Book of Genesis

The Book of Genesis (from Greek Template:Langx; Template:Langx; Template:Langx) is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament.Template:Sfn Its Hebrew name is the same as its first word, Template:Transliteration ('in the beginning'). The primary narrative of Genesis includes a legendary account of the creation of the world, the early history of humanity, and the origins of the Jewish people.Template:Sfn In Judaism, the theological importance of Genesis centers on the covenants linking God to his chosen people and the people to the Promised Land.

Genesis is part of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Tradition credits Moses as the Torah's author. However, there is scholarly consensus that the Book of Genesis was composed several centuries later, after the Babylonian captivity, possibly in the fifth century BC.Template:Sfn Based on the scientific interpretation of archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence, mainstream biblical scholars consider Genesis to be primarily mythological rather than historical.

It is divisible into two parts, the primeval history (chapters 1–11) and the ancestral history (chapters 12–50).Template:Sfn The primeval history sets out the author's concepts of the nature of the deity and of humanity's relationship with its maker: God creates a world which is good and fit for humans, but when humanity corrupts it with sin, God decides to destroy his creation, sparing only the righteous Noah and his family to re-establish the relationship between man and God.Template:Sfn

The ancestral history (chapters 12–50) tells of the prehistory of Israel, God's chosen people.Template:Sfn At God's command, Noah's descendant Abraham journeys from his birthplace (described as Ur of the Chaldeans and whose identification with Sumerian Ur is tentative in modern scholarship) into the God-given land of Canaan, where he dwells as a sojourner, as does his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob. Jacob's name is changed to "Israel", and through the agency of his son Joseph, the children of Israel descend into Egypt, 70 people in all with their households, and God promises them a future of greatness. Genesis ends with Israel in Egypt, ready for the coming of Moses and the Exodus (departure). The narrative is punctuated by a series of covenants with God, successively narrowing in scope from all peoples (the covenant with Noah) to a special relationship with one people alone (Abraham and his descendants through Isaac and Jacob).Template:Sfn

Title

File:Lieber des Ghetto 18.jpg

The Creation of Man by Ephraim Moses Lilien, 1903

The name Genesis is from the Latin Vulgate, in turn borrowed or transliterated from Greek , meaning 'origin'; Template:Langx, 'In [the] beginning'.Template:Sfn

Composition

Genesis was written anonymously, but both Jewish and Christian religious tradition attributes the entire Pentateuch—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—to Moses. During the Enlightenment, the philosophers Benedict Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes questioned Mosaic authorship. In the 17th century, Richard Simon proposed that the Pentateuch was written by multiple authors over a long period of time.Template:Sfn The involvement of multiple authors is suggested by internal contradictions within the text. For example, Genesis includes two creation narratives.Template:Sfn

At the end of the 19th century, most scholars adopted the documentary hypothesis.Template:Sfn This theory held that the five books of the Pentateuch came from four sources: the Yahwist (abbreviated as J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly source (P). Each source was held to tell the same basic story, with the sources later combined by various editors.Template:Sfn Scholars were able to distinguish sources based on the designations for God. For example, the Yahwist source uses Yahweh, while the Elohistic and Priestly sources use Elohim.Template:Sfn Scholars also use repeated and duplicate stories to identify separate sources. In Genesis, these include the two creation stories, three different wife–sister narratives, and the two versions of Abraham sending Hagar and Ishmael into the desert.Template:Sfn

According to the documentary hypothesis, J was produced during the 9th century BC in the southern Kingdom of Judah and was believed to be the earliest source. E was written in the northern Kingdom of Israel during the 8th century BC. D was written in Judah in the 7th century BC and associated with the religious reforms of King Josiah Template:Circa. The latest source was P, which was written during the 5th century in Babylon. Based on these dates, Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch did not reach its final, present-day form until after the Babylonian Exile. Julius Wellhausen argued that the Pentateuch was finalized in the time of Ezra. Ezra 7:14 records that Ezra traveled from Babylon to Jerusalem in 458 BC with God's law in his hand. Wellhausen argued that this was the newly compiled Pentateuch. Nehemiah 8–10, according to Wellhausen, describes the publication and public acceptance of this new law code Template:Circa.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn There was now a large gap between the earliest sources of the Pentateuch and the period they claimed to describe, which ended Template:Circa.Template:Sfn

