Alten Testament,"
Theologische Zeitschrift 4 (1948) 322 (English translation from Wright's God Who
Acts, 43-44).
40. Sarna, Exploring Exodus, 1-2
41. Emil Fackenheim, God's Presence in History (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1970) 8-14.
42. J. Severino Croatto, Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 1981) 12.
43. Ibid., 34-35.
44. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, Harvard
University, 1973) 164, and "The Epic Traditions of Early Israel: Epic Narrative and
the Reconstruction of Early Israelite Institutions," in The Poet and the Historian: Es-
says in Literary and Historical Biblical Criticism, ed. Richard Elliott Friedman (Chico,
CA: Scholars, 1983) 27.
45. Translated by E. A. Speiser in ANET, 60-72; and by Alexander Heidel in
The Babylonian Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1942) 1-60. On the con-
flict in Enuma Elish, see Thorkild Jacobsen, "The Battle Between Marduk and
Tiamat," JAOS 88 (1968) 104-8, and Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian
Religion (New Haven: Yale Univerity, 1976) 167-91.
46. Translated by H. L. Ginsberg in ANET, 129-42; and by Michael Coogan in
Stories from Ancient Canaan (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978) 75-115. On the battle
between Baal and Yamm ("Sea"), see Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 112-20,
147-63.
47. On Exodus 15 and related biblical texts, see Cross's, "The Song of the Sea
and Canaanite Myth," in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 112-44; 147-94. On
Habakkuk 3, see Theodore Hieberl, God of My Victory: The Ancient Hymn in Habakkuk
3, esp. 81-128.
48. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 147-169; "Epic Traditions," 27.
49. For the challenge to Baal by Yamm in the Baal Cycle, see ANET, 130 (CTA
2.1.3-45); Tiamat's challenge to Marduk is described in Tablets 2 and 3 of Enuma
Elish, ANET, 63-66.
50. While the holy mountain is only mentioned explicitly in the E strand of
this initial theophany to Moses, J clearly has Mt. Sinai in mind. This is evident in
the play on the name of the tree (seneh; Exod 3:2) in which the theophany occurs
and the name Sinai (sinay), in the theophanic imagery of lightning that also charac-
terizes the theophany at Mt. Sinai (Exod 3:2; 19:16a, 18), and in the reference to
sacred ground in this narrative (3:5) and in the Sinai narrative later (19:12-13a,
20-25).
51. For Baal in the Baal Cycle, see ANET, 133-35 (CTA 4.3.11, 18; 4.5.68-71;
4.7.29-35; 5.2.7). For Marduk in Enuma Elish, see ANET, 66 (Tablet 4, lines 35-54)
and Jacobsen's comments in "The Battle Between Marduk and the Sea," 106.
52. For labhat 'es as lightning, sec Psalms 29:7; 105:32; Isaiah 29:6; 30:30. Cf.
J's description of Yahweh's storm in Exodus 9:24.
202 Notes
53. For the "column of lightning and cloud" ('ammud es we'anan) as a reflec-
tion of the thunderstorm imagery of the storm deity, see Thomas W. Mann, "The
Pillar of Cloud in the Red Sea Narrative," JBL 90 (1971) 15-30; Divine Presence and
Guidance in Israelite Traditions: The Typology of Exaltation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University, 1977) 130-34; and Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 164-65.
54. In Elohistic traditions, this pillar of cloud and fire/lightning is associated
not with the battle of the divine warrior but only with the tent of meeting and the
communication of the deity in the cult. See Paula Hiebert, "Psalm 78," 115-22,
135-37.
55. Terrence Fretheim, "The Plagues as Ecological Signs of Historical Disas-
ter," JBL 110 (1991) 385-96.
56. ANET, 66-67 (Tablet 4, lines 42-48, 96-100).
57. ANET, 131 (CTA 2.4.27); cf. Coogan, Stones, 89.
58. Baal returns to Zaphon, nature awakens, and a temple is constructed for
the victorious warrior (ANET, 133-34; CTA 4.5.6). Marduk takes up residence in
his temple Esagila, built in his home by the gods, and is granted by them absolute
and undisputed authority (ANET, 68-72; Tablets 6,7).
59. Baal (ANET, 134; CTA 4.6.35-60) and Marduk (ANET, 69; Tablet 6, lines
67-77) both provide lavish banquets at their new palaces following their victories.
Baal brings the rainy season with the onslaught of the thunderstorm and with it the
land's fertility (ANET, 133, 140; CTA 4.5.68-71; 6.3.10-11).
60. Traditionally, going back to the work of H. Gressmann, Mose and seine Zeit
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913) 192, scholars have considered J's
theophany in Exodus 19 to be dependent on volcanic imagery while E's theophany
was attributed to storm imagery. See, for example, Jorg Jeremias, "Theophany in
the OT," IDBSup, 897; Theophanie: die Geschichte einer alttestamentlichen Gattung
(Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1965) 100-11; and Noth, Exodus, 158-
59, and The History of Israel (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) 131-32. Arguments
against this traditional view and in favor of J's imagery as derived from the thunder-
storm have been made by Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 169; Richard J.
Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1972) 108-23; and Mann, "Pillar of Cloud," 15-17. Volcanic activity in
the Sinai ended during the Pleistocene epoch, thousands of years before the biblical
period. See Efraim Orni and Elisha Efrat, Geography of Israel (Jerusalem: Israel
Universities, 1980) 5-14, 118-19; and Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, and Naphtali
Tadmor, The Negev: The Challenge of a Desert (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1971)
81, 94; cf. Clifford, Cosmic Mountain, 111.
61. Whether the story of water in Exodus 17:1-7 also contains J elements is
difficult to say. It is largely from E. P's version is found in Numbers 20:2-13.
62. J's account of manna and quail in Numbers 11 has been interwoven with
E's account of the selection of seventy representatives from the elders of Israel to
assist Moses (vv 14, 16-17, 24-30).
63. William Henry Propp, Water in the Wilderness: A Biblical Motif and Its Mytho-
logical Background (Atlanta: Scholars, 1987); see also Paula Hiebert, "Psalm 78,"
137-87.
64. Dennis J. McCarthy, "'Creation' Motifs in Ancient Hebrew Poetry," in Cre-
ation in the Old Testament, ed. Bernhard W. Anderson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984)
83-85.
65. Sarna, Exploring Exodus, 93.
Notes 203
66. U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, trans. Israel Abrahams

