Cycles through Time

The Primeval History makes a great deal of sense when we understand it as three distinct events that account for the depravity of the world. But another look at the text reveals a truth that is glaringly obvious once we lay it out in plain sight. The narrative of Genesis 1-11 details two cycles of the same story, one after another. Rather than two accounts of the same event, these are different and consecutive stories in which the same lesson must be learned over again.
The first cycle begins with creation, followed by God’s warning and covenant issued to Adam. We then have the Fall of Man, exemplified in the murder of Abel. After this, mankind divides into various clans, develops technological innovations and then attempts to reclaim the divine status lost back at the Garden. This is done through interactions with the spiritual realm that culminate in the advent of giants on the earth, before God intervenes to save humanity. Over the course of ten generations from Adam to Noah, the cycle is complete and man’s effort to achieve glory on his own merit is rewarded only with the erasure of the stain of his evil.

The second cycle is similar. It begins with the renewal or re-creation brought about by the Flood. Again, there is a warning and a covenant, this time issued to Noah, who functions as Adam in this cycle. Noah’s disgrace as a result of overindulging in the vineyard echoes Adam’s ill-fated meal in the Garden. As a result, Canaan is cursed (given an evil destiny, as the ancients might say) like Cain. Even the names Cain and Canaan are similar to make this connection. Following this episode, the families branch out and account for all the nations and languages of the known world, with attention paid to one individual who discovered a technology that allowed him to dabble in the divine. And Nimrod brought about Babel, the event that saw the reintroduction of giants to the world, the worship of the fallen sons of God, and the division of the world as God’s judgment. Perhaps it is now clear why the Table of Nations precedes the Tower of Babel in the text – it preserves the literary structure of the two cycles we have just seen, without the chronology harming the message. And like the first cycle, the second also spans ten generations, from Noah to Abraham, who becomes the new protagonist and God’s agent of change in the new world.
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The writer of the Primeval History ingeniously structured the text so that we would see a pattern repeating in the world according to the tendencies of mankind toward depravity and corruption. Each time, the result was the rise of tyrannical giants that threatened to destroy humanity, were it not for God’s intervention.
The Jewish people have long known that in order to understand the future, one must look into the past, recognizing that it is only then that we can see where we are in our own history. By seeing the world and its history as a series of cycles or retellings of the same stories in new settings, the people of God can learn to anticipate what must change in order to continue into the next phase.

Extract from “Answers to Giant Questions,” chapter 10: “The Tower of Babel” by T.J. Steadman