Most scholars held to the documentary hypothesis until the 1980s. Since then, a number of variations and revisions of the documentary hypothesis have been proposed.Template:Sfn The new supplementary hypothesis posits three main sources for the Pentateuch: J, D, and P.Template:Sfn The E source is considered no more than a variation of J, and P is considered a body of revisions and expansions to the J (or "non-Priestly") material. The Deuteronomistic source does not appear in Genesis.Template:Sfn G.I. Davies argued that J dates from either just before or during the Babylonian Exile, and the Priestly final edition was made late in the Exilic period or soon after.Template:Sfn

In the 21st century, there is scholarly consensus that the Book of Genesis was composed after the Babylonian captivity, possibly in the fifth century BC.Template:Sfn In contrast, Ronald Hendel and Aaron Hornkohl have proposed a date prior to the Persian period (before 550 BC) based on linguistic grounds.Template:Sfn Russell Gmirkin has argued that Genesis was composed in the late 270s BC, drawing on Greek sources like Berossus' Babyloniaca and reflecting the political context of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic realms.Template:Sfn

As for why the book was created, a theory which has gained considerable interest, although still controversial, is that of Persian imperial authorisation. This proposes that the Persians of the Achaemenid Empire, after their conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, agreed to grant Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire, but required the local authorities to produce a single law code accepted by the entire community. The two powerful groups making up the community—the priestly families who controlled the Second Temple and who traced their origin to Moses and the wilderness wanderings, and the major landowning families who made up the "elders" and who traced their own origins to Abraham, who had "given" them the land—were in conflict over many issues, and each had its own "history of origins". However, the Persian promise of greatly increased local autonomy for all provided a powerful incentive to cooperate in producing a single text.Template:Sfn

Genre

Genesis is an example of a work in the "antiquities" genre, as the Romans knew it, a popular genre telling of the appearance of humans and their ancestors and heroes, with elaborate genealogies and chronologies fleshed out with stories and anecdotes.Template:Sfn Notable examples are found in the work of Greek historians of the 6th century BC: their intention was to connect notable families of their own day to a distant and heroic past, and in doing so they did not distinguish between myth, legend, and facts.Template:Sfn Professor Jean-Louis Ska of the Pontifical Biblical Institute calls the basic rule of the antiquarian historian the "law of conservation": everything old is valuable, nothing is eliminated.Template:Sfn This antiquity was needed to prove the worth of Israel's traditions to the nations (the neighbours of the Jews in the early Persian province of Judea), and to reconcile and unite the various factions within Israel itself.Template:Sfn

Describing the work of the biblical authors, John Van Seters wrote that lacking many historical traditions and none from the distant past, "They had to use myths and legends for earlier periods. In order to make sense out of the variety of different and often conflicting versions of stories, and to relate the stories to each other, they fitted them into a genealogical chronology."Template:Sfn Tremper Longman describes Genesis as theological history: "the fact that these events took place is assumed, and not argued. The concern of the text is not to prove the history but rather to impress the reader with the theological significance of these acts".Template:Sfn

Textual variation

The original manuscripts are lost, and the text of surviving copies varies. There are four major groupings of surviving manuscripts: the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch (in Samaritan script), the Septuagint (a Greek translation), and fragments of Genesis found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls are oldest but cover only a small portion of the book.Template:Sfn

Structure

Genesis appears to be structured around the recurring phrase Template:Transliteration, meaning "these are the generations", with the first use of the phrase referring to the "generations of heaven and earth" and the remainder marking individuals.Template:Sfn The Template:Transliteration formula, occurring eleven times in the book of Genesis, serves as a heading which marks a transition to a new subject.Template:Sfn The Template:Transliteration divide the book into the following sections:Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

