The following is an excellent citation from a Yale Course on the Old Testament With section covering the documentary hypothesis covering the origins of the Genesis creation myth.
From:
Open Yale Courses
RLST-145: INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT (HEBREW BIBLE)
Lecture 5 - Critical Approaches to the Bible: Introduction to Genesis 12-50 [September 20, 2006]
Chapter 1. Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis and Characteristics of Biblical Sources
Gunkel began to focus on small little units. He was interested in small units within the four primary documents, and he identified genres or forms, what he called forms. The German word is a
Gattung,
Gattungen, forms. He would identify these small units, and that gave rise to the name of this approach, which is form criticism. He believed that what he was doing was identifying older, pre-literary forms that had been taken up and incorporated by the literary sources, by J, E, P and D.
Examples of the kind of form, or
Gattung, that he would identify are things like a hymn, a proverb — we often have biblical texts quoting proverbs that seem to be folk sayings — laws, rituals, folk stories of a particular type, poems, legends, songs, fragments of mythology. So for example he says of Genesis 6:1-4, a passage that you've read:
When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. The Lord said, "My breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years." It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim [these giants of some kind] appeared on earth — when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring [these giants, these Nephilim]. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
That's just stuck in there, in Genesis 6:1-4. This is an older fragment of a mythology or a legend which is put into place here. It's explaining the origin of heroes and great men of renown in the old days.
He also says that there are etiological stories. We've talked about those — legends that give the origin of a name, or a ritual, or an institution. There are different types of etiological stories. He says there are ethnological legends that will give you the story accounting for the origin of a particular people: so the Moabites for example, and the Ammonites — not a flattering story at all following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Obviously the Israelites didn't care for those people very much and gave them a pretty nasty origin.
We also have etymological legends, because they're explaining the name of something. It's given this particular name because of an etymomological connection with some event earlier.
So all of these things, he argues, are probably older existing traditions that have been taken up and adapted by the biblical writer, and they may preserve some historical reminiscence. More importantly, more important then the actual events that they might be reporting, is the fact that behind each of these is some sort of function. Each one of these did some sort of cultural work, it had some function or setting in life. That's what we can discover when we isolate these forms: this setting in life. That helps us learn something about ancient Israelite society or culture way before the tenth century. That's Gunkel's claim.
