Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (The Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries)

You might want to start with Coogan's A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament. This is a liberal seminary's intro to critical analysis of the old testament. Coogan is a harvard critical biblical scholar. He is heavily involved in the NRSV translation of the bible. You might find it useful to provide context for the stories in the hebrew bible. If you want something extremely dense and scholarly, there was a recent Anchor Yale Bible book released on Genesis 1-11 that you can get. It's a nice scholarly commentary by Ronald Hendel. That series is fairly neutral and provides historical critical analysis if you want. The level of detail you can get into is incredible. Alternatively, and I would highly recommend it either way, I would sit with ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and tell them what your goals are for your interpretations. These models aren't perfect (and neither are any of the books you'll find), but they are actually extremely knowledgeable about these system and can adapt to what you'd like and run with you like an interactive guide to the old testament. Really I'd recommend this avenue first. Even just save a text file or doc that has a statement of your background and your interests and the way in which you would like to understand the text and load that into every conversation you have with any AI model about any section of the book.

In typical Near Eastern creation stories, creation begins with the separation of the heavens from the earth. This usually involves dividing the primordial cosmic ocean, so that after creation, there will be one ocean surrounding the earth and another above the heavens. In some traditions (including many biblical passages), this event also involves a conquest by the creator god over a primordial sea monster – usually named Leviathan or Rahab in the Bible. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which some biblical authors were probably familiar with, Marduk defeats the sea monster Tiamat and divides her body in half to make the heavens and the earth. After this, “He surveyed the heavens and the earth.” (V.65) The other gods then celebrate Marduk’s kingship, and Marduk proceeds with plans to create humans. An older creation story is found in the Sumerian Myth of the Pickaxe, in which the god Enlil separates the earth from heaven: The Lord, that which is appropriate verily he caused to appear,The Lord whose decisions are unalterable,Enlil, who of the land from the earth, brings up the seedTook care to move heaven away from earth,Took care to move earth away from heaven. “The heavens and the earth” can also function as a merism – an expression that uses two opposite or exclusive terms to express the totality of everything in between. So “the heavens and the earth” often just means “the cosmos” or “everything”. “Heavens” itself just refers to the sky. In Mesopotamian cosmology, the sky was the upper realm of the tripartite cosmos (sky, earth, and netherworld). It includes the firmament, which was a solid dome or cover that the ancients thought was up above our heads. They also believed that the sky was full of water, giving it its blue color. In fact, the Hebrew name for the sky, shamayim, might have been related to Akkadian shame, meaning “place of water”. (Wright 54) The use of the plural most likely expressed the vastness of the sky rather than the belief in multiple heavens. A few books I recommend on the subject: The Early History of Heaven by J. Edward Wright Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary by Ronald Hendel (expensive, unfortunately) Genesis 1-11: Tales of the Earliest World by Edwin Good I also have a video here where I provide a much longer and more thorough explanation of how the cosmos is depicted in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), with many more citations you can follow up on.