1. Genesis 1:1–2:3 In the beginning (prologue)
2. Genesis 2:4–4:26 Template:Transliteration of Heaven and Earth (narrative)
3. Genesis 5:1–6:8 Template:Transliteration of Adam (genealogy, Template:Crossreference)
4. Genesis 6:9–9:29 Template:Transliteration of Noah (Genesis flood narrative)
5. Genesis 10:1–11:9 Template:Transliteration of Noah's sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth (genealogy)
6. Genesis 11:10–26 Template:Transliteration of Shem (genealogy)
7. Genesis 11:27–25:11 Template:Transliteration of Terah (Abraham narrative)
8. Genesis 25:12–18 Template:Transliteration of Ishmael (genealogy)
9. Genesis 25:19–35:29 Template:Transliteration of Isaac (Jacob narrative)
10. Genesis 36:1–36:8 Template:Transliteration of Esau (genealogy)
11. Genesis 36:9–37:1 Template:Transliteration of Esau "the father of the Edomites" (genealogy)
12. Genesis 37:2–50:26 Template:Transliteration of Jacob (Joseph narrative)

It is not clear, however, what this meant to the original authors, and most modern commentators divide it into two parts based on the subject matter, a primeval history (chapters 1–11) and a patriarchal history (chapters 12–50).Template:SfnTemplate:Efn While the first is far shorter than the second, it sets out the basic themes and provides an interpretive key for understanding the entire book.Template:Sfn The primeval history has a symmetrical structure hinging on the flood story (chapters 6–9) with the events before the flood mirrored by the events after.Template:Sfn The ancestral history is structured around the three patriarchs Abraham, Jacob and Joseph.Template:Sfn The stories of Isaac arguably do not make up a coherent cycle of stories and function as a bridge between the cycles of Abraham and Jacob.Template:Sfn

Summary

Primeval history (chapters 1–11)

File:Edward Hicks, American - Noah's Ark - Google Art Project.jpg

Noah's Ark (1846), by American folk painter Edward Hicks

The Genesis creation narrative comprises two different stories; the first two chapters roughly correspond to these.Template:Efn In the first, Elohim, the generic Hebrew word for God, creates the heavens and the earth including man, in six days, and rests on the seventh. In the second, God, now referred to as "Yahweh Elohim" (rendered as "the Template:LORD God" in English translations), creates two individuals, Adam and Eve, as the first man and woman, and places them in the Garden of Eden.

God commands the man that he is free to eat from any tree, including the tree of life, except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A serpent, portrayed as a deceptive creature or trickster, convinces Eve to eat the fruit. She then convinces Adam to eat it. Both become ashamed of their nudity, and are discovered by God, who exiles them from Eden and punishes them. Adam is forced to gain his sustenance by difficult toil, and Eve to giving birth in pain. This is interpreted by Christians as the "fall of man" into sin. Eve bears two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain works in the garden, and Abel works with meat; they both offer offerings to God one day, and God does not accept Cain's offering but does accept Abel's. This causes Cain to resent Abel; he takes Abel to a field and murders him. God then curses Cain. Eve bears another son, Seth, to take Abel's place.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

After many generations of Adam have passed from the lines of Cain and Seth, the world has become corrupted by human sin and Nephilim. God intends to wipe out humanity for their wickedness. However, Noah is righteous and blameless. God instructs Noah to construct an ark and store in it all the animals, seven pairs of every clean animal and one pair of every unclean. Then God sends a great flood to destroy all the world. When the waters recede, God establishes a covenant with Noah, promising he will never destroy the world with water again, and making a rainbow as a symbol of his promise. God sees mankind cooperating to build a great tower city, the Tower of Babel. He divides humanity with many languages and sets them apart with confusion. Then, a generation line from Shem to Abram is described.