(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967) 179.
67. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 143-44.
68. ANET, 68-72 (Tablet 6).
69. Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis, 10-11.
70. Thorkild Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, 189—91, and "Religious Drama
in Ancient Mesopotamia," in Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature,
and Religion of the Ancient Near East, ed. Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University, 1975) 75-76.
71. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, 189-91, and "Religious Drama," 75-76.
72. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 143—44; J. J. M. Roberts, "Myth
versus History," CBQ 38 (1976) 7-13; Fretheim, Exodus, 12-14, 161-70, and "The
Reclamation of Creation: Redemption and Law in Exodus," Interpretation 45 (1991)
354-65.
73. Jacobsen, "The Battle Between Marduk and Tiamat," 104-8.
74. This literary critical judgment goes back to J. Wellhausen's proposal that
J's "ritual dialogue" in Exodus 34 must be understood as a parallel to E's "ethical
decalogue" in Exodus 20; see Die Composition des Hexateuchs (1899. Reprint. Ber-
lin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963) 329-35. While Wellhausen's selection of titles for these
parallel codes are in certain respects misleading, his literary critical judgment re-
mains sound.
75. A brief introduction to sacrifice, including the offering of first fruits, and
to the major interpretations of it is found in Joseph Henninger's "Sacrifice," ER
12.544-57.
76. For example, Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (New York: Doubleday, 1991)
440—41; J. J. M. Roberts, "Divine Freedom and Cultic Manipulation in Israel and
Mesopotamia," in Unity and Diversity, 181—90; Sarna, Exploring Exodus, 89; Noth,
Exodus, 102.
77. S. R. Driver, "Offer, Offering, Oblation," in Dictionary of the Bible, ed.
J. Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900) 587.
78. Though this text is generally attributed to the Elohist, it contains a num-
ber of Yahwistic elements, not the least of which is the interest in 'adama (v 24).
Other J traits are the invoking of the divine name in worship (v 24), the reference to
divine blessing (v 24), and the concern for nakedness (v 26); cf. Coote and Ord,
First History, 261, 264.
79. For discussions of the avoidance of leaven in Israelite religious ritual, see
Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, 189 and Noth, Exodus, 191.
80. See chapter 3, "Nature and Society."
81. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, trans. D. M. G. Stalker,
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 218; cf. 212-19.
82. For a review of the recent debate, see Ronald S. Hendel, "The Social Ori-
gins of the Aniconic Tradition in Early Israel," CBQ 50 (1988) 365-82; and J. J. Stamm
and M. E. Andrew, The Ten Commandments in Recent Research (Naperville, IL: Alec
R. Allenson, 1967) 81-89; and Childs, Exodus, 404-9.
Chapter 5
1. H. and H. A. Frankfort, et al., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure
of Ancient Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1974) 246-47.
204 Notes
2. Albrecht Alt, "The God of the Fathers," "The Origins of Israelite Law," and
"The Settlement of the Israelites in Palestine," trans. R. A. Wilson, in Essays on Old
Testament History and Religion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968) 1-221.
3. Helmer Ringgren, Israelite Religion, trans. David E. Green (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1966) 42.
Liturgical Press, 1968) 31.
5. Compare the characterizations of the Yahwist by Gerhard von Rad, The Prob-
lem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, trans. E. W. Trueman Dicken (London: SCM,
1966) 68-74, and Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962) 48-56; Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1973) 261; and Robert Coote and David Ord, The
Bible's First History (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989) 1-7.
6. The link between David and Abraham has been discussed by, among others,
Ronald Clements in Abraham and David: Genesis XV and Its Meaning for Israelite
Tradition (Naperville, IL: A. R. Allenson, 1967).
7. For the Sumerian King List, see Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1939); the Epic of Gilgamesh is translated in ANET,
72-99, 503-7, and Agamemnon and Odysseus are the protagonists, of course, of
Greece's great epic literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
8. This is the traditional view of the origin of the Yahwist's traditions. It has
been developed in elaborate detail by Martin Noth in his A History of Pentateuchal
