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On page 134 of The Old Testament: An Introduction, Rolf Rendtorff states:
There is no formal connection by specific references in either direction between the primal history and the patriarchal history which follows. The Abraham story begins quite abruptly in [Genesis] 12.1-3. This marks a basically new beginning: from the general history of humanity there now emerges the history of the one people whose ancestor is Abraham. The promise to Abraham, and through him to all the families of the earth, which stands at the centre of these verses, points forwards to the future history of Israel and humanity. At the same time, in the present context, it also has the function of pointing backwards; the curses of primal history (3.14-19; cf. 8.21) are countered and contrasted with the promise of the blessing. In this way there is a bridge from the primal history to the patriarchal history.
Rendtorff appears to contradict himself in the course of a single paragraph. He says that the primal history and the patriarchal history aren’t connected, right before saying that there’s a bridge between the two. Then again, he does say that there’s no “formal connection”, so maybe the contradiction’s not as bad as I think.
Apparently, the question of whether or not the primal and the patriarchal histories are connected is a big one in biblical scholarship. In my first year at Harvard Divinity School, for my first paper in my Hebrew Scriptures class, I was asked to address whether or not there’s a connection between the primal history and the sacred history. My fundamentalist friend didn’t really understand the question! His response was that all of the Bible is sacred! I can understand his confusion.
Personally, I didn’t know at the time why I was asked that question, but I did believe that there was some connection between the primal history and the patriarchal history. In Genesis 9, Noah curses Canaan. In my opinion, that aspect of the primal history foreshadowed God’s promise to Abraham that Israel would possess Canaan.
Also, I suppose that the question did swim around in my mind before I took that Hebrew Scriptures class. As I took Bible classes at DePauw University, I became sensitive to the existence of different ways to interpret the Hebrew Bible: Jewish, Christian, and historical-critical. Reading the Bible from a Christian perspective that emphasized Jesus correcting the Fall had become boring to me. I wondered how other communities interpreted Genesis 3, and where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob fit into that. At some point, I learned that some Jewish interpreters held that God chose Abraham in order to heal the negative effects of the Fall. So I guess that I was wondering what the connection was between the primal and the patriarchal histories!
When I take another look at Christian interpretations, I wonder if they are too far afield from that one Jewish view on Abraham: in a sense, even Christians acknowledge that God chose Abraham to correct the problems of the Fall, for Abraham was the ancestor of Jesus, through whom many nations would be blessed. At the same time, I can understand how Jewish interpreters would find such a perspective to be lacking. Abraham was to be more than the ancestor of Jesus. God chose Abraham because God knew that he would teach his children to walk in God’s commandments (Genesis 18:19). Abraham’s seed was to obey God and bless the nations in so doing, not just wait for Jesus to come.
