Introduction to Genesis

Title and authorship

The book does not name its author, and it does not name itself. The title it carries in English comes from the Greek word for origin, and the title it carries in Hebrew is simply its first words — In the beginning. Both are descriptions rather than claims.

What the book does supply is its own internal seams. Eleven times a formula appears — This is the history of the generations of — and each occurrence opens a new section: the heavens and the earth Genesis 2:4, Adam Genesis 5:1, Noah Genesis 6:9, the sons of Noah Genesis 10:1, Shem Genesis 11:10, Terah Genesis 11:27, Ishmael Genesis 25:12, Isaac Genesis 25:19, Esau twice Genesis 36:1 Genesis 36:9, and Jacob Genesis 37:2. The book is built on that phrase, and the phrase always looks forward — the section headed by a man's name tells the story of what came from him, not of him. This is a single architecture carried through fifty chapters, and it is the strongest internal evidence that the work is one composition rather than a compilation.

The rest of Scripture ascribes the five books to Moses, and does so in a way that is hard to read as a convention. Moses is commanded to write Exodus 17:14, writes what he is given Exodus 24:4, and finishes a book which is placed beside the ark Deuteronomy 31:9 Deuteronomy 31:24–26. Joshua refers to what is written in the book of the law of Moses Joshua 8:31. Centuries later the same ascription is still in use 2 Kings 14:6 Nehemiah 8:1, and in the Gospels it is the settled way of citing this material: have you not read in the book of Moses, in the bush Mark 12:26, and if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me John 5:46.

That testimony concerns the law as a whole, and Genesis is where the law's own narrative begins — Exodus opens with a conjunction and a list of names carried straight over from Genesis 46, which is not how an independent book starts.

A writer of Moses' generation stands at the right distance for this material. The events of the last half were four centuries behind him and had been carried in a family that kept genealogies and burial sites with care; the events of the first eleven chapters were beyond any human memory and are told as what God disclosed rather than as what anyone observed. Genesis reports the creation of the world with no witness present, and it never pretends otherwise.

Date

The composition belongs to the time of Moses; the events run from the creation to a coffin in Egypt.

Several small details fit a writer of that period and no later one. Places are given their old names with the current name attached — Bela (also called Zoar), the valley of Siddim (that is, the Salt Sea), Kiriath Arba (also called Hebron) — which is what a writer does when the older name is the one in his sources and the newer is the one his readers use. Egypt is described from the inside, with court titles, embalming practice and a seven-year famine cycle handled as ordinary knowledge. And Canaan is described from outside it, as a land promised rather than possessed, by someone whose readers have not yet entered.

Dating the events themselves is a different question and the book answers it only in part. The genealogies of chapters five and eleven are unlike any others in Scripture in that each link carries a figure — the age of the father at the son's birth — which makes the chain arithmetical rather than merely successive. Read straight, those numbers place the creation a few thousand years before Abraham, and the flood between.

How tightly the sum should be pressed is honestly disputed among readers who take the numbers seriously, because biblical genealogies elsewhere are demonstrably selective — one omits three generations of kings, and a New Testament list arranges the same line into three groups of fourteen Matthew 1:8 Matthew 1:17. Chapters five and eleven are not built that way, since a gap would break the arithmetic rather than merely shorten a list. What the numbers plainly exclude is a human race of vast antiquity, and what they do not settle to the year is the total.

Abraham can be placed with more confidence, because the world he moves through is recoverable: city-states in Canaan, a Mesopotamian homeland, kings whose names and titles belong to the earlier second millennium, and a Egypt open to Semitic settlement in its delta. The narrative gives him a datable kind of world, and the burial cave he bought is the only piece of the land he ever owned.

Backgrounds

The book falls into two very unequal halves. Eleven chapters cover the world; thirty-nine cover one family. The first eleven move at enormous speed — creation, the fall, a murder, a flood, a scattering — and cover the whole human race in about three hundred verses. Then the pace changes completely and the narrative slows to follow four generations of one household. The proportion is the argument: everything that goes wrong with the world goes wrong in eleven chapters, and the rest of Scripture is the answer God begins in the twelfth.

