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Acknowledgments

This translation is dedicated to Cyrus H. Gordon, my teacher and my friend. I have never known another person like him. His classes were always exciting, and his store of knowledge was always there to help the discussion. He is a real pioneer in Mediterranean studies. Loren Eiseley explained Charles Darwin’s importance to biological history in a way that also explains Gordon’s importance to Mediterranean studies. Eiseley said:

Almost every scientific generalization is a supreme act of creative synthesis. There comes a time when an accumulation of smaller discoveries and observations can be combined in some great and comprehensive view of nature. At this point the need is not so much for increased numbers of facts as for a mind of great insight capable of taking the assembled information and rendering it intelligible. Such a synthesis represents the scientific mind at its highest point of achievement.1

Gordon’s comprehensive view of the Mediterranean World and his synthesis has created a new and an enlightened way of approaching our search for the foundations of our culture. It is a privilege to have worked with Cyrus H. Gordon.

Stan Rummel, who studied with me at Claremont and took over the Ras Shamra Parallels project when I left Claremont, has assisted me during the preparation of this translation. I want to thank him for his help. We have worked on many of the problems of Genesis during regular meetings that were scheduled for that purpose. He has put a lot of time into this project, and this work is much better because of his help.

I also thank the members of the Hebrew Bible Seminar of the Westar Institute (the late Robert W. Funk, director) for their comments and help on translation problems. From 1987 to 1991, we met twice a year. At each meeting, Genesis and its complexities took more than their share of the time.

I extend many thanks to Dr. K. C. Hanson, Editor-in-Chief at Wipf and Stock Publishers, for his help with this second edition. His editorial work was important as usual, and his scholarly intuition and assistance has been priceless. As always, I thank my wife, Jane Sheldon, for her editorial help.

I want to thank my son, Prof. Daniel C. Fisher—who is Claude W. Hibbard Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan and Curator of Paleontology at the University of Michigan Museum—for all of his encouragement and help, especially with Appendix II, and my conversations with Judith P. Fisher concerning the cover have been extremely rewarding. I want to thank Betty Lou Whaley for the original front cover concept. The embossed background on the cover of the first edition is an image of a gastropod mollusc (Murex trunculus), one of the snails used by the Phoenicians to produce a precious purple dye. It was used to dye garments for the royalty. I have used it as a symbol for this very precious Royal Epic. The following terms are interesting in that they refer to both the Phoenicians and their purple dye:

Mycenaean Greek, Po-ni-ke

Ugaritic, Pwn and Pwt

Hebrew, Pûnî

Greek, Phoinix and Phoinikes

Latin, Punicus

Preface to the Second Edition

There are not many changes in this second edition. The format and structure of the translation has been changed, and it is now divided into four parts:

Part I 1:1—11:26

Part II 11:27—25:18

Part III 25:19—37:1

Part IV 37:2—50:26.

Part IV has been reset to represent the prose, as opposed to epic line, structure of that section. Furthermore, the bibliography has now all been gathered to the end, and an Index of Ancient Documents has been provided to track the references in the Introduction, notes, and appendices.

Genesis is a royal epic constructed from many sources by the scribes of Jerusalem, and I suggest that this could have happened during the reign of King David. In my novel, The Jerusalem Academy, I try to show how this happened. I am more convinced than ever about this event. One reason for my optimism is the discovery in Jerusalem—or to be more specific in the City of David, the oldest part of Jerusalem—of a cuneiform tablet. There is a good article on this by Eilat Mazar, Wayne Horowitz, Takayoshi Oshima, and Yuval Goren.2 Actually the tablet is just a fragment (designated Jerusalem 1), and that means we cannot say much about the content. However, by analyzing the signs carefully, the authors who studied it have determined that the scribe, who wrote this tablet, had a better hand than the two scribes who wrote tablets 285–291 of the Amarna letters. The Amarna letters were sent by the ruler of Jerusalem, Abdi-Heba, to the Egyptian Pharaoh.3 So the authors say:

In fact, it is our impression that the scribe of Jerusalem 1 shows greater expertise than the scribes of Abdi-Heba in EA 285–290. Our conclusion, then, is that the scribe of the Jerusalem fragment seems capable of producing high-quality international-standard scribal work, a conclusion that is also supported by the shape of the fragment, as indicated by the surviving piece of the left edge, which seems to us to be closer to the Mesopotamian ideal than most tablets from the cuneiform west.4

This new information may not prove my view that there was a scribal school in Jerusalem before and during the Davidic monarchy, but it certainly points to a great teacher and at least two other scribes. My view is based on the fact that great centers needed and had scribal schools. In my novel, Magon of Tyre was such a scribe and a great teacher of Babylonian cuneiform.

