Biblical ethics reflects upon maxims of moral behavior from the perspective of normative good and examines its legitimations and justifications, as well as the consequences of what can be called a morally positive or negative behavior. If maxims of good behavior are to be derived from historical narrative traditions, such an undertaking is confronted with the problem that implicit maxims of moral behavior are entangled with a number of other motifs and can never be isolated purely. The narratives of the Bible are subject to this challenge for any reconstruction of a historical ethos and its ethics. Their moral maxims were also anchored in the cultural contexts and ideals of their time. Although biblical narratives, including some in the book of Genesis, were ethically self-reflecting, they participated in the historicity of the cultural ideal motifs of their time.1 The solution for the resulting hermeneutical problem for any historical ethics due to the “nasty gap of history” (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing) – the tensions between modern ethical maxims and those of the Bible – is the main problem for any biblical ethics of the Torah or more specifically, the book of Genesis.