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the commentary series not only includes volumes on books in the Jewish Tanach/Protestant Old Testament, but also other books recognized as canonical parts of the Old Testament by diverse Christian confessions (thus including the Deuterocanonical Old Testament books).

      When it comes to “contemporary,” one central distinguishing feature of this series is its attempt to bring together two broad families of perspectives in analysis of biblical books, perspectives often described as “synchronic” and “diachronic” and all too often understood as incompatible with each other. Historically, diachronic studies arose in Europe, while some of the better known early synchronic studies originated in North America and Israel. Nevertheless, historical studies have continued to be pursued around the world, and focused synchronic work has been done in an ever greater variety of settings. Building on these developments, we aim in this series to bring synchronic and diachronic methods into closer alignment, allowing these approaches to work in a complementary and mutually-informative rather than antagonistic manner.

      Since these terms are used in varying ways within biblical studies, it makes sense to specify how they are understood in this series. Within IECOT we understand “synchronic” to embrace a variety of types of study of a biblical text in one given stage of its development, particularly its final stage(s) of development in existing manuscripts. “Synchronic” studies embrace non-historical narratological, reader-response and other approaches along with historically-informed exegesis of a particular stage of a biblical text. In contrast, we understand “diachronic” to embrace the full variety of modes of study of a biblical text over time.

      This diachronic analysis may include use of manuscript evidence (where available) to identify documented pre-stages of a biblical text, judicious use of clues within the biblical text to reconstruct its formation over time, and also an examination of the ways in which a biblical text may be in dialogue with earlier biblical (and non-biblical) motifs, traditions, themes, etc. In other words, diachronic study focuses on what might be termed a “depth dimension” of a given text – how a text (and its parts) has journeyed over time up to its present form, making the text part of a broader history of traditions, motifs and/or prior compositions. Synchronic analysis focuses on a particular moment (or moments) of that journey, with a particular focus on the final, canonized form (or forms) of the text. Together they represent, in our view, complementary ways of building a textual interpretation.

      Of course, each biblical book is different, and each author or team of authors has different ideas of how to incorporate these perspectives into the commentary. The authors will present their ideas in the introduction to each volume. In addition, each author or team of authors will highlight specific contemporary methodological and hermeneutical perspectives – e.g. gender-critical, liberation-theological, reception-historical, social-historical – appropriate to their own strengths and to the biblical book being interpreted. The result, we hope and expect, will be a series of volumes that display a range of ways that various methodologies and discourses can be integrated into the interpretation of the diverse books of the Old Testament.

      Fall 2012 The Editors

      Preface and Acknowledgements

      The following commentary is a guided tour of some of the most interesting and discussed chapters of the Bible. Much like a tour guide informs his group about particular features of an often-visited city, this guide to Gen 1–11 discusses aspects of the biblical text that I know the most about and find particularly fascinating. In this case, many other such commentary/tours of Gen 1–11 have been and will be done, and this tour makes no pretense to cover the text comprehensively.¹ Instead, in agreement with the focus of the overall series, I focus on ways that the Bible might be illuminated through a combination of close reading and attention to the original literary contexts of the texts under discussion. In addition, I have tried to bring together diverse worlds and forms of biblical criticism together in this commentary. I attend in the historical exegesis portions to a mix of international perspectives on the philology and formation of the texts discussed, and I include at least some pointers (in the Synthesis) to how such discussions might interact with non-historical approaches to the biblical text.

      Having brought this commentary to a close, I have ever more respect for my predecessors who have done the same. I keep learning interesting things about these texts, and so there is never a point of obvious closure. Moreover, as one works on a commentary of this sort over years, the successive stages of learning necessarily end up reflected in diverse diachronic levels of the commentary itself. I and my editors have done our best (perhaps like the editors of Gen 1–11 itself) to bring the whole into a coherent unity. Nevertheless, I hope remaining imperfections can stand as an important reminder that this guide offers an imperfect and partial, but hopefully suggestive mix of ways one might understand the texts in Gen 1–11.² It does not, contrary to some concepts of biblical commentary, purport to have mastered the text.

      This work would be more imperfect if I had not had the aide of numerous people. I have presented and gained invaluable feedback on my work as I presented it to two seminars on Gen 1–11 at Union Theological Seminary (Fall 2015 and Fall 2019) and two seminars at NYU (Spring 2017; Spring 2019 host Liane Feldman), two meetings of the Columbia University Hebrew Bible seminar (September 2015, May 2019), two Colloquiums on Old Testament at Heidelberg and Tübingen (January 2016; hosts Jan Gertz and Erhard Blum), a conference on scribalism and orality at the College de France (May 2016; host Thomas Römer), a workshop on scribalism and Genesis in Koblenz (February 2016; host Michaela Bauks), a faculty and doctoral student gathering in Zurich (July 2018; host Konrad Schmid), and multiple presentations at both the International SBL (2017) and Annual SBL meeting (2016, 2018, 2019). Along the way, I gained specific help from more people than I can gather and name here. Nevertheless, the following is an alphabetical list of some of the individuals who provided extra comments on my work and/or private copies of theirs: Fynn Adomeit, Joel Baden, Walter Bührer, Simeon Chavel, Colleen Conway, John Day, Paul Delnero, Albert DePury, Liane Feldman, Dan Fleming, Aron Freidenreich, Jan Gertz, Esther Hamori, Robin ten Hoopen, Ki-Eun Jang, Ed Greenstein, Christophe Nihan, Thomas Römer, Konrad Schmid, Stephan Schorch, Mark Smith, and (for discussion of theological matters) my Union Seminary colleagues John Thatamanil and Andrea White.

      Above all I thank Erhard Blum for his extraordinary help. Initially he read and discussed my work across a series of visits to Tübingen in Winter 2016 (funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung) and Summer 2017 as we planned then to write this commentary together. Even when he had to withdraw as co-author, he continued to provide generous help up to the final days of the commentary’s completion. Along the way I have become ever more convinced that Erhard Blum is one of the premier Hebrew philologians and exegetes of our age. This commentary, especially the translation, is immensely better as a result of his input, even as I must stress that he did not read the final whole and would not agree with some of the positions adopted in it.

      One thing that both Erhard Blum and my wife, Colleen Conway, encouraged me to do was to publish my work on Gen 1–11 in two books. My initial work on this commentary ended up being too long to be included in a single volume, and my diachronic discussions of precursors to Gen 1–11 had become too technical. Therefore, I made the decision to include those more technical, diachronic discussions in a separate monograph, The Formation of Genesis 1–11, which was published this year (2020) by Oxford University Press (New York). I still treat diachronic issues in this commentary, but the separate publication allowed me to treat them in a more summary way.³ I apologize in advance to some readers who then must consult a different book to find more detailed coverage of issues that interest them. At the same time I hope that this move thus makes this particular volume more accessible to those who do not need as much technical background.

      I must stress that most of this commentary is a synthesis of others’ work. Of course, I have attempted through footnotes to indicate particular places where I have gotten ideas. Nevertheless, as a result of reading and composing this commentary over a number of years, there are places where I have absorbed something from somewhere and forgotten my source. In particular, I found myself coming back again and again to certain interpreters of Genesis that I found to be unusually good readers, even when I also disagreed with aspects of their positions. They are cited in the relevant parts of the commentary,

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