The world of the first half is the ancient Near East, and the narrative knows it. Ur  and Haran  are real cities on a real route; Babel  sits in the plain of Shinar where fired brick and bitumen were in fact how people built, in a land with no stone. The nations of chapter ten are laid out in a geographical arc that a reader of that world could have walked.

The patriarchs are not settled townspeople. They move with flocks between water sources, camp at oaks and wells, bury their dead in caves they have paid for, and negotiate with the city-dwellers around them from a position of wealth without citizenship. Abraham can field three hundred and eighteen men of his own household and still has to buy a grave.

Covenant is the legal form the book runs on, and its procedures are those of the period rather than of ours. An agreement is cut rather than signed — animals divided and the parties passing between the pieces Genesis 15:9–17. A sign is attached to it and worn. Oaths are sworn with a hand under the thigh. Birthright, blessing and inheritance are transactions with real force, which is why a blessing given to the wrong son cannot simply be recalled.

God is named in two ways and the difference is consistent. God is the term used where the subject is the maker of everything and his relation to all that lives; Yahweh is the personal name, used where the subject is his dealing with particular people whom he has bound himself to. The opening chapter uses the first throughout; from Genesis 2:4 the two appear together. Both are used of one God, and the book never treats them as two.

Ages, numbers and lifespans are recorded with unusual care. People live for centuries before the flood and the figures decline steadily afterward; a man's age at his son's birth is given where no other book gives it; days are counted through the flood in a pattern that mirrors itself. Numbers in this book are load-bearing and are meant to be read.

Theology and purpose

God creates by speaking, and what he makes is good. Nothing is fought, nothing is defeated, and nothing pre-exists him that he has to work around. The recurring assessment — God saw that it was good, and at the end very good — is a verdict on the material world, and it settles at the outset that evil is a later arrival rather than a permanent feature. Everything the rest of Scripture says about redemption depends on that order.

Humanity is made in God's image, male and female, and given work and rest. The image is stated twice in one verse for emphasis Genesis 1:27, is given to both sexes without distinction, and carries a commission — to fill the earth and have dominion. Rest is built into the same week: God blesses the seventh day and makes it holy Genesis 2:3, before there is a nation, a law or a sanctuary, which is why the seventh day belongs to the human race rather than to one people.

The fall is a real event with real consequences, and God's first word after it is a promise. Enmity is set between the serpent and the woman, and between his offspring and hers, and one of hers will crush his head Genesis 3:15. Everything after that verse is the working out of a conflict that has already been declared, with an outcome that has already been stated. The rest of Scripture reads this book as the opening of a controversy over God's character and government, and Genesis supplies its first scene: a creature who contradicts God's word, casts doubt on his motive, and is answered not by force but by a promise kept over millennia.

Sin spreads and God narrows. Adam to Cain to Lamech to the generation of the flood to Babel — the movement is outward and downward, and at each stage God's response pairs judgment with preservation: coats of skin, a mark on Cain, an ark, a scattering that stops a worse unity. Then the narrowing: one man, one family, one nation, so that through them the widening can begin again.

The call of Abraham is the hinge of the book and of the Bible. Leave your country, and I will make you a great nation — closing with the clause the whole of Scripture unfolds: All the families of the earth will be blessed through you Genesis 12:3. The election is of one family and the purpose is the world's. Nothing in Genesis lets the choosing be read as favoritism, because the reason for it is stated in the same breath.

Righteousness comes by believing God. Abram is given a promise he has no means of securing, and he believed in Yahweh, who credited it to him for righteousness Genesis 15:6. That verse is quoted at the center of the New Testament's argument about how anyone is accepted, and it stands here before circumcision, before the law, and before Isaac was born.

God's purpose runs through human evil without excusing it. The book's last theological statement is made by a man his brothers had sold: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good Genesis 50:20. Both clauses are meant. The brothers' act was evil and is never called anything else, and God's intention ran through it to save many alive.