Traditions, trans. Bernhard W. Anderson (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1981).
9. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Fran-
cisco: Sierra Club, 1986 [orig. 1977]), The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cul-
tural and Agricultural (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), and Home Economics (San
Francisco: North Point, 1987); Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (San Fran-
cisco: Friends of the Earth, 1980), Altars of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), and Becoming Native to this Place (Lexington,
KY: University of Kentucky, 1994); Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revo-
lution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, Politics (London: Zed Books, 1991); Miguel
A. Altieri, Environmentally Sound Small Scale Agricultural Projects: Guidelines for
Planning (New York: Coordination in Development, 1988); and C. Dean Freuden-
berger, Global Dust Bowl: Can We Stop the Destruction of the Land Before It's Too Late?
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990).
10. Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting
the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston:
Beacon, 1989) 268.
11. Wendell Berry, Unsettling, 97.
12. Ibid., 38.
13. Timothy C. Weiskel, "In Dust and Ashes: The Environmental Crisis in Re-
ligious Perspective," Harvard Divinity Bulletin 21.3 (1992).
14. Daly and Cobb, Common Good, 271.
15. Compare the concrete proposals of the agriculturalists listed in note 9.
16. Wendell Berry, Unsettling, 7.
17. For Mircea Eliade's conception of the cosmic center, see Images and Sym-
bols (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969) 27-56.
18. John Bright, A History of Israel, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972)
171.
Notes 205
19. See, for example, Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions,
trans. John McHugh (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961) 468-515.
20. See, for example, the recent summary of apocalyptic thought by Paul Hanson
and John Collins in ABD 1.279-88.
21. Gordon Kaufman, "A Problem for Theology: The Concept of Nature," HTR
65 (1972) 353-56.
22. Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993)
109.
23. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988)
129, 132-33, 219.
24. Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1993).
25. See, for example, Now Is the Time, the final document and other texts from
the World Convocation on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation; Seoul, 1990
(Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1990).
26. John B. Cobb, Jr., "Postmodern Christianity in Quest of Eco-Justice," in
After Nature's Revolt: Eco-justice and Theology, ed. Dieter Hessel (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1993) 21-22, 27.
27. J. Baird Callicott, "Genesis and John Muir," in Covenant for a New Creation:
Ethics, Religion, and Public Policy, ed. Carol S. Robb and Carl J. Casebolt (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis, 1991) 107-40.
28. See, for example, 1 Kings 5:4,30; Isaiah 14:2,6; Leviticus 25:43,46,53; Psalms
110:2.
29. See, for example, Numbers 32:22,29(P); 2 Samuel 8:11; 2 Chronicles 28:11;
Nehemiah 5:5; Esther 7:8.
30. Wes Jackson, Altars, 9.
31. This theme has been taken up again recently by Bill McKibben in The Com-
forting Whirlwind: God, fob, and the Scale of Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1994).
32. Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth, 50, 128, 133, 200, 218.
33. Wendell Berry, Unsettling, 87, 95, 98, 212.
34. See, for example, Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come
of Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990); Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology
and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992) 167-81, 238-65; and the
review of the literature by Callicott "Genesis" (p. 136, n. 9).
35. See, for example, Bernhard Anderson's exegesis on Genesis 1:26—28,
"Human Dominion over Nature," in Biblical Studies in Contemporary Thought, ed.
Miriam Ward (Burlington, VT: Trinity College Biblical Institute, 1975), and J. Baird
Callicott's summary of the stewardship position (Genesis, 110-12).
36. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University, 1949)
204.
37. Callicott, "Genesis," 107-16.
38. Wes Jackson is quoted here from correspondence to supporters of The Land
Institute, dated November 30, 1993 and April 1, 1994.
39. Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce (New York: HarperCollins, 1993)
3, 15, 130-34.
Index
'abad. See Cultivation Animals. See also Camels; Cattle;

