0031 Does a debate over Biblical genres offer clues concerning the character of life during and after the start of the first singularity?

0032 For one, technically, the first singularity precedes history, even as it potentiates history.

0033 For two, how can anyone tell the history of an event that no one knows about?

The Ubaid practices speech-alone talk from the start.  Plus, the consequences of practicing speech-alone talk are unfathomable.  The semiotic qualities of speech-alone talk potentiate labor and social specialization, resulting in increasing wealth and power over the span of generations.

Who is going to figure that out?

Surely, the Ubaid is aware that other Neolithic cultures practice hand-speech talk. But, those are loser cultures.  All the action is happening in the Ubaid.  The other cultures are way behind.  Plus, they intend to catch up.  They drop the hand-talk component of their hand speech talk.

The change in semiosis between hand-speech and speech-alone is so dramatic that even these neighboring cultures forget the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.  The tree of life disappears.  The seeds of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are sown in distant lands.

0034 For three, Gen 1-11 may be regarded as a witness from within the spontaneously differentiating and specializing Ubaid villages, as they develop into Uruk town-chiefdoms, then into Sumerian city-states.

0035 The third point in the previous blog seems odd, almost unbelievable.

Somehow, a discussion of genre allows the claim that Gen 1-11 offers as an insider’s tale of the emergence and tribulations of one of the world’s first civilizations.

0036 So, what does the insider think about how the Ubaid begins?

James Hoffmeier, the first contributor, says (more or less), “Genesis 1-11 begins the story of redemption (for all) with the loss of God’s presence, intimacy between God and humans, and access to the tree of life.”

0037 Does that sound like the loss of the Lebenswelt that we evolved in?

Before the first singularity, there is no history.  There is no concept of history.  No gesture-word can picture or point to “history”.  Instead, traditions are timeless, just like the circles of the North American Plains Indians and the dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines.  As long as the group lives, no one really dies.  The dead become ancestors.

After the first singularity, there is history.  Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden.  There is no going back.

0038 The scientific hypothesis of the first singularity changes the landscape of inquiry into what it is to be human.

Biblical scholars, such as James Hoffmeier, sense that a purely material interpretation of human evolution cannot stand.  Similarly, a purely instrumental interpretation of the Bible cannot stand.

For centuries, Biblical inquiry is dominated by a Wissenschaftlich seeking to identify authorship through the grammar and the vocabulary of the text itself.  Today, Wellhausen’s four-source hypothesis, although interesting, is moribund.

0039 That will change under the challenges posed by the hypothesis of the first singularity.

What if Gen 1-11 is an insider’s tale of the birth and development of the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia, the first culture on Earth to practice speech-alone talk?

If it is, its lessons entangle all civilized humanity.

0040 James Hoffmeier gives a literary overview of Gen 1-11, before considering genre.

Notably, a break between the primeval and the patriarchal narratives appears precisely at the point when Terah, Abraham’s father, enters the story.

It is almost as if the genre changes.

0041 Have I seen a change in genre before in the book that I am looking at?

Yes, the story of Galileo marks a change of genres, from Aristotelian formulations to empirio-schematics.

Galileo stands at the twilight of the Latin Age, which opens with St. Augustine and continues for twelve hundred years.  According to Thomist and semiotician John Deely, the Latin Age is the second age of understanding.

Galileo stands at the dawn of the Age of Ideas, which runs four hundred years to the present. The Age of Ideas is an era of Wissenschaftlich.  Analytical and scientific approaches dominate.  Now, this third age of understanding draws to a close.

The fourth age of understanding, the Age of Triadic Relations, enters civilizational awareness, with the philosophy of Charles Peirce.  Peirce’s philosophy empowers the hypothesis of the first singularity.

0042 Here is a list.  For each period, the top item labels the cycle and the bottom item names the genre.

0043 Hoffmeier mentions a pattern, discerned by David Clines, of sin, divine speech, mitigation and punishment.  This pattern is encapsulated in the Story of the Fall.  The pattern repeats over and over in Gen 1-11.

I naturalize this pattern as failure, reorientation, paradigm implementation and coping with contradictions inherent in established paradigm.

This describes a cycle.

Does this cycle last for four generations of four generations (that is, around 400 years)?

0044 If so, then here is my guess.

Within each cycle, one genre predominates.

I can call each cycle a genre or a denkstyle.

0045 If this guess makes sense, then there may be nine genres in Gen 1-11, corresponding to nine cycles from the start of the Ubaid to the end of Ur III.

Here is a picture.

0046 There are three cycles between the start of Ubaid and its first expansion into northern Mesopotamia.

One cycle to the start of the Uruk.

Two cycles to right before the Sumerian Dynastic.

Then, three cycles to the twilight of Ur III, when the Sumerian language is no longer spoken.

0047 How do Hoffmeier’s first two genres, legend and myth, fit into this idea of the confluence of cycles and genres?

Legends associate to distant cycles.

Myths go with recent cycles.

0048 It is like a river.  Legends are like the uniform flow of water.  Myths are like the waterfalls and eddies.  Legends move under the pull of archetypes, just like water uniformly moves according to gravity.  Myths are like whirlpools and turbulence, generated by the landscape beneath the stream.

