Adam and Eve
Textual history

The Primeval History forms the opening chapters of the Torah, the five books making up the history of the origins of Israel. This achieved something like its current form in the 5th century BCE, but Genesis 1–11 shows little relationship to the rest of the Bible: for example, the names of its characters and its geography – Adam (man) and Eve (life), the Land of Nod ("Wandering"), and so on – are symbolic rather than real, and almost none of the persons, places and stories mentioned in it are ever met anywhere else. This has led scholars to suppose that the History forms a late composition attached to Genesis and the Pentateuch to serve as an introduction. Just how late is a subject for debate: at one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE; on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by some scholars, notably John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period (the 6th century BCE) precisely because the Primeval History contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth. The Primeval History draws on two distinct "sources", the Priestly source and what is sometimes called the Yahwist source and sometimes simply the "non-Priestly"; for the purpose of discussing Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis the terms "non-Priestly" and "Yahwist" can be regarded as interchangeable.
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