Abel, 27, 38-40, 69, 73-75, 79, 128, Donkeys; Pastoralism; Sheep and
138, 141, 150 goats
Abraham, 64, 70, 80-81, 87-96, 98- ancestors', 91-94
105, 107-115, 118-20, 122, 125, creation of, 60
139, 141, 144-45, 151, 157 naming, 66, 157
and Lot, 53-57, 79, 90, 92, 102, relation to humans, 63, 157
124 Anthropocentrism, 13-14, 66, 77, 115,
adam/Adam, 33, 35-36, 38, 59-61, 155
63-65, 70, 76, 79-80, 99, 102, Arable land
141, 150, 155-159 in the ancestral age, 87-88, 99, 104,
'adama. See Arable land 112, 114, 145
Agriculture. See also Arable land; at creation, 33-36, 52, 54, 57, 59-
Cultivation; Figs; Grain; Olives; 60, 62-63, 65-67, 73, 75-77, 141,
Vineyards 143, 150, 156-58
dry-land, 36-37, 50, 61, 90, 125, in the primeval age, 39-40, 45, 47-
141-146 48, 50, 68-73, 75-77, 81
irrigation, 36-37, 50, 52-61, 70-71, in the ritual decalogue, 128, 137—38,
125 142, 158
Albrecktson, Bertil, 18 Atrahasis, 71, 74, 78, 82
Albright, W. F., 86
Alt, Albrecht, 9-10, 85-86, 105-106, Baal, 73, 131-33
115, 143 Balaam's donkey, 63
Altar, 45, 107-110, 138, 158 Barr, James, 8, 18
Altieri, Miguel, 147 Bedouin, 86-88, 91
Ammonites, 101-3, 113-14, 144-45 Beersheba, 87-88, 90, 93, 96, 104-5,
Amorites, 96 108-11, 145, 150
207
208 Index
Berry, Thomas, 14, 154, 159-60 Deuteronomy, 37, 84, 117, 127-28,
Berry, Wendell, 62, 147-49, 153-54, 152
160 Dever, William, 87
Bethel, 87, 90, 94-96, 100, 105, 107-9, Dicaearchus, 19
111-12, 119, 145, 150 Documentary hypothesis, 23-26, 163-
Blessing, 81, 90-91, 114, 120, 141, 150 171
Bloom, Harold, 25-26, 83 Dominion, 14, 157-62
Bright, John, 152 Donkeys, 60, 86, 91-92, 128, 137,
Brueggemann, Walter, 98, 115 141
Budde, K., 121 Dualism, 13-14, 152-56
Cain, 27, 38-41, 57, 64, 69-70, 73-76, Earth, 34, 51, 67, 88
79, 81, 123, 128, 138, 141-42, Eden. See Garden of Eden
150 Edom, 57, 102-3, 113-14, 144-45
Callicot, J.Baird, 156, 161 Egypt, 9, 11, 13, 35, 41, 54, 73, 86, 88,
Camels, 3, 19, 91-92, 141 90, 93-95, 100, 103, 112, 114,
Canaanite religion, 6, 8, 10, 27, 143- 117-26, 129-33, 142, 146, 150-
44, 152 51. See also Nile River Valley
Carpenter,J. Estlin, 83, 104 Eichrodt, Walther, 130
Cassuto, U., 8 Eissfeldt, Otto, 26-27
Cattle, 41, 60, 91-92, 128, 137, 141 Eliade, Mircea, 9, 17, 62, 80, 110-11
Cities. See Urban culture Ellis, Peter, 25-27, 83-84, 118, 144
Coats, George, 77 Elohist (E), 24, 49, 89-90, 112, 120,
Cobb, John, 147-48, 155 136-37, 163-71
Cohn, Robert L., 9, 124 Enuma Elish, 34, 131, 133, 135-36
Coote, Robert, 84 'eres. See Earth
and David Ord, 25, 86, 118 Esau, 89-91, 102-3
Cosmology, 64 'eseb hassadeh. See Grain
Cox, Harvey, 13 Euphrates River, 53, 58
CroattoJ. Severino, 12-13, 130 Eve, 59-61, 71, 79-80, 102
Cross, Frank Moore, 80, 131, 135 Ezekiel, 57
Cultivation, 33, 40, 49, 59-60, 65-66,
129, 150, 156-59 Fackenheim, Emil, 130
Curse, 45, 47-48, 68-72, 81, 114, 141 Fertility cults, 8, 27, 143-44
Figs, 45, 47-49, 52, 122
Daly, Herman, 147-48 Flight, John W., 121
David, 86, 100, 144-45 Fohrer, Georg, 26—27
Dead Sea, 54, 57, 102 Frankfort, H. and H. A., 7, 10-11, 121,
Desacralization of nature, 13-14, 16, 142
137, 152 Fretheim, Terence, 132
Desert Freudenberger, Dean, 147
in the ancestral narratives, 101, 108
ideal, 120-21, 129 Galling, Kurt, 99
in the primeval narratives, 40-41, Garden of Eden, 30, 32-38, 51-62,
61, 65 64-65, 68-69, 110, 124, 151,
in the southern narratives, 120—29, 157
133, 138 ger. See Resident alien
versus the sown, 9—12, 19—22, 26— Gerar, 87-88, 92, 96, 104
27, 75-76, 1.05-7, 112-13, 127- Gezer calendar, 45—47
28, 141-44, 149-50 Gihon spring, 53, 57-58
Index 209
God. See also Theophany Kaufman, Gordon, 154