The metaphor is water.  The flow of genre is the thing itself, moving through time from the first singularity.

0049 Hoffmeier’s third genre is family history.

The Genesis phrase, “these are the generations”, seems to be an organizational marker.  The genealogies are a genre that imply a period of continuity, as expected when a cycle, or a suite of cycles, proceeds.

0050 The start of Ubaid to the end of Ur III spans nine cycles.

On the one hand, the primeval history does not delineate them all.

On the other hand, the genealogies in the primeval history express how cyclesfeel, especially from the point of view of a family holding together within southern Mesopotamia, for thousands of years.

0051 Hoffmeier next turns to the stories, starting with Adam and Eve.

Genesis 2:10-14 places Eden in Mesopotamia during the wet Neolithic (around 7800 years ago), when four rivers enter the newly-filled Persian Gulf.

0052 To me, the stories of the Garden of Eden associate to the first singularity.

From a scientific standpoint, the first singularity starts with the appearance of a speech-alone talking culture, the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia.  The dynamics are discussed in The First Singularity and Its Fairy Tale Trace.  The melding of two cultures, one land-loving Neolithic and the other coast-loving Mesolithic, must have taken generations.  The routinization of pidgin, followed by its transformation into a fully linguistic creole, requires more than one generation.

0053 Yet, as typical of fairy tales, the names of actual people get entangled in memories of what happened.  Clearly, something happened.  It happened to real people.

0054 The artistry of the Stories of Adam and Eve is remarkable, especially when the nature of the first singularity is not disregarded.

For example, a talking serpent, who suddenly appears in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and ends up crawling on the ground like a snake named “Desire”, testifies to the character of the transition.  The serpent has no hands.  It cannot talk in hand-speech talk.  It can only perform speech-alone talk.

0055 Hoffmeier dwells on Genesis 6:1-4, concerning the sons of God and the daughters of men.

Literary analysis suggests that the Nephilim episode relates to Noah’s flood in the same way that the Tower of Babelrelates to Abraham’s calling.

0056 In this, both point to periods of increasing contradictions within established paradigms, the final period of a cycle… er… genre.

0057 Hoffmeier considers the story of Noah’s flood.  It has a literary structure common to Semitic civilizations.  Typically, the structure goes ABCB’A’, where B’ and A’ mirror B and A.  Noah’s flood story, ABC…P…C’B’A’, contains 16 steps. 

0058 On top of that, during the past three centuries of the Age of Ideas, archaeologists unearth cuneiform-bearing clay tablets from long-buried libraries of ancient cities.  Some of the tablets tell a flood tale almost identical to the story of Noah’s flood.

0059 What does this imply, concerning the genres in Gen 1-11?To me, this implies a deep coherence between an elite Sumerian tradition and Abraham’s ancestors.  The idea is dramatically envisioned in the masterwork, An Archaeology of the Fall.  

Gen 1-11 in an insider’s tale about the rise and the fall of Sumerian civilization.

0060 James Hoffmeier concludes, by expressing the conviction that the entire Bible, including Genesis 1-11, intend to portray real events.  Therefore, the genre of Gen 1-11 is history and theology.

0061 These comments rely on the hypothesis of the first singularity, where a change in the way humans talk, from hand-speech to speech-alone talk, constitutes a transition so fundamental that our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

To me, this implies that the stories of Adam and Eve are fairy tales about the initiation and early development of our current Lebenswelt of unconstrained social complexity.

0062 The first singularity initiates cycles of failure, reorientation, paradigm implementation, and response to contradictions inherent in the established paradigm.  Each cycle expresses its own genre.  Each cycle lasts for 16 generations (that is, about 400 years).  Each cycle brings the Ubaid further into the rewards and losses of increasing social differentiation.

A similar spiraling appears in Gen 1-11.  For example, the stories of Cain and Abel are a little less dreamy than the stories of Adam and Eve.  Lamech’s attitude is way more arrogant than Cain’s.

0063 The primeval history serves a witness to the consequences of the first singularity.

In this sense, Hoffmeier is on target.  Gen 1-11 is history and theology.

0064 In chapter two, Gordon H. Wenham views Gen 1-11 as protohistory.

He starts with the genealogies.

Even though the narratives are difficult to classify as genre, the genealogies are not.

0065 Wenham proposes a thought experiment.

Clearly, the view from within, the author’s point of view, would not assign the classifier, “genre”, to portions of the text.  The classification comes from the outside, from the reader’s point of view.

So, how does the reader, on the outside, enter the thought-world of the author, on the inside?

0066 This thought experiment associates to a two-level interscope, which is discussed in A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction.

For content, in the normal-context of the author’s world_3a, the Biblical text_2a emerges from (and situates) the potential of ‘the insider’s witness’_1a.

For situation, in the normal-context of the reader’s world_3b, an interpretation of the Biblical text_2b emerges from (and situates) the potential of ‘insights into the revelation of what happened’_1b.

0067 Here is a picture.