Genesis is a wonderful collection of stories arranged in a fascinating structure. It has been and remains a most important element in western culture. The scribes who produced it should be given all the credit. I tire of hearing that otherworldly agents accomplished the great achievements of the ancient Mediterranean world. These scribes were thoughtful and talented human beings who deserve more than a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize in Literature. They may have helped each other, but this just proves the point made in the Egyptian text, The Instruction for King Meri-Ka-Re: “Great is a great man when his great men are great.”5

18 April 2011

Walnut Creek, CA

Loren R. Fisher

Preface to the First Edition

I have been publishing essays on the book of Genesis since 1962. I did not start this translation, however, until 1985. I finished it in 1993, and at that time, I started my historical novel, The Jerusalem Academy (dealing with the scribes who put Genesis together). I have now finished this novel, and since I needed to use parts of this translation in the novel, I found out that this translation works well.

During the last six years other translations have appeared by Robert Alter and Everett Fox (see “Works Consulted”). At the end of my introduction, I make some comments on these translations in a long note that I have added (note 53 at the end of the Introduction), but I was not able to use them during the time that I was working on this translation. Also during the last six years, I have discovered that this translation speaks to some very important problems for which the Alter and Fox’s translations are not very helpful. This is not something that I planned. I just made a very open translation, and it has turned out to be very useful. The first problem has to do with the study of Israel’s ancient history. I have referred to this problem in note 9 in the Introduction. There is now a group of scholars (N. P. Lemche, P. R. Davies, T. L. Thompson, and others) who have argued that Saul, David, Solomon, and the entire Davidic Monarchy are all just parts of a literary fiction written in Persian and Hellenistic times. In my opinion, this is a misguided effort to do away with the history of ancient Israel. My new translation of Genesis is based on the presupposition that Genesis is The Royal Epic of the Davidic Monarchy, and I think that the Davidic Monarchy needed the book of Genesis in order to unify Israel and Judah and to entertain the people on great occasions. Also, stories of the patriarchs and the patriarchs themselves are not much older than the monarchy. I think these stories took their form at the tombs of the patriarchs, and I have shown how they are much older than Lemche and others suggest (I have dealt with this problem in Appendix I: You Can’t Tell a Book by Its Cover).

The second problem has reminded me that my work also stands at the focal point of a much larger problem. This larger problem just resurfaced in Kansas when its State Board of Education voted effectively to exclude references to evolution from the public school curricula. To whom does my work speak? Not to the creationists, because their dogma has already closed their ears to most of what I would say, and not really to evolutionary biologists, at least as they act in that capacity. It is directed instead at the onlookers to this debate—the ‘third parties who are trying to make honest sense of this conflict. People who are interested in the education of their children are entitled to some help as they listen to the old debate between the creationists and the evolutionists. They can learn something of the growth of the Genesis traditions in my novel, The Jerusalem Academy; but these onlookers need a very clear translation of Genesis. In this translation you will not find the word “create” or “creation.” The creationists, along with some other theologians, have maintained that the word creation means “creation out of nothing.” They have brought this dogma to the story. So I have not used the “C” word. I use words such as “form” or “order” (I have another essay on this problem which appears here as Appendix II: Let There Be Light: A Scientific Approach To Genesis).

15 Oct 2000

Willits CA

Loren Fisher

Abbreviations

AAT An American Translation

AB Anchor Bible (see E. A. Speiser and Marvin H. Pope in Bibliography)

AML Ancient Mediterranean Literature

ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts

Buber and Rosenzweig Die Fünf Bücher der Weisung

BWL Babylonian Wisdom Literature, W. G. Lambert

CAD The Assyrian Dictionary: Of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

Cassuto A Commentary on the Book of Genesis

CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly

COS The Context of Scripture, 3 vols., edited by William W. Hallo

CRST The Claremont Ras Shamra Tablets, edited by Loren R. Fisher

EA El Amarna tablets

Gesenius Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, edited by E. Kautzsch and A. E. Cowley

Gen R Genesis Rabba (A midrash on the book of Genesis)

HTR Harvard Theological Review

JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies

JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

JSS Journal of Semitic Studies

KAI Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften, edited by Herbert Donner and Wolfgang Röllig

KJ King James Version

LCL Loeb Classical Library

MT Masoretic Text

NEB New English Bible

NRSV New Revised Standard Version

PRU III/ IV Le Palais royal d’Ugarit, edited by Jean Nougayrol

RSP I/II/III Ras Shamra Parallels, edited by Loren R. Fisher and Stan Rummel

RSV Revised Standard Version

Sam Samaritan Text

Tanakh The Holy Scriptures

TC Genesis Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary, Nahum Sarna

UF Ugarit-Forschungen

Ug V/VI Ugaritica V/ VI

UT Ugaritic text

UT Ugaritic Textbook, Cyrus H. Gordon

VAB Vorderasiatische Bibliothek

ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

LXX Septuagint

[ ] contains words added by the translator

1. Eiseley, “Charles Darwin.”

2. Mazar et al., “A Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel in Jerusalem.”

3. See Moran, ed. and trans., The Amarna Letters, 325–34.

4. Mazar et al., “A Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel in Jerusalem,” 11.

5. John Wilson’s translation in ANET, 415; see also COS 1.35 (pp. 61–65).