One assumption of the Documentary Hypothesis is that there actually is a difference in the naming of God between the two visions of creation. If we return to Genesis 1:2 we have, "and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." The 'of' between 'Spirit' and 'God' is translating a genitive construct chain in Hebrew. In English, we usually think of genitives in the possessive case (eg. "spirit of God" or "God's spirit"). However, the word used for 'Spirit' is ambiguous as a genitive - no letters are changed or added to the end of its root form. It is perfectly sound to translate it as a genitive in a language without a dingir-like determinative, such as English, but if we translate the written Hebrew into either Sumerian or Akkadian cuneiform, 'god' would be the read but not spoken determinative 𒀭. We would be left with a god called "Spirit" or possibly "Wind." This gives the same construction as the most common name of the king and counselor of the gods in both of those cultures Enlil - den-lil₂ - "Lord Wind/Breath/Spirit." 

Enlil/Ellil (god) - oracc.museum.upenn.edu 

This connection of naming to cuneiform conventions suggests the opposite conclusion of the one Asimov was trying to make. Not only could the first and second vision easily be written by the same author, but that author might have been particularly ancient as the Akkadian cuneiform writing conventions he was reflexively using were nearly out of use (Huehnergard & Pat-El 2019, p. 95; Michalowski 1990, p. 395) and Enlil almost unknown by the time of the exile. Enlil was first replaced by Marduk in the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish sometime late in the second millennium BC. Much later in the first millennium BC, but before the exile, Enlil was finally replaced in common Mesopotamian religious thought. Furthermore, the Assyrian-style cuneiform exiled Hebrews would have encountered was simplified to the point that visual puns would no longer be apparent.

We find in the first two chapters of Genesis clear references to the Sumerian Triad of creator gods - An, Enlil, and Enki - treated monotheistically. If Elohim has a triadic or trinitarian meaning at all, then the Documentary Hypothesis as it applies to divine naming in the creation account has been rebutted. 

Other Names

There are other names for God that arrive to us in Genesis in a similar way to that shown above. 

The Voice and the Angel of the LORD

Adam hears the sound/voice - qol - of Genesis 3:8, 10 - "I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself."

>> ŋeštu/ŋeštug ear, wisdom, understanding   ŋeš means tree, pole or penis; tug by itself is a logogram for clothing; Enki/Ea is the god of ŋeštug type of wisdom

The Angel of Yahweh in Genesis 22:15-18 - "In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice."

Yahweh appears to Isaac in Genesis 26:1-5 - "...because Abraham obeyed My voice..."  

Who Is the Angel of the Lord and What Is the Name of Yahweh? (2017) by Michael S. Heiser - logos.com

El Roi

In Genesis 16:13, Hagar gives God the name El Roi - "the God who sees me" - for answering her in her time of anguish. 

El Shaddai 

In contrast to the intimate lover of mankind associated with the names Yahweh and El Roi, in Genesis 17:1 will give us another name for God with El Shaddai - often translated as "God Almighty."

Now when Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him,

“I am God Almighty; Walk before Me, and be blameless."

There have been many different proposals for the meaning of El Shaddai, but the most straightforward from context is "God the Destroyer" from the Hebrew root word shadad. This is a stern god who will demand justice and intends to be obeyed. This meaning makes the most sense of the verse's subtext and Abraham's immediate response: 

"I am El Shaddai; Walk before Me, and be blameless [or else]"

Abram fell on his face...

Shaddai: Defining the ALMIGHTY - hebrewwordlessons.com 

The other uses in Genesis (28:3, 35:11, 43:14, 48:3, and 49:25) and the technical etymology of Shaddai don't favor "destroyer" as a primary meaning. Both the Amorites and the Assyrians have as one of their chief gods ilu šâdû - "high god" or "god the mountain." This is a straightforward translation into the Semitic languages of one of the most common Sumerian epithets of Enlil in the literature - kur gal "great mountain." Xianhua Wang (2011, pgs. 198-201) makes a strong case that kur-gal is a Sumerian expression that came in with Sargon the Great and the Akkadian Empire. 

The Sumerian kur has the meaning ša-du-um, thus also suggesting a correlation of the Akkadian ŚA.DÚ ì-li ra-bí-um with dEn-líl(É) kur-gal in the Zà-mì Hymns. The somehow unexpected absence of kur-gal in Pre-Sargonic Sumerian inscriptions, as noticed in the last chapter, makes the correlation far-reaching, since the Semitic ŚA.DÚ seems to recall more readily the earlier mythic tradition.