Patriarchal age (chapters 12–50)

File:Molnár Ábrahám kiköltözése 1850.jpg

Abram's Journey from Ur to Canaan (József Molnár, 1850)

Abram, a man descended from Noah, is instructed by God to travel from his home in Ur of the Chaldees to the land of Canaan. There, God makes a promise to Abram, promising that his descendants shall be as numerous as the stars, but that people will suffer oppression in a foreign land for four hundred years, after which they will inherit the land "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates". Abram's name is changed to Abraham and that of his wife and half-sibling Sarai to Sarah (meaning 'princess'). God institutes that all males should be circumcised as a sign of his promise to Abraham. Due to her old age, Sarah tells Abraham to take her Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar, as a second wife. Through Hagar, Abraham fathers Ishmael.

God then plans to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for the sins of their people. Abraham pleads for the city, that it may not be destroyed if ten righteous people are found there. Angels remove Abraham's nephew, Lot, and his family from Sodom. The cities are destroyed; his wife turns to view them and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot's daughters, concerned that they are fugitives who will never find husbands, inebriate Lot so they can become pregnant by him, and give birth to the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites.

Abraham and Sarah go to the Philistine town of Gerar, claiming to be brother and sister. The King of Gerar takes Sarah for his wife, but God warns him to return her and he obeys. God sends Sarah a son and tells her she should name him Isaac; through him will be the establishment of the covenant. Sarah then drives Ishmael and his mother Hagar out into the wilderness, but God saves them and promises to make Ishmael a great nation.

File:Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 035.jpg

The Angel Hinders the Offering of Isaac (Rembrandt, 1635)

God tests Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice Isaac. As Abraham is about to lay the knife upon his son, "the Angel of the Template:LORD" restrains him, rewarding his obedience by promising him again innumerable descendants. On the death of Sarah, Abraham purchases Machpelah (believed to be modern Hebron) for a family tomb and sends his servant to Mesopotamia to find among his relations a wife for Isaac; after proving herself worthy, Rebekah becomes Isaac's betrothed. Keturah, Abraham's other wife, births more children, among whose descendants are the Midianites. Abraham dies at a prosperous old age and his family lays him to rest in Hebron (Machpelah).

File:Foster Bible Pictures 0047-1 Jacob Flees Laban.jpg

Jacob flees Laban (1897) by Charles Foster

Isaac's wife Rebekah gives birth to the twins Esau, father of the Edomites, and Jacob. Esau, being born first, is owed the birthright; however, through carelessness, he sells his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. Rebekah ensures Jacob rightly gains his father's blessing as the firstborn son and inheritor. At 77 years of age, Jacob seeks a wife and meets Rachel at a well. He goes to her father and his uncle, Laban, where he works for fourteen years to acquire Leah, Laban's first-born daughter, and Rachel. Jacob leads his family out of Laban's household; by his wives and their handmaidens he has twelve sons, the ancestors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and a daughter, Dinah. Jacob's name is changed to Israel after wrestling with an angel.

Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite, rapes Dinah and asks his father to get Dinah for him as his wife, Jacob agrees to the marriage but requires that all the males of Hamor's tribe be circumcised, including Hamor and Shechem. Jacob's sons Simeon and Levi murder all the males in Hamor's tribe while they are recuperating from their circumcisions. Jacob warns that their act would mean retribution by others, namely the Canaanites and Perizzites. Jacob and his tribe take all Hivite property.

Joseph, Jacob's favorite son of the twelve, makes his brothers jealous. They covertly sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt. Joseph endures many trials including being innocently sentenced to jail but remains faithful to God. After several years, he prospers there after the pharaoh of Egypt asks him to interpret a dream he had about an upcoming famine, which Joseph does through God. He is then made second in command of Egypt by the grateful pharaoh, and later on, he is reunited with his father and brothers, who fail to recognize him and plead for food as the famine reaches Canaan. After testing their faith, Joseph reveals himself, forgives them for their actions, and lets them and their households into Egypt, where Pharaoh assigns to them the land of Goshen. Jacob calls his sons to his bedside and reveals their future before he dies. Joseph lives to old age and tells his brothers before his death that if God leads them out of the country, then they should take his bones with them.

