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PRIMEVAL HISTORY: BABYLONIAN, BIBLICAL, AND ENOCHIC, AN INTERTEXTUAL READING. Helge S. Kvanvig. (2011). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Pp. 612 + xvi. $251.00. Cloth. ISBN 978 90 04 16380 5. Reviewed by J. Harold Ellens. Twenty five years ago I presented to an SBL regional meeting in Chicago, a substantial piece of research about the Mesopotamian and Persian influences upon apocalyptic and other post-exilic Second Temple Jewish literature. Professor Jarl Fossum, who had written an important tome entitled, The Nime of God and the Angel of the lord, aggressively attacked my paper and insisted that the biblical and Second Temple documents are shaped as they are, sui generis, by forces exclusively inherent to Semitic sources and images. Now we have in hand a massive volume of research and analysis by Helge S. Kvanvig, the consummate schokr of the roots and sources of biblical and extra-biblical literary traditions. His work overwhelmingly confirms the right-headedness of my far less illustrious inquiry into the matter a quarter of a century ago. This is a volume in which the reader spontaneously finds himself or herself attending carefully to every word. It will surely be the watershed volume on its subject for centuries. All future research in matters related to the primary biblical traditions will need to begin with Kvanvig's tome. Kvanvig received his doctorate in theology at the University of Olso in 1984; and is currently Professor of Old Testament Studies at his Alma Mater. He has published extensively on early Jewish Apocalyptic literature and on Enochic texts. He is author of the noted volume, Roots of Apocalyptic (Neukirchen Vluyn, 1988) and has been a major contributor to the biennial International Symposium on Enochic Studies that has convened in Italy every other year since 2001, sponsored by the University of Michigan Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies. This present volume is surely Kvanvig's magnum opus. With detailed analysis of creation, fall, and flood stories, from Old Babylonian documents, Atrahasis literature, biblical Genesis narratives, and The Book of the Watcher (I Enoch), Kvanvig offers us a volume that will remain permanently definitive. He provides us with a comparative study that establishes the chronology and interdependence of all of these sources of the biblical narratives that are so familiar to us, yet so endlessly mystifying. Kvanvig's volume is divided into three parts: Mesopotamian Primeval Traditions, Primeval History in Genesis, and The Primeval History in the Book of the Watchers. Part one discusses the Epic of Atrahasis, providing us with a careful study of the relevant manuscripts in which it is presented and its relationship to the Gilgamish Epic, the Enuma Elish, and other such narratives in the Old Mesopotamian manuscripts. There follows the outline and structure of the story of Atrahasis, its characters, and the crisis toward which it works. By this crisis in primeval history the story explains the character of the gods, the nature and motive for creation, various primeval (pre-deluvian) lists and stories of kings and priests, and the traditions of Apkallus and the holy men. Then Part one discusses the Poem of Erra in comparison with Atrahasis, the original cosmic crisis and the explanation of the problem of evil in the world. Part two deals with the biblical account of primeval history, the structure and sources of Genesis' pre-deluvian narratives, the priestly and non-priestly material, the Mesopotamian parallels to the Genesis flood story, comparison of the structure of the priestly source with the Mesopotamian primeval traditions, and the differing justifications for the flood in each of these parallel traditions. …
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