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Book of Genesis

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Template:Books of the Old Testament Template:Books of Torah

Genesis (Template:Lang-he, Greek: Γένεσις, meaning "birth", "creation", "cause", "beginning", "source" or "origin") is the first book of the Torah, the Tanakh, and the Old Testament. As Jewish tradition considers it to have been written by Moses, it is sometimes also called The First Book of Moses. In Hebrew, it is called בראשית (B'reshit or Bərêšîth),[1] after the first word of the text in Hebrew (meaning "in the beginning"). This is in line with the pattern of naming the other four books of the Pentateuch.

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Structure

Many exegetes have observed that Genesis is structured around ten occurrences of the toledot (Hebrew) or generations formula.

  1. The generations of the heavens and the earth (2:4).
  2. The generations of Adam (5:1).
  3. The generations of Noah (6:9).
  4. The generations of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah (10:1).
  5. The generations of Shem (11:10).
  6. The generations of Terah (11:27).
  7. The generations of Ishmael (25:12).
  8. The generations of Isaac (25:19).
  9. The generations of Esau (36:1, 9).
  10. The generations of Jacob (37:2).


Islamic views

Main article: Similarities between the Bible and the Qur'an

Many of the stories from Genesis are retold in the Qur'an, with frequent variations. The Qur'an emphasises the moral stature of the Prophets; stories such as the drunkenness of Lot therefore find no place in it. While Islam accepts the Torah in principle, the view of Islamic scholarship is that the revelation given to earlier times had become corrupted, and that the only valid text is that revealed by Allah to His Prophet Mohammed. The Qur'an, the final revelation, contains the essence of all previous revelations, including the Torah.

Main themes

  • God created the world. God has called all objects and living beings into existence by his word.
  • The universe when created was, in the judgment of God, good. Genesis expresses an optimistic satisfaction and pleasure in the world.
  • God as a personal being, referred to in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms. God may appear and speak to mankind.
  • Genesis gives no philosophically rigorous definition of God; its description is a practical and historical one. God is treated exclusively with reference to his dealings with the world and with humankind.
  • Humankind is the crown of Creation, and has been made in God's image.
  • All people are descended from Adam and Eve; this expresses the unity of the whole human race.
  • The Earth possesses for humanity a certain moral grandeur; humans must include God's creatures in the respect that it demands in general, by not exploiting them for selfish uses.
  • God is presented as being the sole creator of nature, and as existing outside of it and beyond it.
  • Some historians believe Genesis to be a more recent example of monotheistic belief than Zoroastrianism, interpreting the commandment "have no other gods before me" as an artifact of early henotheism among the Jews -- i.e., as evidence that the Hebrews were not to worship the gods of other peoples, but only their own tribal god. On the other hand, Genesis, in its present form, purports to give a record of beliefs prior to any surviving religious texts, describing the worship of other gods and local deities as a gradual development among the nations, who departed from original monotheism.
  • God created an eternal, unbreakable covenant with all humankind at the time of Noah; this is known as the Noachide covenant. This universal concern with all mankind is paralleled by a second covenant made to the descendants of Abraham in particular, through his son Isaac, in which their descendants will be chosen to have a special destiny.
  • The Jewish people are chosen to be in a special covenant with God; God says to Abraham "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless them that bless you, and curse him that curses you; and in you shall all families of the earth be blessed". God often repeats the promise that Abraham's descendants shall be as numerous as the stars in heaven and as the sand on the seashore.

The article on Biblical cosmology discusses the Bible's view of the cosmos, much of which derives from descriptions in Genesis.

Biblical literalism

Literal versus allegorical interpretations

Genesis begins with a creation narrative, or narratives. Because a literal reading of Genesis can be seen to conflict with widely accepted scientific theories such as the Big Bang and common descent, many believers view the creation narratives presented in Genesis as an allegory; however the non-literal view of creation did not begin with Charles Darwin, but rather predated him by hundreds of years.[2]

Those who believe that the first eleven chapters are literal argue that the style of writing shares a literary style with other biblical writing often considered to be historical in nature and the text nowhere indicates that it is meant as anything other than a literal account.[3] Such analysis, along with a strong tradition of Biblical inerrancy, has led a significant number of religious individuals and organizations to rejecting theoretical accounts of the origin of life and the universe in favor of Young-Earth creationism or YEC. Those holding to the view of YEC, use the Genesis account of creation to provide alternative explanations to those of modern science on subjects including the origin of the universe, life and humankind.

