01_VanSeters_copiaaaa_01_25 28/04/15 11:15 Pagina 14 14 JOHN VAN SETERS Babylonian literary traditions and allusions to contemporary his- torical events. 1. The Flood Story in Genesis and in Mesopotamia Within the primeval history the clearest example of the Baby- lonian literary tradition is in the Flood Story of Genesis 6–8. The attribution of the basic account in the biblical version of this story to a particular source involves the problem of distributing its vari- ous parts to two different sources or authors, J and P, such that for most scholars from Wellhausen to the present neither source yields a complete and self-contained version of the story. This results in the need for a “redactor” to select some parts of the narrative from each source arbitrarily in order to form the story, while at the same time including other parallel parts that clearly contradict each other. Such contradictions completely undermine the notion that the end result is a product of redaction. The fallacy of this approach lies in the long outmoded principle that the J source did not make use of the generic designation God (Elohim) alongside of the divine name YHWH, as one finds them in J’s creation account (Genesis 2), in the story of Adam and Eve (chapter 3), and in the birth accounts of Cain (Gen 4,1) and Seth (4,25). If one rejects this basis for the di- vision of sources, as I do, along with many other scholars, then there is every reason to assign several passages in the flood narra- tive, such as the construction of the ark (Gen 6,13-17a), to J and not to P, and one is left with a fully coherent flood story for J. To this story P made a number of late additions for purely ideological reasons. No redactors are required. Since I have dealt with the ev- idence for this reconstruction in another place, I will not repeat that discussion here 20. As indicated above, J’s use of the various terms for deity is the same as that which one finds in Second Isaiah, and recognition of this fact solves a lot of the literary problems that scholars encountered in the past. Consequently, we may attribute the basic version of the flood story to J. For this version he was dependent upon a late form of the story such as the one reflected in a late rendering of the Gil- 20 See J. VAN SETERS, “The Yahwist Flood Story and the Babylonian Flood Tradition”, ID., Yahwist, 192-214. The J story is found in Gen 6,5-7.13- 17a.22a; 7,1-5.7-9.16b.10.12-17.22-23; 8,1.2b-4.6-12.13b.15-16.18.20-22.