Biblical prehistory considers the origin of the world and its order, the origin of man and the origins of culture. It is an expression of the basic conviction, which was widespread in ancient cultures and based on the natural history of the time, that everything present and everything future received its essence in the beginning. In this sense, the biblical prehistory offers less an explanation of the origin of the world, but is primarily an attempt to interpret man's experience of himself and his environment. At the center of this reflection in exemplary narratives, which are accompanied by natural history, genealogical and geographical explanations, is the human being in his diverse relationships to fellow human beings, to non-human creation and to God. Jan Christian Gertz makes a new commentary with his work prehistory, whose stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel have shaped our self-image and worldview like few other literary works. The commentary offers readers inside and outside the subject a clearly understandable synthesis of previous research and places prehistory in the context of the literatures of the ancient Near East. The revision of the commentary on the biblical prehistory for the Old Testament German follows that by Gerhard von Rad from 1949, the last revision of which was published in 1972.
