Disagreed Mr. Greenblatt!

Chapitre 2, "Au bord des fleuves de Babylone", Adam & Ève:

Le principe des récits de création, c'est que personne ne prétend véritablement avoir été témoin de l'événement, ni s'en souvenir, ni même appartenir à une chaîne de mémoire remontant à quelqu'un qui aurait été physiquement présent.

Chapter 2, "By the Waters of Babylon", The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve:

The whole point about stories of creation is that no one can actually claim to have been an eyewitness or to remember it or even to be part of a chain of remembrance leading back to someone who had been there.

This is where we disagree.

First, the story of Genesis 1, most of the chapter no man was there (benediction in verse 28, Adam and Eve both were), but God was. If God has revealed it, we can know it, even if we cannot remember it from human eyewitnesses.

Second, the story of Genesis 2, most of the chapter Adam was, but Eve was not yet there. At the end of it, Adam and Eve both were there.

Third, the story of Genesis 3, both Adam and Eve were there.

Now, look at Haydock's comment at the end of the chapter:

HAYDOCK CATHOLIC BIBLE COMMENTARY ON THE OLD TESTAMENT : GENESIS 3
https://www.ecatholic2000.com/haydock/untitled-05.shtml#navPoint_6

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H.

The point is, Moses was united to Adam and Eve in a chain of remembrance.

Genesis 5 and 11, the genealogical parts (very few verses) in Genesis 12 to 50, plus a few verses in the beginning of Exodus line out what this chain of remembrance concretely consists in.

If we take, as I tend to do, LXX chronology in the shape of Roman Martyrology, over the one in common between Vulgate, Masoretic and either King James or Douay Rheims, the detail is a bit different from that given by Haydock, but the principle is the same.

A bit earlier, you compared to stories collected by the brothers Grimm. Do not forget, these stories were Märchen - stories transmitted for the fun of it, without pretence to being historical.

I know of another, very different, collection of stories in German : Sagen aus Österreich. I am not saying all of it is correct, but I am saying that Richard Lion-Heart and the men who held him captive in Austria over an insult suffered at St. Jean d'Acre were real men, and so was Theophrastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. And Faust was probably as close to one of the inventors of printing as Krabat by Preußler was to Johann Schadowitz. If not more. I don't think the Catholic Schadowitz sold his soul to Satan, but I am less confident about ... wait, there seems to be a difference on whether Faust is from Johann Georg Faust or from Johannes Fust. But either way it is agreed that there was a known historic model.

If Richard Lion-Heart had been a fictional character, why wouldn't German speaking and English speaking fiction writers treat him basically the same? But if he was a real person, one can see why English and French writers recalled his valour, and Austrians recalled his blustering and domineering over a fellow crusader. In other words, the German "Sage" does not cover the same kind of literature as the German "Märchen".

However, both have in common to be easy to remember. And if Adam and Eve knew some conditions of the transmission would not be ideal libraries, perhaps that is why they settled for formulating a very short and succinct text, easy to remember. Indeed, easy to learn by heart.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou Library
Septuagesima Sunday
9.II.2020