Themes

File:Bourgeois Joseph recognized by his brothers.jpg

Joseph Recognized by His Brothers (Léon Pierre Urban Bourgeois, 1863)

Promises to the ancestors

In 1978, David Clines published The Theme of the Pentateuch. Considered influential as one of the first authors to take up the question of the overarching theme of the Pentateuch, Clines' conclusion was that the overall theme is "the partial fulfilment—which implies also the partial nonfulfillment—of the promise to or blessing of the Patriarchs". (By calling the fulfilment "partial", Clines was drawing attention to the fact that at the end of Deuteronomy the people of Israel are still outside Canaan.)Template:Sfn

The patriarchs, or ancestors, are Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with their wives (Joseph is normally excluded).Template:Sfn Since the name YHWH had not been revealed to them, they worshipped El in his various manifestations.Template:Sfn (It is, however, worth noting that in the Jahwist source, the patriarchs refer to deity by the name YHWH, for example in Genesis 15.) Through the patriarchs, God announces the election of Israel, that is, he chooses Israel to be his special people and commits himself to their future.Template:Sfn God tells the patriarchs that he will be faithful to their descendants (i.e. to Israel), and Israel is expected to have faith in God and his promise. ("Faith" in the context of Genesis and the Hebrew Bible means an agreement to the promissory relationship, not a body of a belief.)Template:Sfn

The promise itself has three parts: offspring, blessings, and land.Template:Sfn The fulfilment of the promise to each patriarch depends on having a male heir, and the story is constantly complicated by the fact that each prospective mother—Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel—is barren. The ancestors, however, retain their faith in God and God in each case gives a son—in Jacob's case, twelve sons, the foundation of the chosen Israelites. Each succeeding generation of the three promises attains a more rich fulfilment, until through Joseph "all the world" attains salvation from famine,Template:Sfn and by bringing the children of Israel down to Egypt he becomes the means through which the promise can be fulfilled.Template:Sfn

God's chosen people

Scholars generally agree that the theme of divine promise unites the patriarchal cycles, but many would dispute the efficacy of trying to examine Genesis' theology by pursuing a single overarching theme, instead citing as more productive the analysis of the Abraham cycle, the Jacob cycle, and the Joseph cycle, and the Yahwist and Priestly sources.Template:Sfn The problem lies in finding a way to unite the patriarchal theme of the divine promise to the stories of Genesis 1–11 (the primeval history) with their theme of God's forgiveness in the face of man's evil nature.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn One solution is to see the patriarchal stories as resulting from God's decision not to remain alienated from man:Template:Sfn God creates the world and humans, humans rebel, and God "elects" (chooses) Abraham.Template:Sfn

To this basic plot (which comes from the Yahwist), the Priestly source has added a series of covenants dividing history into stages, each with its own distinctive "sign". The first covenant is between God and all living creatures, and is marked by the sign of the rainbow; the second is with the descendants of Abraham (Isaac and Ishmael), and its sign is circumcision; and the last, which does not appear until the Book of Exodus, is with Israel alone, and its sign is Sabbath. A great leader mediates each covenant (Noah, Abraham, Moses), and at each stage God progressively reveals himself by his name (Elohim with Noah, El Shaddai with Abraham, Yahweh with Moses).Template:Sfn

Deception

Throughout Genesis, various figures engage in deception or trickery to survive or prosper. Biblical scholar David M. Carr notes that such stories reflect the vulnerability felt by ancient Israelites and that "such stories can be a major way of gaining hope and resisting domination". Examples include:Template:Sfn

• To avoid being killed, Abraham (in 12:10–20 and 20:1–18) and later Issac (26:6–11) tell a king that their respective wives are only their sisters.
• In chapter 25, Jacob tricks Esau into selling his birthright for a pot of lentil stew.
• In chapter 27, Rebekah has Jacob impersonate Esau to trick Issac into giving him a superior blessing.
• In chapter 29, Jacob believes he is marrying Rachel but is tricked into marrying her sister.

