of the tower of Babel) look back to it.  This piece is obviously not the continuation of chapter x.  That chapter brought us to a point at which the earth was occupied by different peoples and different tongues; and here (xi. 1) we are suddenly carried back to a time when the whole earth was of one language and one speech.  Can this have been the time when Noah’s family made up the whole population of the earth? or in other words, does xi. 1-9 go back before chap x. and join on to vi.-ix.?  Manifestly not:  “the whole earth” (xi. 1) is not merely Shem and Ham and Japhet; the multitude of men who seek by artificial means to concentrate themselves, and are then split up into different peoples, cannot consist of only one family.  The point of view is quite different from what it would be if chaps. vi.-ix. were taken into account; the narrator knows nothing of the flood, which left Noah’s family alone surviving out of the whole world.  Nor would it avail to place xi. 1 at a period so long subsequent to the flood that the family might have increased again to a great people; even this would not give the requisite connection with the idea of Noah and his three sons.  If the latter united themselves afterwards in one family, and one coherent people thus grew out of them, which was then split up by a higher power into different languages, then Shem, Ham, and Japhet entirely lose their significance as the great heads of the nations.

The fact is simply this, that the whole section of the flood (Genesis vi.-ix.) is an isolated piece without any connection with the rest of the narrative of the Jehovist.  Another strange erratic boulder is the intercourse of the sons of God with the daughters of men (Genesis vi. 1-4). l The connection between

************************************* 1 See p. 307, note. *************************************

this piece and the story of the flood which follows it, is of the loosest; and it is in entire disagreement with the preceding part of the Jehovist narrative, as it tells of a second fall of man, with a point of view morally and mentally so different from that of the first, that this story can in no wise be regarded as supplementing or continuing that one.  In Genesis vi. 1-4 morality has nothing to do with the guilt that is incurred.  We have further examples which illustrate the fragmentary character of the Jehovist primitive history as we have it, in the story of the fratricide of Cain, and the curse of Canaan, which indeed ought not to be here at all, but belong by rights to the history of the patriarchs.