The Hebrews were determined to distinguish themselves—from the very beginning of time—from their former captors. The Genesis storyteller was in effect burying a hated past. At the same time, in the wake of Smith’s deciphering, it was possible to catch distant echoes, like sounds coming to us from under mounds of rubble, of what had been buried. A god, hovering over the restless deep, engenders everything that will come to exist; he divides the waters in two, shaping one into the sky and the other into the sea; he forms a primordial human from clay and assigns him agricultural work. Are we in
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