There are also growing number of Christians and Jews who argue that the beginning ‎of ‎Genesis is not an account of the physical creation of the world; but, in keeping with ‎how they think ‎ancient Hebrews would have viewed this text, believe it is an account of God's ‎‎dissemination of order on a physical plane that was there before the narrative begins. ‎‎Some even decry any attempt as inaccurate that interprets the text as anything other than a bestowment of ‎‎order on the physical universe. Saint Augustine took this view in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, but strongly rejected the suggestion that it represented an allegory; he took, instead, the position that in the Bible, "light" is continually used to mean order, enlightenment, or a higher plane of existence, and that similarly, "day" means an indeterminate interval of time defined by some central paradigm, as in the expression "dawn of a new day". From this point of view, he could reject as irrelevant the question of what was meant by the first three "days of Creation", when the sun and moon were not created until the fourth day, in favor of a "literal" interpretation that the universe was created all at once and then progressed from chaos through a "day when light was created", with light meaning understanding, order, etc. rather than electromagnetic radiation, followed by "a day when heaven was created", etc.[1] Examining Gen 1:6-8 we see that day two is the only day not called good -- not because of some scribal error, but because it conveys the deeper meaning that division, is a necessary evil. Water is symbolic of a level of consciousness, thus dividing water represents the choice we have in chosing to be aware. As stated by Origen:

"What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon and stars, and the first day without a heaven. What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in paradise in Eden, like a husbandman, and planted therein the tree of life, perceptible to the eyes and senses, which gave life to the eater thereof; and another tree which gave to the eater thereof a knowledge of good and evil? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which the hidden sense lies concealed." (Origen - Huet., Prigeniana, 167 Franck, p. 142).

Use of the literal reading to date creation

Based on the genealogies in Genesis and later parts of the Bible, both religious Jews and Christians have independently worked backwards to estimate the time of the Creation of the world. This approach suggests Creation was around the beginning of the 4th millennium BC. This dating is based on an entirely literal reading of the creation account: that the six days in which God created the heavens and the earth were 24-hour days, that Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden existed, and that a complete trace of events from Creation to a historically verifiable date is listed in the Biblical account. The most famous, and most often quoted is the Anglican Bishop James Ussher's calculation stating that the earth was created on the evening preceding October 23rd at dusk in the year 4004 BC at 9:00 AM.

Many scholars have questioned the accuracy of the historical account, and the use of such a retracing of the events presented in Genesis to date human history on earth has been rejected by the great majority of historians and archaeologists. Furthermore, independent scientific evidence from fields as diverse as cosmology, geology and biology is entirely incompatible with the timeline described in Genesis (e.g. the age of the Earth is estimated as more than 4 billion years, according to the theory of evolution). This subject is further discussed in The Bible and history and Young Earth creationism.

See also

References

  1. ^ 7225
  2. ^ Davis A. Young (March 1988). "The Contemporary Relevance of Augustine's View of Creation". Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. 40.1: 42–45.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: year (link)
  3. ^ Gerhard F. Hasel (1994). "The "days" of Creation in Genesis 1 : Literal "days" or figurative "periods/epochs" of time?". Origins. 21(1): 5–38.

Further reading

  • Umberto Cassuto, From Adam to Noah. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978. ISBN 965-223-480-X (A scholarly Jewish commentary.)
  • Umberto Cassuto, From Noah to Abraham. Eisenbrauns, 1984. ISBN 965-223-540-7 (A scholarly Jewish commentary.)
  • Isaac M. Kikawada & Arthur Quinn, Before Abraham was – The Unity of Genesis 1-11. Nashville, Tenn., 1985. (A challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis.)
  • Nehama Leibowitz, New Studies in Bereshit, Genesis. Jerusalem: Hemed Press, 1995. (A scholarly Jewish commentary employing traditional sources.)
  • Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Record: A Scientific and Devotional Commentary on the Book of Beginnings. Baker Books, 1981. ISBN 0-8010-6004-4 (A creationist Christian commentary.)
  • Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), In the Beginning. Edinburgh, 1995. (A Catholic understanding of the story of Creation and Fall.)
  • Jean-Marc Rouvière, Brèves méditations sur la création du monde. L'Harmattan Paris, 2006.
  • Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis. New York: Schocken Press, 1966. (A scholarly Jewish treatment, strong on historical perspective.)
  • Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. (A maintream Jewish commentary.)
  • E. A. Speiser, Genesis, The Anchor Bible. Volume 1. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1964. (A translation with scholarly commentary and philological notes by a noted Semitic scholar. The series is written for laypeople and specialists alike.)
  • Bruce Vawter, On Genesis: A New Reading. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1977. (An introduction to Genesis by a fine Catholic scholar. Genesis was Vawter's hobby.)
  • Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis. New York: Doubleday, 1995. (A scholarly Jewish commentary employing traditional sources.)
  • Gerald Schroeder, Genesis and the Big Bang, Bantam Books 1990, ISBN 0-553-35413-2.

Online versions and translations of Genesis:

See also

Other sites

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