Theopedia

Genesis

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

— Genesis 1:1 (ESV)

Overview

Genesis (Hebrew: Bereshit, “in the beginning”) is the first book of the Old Testament and the opening book of the Pentateuch, the five books traditionally ascribed to Moses.1 Its Greek title, from which the English name derives, means “generation” or “origin,” reflecting the genealogical framework the book uses to structure its own history.1 Genesis is narrative history: it recounts the creation of the world, humanity’s fall into sin, and the origins of the covenant people of Israel through the family of Abraham.2 As the “introductory book to the Pentateuch,” it supplies the covenantal and historical background without which Exodus through Deuteronomy cannot be rightly understood.2

Timeline

  • Creation: In six days God creates the heavens, the earth, and all living things. Last he makes man and woman in his own image. On the seventh day he rests (Gen. 1-2).
  • The fall: The serpent tempts Adam and Eve, and they eat the forbidden fruit. Sin and death enter the world. God promises a future child who will crush the serpent (Gen. 3).
  • Cain murders Abel: Cain is jealous that God accepts Abel’s offering but not his own. He murders Abel and is driven out to wander the earth (Gen. 4).
  • The flood: As human evil fills the earth, God sends a flood but saves Noah, his family, and the animals in the ark. He then promises never to flood the earth again (Gen. 6-9).
  • The tower of Babel: Speaking one language, humanity builds a tower to make a name for itself. God confuses their speech and scatters the nations across the earth (Gen. 11).
  • God calls Abraham: God calls Abraham out of Ur and promises him land, many descendants, and blessing for all nations. Abraham believes God, who counts this as righteousness (Gen. 12; 15).
  • Isaac’s birth and near sacrifice: Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. God later tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac, then provides a ram instead (Gen. 21-22).
  • Jacob supplants Esau: Jacob buys Esau’s birthright, then tricks their father Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing. He flees his brother’s anger to Laban in Haran (Gen. 25; 27).
  • Jacob wrestles with God and is renamed Israel: Returning to Canaan, Jacob wrestles all night with a divine visitor, who renames him Israel. He is then reconciled with Esau (Gen. 32-33).
  • Joseph sold into slavery: Jealous of Joseph’s dreams and their father’s favor, his brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt. There he rises to serve in Potiphar’s house (Gen. 37).
  • Joseph rises to rule Egypt: After Joseph explains Pharaoh’s dreams, Pharaoh puts him in charge of Egypt’s famine relief. Joseph later reveals himself to the brothers who sold him (Gen. 41-45).
  • Israel settles in Egypt: Jacob’s family moves to Egypt because Joseph provides for them. Jacob blesses his sons before he dies. Joseph’s own bones wait for Israel’s future exodus (Gen. 46-50).

Author and Date

The book itself contains no explicit claim to authorship, but Jewish and Christian tradition has consistently held that Moses wrote Genesis together with the rest of the Pentateuch. The New Testament regularly refers to the Pentateuch as “the law of Moses” or “the book of Moses,” including passages drawn from Genesis (Mark 12:26; Luke 24:27, 44). Nineteenth-century apologetic treatments defended Mosaic authorship on several grounds: Moses had the qualifications, occasion, and access to sources needed to compose it; Genesis is bound organically to the following books, since Exodus assumes the reader already knows the Abrahamic covenant it repeatedly invokes (Exod. 2:24-25); and the institutions Moses established, such as the Sabbath, are grounded in events Genesis alone records.3

Genesis contains a small number of passages, such as the notice of Edom’s kings in Genesis 36:31, that some conservative interpreters have attributed to a later editorial hand, typically Ezra or another prophetic figure updating place names or genealogical notes; others deny any such later material at all. Either way, older harmonizations held that these do not affect the substance or Mosaic origin of the book.4 The same tradition also allowed that Moses may have drawn on earlier written or oral family records, particularly in the genealogical sections, without this compromising the book’s final composition under his hand and by divine authority.5

Since the nineteenth century, critical scholarship has largely rejected Mosaic authorship in favor of the documentary hypothesis, associated above all with Julius Wellhausen, which attributes the Pentateuch to several later sources, commonly labeled J, E, D, and P, combined by editors centuries after Moses.6 Later critical work, including that of John Van Seters, has revised the dating and character of these proposed sources still further, in some cases treating Genesis as a literary composition from as late as the sixth century BC.7 Genesis is dated, on the traditional view, to the wilderness period of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, roughly the fifteenth or thirteenth century BC depending on the dating of the exodus itself; on the documentary hypothesis, its final form is dated many centuries later.

Historical and Literary Context

Genesis was written for Israel, the covenant people whom Moses was leading out of Egypt toward the land promised to their fathers. Its audience needed to know who they were and to whom they belonged before they could understand the law given at Sinai: their identity as “my people” and their claim to the land rest, in the text’s own logic, on the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Exod. 2:24; 3:6-10).8 Genesis 1-11 (the primeval history) addresses the whole human race and its plunge into sin, ending in the scattering of the nations at Babel; Genesis 12-50 (the patriarchal history) narrows to a single family, called out from a world in which the worship of God had again been corrupted by idolatry, through whom God purposed to bless “the whole world.”9 The narrower story of the patriarchs is thus set within, and answers to, the larger story of humanity’s decline recounted in the book’s opening chapters.