and arable soil, 73-74, 137-38, 143- Khazanov, A. M., 75
44 Klimkeit, Hans J., 9
and the earthly realm, 64—68, 131— Knierim, Rolf, 18
36, 150-51
of the fathers, 105-7 Laban, 95
and rain/storm, 72-74, 131-36 Lamech, 41-43
Gordon, C. H., 86 Land. See also Arable land
Gottwald, Norman, 20-21, 96-97 in promises to ancestors, 87-89, 99-
Grain, 3, 37, 45-48, 59, 66, 90, 92, 100, 114-16
113, 126-29, 142, 152 in the ritual decalogue, 138-39
Grapes. See Vineyards in theophanies, 107-11
Gunkel, Hermann, 77, 79, 101 Leopold, Aldo, 161
Luke, J. T., 86-87
Hagar, 88, 101, 108, 110, 123 Lutfiyya, Abdulla, 100
Haran, 95
Hawken, Paul, 162 McCarter, P. Kyle, 96
Hebron, 87-88, 90, 92-96, 100-101, McCarthy, Dennis, 134
108-9, 111, 119, 122, 145, 150 McFague, Sallie, 154
Hegel, G.W.F., 15-17 Marx, Emmanuel, 20
Heidel, Alexander, 135 Matthews, V. H., 86-87
Hendry, George, 14 Meadow, Richard, 20
History versus nature, 4-9, 15-19, 27, Mendenhall, George, 21
76-77, 97-98, 105-7, 113-15, Mesopotamia, 7, 11, 13, 34, 36, 41-
133-39, 149-55 43, 50, 53, 57, 70-71, 74, 78,
Horses, 19 82, 94, 96, 114, 131, 135, 145-
Hunting-gathering, 19, 21, 49, 103 46
Midian, 123
Idealism, 15-19, 152-53 Moabites, 101-3, 113-14, 144-45
Ingathering, festival of, 127, 137- Moses, 112, 118, 120, 122-23, 130,
38 132, 158
Isaac, 87-88, 90-96, 101-4, 108-11, Mountains, sacred, 107, 109-11, 115,
113, 115, 119, 122, 125, 141 133, 145, 151
Isaiah, 5 Mowinckel, Sigmund, 8
Ishmael, 88, 101, 103, 113, 142 Muir, John, 156
Jackson, Wes, 147, 158, 161-62 Negev, 94, 101, 105, 108, 111, 119
Jacob, 87-96, 101-4, 108, 110, 112- Nile River Valley, 54, 57, 122-26
15, 117, 119, 122, 124-25, 141, Noah, 44-51, 64, 69-70, 72, 74, 76,
145, 151 79-81, 89, 91, 94, 97, 99, 109,
Jacobsen, Thorkild, 135-36 113-14, 118, 120, 127, 141, 144,
Jericho, 54 157
Job, 159-60 Nomadism, 9-12, 19-22, 26-27, 38-
Joel, 57 39, 41-44, 75, 85-87, 89, 94, 105,
Jordan River Valley, 53-59, 61-62, 79, 112-13, 120-27, 142-44
101, 124 Noth, Martin, 78, 84, 86, 106, 117
Joseph, 90-93 Nystrom, Samuel, 121
Josephus, 32
Joshua, 84, 117 Oasis, 54-62, 65, .102
Judah, 91, 93, 145 Oelschlaegcr, Max, 121
210 Index
