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5 Noah did it — everything YHWH had commanded him.
וַיַּ֖עַשׂ נֹ֑חַ כְּכֹ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֖הוּ יְ׳הוָֽה׃
If you’re thinking, “We’ve heard this before,” you are absolutely correct. If you are thinking, “We’ve thought, ‘We heard this before’ before,” you are even more correct than absolutely, if that’s possible. In short, it is another Wiederaufnahme, a resumptive repetition. Let’s start with today’s verse and the verse it is repeating. I’ll highlight the differences in bold:
Gen 6:22 Noah did it. Everything God had commanded him — that is what he did.
וַיַּ֖עַשׂ נֹ֑חַ כְּ֠כֹל אֲשֶׁ֨ר צִוָּ֥ה אֹת֛וֹ אֱלֹהִ֖ים כֵּ֥ן עָשָֽׂה׃ ס
Gen 7:5 Noah did it — everything YHWH had commanded him.
וַיַּ֖עַשׂ נֹ֑חַ כְּכֹ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֖הוּ יְ׳הוָֽה׃
The differences (all but one of them trivial) don’t disguise the repetition:
6:22 calls the deity by his job title, God; 7:5 calls him by his name, YHWH.
6:22 leaves “commanded him” as two separate words; 7:5 combines them into one.
6:22 uses the complete formula, “as X, so Y”; 7:5 omits the “so Y” phrase.
Now let’s look back at the earlier repetition that we spotted. This time I’ll highlight the similarities:
Gen 6:9 Noah was a correct man who was unblemished in those ten generations. Noah had walked around with the gods.
פ נֹ֗חַ אִ֥ישׁ צַדִּ֛יק תָּמִ֥ים הָיָ֖ה בְּדֹֽרֹתָ֑יו אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֖ים הִֽתְהַלֶּךְ־נֹֽחַ׃
Gen 7:1 For it is you I have seen as correct before me in this generation.
אֹתְךָ֥ רָאִ֛יתִי צַדִּ֥יק לְפָנַ֖י בַּדּ֥וֹר הַזֶּֽה׃
The biggest differences here are simply because YHWH is speaking to Noah in 7:1, while in 6:9 the narrator is telling us about Noah. (And I’ve omitted the toledot formula that begins 6:9.) The real clues to what’s going on are the Hebrew letter פ that precedes 6:9 and the letter ס that follows 6:22, marking 6:9–22 as a complete semi-paragraph. The repetition lets us see that 7:1–5 matches 6:9–22. Now let’s talk about why.
The reason is “simple” — until you start to think about it. 6:9–22 is in the priestly voice, while 7:1–5 is in the voice scholars call “J,” simultaneously standing for “JHWH” (God’s name as transliterated into the German where these ideas were originally described) and “Judah / Jerusalem,” where the J text is understood to have originated.
If we zoom out to look at the bigger picture, we see the creation story told in two different ways, which we called Version 1 and Version 2. Version 1 (P) encompassed all of Genesis 1 and the first three verses of Genesis 2; Version 2 (J) started with Gen 2:5 and continued (with some bumps in the road) through the end of Genesis 4. Gen 2:4 provided a neat hinge between the two versions.
If we must label Genesis 5, The Genealogy of Adam, as P or J, it’s definitely priestly — yet it is self-identified as a separate book that has been incorporated into the telling of this story. The snake story of Genesis 3, where we pick up a conversation already in progress, and Cain’s story in Genesis 4, set in a world where farming and ranching already exist, fill out Version 2 of creation but aren’t specifically identified as coming from elsewhere the way Genesis 5 is. The bottom line: P and J are catchall terms, not chemical labels.
Genesis 6 begins with eight verses in which YHWH is the divine character. At least the last four of them, 6:5–8, seem to be an introduction to the Flood story. As we saw when we started Genesis 7, those four verses flow naturally into that chapter, as they do in Ronald Hendel’s commentary:
6:8 But YHWH liked Noah. 7:1 YHWH said to Noah …
And that brings us to where we are today. The traditional paragraphing of the text separates 6:9–22 from what precedes and follows it, and a comparison of the wording shows that 7:1 and 5 match the beginning (6:9) and ending (6:22) of that section. What’s happening?
The two versions of creation are very different in flavor: Version 1 is cosmic and Version 2 is earthy. Alternatively, we can call Version 1 scientific, even taxonomic, while Version 2 retells it as a story with characters, plot, and dialogue. Those differences are much less evident when it comes to telling the story of the Flood. Moreover, as much of chapter 7 as we’ve read so far does not retell 6:9–22. It simply gets a few extra animals on board so that Noah can offer sacrifice, when the crisis is over, without making the kosher animals extinct.
Now an even greater mishmash begins (or should I say a tohu-bohu?). I thought of trying to provide a chart here outlining various scholars’ ways of separating out the different sources of the story, and at this very moment my computer desktop is covered with scattered screenshots from four different analyses. Presenting them to you on Substack would be a total mess. Let me just outline the J version of the story as you’ll find it in one example, Hendel’s brand-new Anchor Bible volume:
7:1–5 (as we’ve presented it) and then …
v. 10
vv. 7–9 (but these are marked as “redactor,” except for “Noah,” the first word of v. 7
v. 16
v. 12
v. 17
vv. 22–23, with 23aß marked as “redactor”
Then it continues with 8:2.
If you remember the numbers you learned to count in Miss So-and-So’s kindergarten class, you realize that all this is completely out of the actual order of Genesis 7.
I don’t mean even to suggest that Hendel is wrong, let alone to make fun of him. What I’m trying to do now is let you know that we’ve reached the point where the combination of earlier sources — so simple at the beginning of Genesis — descends into something like chaos.
Is it too much too suggest that the creator of the unified story is mimicking the chaos that the rising waters will soon inflict on the created world? As someone who has been insisting that the Primeval History is an artistic creation and not an automatic combination of the earlier sources, I’d like to think that this is a deliberate literary choice.
As we move forward, I will point out certain words, phrases, and verses as being from one source or another — when there’s an important point to be made by doing so. I don’t feel any need to disentangle the sources in my own way and try to re-create them. The point of distinguishing them in the first place is to understand what the earlier writers were trying to do, shedding light on the interplay of (and sometimes the conflict between) the ideas that our own final redactor was trying to work with.
In this column, I’ll simply continue in the order of the Bible as we now have it. That means we’ll be reading v. 6 next time, the natural way. See you then.