Cultural impact

By totaling the spans of time in the genealogies of Genesis, religious authorities have calculated what they consider to be the age of the world since creation. This Anno Mundi system of counting years is the basis of the Hebrew calendar and Byzantine calendar. Counts differ somewhat, but they generally place the age of the Earth at about six thousand years.

During the Protestant Reformation, rivalry between Catholic and Protestant Christians led to a closer study of the Bible and a competition to take its words more seriously. Thus, scholars in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century treated the book of Genesis as factual. As evidence in the fields of paleontology, geology and other sciences was uncovered, scholars tried to fit these discoveries into the Genesis creation account.Template:Sfn For example, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in the 18th century believed that fossils were the remains of creatures killed during the flood. This literal understanding of Genesis fell out of favor with scholars during the Victorian crisis of faith as evidence mounted that the Earth was far older than six thousand years.

Judaism's weekly Torah portions

It is a custom among religious Jewish communities for a weekly Torah portion, popularly referred to as a Template:Transliteration, to be read during Jewish prayer services on Saturdays, Mondays and Thursdays. The full name, Template:Langx, is popularly abbreviated to Template:Transliteration (also Template:Transliteration Template:IPAc-en or Template:Transliteration), and is also known as a Template:Transliteration (or Template:Transliteration Template:IPAc-en).

The Template:Transliteration is a section of the Torah (Five Books of Moses) used in Jewish liturgy during a particular week. There are 54 weekly parshas, or Template:Transliteration in Hebrew, and the full cycle is read over the course of one Jewish year.

The first 12 of the 54 come from the Book of Genesis, and they are:

1. Chapters 1–6 (verses 1–8) Parashat Bereshit
2. Chapters 6 (v. 9 ff)–11 Parashat Noach
3. Chapters 12–17 Parashat Lekh Lekha
4. Chapters 18–22 Parashat Vayera
5. Chapters 23–25 (v. 1–18) Parashat Chayyei Sarah
6. Chapters 25 (v. 19 ff)–28 (v. 1–9) Parashat Toledot
7. Chapters 28 (v. 10 ff)–32 (v. 1–3) Parashat Vayetzei
8. Chapters 32 (v. 4 ff)–36 Parashat Vayishlach
9. Chapters 37–40 Parashat Vayeshev
10. Chapters 41–44 (v. 1–17) Parashat Miketz
11. Chapters 44 (v. 18 ff)–47 (v. 1–27) Parashat Vayigash
12. Chapters 47 (v. 28 ff)–50 Parashat Vayechi

See also

• Apollo 8 Genesis reading while in lunar orbit
• Biblical criticism
• Criticism of the Bible
• Dating the Bible
• Template:Transliteration
• Historicity of the Bible
• Interpretations of Genesis
• Paradise Lost
• Protevangelium

Further reading

Commentaries

• Fretheim, Terence E. "The Book of Genesis." In The New Interpreter's Bible. Edited by Leander E. Keck, vol. 1, pp. 319–674. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994. Template:ISBN.
• Hirsch, Samson Raphael. The Pentateuch: Genesis. Translated by Isaac Levy. Judaica Press, 2nd edition 1999. Template:ISBN. Originally published as Der Pentateuch uebersetzt und erklaert Frankfurt, 1867–1878.
• Kass, Leon R. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. New York: Free Press, 2003. Template:ISBN.
• Plaut, Gunther. The Torah: A Modern Commentary (1981), Template:ISBN
• Sarna, Nahum M. The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. Template:ISBN.

External links

• Template:Librivox book Various versions
• The Book of Genesis full Hebrew and translated text with Jewish commentaries on hebrewbible.app