Academic research on the book of Genesis focuses on the authors and the process of shaping the text, but the first readers and hearers of the book are mostly absent from the discourse on it, even though they played an important role in turning it into a founding myth. For this group, the names "Yhwh" and "Elohim" appearing in the book were familiar words with a different meaning than the contemporary one, and they were used to criticize the power structures of the time.