Olives, 3, 45, 47-50, 127 Sheep and goats, 3, 19-20, 38-40, 60,
Otto, Rudolf, 151 75-76, 91-97, 99, 106, 128-29,
137, 141-42
Passover, festival of, 127, 152 Shepherds. See Pastoralism
Pastoralism. See also Animals; Sheep Shiva, Vandana, 147
and goats Sin and punishment, 68-72, 123
integrated, 19-20, 37-40, 49, 61, Sinai, ML, 73, 84-85, 110, 117-26,
75-76, 91-97, 113, 128, 141-43 130, 133, 136, 142-43, 158
at Mari, 86, 90 Smend, Rudolf, 26-27
nomadic, 9-12, 19-22, 26-27, 41- Speiser, E. A., 98
43, 75, 85-87, 94, 105-7, 112-13, Spirit, 17, 63, 76, 152-53, 156
120-29, 141-44 Sumerian King List, 70-71, 82, 145,
seminomadic, 86-97, 106 151
Philistia, 88, 94, 96, 103-4, 145 Syria, 88, 94, 112, 119, 142
Priestly Writer (P), 24, 31, 49, 51, 61,
67, 71-73, 84-85, 89, 100, 112, Talmon, Shemaryahu, 121
118, 120, 123, 126, 128, 147, 152, Tents, 89
155-62, 163-171 Theophany, 73, 107-12, 120, 124, 132,
Propp, William, 133 138, 141-42, 145
Tigris River, 53, 58
Rad, Gerhard von, 4-5, 14-15, 17-18, Trees, sacred, 107-110, 115, 145, 151
68, 78, 84, 86, 98, 106, 117, 139
Resident alien, 88-89, 119, 142 Unleavened bread, festival of, 126-28,
Reuben, 90 137-38, 152
Ricoeur, Paul, 30 Urban culture, 41-43, 90, 144-48
Ringgren, Helmer, 143-44
Ritual. See also (festivals of) Van Seters, John, 25, 80, 84
Ingathering; Passover; Unleavened Vaux, Roland de, 11
bread; Weeks Vineyards, 3, 45, 47-51, 59, 66, 69, 81,
Cain and Abel, 40, 74 89, 91, 103, 113, 122, 127
ritual decalogue, 126-129, 136-39
Robinson, H. Wheeler, 7 Weeks, festival of, 127, 137-38
Rost, L., 127-28 Weiskel, Timothy, 148
Rowton, M. B., 86-87 Wellhausen, Julius, 16, 23, 27, 76-77,
Royalty, 61, 67-68, 144-45, 157 83-84, 86, 94, 104, 127-28
rflah. See Spirit Westermann, Claus, 27, 68, 84, 87, 97,
103, 106, 118
Sabbath, 128-29, 137 White, Lynn Jr., 13-14, 18, 153-55
Santmire, Paul, 15 Williams, George, 121
Sarna, Nahum, 8, 130 Woodward, Kenneth, 15
Schmid, H. H., 18 Wright, G. Ernest, 5-7, 12, 15-17,
Schneidau, Herbert, 121 129
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 32
Science, modern, 13 Zechariah, 57
Shechem, 87, 90, 94-96, 100, 107-9, Zion, 110
111, 145, 150-51 Zoar, 54

