So did J's early narrative originally end in famine, not flood?

 By J, of course, I'm talking about the Yahwist strand within the Torah. (And, yes, while I believe the original version of the documentary hypothesis doesn't hold water, I do believe a modern, updated version is the best explanation of the Torah's development and I reject any full-on fragmentary hypothesis.)

Now that that's out of the way?

Idan Dershowitz, who continues to show himself a name to watch in Torah exegesis, argues well in a brief paper that the earliest version of J's primeval narrative, ie, creation to Flood, did NOT end in a flood but rather a great famine.

Dershowitz starts with the descriptors of Lamech's descendants in Gen. 4. He next notes that Yahweh's promise, after Noah's post-Flood sacrifice, to never curse the ground again has language that elsewhere ties to famines. 

Specifically, that's Genesis 8:22:

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

Could be a flood, right? But, sounds more like an earth-cursing that spins off that of the expulsion from Eden.

And, here's Dershowitz's exegesis, starting with his note that the Samaritan Penteteuch and LXX differ from the Masoretic Text, which is reflected in the English above, versus the English of their translations below:

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, for all time shall not cease.

Note that difference. He further explicates:

Without the final pair, nothing remains to support a Flood reference. The six phenomena relate to the regular cycle of seasons, guaranteed to once again follow their natural course »by day and by night«, i.e. permanently . Previously, summers had been cold, winters dry, seedtime and harvest perverted – a famine had devastated the earth.

Pretty convincing.

From there, he connects dots from Lamech to Noah. He then goes to look at the Noah references in Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah.

How did this become a flood narrative, then? Dershowitz says the popularity of the Babylonian tradition eventually "flooded" the original J narrative.

Related to that, on Torah criticism? He says this supports the idea of J being a separate narrative, not a supplement to P. In other words, some modernized version of the documentary hypothesis is valid.

Sidebar: Exegesis like this shows that van Seters' semi-strawmanning claim that editors didn't exist in antiquity is not true. Maybe how they worked was different from, and harder than, today. But, they were there.

Sidebar 2: See my "extended haiku stanzas" poem about Genesis 6 here.