Structure

Genesis divides into two unequal parts. The first eleven chapters, the primeval history, cover creation, the institution of the Sabbath and of marriage, the fall of Adam and Eve, Cain’s murder of Abel, the spread of human wickedness, the flood and Noah’s covenant, and the dispersion of the nations at Babel, framed by two genealogies (Genesis 5 and 11).10 Chapters 12-50, the patriarchal history, narrow to Abraham’s family: the call of Abraham and God’s covenant with him, its renewal to Isaac and Jacob, and the narratives of Jacob’s sons, closing with Joseph’s rise in Egypt and the family’s move there (Genesis 50).11

The text itself marks a further division with the recurring formula “these are the generations of” (Hebrew toledot), which opens ten sections running from the heavens and the earth (Gen. 2:4) through the generations of Adam, Noah, Noah’s sons, Shem, Terah, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau, and Jacob (Gen. 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10, 27; 25:12, 19; 36:1; 37:2).

Major Themes

Creation. Genesis 1-2 presents God as the sole Creator of the heavens and the earth, who forms humanity, alone among his creatures, in his own image and likeness (Gen. 1:26-27), a truth the rest of Scripture confirms and celebrates (Gen. 5:1; 9:6; Ps. 8; Eccl. 7:29).12 Herman Bavinck observes that Scripture alone, as against the mythologies of the surrounding nations, “sheds a full and true light on this doctrine of man’s divine likeness.”12 The image consists not merely in a particular faculty but in the whole of what humanity was created to be, and it grounds the special dignity Genesis ascribes to human life throughout the book (Gen. 9:6).

The fall and the spread of sin. Genesis 3 recounts Adam and Eve’s disobedience in Eden and its consequences: expulsion from the garden, conflict, and death. Bavinck notes that the universality of human sinfulness “derives from the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve,” a connection Genesis 3 implies and the rest of Scripture, especially Paul in Romans 5, makes explicit.13 The chapters that follow trace this corruption outward, from Cain’s murder of Abel to the violence that provokes the flood (Gen. 6:5) and the pride of Babel, establishing the moral condition the rest of the Bible’s redemptive history addresses.

The promise of a deliverer. In pronouncing judgment on the serpent, God promises that the seed of the woman will one day crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15), a promise commonly identified as the protoevangelium, the first announcement of the gospel in Scripture.14 The promise anticipates the long conflict between good and evil that the rest of the biblical narrative unfolds, and it is the first thread in the line of promise Genesis traces through Seth, Noah, and Abraham’s line toward its fulfillment in Christ.

Covenant and election. From Genesis 12 onward the book is organized around God’s covenant with Abraham, renewed to Isaac and Jacob, by which God set apart one family to bless “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:3; 17:7; 22:18).15 Bavinck distinguishes this covenant from election as such: the covenant “shows how election, once it has been accomplished, is also historically realized and implemented” in space and time, through ordinary generations and ordinary means.16 The covenant God makes with Noah after the flood, never again to destroy the earth by flood (Gen. 9:8-17), likewise establishes the stable created order within which this later covenant of promise unfolds.

Related Doctrines

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Further Reading

  • Bruce Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001).
  • John H. Walton, Genesis, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001).
  • R. W. L. Moberly, The Theology of the Book of Genesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 224: “The Hebrews name this book Bereshith, in the beginning, from the first word. Its Greek name Genesis signifies generation, genealogy.” ↩ ↩2

  2. Barrows, 225-26: “Genesis is the introductory book to the Pentateuch, without which our understanding of the following books would be incomplete… the connection of this book with the following is not simply explanatory; it is organic also, entering into the very substance of the Pentateuch.” ↩ ↩2

  3. Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 130-31. ↩

  4. Barrows, 227-28. ↩

  5. Barrows, 132: “Whatever may have been the origin of these documents, they received through Moses the seal of God’s authority, and thus became a part of his inspired word.” ↩

  6. John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), chap. 10, “Conclusions”: the classical documentary hypothesis dated “the earliest document,” J, “from Judah about 900 BC, followed by the E document from Israel about 800 BC,” with D and P added still later. ↩

  7. Oswalt, chap. 10, “Conclusions.” ↩

  8. Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 225. ↩

  9. Barrows, 226. ↩

  10. Barrows, 226-27. ↩

  11. Barrows, 227. ↩

  12. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 11, “The Image of God”: “The first creation narrative tells us that God created humanity in his image and likeness… Only Scripture, however, sheds a full and true light on this doctrine of man’s divine likeness.” ↩ ↩2

  13. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 12, “The Fallen World”: “the universality of sin derives from the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve. Although it is clearly implied in Genesis 3… it is especially the apostle Paul who spells this out in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15.” ↩

  14. Oren Rhea Martin, “The Beginning and the End: Situating the Land Promise in Redemptive History,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 89: “This promise has often been referred to as the protoevangelium, or the first gospel proclamation. It is a gracious, eschatological promise that God will act for the benefit of mankind by finally defeating the deceitful serpent.” ↩

  15. Barrows, 226. ↩

  16. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace”: “the covenant is distinct from election in that it shows how election, once it has been accomplished, is also historically realized and implemented.” ↩