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The following commentary will explore more similarities and distinctions between texts in Gen 1–11 and their Mesopotamian (and other) counterparts. The point for now is to emphasize how the broader focus of the Gen 1–11 materials corresponds to the focus of many Mesopotamian primeval narratives on the overall origins of human city culture and specific temple cults as well. Both sets of material undermine a common contemporary conceptual division between cosmos-oriented “creation stories” on the one hand and other primeval stories on the other. Such an understanding assumes a semi-scientific division of the order of the natural world from social, ethnic, and other constructed orders (e.g., canals, cities), a division that was foreign to the world of the Bible.³⁶ Where modern readers might separate off the seven-day account of Gen 1 or the Eden story of Gen 2–3 as being stories of “creation,” ancient authors and readers probably would have seen the entire primeval history of Gen 1–11, including its account of post-flood peoples and cities in Gen 10:1–11:9, as an overall account of the primeval origins of the audience’s natural-ethnic-social world.³⁷