So we have several names of God here in Genesis - Elohim, Yahweh, Spirit/Breath/Wind of Elohim, "The Voice", El Roi, El Shaddai, and the Angel of Yahweh - each denoting a different aspect, attribute, attitude, experience, face, or person of God.

Functional Naming

Asimov relates how the name Yahweh was used sparingly and often replaced with the word 'Adonai' for fear of it being used in magic. While magic could be some distant consideration, the more obvious concern is not to treat God disrespectfully or flippantly in any way. The point of reverence that God should be set apart (ie. holy) in our thoughts and expressions was enshrined in the third commandment. Asimov does have a slightly more nuanced description of magic concerning God's name in the ITB (pgs. )

The Hebrew Name For God - YHVH - hebrew4christians.com 

In Genesis, names are used in a very functional and public way. Magic does not seem to be a concern at all. It is even doubtful that many of the names used in Genesis were actual personal names. If whatever the name Adam represents were sitting in a coffee shop and you yelled their name, likely, they would not respond because the name is an exonym. Unless it became an endonym - a name known and used by the people named - they may not know their name is Adam. Even if it is an endonym, it might be a type or category name rather than a personal name - for instance, yelling "human" or "settler" in the coffee shop wouldn't get more response than an annoyed side-eye or a harrumph to stop yelling. 

Endonyms and Exonyms: Say What? - translation-blog.trustedtanslations.com 

The use of exonyms was as common in Mesopotamia and the Levant as it is for us today. For instance, one common exonym that we have used many times now is Sumer. The Sumerians did not call themselves "Sumerians" or anything like that. Rather, they called their land ki-en-gi 𒆠𒂗𒄀, "Place of the Noble Lords", or more often Kalam-ma 𒌧𒈠, the familiar land, and their language eme-gi or eme-gir 𒅴𒄀 - "noble/native tongue." From at least as early as the Ur III period (c. 2200 BC), the ruling class of Sumer called themselves sag gig-ga - "the black-headed people." Sumer, or more properly Shumer, was first used in Old Babylonian times by Akkadian speakers after the Sumerian language had become a dead language.

Most of the names used in the beginning nine chapters of Genesis come from short sentences or puns that trace back to Sumerian and Akkadian words, and cuneiform symbols. The text assumes the reader will grasp the obvious puns but occasionally provides help with a more obscure word or idea. This creates a functional use of exonyms that is easy to see if the name in the text is replaced with the meanings the sentence-names and pun-names allude to. Whole layers of meaning emerge that are only hinted at by modern English translations.

Lamech is by far the most obscure name above. Nobody has confidence in its etymology. The decipherments of the other names are at least moderately probable. The Sumerian and Akkadian references above are all taken from Old Babylonian times and earlier - hundreds of years before Moses and at least contemporary with Abraham. Many of the Sumerian references go back to the Early Dynastic period in the early 3rd millennium. 

There are several points to make by looking at the cognates and forebearers of the second vision's vocabulary:

1. It is possible that there is not a single originally proper name in the whole story. Every name in the text is functional - the name describes the object's characteristics, actions, and/or purpose. If it were turned into a proper name, such as Yahweh or Adam, it is because the name matched the function.

2. The functional characteristics of the names for the first part of the vision can only be fully understood by knowing two languages - Sumerian and Akkadian. Akkadian, being a Semitic language like Hebrew, does not natively contain enough words to make sense of the text. 

3. Some of the puns are built into the cuneiform symbols. That is, they are visual puns. The pun is in the symbol rather than the sound. Most logograms represent several different words. 

Adam-Ish-Ti Pun Complex

The recognition of puns as being the foundation of many of the early etymologies cannot be overemphasized. The pun drives the word selection, such as in the ha-adam ha-adama pun. The more precise word for adama would be chomer - "clay" - just as it is used in Job 10:9; 33:6 and Isaiah 29:16; 45:9; 64:8. The ancient Hebrew hearer would not only relate the punned word, but the other word that would be used if not for the pun. 

The ha-adam ha-adama pun could be justified just because of its alliteration, but there is more. So much more.

 >>In this way, the pun names carry many layers of functional meaning and allow the writer to encode an enormous amount of meaning into just a few verses of text.

uṣṣu

Sumerian→Akkadian→Hebrew

As shown above, many of the pun names used in Hebrew work equally well if not better as puns in the earlier Sumerian language and writing. This is astounding! Sumerian is a language isolate having no direct connection with the Semitic languages, such as Akkadian until their shared history. During the later half of the 3rd millennium BC, Semitic languages and writing such as Old Akkadian and Elbaite, began to be used along with and then eventually supplanted Sumerian. After this, Sumerian soldiered on as a dead language much as Latin did after the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Sumerian words and logograms cited above are simple, straight across relationships - low hanging fruit - attested from the earliest writing of the Early Dynastic period to the 2nd millennium BC Old Babylonian period. There is much more that could and should be said by experts who cross the fields of Hebrew, Akkadian, and Sumerian.

