Primeval history

The primeval history is the name given by biblical scholars to the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible.

The history contains some of the best-known stories in the Bible plus a number of genealogies, structured around the five-fold repetition of the toledot formula ("These are the generations of..."):[3] Scholars generally agree that the Torah, the collection of five books of which Genesis is the first, achieved something like its current form in the 5th century BCE.

[4] However, the almost complete absence of all the characters and incidents mentioned in the Primeval history from the rest of the Hebrew Bible has led a sizeable minority of scholars to conclude that these chapters were composed much later than those that follow, possibly in the 3rd century BC.

[10] Just how late is a subject for debate: at one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE;[5] on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by some scholars, notably John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period (the 6th century BCE) precisely because the primeval history contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth.

[11][Note 1] David M. Carr argues that the latest edition of the pre-Priestly version of the narratives probably dates to the mid-7th century BCE, during the period of Neo-Assyrian hegemony.