Additional notes

Note — the days of creation. The days of chapter one are read as literal days. The text itself supplies the reason: each is closed by the formula there was evening and there was morning, which describes an ordinary day and would be a strange way to mark an age; each is numbered in sequence; and the fourth day sets the sun and moon expressly for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years, which fixes the unit being counted. The same week is then used as the pattern for the human week in a commandment that would lose its force if the two were not the same kind of period Exodus 20:11.

Note — chapter one and chapter two. These are not two competing accounts of creation. Genesis 2:4 opens with the book's own section formula, and what follows is not a second week but a closer view of the sixth day, told from the ground up rather than from the sky down: the garden, the man, the work he was given, the animals brought to be named, and the woman. The order of chapter two is topical and its subject is the man's situation, which is why the vegetation, the animals and the woman appear in the order they matter to him.

Note — the flood. The account describes a flood covering the mountains, destroying all breathing life on the land, and lasting a year, and it is read that way. The scale is not incidental detail; the text argues from it — an ark of that size is unnecessary for a regional event, a regional event does not require the preservation of birds, and the promise that never again would all flesh be cut off would be broken by every serious flood since Genesis 9:11. The narrative is also dated to the day at both ends and structured around a mirror of day-counts, which is the work of a writer who expected the numbers to be checked.

Note — the sons of God in Genesis 6:1–4. The passage is four verses long, introduces a term it does not define, and moves on. Honest readers have long differed about who is meant, and the text supplies markers rather than an identification: the phrase is used elsewhere of heavenly beings, and the immediate context is the corruption of all flesh and the shortening of human life. What the passage plainly states is that the boundary between two orders was crossed and that the flood follows. Beyond that it declines to say, and the restraint is deliberate.

Note — where the English translations divide. Several places in this book are printed differently: the length of the days as rendered in some versions, the reading the sons of God against alternatives, whether Genesis 4:8 preserves Cain's words to Abel, and the difficult clause about the ruler's staff and the one to whom it belongs Genesis 49:10. Each is treated where it stands.

Note — the long lifespans. The ages before the flood run to nine centuries and then decline in a steady curve through the generations after it, reaching an ordinary span by the time of Moses. The book records the decline without explaining it, and it is worth noticing that it is a decline rather than a sudden change, which is not the shape a legend takes.

Outline

How the book is built

The flood, mirrored around a single sentence chiasm 6:9-9:17

• A 6:9-22 Noah is blameless; God announces the covenant he will establish, and the ark is made.
• B 7:1-10 Come into the ark: the creatures go in, and seven days pass before the rain.
• C 7:11-16 On a dated day the fountains of the deep burst open and the sky's windows open; Yahweh shuts him in.
• D 7:17-24 Forty days rising, then the waters prevail over the mountains a hundred and fifty days; all flesh dies.
• X 8:1 God remembered Noah, and made a wind to pass over the earth.
• D′ 8:2-5 The deep is stopped; after a hundred and fifty days the waters recede and the ship rests on a dated day.
• C′ 8:6-14 At the end of forty days Noah opens the window; the raven and the dove, and the ground dries.
• B′ 8:15-19 Go out of the ark: Noah and every creature come out by families.
• A′ 8:20-9:17 The altar and the promise; the blessing renewed; the covenant established, with the bow as its sign.

The mirror is built from the text's own numbers and its own verbs, not imposed on them. Seven days are announced before the rain Genesis 7:4; forty days of rain Genesis 7:12; the waters prevail one hundred fifty days Genesis 7:24. Then one sentence — God remembered Noah Genesis 8:1 — and the counts run back out in reverse: one hundred fifty days receding Genesis 8:3, forty days to the window Genesis 8:6, then seven days and seven days for the dove Genesis 8:10 Genesis 8:12. The verbs mirror with them: come into the ark and go out of it, the deep opened and the window opened, the covenant announced and the covenant established. The dates match at both ends, the seventeenth day of a month each time Genesis 7:11 Genesis 8:4. What the shape says is that the turn of the whole catastrophe is not a change in the weather but God's remembering, and that everything before it is undone in the same order it was done.

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