The only way these words would survive with so little change to become recognizable word concepts in Hebrew is through their continued use as logograms or Sumerograms in the otherwise syllabic Akkadian cuneiform. A Sumerogram is a Sumerian logogram used to encode the equivalent word in another language. 

A form of Akkadian was the international written language during the Late Bronze Age, allowing Egypt to communicate with the Levant and Mesopotamia such as demonstrated in the Amarna Letters. This suggests the source documents used for the first chapters of Genesis are Akkadian tablets that reference or copy Sumerian tablets. These were most likely translated and compiled into Hebrew during the age we find the Amarna Letters - a key point of evidence for the Tablet Hypothesis. 

The use of Akkadian cuneiform script declined quickly during the Late Bronze Age Collapse that followed, which is the proximate time of the Exodus. It was replaced by the Phoenician/Old Hebrew Alphabet. In Mesopotamia, the Aramaic version of this same alphabet had nearly replaced cuneiform writing by the time of the exile, which makes getting these pun correlations unlikely during the time of the exile around 600 BC - a point of criticism against the Documentary Hypothesis.

As far back as the 1920s, when Sumerian translation was still in its infancy, it was generally recognized that some of the early Mesopotamians considered the kings before the flood to be "profane history" and would therefore refuse to include them in their version of the Sumerian Kings List (Langdon 1923, pg. 1).  

Preemptive Naming

In both visions of creation, God formally names parts of His creation only after he finishes the part, the text uses preemptive naming to describe the process. That is, we often see the name of the object in the text well before it is finished and named. For instance:

This is common throughout the Old Testament:

• The Valley of Achor is specified as the execution place of Achan before it is formally named. (Joshua 7:24-26)

In continuity with this, a key feature of the second vision is the naming of the animals after they arrive culminating in the naming of Eve after the Fall. In this way, the second vision depends upon the first. Adam is not formally used as a proper name for 'mankind' until Genesis 5:1-2: 

On the day God created mankind [ie. adam], he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” [Adam] when they were created.

Asimovian Documentary Hypothesis

The AGB relates how the use of Elohim, YHWH, and their combination serve as markers for the documentary hypothesis. The book of Genesis reads something like an anthology, so the question is not whether there are different sources in Genesis, but what markers could show them. It could be that this second vision of creation comes from a different author writing at a different time. However, the names and naming have primary theological and literary purposes, such as marking out the intimacy of the action. How can they then go on to be used as markers of independent documents?

The greatest irony of Asimov's defense of the Documentary Hypothesis is how easily it could be used to divide up his own work. Depending on who is counting, Asimov has written somewhere around 500 discrete books, short stories and long articles in his 72 years of life. That is a very unrealistic number, even for a genius. Given enough time for the chain of evidence of his autographs (ie. original documents) to be broken, a future generation using the methodology of the Documentary Hypothesis would easily disperse his authorship to the four corners of the earth. I have not read enough of his work to say exactly how the Asimovian Documentary Hypothesis might work, but certainly, his fiction would be separated from his nonfiction, his early work from his latter, and in the nonfiction section, his histories from his scientific writings. Of course, it goes without saying that his 7 works with the Bible are such an outlier, they would be the first to be deemed Pseudo-Asimov.

The second vision of creation (Genesis 2:4b to 3:24) has the same basic observational question - is it a created or a received text? Some small parts may have rested in the collective memory, but the overall narrative is outside of human experience. Furthermore, it has always been baffling to read both visions together as a consecutive literal 7 or 8-day account of history as they so starkly disagree with each other. I have yet to read a young earth creationist commentator who doesn't ignore a part of the text or unnecessarily multiply miracles to shoehorn their scheme into it.

One can look to St. Augustine as an example of the befuddlement taking the whole creation account together. St. Augustine addresses the beginning of Genesis in four major works, each time treating it in a different way. The second of these attempts was quoted heavily by Galileo in his Letter to Christiana. The third attempt is a very allegorical view found in his most famous work - The Confessions (books XI, XII).  

Asimov notices a key clue - Adam is not used as a proper name until chapter 5. So even if we are to read this vision as a created text, it should be unpacked with Adam as a metaphorical everyman, the species name for mankind, or the eventual Tribe of Adam not consummated until after the Fall with the naming of Eve (ie. Havvah). 