Theodore Hiebert-The Yahwist's Landscape - Nature and Religion in Early Israel (1996)

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Copyright © 1996 by Theodore Hiebert

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ture in biblical religion, one invariably confronts two widespread assump-

to my wife, Paula Sharpe Hiebert, who has given a tremendous amount of

ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. Edited by D. N. Freedman. New

AJSL American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature

BAR Biblical Archaeology Review

BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

BDB F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexi-

CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly

CTA Corpus des tablettes en cuneiformes alphabetiques. A. Herdner.

ER Encyclopedia of Religion. Edited by M. Eliade. New York:

GKC Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar. Edited by E. Kautzsch, translated by

HTR Harvard Theological Review

ICC International Critical Commentary

IDB Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. 4 vols. Edited by George

IDBSup Supplementary volume to IDB. Edited by Keith Crim. Nashville:

JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies

JJS Journal of Jewish Studies

JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JPSV Jewish Publication Society Version

JT5 Journal of Theological Studies

KAI Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften. H. Donner, W. Rollig.

KJV King James Version

NAB New American Bible

NEB New English Bible

NRSV New Revised Standard Version

TDOT Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Edited by G. J.

TWAT Theologisches Worterbuch zum Alten Testament. 4 vols. Edited

VTSup Vetus Testamentum, Supplements

ZAW Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

ZDPV Zeltschrift des deutschen Palastina-Vereins

The "Problem" of Nature

In both the popular consciousness and the enduring achievements of West-

The Problem in Biblical Interpretation

From Wright's analysis emerge two further conceptions characteristic

history. Yahweh's ultimate relation to things is a derivative from His primary

Sigmund Mowinckel, a scholar known for his vigorous and sympathetic

is considered in broader comparativist contexts, it is invariably character-

According to Alt, this historical consciousness, forged in the furnace

Everything that we recognized as truly characteristic of these gods—their asso-

This conception of Israelite religion as distinctively historical on account

It was Israel's "metaphysical experience" of the desert, according to this line

biblical society could be clearly distinguished from those of its neighbors by

The Problem in Ecological Literature

Rethinking the Problem

Within this second stage of religious development, according to Hegel, hu-

exclusion of nature. While by no means abandoning his staunch historicist

biblical religion. And by consequence they have questioned the accuracy of

with sedentary agriculture in some way. In fact, it is better to think of an-

Israel as a revolt against oppressive political structures. Whether or not this

Rereading Biblical Texts

sive preoccupation with the creation accounts in discussions of nature in the

Eissfeld, however, he connected this nomadic source with a later revival of

This nearly exclusive interest in the Priestly viewpoint has persisted in

The Environment of the Primeval Age:

Ours is not a maritime country; neither commerce nor the

Adam and Eve

Such a procedure is not unique to the Yahwist but is in fact a traditional

When on high the heaven had not been named,

The Yahwist is thus following a traditional pattern for the introduction of

Before any pasturage was on the earth.

In those days no canals were opened,

By contrast, J's reference to rain alone reflects the rain-based, dryland

and the irrigation agriculture of its neighbors is described very specifically

Cain and Abel

rative of a group of nomadic pastoralists in the southern desert.32 But key

When the royal scepter was coming down from heaven . . .

The character of Mesopotamian civilization, centered in the city and the

is supported by a common translation of v 20: "Noah, the man of the soil,

13b). By planting a vineyard, he establishes in the hill country a typical spe-

The Garden of Eden