2600 BC to 2100 BC
Before the nations
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
Genesis 1 to 11
About the dating
These chapters carry no dates and the text makes no attempt to give them any. Christians read them in different ways, from straight chronology to figurative history to theological prologue, and the bounds shown here exist only so this era has a place in the corridor. Nothing in the reading depends on them.
The world at this moment
What everyone else was doing while this part of the story was happening.
The neighbours' own stories
Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
Babel and the ziggurat
A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
The wider world
If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
What you would be reading
One book sits here. Open any of them and every card in the margin will describe itself at this moment.
Who was alive
9 of the people written up in the Hall of Witnesses belong to this stretch of the story.
The first human being, formed from the dust and given the garden to keep. Paul later treats him as the head of the old humanity, the man through whom death entered, set against Christ as the head of the new.
The one righteous man of his generation, who built a ship on dry ground on the strength of a warning about weather he had never seen. After the flood God set the rainbow as the sign of a covenant made with every living creature.
Adam and Eve's firstborn, a farmer, whose offering was not accepted while his brother's was. The text never explains why, which is part of its difficulty. God warns him that sin is crouching at the door and must be mastered, and he kills Abel in a field anyway.
The second son, a shepherd, whose offering of the firstborn of his flock was accepted. Killed by his brother. God tells Cain that his brother's blood is crying out from the ground.
Seventh from Adam, of whom Genesis says only that he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. One of two people in Scripture who do not die, the other being Elijah.
Noah's three sons, from whom Genesis 10 traces the nations of the known world. Shem's line runs to Abraham, which is why the word Semitic exists.
The seventy names of Genesis 10, repeated at the head of Chronicles, tracing the peoples of the known world back to Noah's three sons. Most are not individuals but peoples and places written as ancestors, which is how ancient genealogies mapped the world.
The ten generations from Adam to Noah, and the parallel line from Cain. Seth is the son given after Abel's death, and it is in his line that people began to call on the name of the LORD.
Abraham's father Terah, his brother Nahor, Nahor's wife Milcah, and their son Bethuel, who was Rebekah's father. The branch of the family that stayed behind in Mesopotamia when Abraham went on.
The world as it stood
3 entries describe themselves differently at this moment than at any other. These are the same notes that appear in the margin while you read.
The land
Cities, regions, rivers, and kingdoms, as they stood.
The plain of Shinar, where the tower is built. Genesis is describing the region that would later become Babylon, and the wordplay on 'Babel' and the Hebrew for 'confuse' is the point of the story.
One of the four rivers flowing out of Eden, and the first river Scripture names.
The garden, and the only place in Scripture described as unambiguously good before anything goes wrong. Its four rivers include the Tigris and Euphrates, which places it in the reader's real geography without ever quite locating it.
And then
The narrowing. After Babel the camera stops covering the whole earth and follows one man out of Ur.