Double Blessing Tuesday

"These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens," - Genesis 2:4, RSV

When considered as one sentence, verse 2:4 has been described as "awkward" and "scarcely translatable," but Asimov (ITB, pg.76) and many others agree it serves as the end of the first vision and beginning of the second. To identify this, the verse is split into 'a' and 'b' clauses. The first vision is a grand overview of the past, present, and future. The second vision is an inset, focused on the lineage of mankind, starting with the second divine day - "On the day that YHWH, God, made earth and heaven..." (Fox 1983). 

The word 'generations' in the verse is the first toledot in Genesis and the only one spelled with all six letters. In the Tablet Hypothesis, verse 2:4a is a colophon. A Colophon is a statement at the end of a document that could contain various citation information, such as title, author, owner, scribe, number of lines, series, and sequence identification, etc. A lot of what goes into a Mesopotamian colophon is materials we customarily put on a title page at the front of our modern books and articles. Simple colophons are present on some of the earliest Sumerian documents and gradually became much more elaborate over time. Genesis 2:4a is a colophon that nearly replicates the words of Genesis 1:1, changing the word order so that the tablet both begins and ends with the action of creating. 

Verse 2.4b is a combined incipit and catch-line. An Incipit is the first line of a tablet and the usual way that tablets were titled. Verse 2.4b is the incipit for the next tablet. It was very common for Sumerian literature to begin with "In the day" or "In those days" in such a way as to reference other stories in the literature. That is exactly what is being done here - "In the day" is referring back to the second divine day of creation. 

Catch-lines are repeated words and phrases at the beginning and/or end of tablets to help keep tablets in the proper order, much like headers or footers with chapter and page numbers in our modern books. While using different but related words to highlight the new focus on the second divine day of creation, verse 2:4b repeats the words 'God', 'earth' and 'heaven'. 

Some have objected that verse 2.4b can't be referring to the second day because the dry land that God called 'Earth' wasn't made until the third day, but that belies the fact that the waters were not called 'Seas' until the third day also. So what is it to be called? Verse 1:2 has already made it clear - "the Earth was formless and void." The introduction to the Sumerian text Enki and Ninmah confirms our reasoning:

In those days, in the days when heaven and earth were created; in those nights, in the nights when heaven and earth were created...

Furthermore, just as when light and night occur together, they are called 'day', so also the earth and the seas together are called 'Earth'. The same for Adam and the animals. The same for Adam and Eve. 

Verse 2:5 gives us another clue - this vision begins in the time before there was rain. Phenomenologically, rain would occur only after the waters were separated and the sky/heaven was finished, but before any plants had grown on the land. That is Day 2. Again, a Sumerian text confirms this conclusion:

After heaven had been moved away from earth,

After earth had been separated from heaven,

After the name of man had been fixed;

Which the translator Samuel Noah Kramer (1961, pg. 37-39) paraphrases as:

Heaven and earth, originally united, were separated and moved away from each other, and thereupon the creation of man was ordained. 

The odd thing about Day 2 - our Monday - is that there is no blessing after the sky is finished. There is nothing good about Mondays! The third day - Tuesday - has two blessings, which is why many people plan to get married on Tuesday, such as in the Wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11) where Jesus is thought to have performed his first public miracle. The first blessing on Tuesday comes after completing the creation and separation of land and sea, suggesting that this was perhaps work also begun on Day 2. The implication is that God is forming Adam from the red dust/mud/clay (v. 2:7) at the same time as he is separating the land and the sea - a perfect parallel. 

The garden was already established when mankind was placed in it, V. 15 then... repeats V. 8

Three Upright Pillars

Observationally, the formation of man and the story of the deep sleep and the rib must come from a prophetic encounter - a vision. As with the first vision

"And yet, if we were to try the simplest and most direct line of thought..." -AGB

Dilmun

Dilmun as far south as Bahrain.

rising sea levels

Around 2000 BC sea levels fell about 2 meters. 

Southern Location for the Biblical Garden of Eden - israel-a-history-of.com

Writing

"Genesis...traditions were not reduced to writing until the ninth century B.C, at the earliest." - AGB

One of the strengths of the AGB is that Asimov actually looks to the meaning of the text instead of merely regurgitating competing claims or hiding behind the Documentary Hypothesis. Consequently, he just about gets it right. He correctly identifies the northern reaches of the Garden of Eden. Still, Asimov is under the spell of the Documentary Hypothesis and its 19th-century assumptions. Nearly all of those assumptions have since eroded away.

