The Book of Genesis (from Greek ; ; ) is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. The Hebrew name ('in the beginning') is taken directly from the first word. The primary narrative of Genesis includes a legendary account of the creation of the world, the early history of the human race, and the origins of the Jewish people. 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, the first five books of the Bible (or Pentateuch). 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 BCE. Like other ancient Israelite texts, the Book of Genesis originally circulated anonymously. 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). 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, and God creates a garden for Adam and Eve, but when humanity corrupts the world with sin, he decides to destroy his creation, sparing only the righteous Noah and his family to re-establish the relationship between man and God.
The ancestral history (chapters 12–50) tells of the prehistory of Israel, God's chosen people. 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 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).
Title
The name Genesis is from the Latin Vulgate, in turn borrowed or transliterated from Greek , meaning 'origin', which is the name of the book in the Septuagint; in Hebrew, consistent with the naming convention for the Pentateuch, the book is titled by its first word, בְּרֵאשִׁית, meaning 'In [the] beginning'.
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 Baruch 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. The involvement of multiple authors is suggested by internal contradictions within the text. For example, Genesis includes two creation narratives.
At the end of the 19th century, most scholars adopted the documentary hypothesis. This theory holds that the five books of the Pentateuch come from four sources: the Yahwist (abbreviated as J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D) and the Priestly source (P). Each source is held to tell the same basic story, with the sources later combined by various editors. Scholars distinguish sources based on the designations for God. For example, the Yahwist source uses "Yahweh", while the Elohistic and Priestly sources use "Elohim". 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 two versions of Abraham sending Hagar and Ishmael into the desert.
According to the documentary hypothesis, J was produced during the 9th century BCE in the southern Kingdom of Judah and is the earliest source. E was written in the northern Kingdom of Israel during the 8th century BCE. D was written in Judah in the 7th century BCE and associated with the religious reforms of King Josiah . The latest source is P, written in the 5th century in Babylon. Based on these dates, Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch did not reach their 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 travelled from Babylon to Jerusalem in 458 BCE 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 . There is a large gap between the earliest sources of the Pentateuch and the period they claim to describe, which ended .
Most scholars held to the documentary hypothesis until the 1980s. Since then, several variations and revisions have been proposed. The supplementary hypothesis posits three main sources for the Pentateuch: J, D, and P. E 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. 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.
In the 21st century, most scholars came to a consensus that the Book of Genesis was composed after the Babylonian captivity, possibly in the fifth century BCE. Ronald Hendel and Aaron Hornkohl propose a date before the Persian period (before 550 BCE) on linguistic grounds. Russell Gmirkin has argued that Genesis was composed in the late 270s BCE, drawing on Greek sources like Berossus's Babyloniaca and reflecting the political context of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic realms.
As for why the book was created, a controversial theory that has attracted considerable interest is that of Persian imperial authorisation. This proposes that the Persians of the Achaemenid Empire, after their conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, granted Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire but required local authorities to produce a single law code for 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 traced their origins to Abraham, who had "given" them the land—were in conflict over many issues, and each had its own "history of origins". But the Persian promise of greatly increased local autonomy for all provided a powerful incentive to cooperate in producing a single text.
Genre Genesis is an example of a work in the "antiquities" genre, as the ancient 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. Notable examples are found in the works of ancient Greek historians (6th century BCE): 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. 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. 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.
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." 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".
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.
Structure Genesis appears to be structured around the recurring phrase , 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. The formula, occurring eleven times in the book of Genesis, serves as a heading which marks a transition to a new subject. The divide the book into the following sections:
Genesis 1:1–2:3 In the beginning (prologue) Genesis 2:4–4:26 of Heaven and Earth (narrative) Genesis 5:1–6:8 of Adam (genealogy, ) Genesis 6:9–9:29 of Noah (Genesis flood narrative) Genesis 10:1–11:9 of Noah's sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth (genealogy) Genesis 11:10–26 of Shem (genealogy) Genesis 11:27–25:11 of Terah (Abraham narrative) Genesis 25:12–18 of Ishmael (genealogy) Genesis 25:19–35:29 of Isaac (Jacob narrative) Genesis 36:1–36:8 of Esau (genealogy) Genesis 36:9–37:1 of Esau "the father of the Edomites" (genealogy) Genesis 37:2–50:26 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). 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. 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. The ancestral history is structured around the three patriarchs Abraham, Jacob and Joseph. 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.
Summary Primeval history (chapters 1–11)
The Genesis creation narrative comprises two different stories; the first two chapters roughly correspond to these. In the first, Elohim, the generic Hebrew word for 'gods') (rendered as "God" in English translations), creates the heavens and the earth including man, in six stages or phases (translated as "days"), and rests on the seventh. In the second, Yahweh elohim (rendered as "the God" in English translations), creates two individuals, Adam and Eve, as the first man and woman, and places them in the Garden of Eden.