One of the most important of these fallen assumptions is that writing came much later than we now know to be the case. During the medieval period of Europe, a tradition had formed that treated the Pentateuch and Job as some of the oldest writings to have ever existed. In the 1600s AD, artifacts with cuneiform writing were brought back from Mesopotamia to Europe which challenged this tradition. Cuneiform literally means wedge-shaped. It is the script developed by Sumerian speakers and later Akkadian speakers that uses a stylus, such as a reed, to impress figures made of lines and wedges into clay. 

In the 1800s, the trilingual cuneiform Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great (522-486 BC) became available. This inscription, high on a rock cliff, contains a long inscription in three languages - Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. The Old Persian language fits in the Indo-European language group, and was well-known. This allowed the decipherment of the other two languages. Even though the Babylonian part of the inscription is relatively late and, at the time it was written, was being replaced by Aramaic, the decipherment unlocked the whole East Semitic language family and its various languages and dialects, such as Old Akkadian, Eblaite, Babylonian, and Assyrian, on thousands of cuneiform tablets. A large proportion of these tablets predate written Hebrew.

Most of these texts were bureaucratic or economic in nature, but there was no bright line distinction between government and religion. On the contrary, these subjects went hand-in-hand. A major focus of government in Mesopotamia was the upkeep of temples and sustaining the worship of idols. Receipts and ledgers of goods often list the gods, temples, rites, and festivals that defined and mediated social life.

The first significant decipherable literature that went back very far was the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish. Fragments were first discovered in 1849, but the 7th-century BC Ashurbanipal text was not published until 1876 by George Smith, just at the time Julius Wellhausen was developing the Documentary Hypothesis. Fragments of the Enuma Elish have been dated back to 1200 BC, and it has been suggested that phrasing might go back to Hammurabi (1792-1750), contemporary with Abraham. This alone puts the prejudice that the Jews could only write Genesis during the exile, when they had access to the Enuma Elish, as run-of-the-mill selection bias.

Sumerian Cuneiform

The Eridu Genesis was discovered in 1890 and first translated and published in 1920. 

Other Sumerian stories that make up the source material of Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh have been found. 

At the time Asimov was writing the first edition of the AGB, it was thought that writing had not spread to the Levant until the time of Hammurabi, around 1800 BC. In 1974, this illusion was shattered with the discovery of the state archives of Ebla. The state archives consist of about 40,000 cuneiform tablets from the reigns of the last three kings of Ebla, before it was destroyed during the time of the Akkadian Empire. There are still arguments about exactly when the Akkadian Empire ruled   

Earliest Known Alphabet Chart Deciphered - robertcargill.com

Distinction between script and language. A single script can support many languages. A single language can be written in many scripts.

Akkadian Cuneiform

Old Hebrew

The reason Asimov assumes that the ninth century BC is the oldest any of these 

Old Hebrew script using Hebrew idioms is found from the 10th century BC. But the Old Hebrew script is merely a cursive version of the Phoenician script. To the casual observer, the difference is like that of writing in Times New Roman font versus Comic Sans font. Times New Roman is a fine font for chiseling letters into stone, but with its serifs, it would be extremely inefficient and tedious to write by hand on paper.

Descendants of the Phoenician Alphabet - bobcargill.files.wordpress.com

Although borne of the evolutionary mindset and deemed to have too many exceptions to be taught in grade school anymore, the run of rivers used to be divided up into three basic categories: Youthful, Mature, and Old.

• Youthful Rivers lie on steep slopes causing the water to move fast, quickly eroding away deep, narrow channels. Landslides, mudslides, and flood events bring in more material from the bank and deposit sediment wherever natural boundaries slow the water.

• The more Mature Rivers that follow typically have eroded the area to shallower slopes. Shallow slopes cause slower water, where meanders and braiding start to form. Erosion happens on the outside of a meander where the water is moving faster and deposits sediment on the inside, creating sandbars. Since rivers are constantly eroding and depositing material, the river is continuously changing its shape. At times, the river will cut through a deeply eroded meander and take a shorter path. The old meander that is left over is called an oxbow lake because it is shaped like the harness attached to working oxen.

• In Old Rivers, the deposition of sediment over time has filled in the low areas, decreasing the slope, which encourages more meandering. After many cycles of meandering, cutting, and depositing in the same places, a relatively wide flat area called a floodplain develops. In times of flooding, the water will come out of its current channel to flood a very wide area and can even erode through previous meanders to quickly produce a new channel. 

Why Do Rivers Curve? - youtube.com 

Throughout human history, the Euphrates River has been the prototypical Old River. 

Inanna and Dumuzid

AGB - Asimov, Isaac and Palacios, Rafael (1981) Asimov's Guide to the Bible. Wings Books: NY.

ITB = Asimov, Isaac (1981) In The Beginning... Crown Publishers, 234 pages.