Genesis: From the Beginning

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Tradition says Moses. The book never says so. Most scholars think it weaves together several older sources, shaped by later editors.

When: Its stories are very old. The book reached its final form during or after the exile in Babylon, in the 500s or 400s BC.

Where it fits: Before Israel was a people. It runs from the creation of the world to Jacob’s family living in Egypt, and it sets up everything that follows.

Where I quote it: On marriage (Mark 10:6–8, quoting Genesis 1:27 and 2:24). I also point to Abel, Noah, Sodom and Lot’s wife (Luke 11:51; Matthew 24:37–39; Matthew 10:15; Luke 17:32).

If you only read three chapters: Genesis 1, Genesis 2 and Genesis 45.

Words to Know

Torah — the Law, the first five books of the Bible. The word means teaching or instruction, not just rules.

Covenant — a binding agreement with promises on both sides. Genesis has several: with Noah, with Abraham, with Jacob.

Image of God — in the world around Israel, a title kings gave themselves. Genesis gives it to everyone.

Patriarchs — the founding fathers of the story: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Book in Brief

Genesis has two halves.

The first eleven chapters are about the whole world. God makes the heavens and the earth in six days and rests on the seventh. Then, in a second telling, God shapes a man from the dust, plants a garden in Eden, and makes a woman from the man’s side. They eat from the one tree God told them to leave alone, and they are sent out of the garden. Their son Cain kills his brother Abel. People multiply and fill the earth with violence, and God sends a flood. Noah, his family and the animals survive it in a great boat, and God promises never to flood the earth again, with the rainbow as the sign. Later, people build a city with a tower meant to reach the sky, and God scatters them into many languages.

The second half, chapters 12 to 50, follows one family through four generations.

God calls Abraham to leave his family in Mesopotamia and go to the land of Canaan, and promises him land, children, and a blessing for every family on earth. Abraham and his wife Sarah wait years for a son. Isaac is born when they are old. Then God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac, and stops him at the last moment.

Isaac has twin sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob buys Esau’s rights as the firstborn for a bowl of stew, then tricks their blind father into giving him the blessing meant for Esau, and runs for his life to his uncle Laban. There he marries two sisters, Leah and Rachel. With them and their two maids he has twelve sons, though the youngest, Benjamin, is born later, on the way home. On the way home he wrestles all night with a stranger and is given a new name, Israel. His twelve sons become the twelve tribes of Israel.

Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, is sold by his jealous brothers to traders and taken to Egypt as a slave. He ends up in prison, explains Pharaoh’s dreams, and rises to run the country. When famine comes, his brothers go to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph tests them, then tells them who he is. Jacob’s whole family moves to Egypt. The book ends with Joseph’s death there, and with his request that his bones be carried home one day.

Some Pharisees came to test me with a question about divorce. Is a man allowed to send his wife away?

In my country a man could divorce his wife by handing her a certificate. She could not usually do the same to him. A woman sent away often had nothing.¹

They expected me to argue about Deuteronomy, where Moses allows the certificate. I went past Moses, back to Genesis.

But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this cause a man will leave his father and mother, and will join to his wife, and the two will become one flesh (Mark 10:6–8; Genesis 1:27; 2:24).

When they pushed back with Moses, I said, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been so (Matthew 19:8; compare Mark 10:5).

That is how I read Genesis. It shows you the way things were meant to be, before people bent them. The rest of the Law often shows you how to live with the bending.

Two beginnings

Open your Bible to the first page and read slowly, because there are two creation stories, one after the other.

In the first, Genesis 1, God speaks the world into being over six days and rests on the seventh. Plants come on the third day, animals on the fifth and sixth, and people last of all, male and female together. God is called Elohim, the ordinary Hebrew word for God.

In the second, starting halfway through Genesis 2:4, the order changes. The LORD God forms a man from the dust first, then plants a garden, then makes the animals, and finally builds a woman from the man’s side. God has a different name here, the LORD God, written with the four letters of God’s own name.

Two stories, two orders, two names. The people who put this scroll together did not see a problem. They set both side by side, because they were not writing a science lesson. They were telling you who made the world, and what you are.²

Everyone is the image

Here is the line I want you to notice.

God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27).

In the world my ancestors lived in, the image of a god was a title for a king. The name of the Egyptian king you know as Tutankhamun means the living image of Amun. Assyrian courtiers wrote to their king that he was the image of the god.³

Genesis takes that title away from the king and gives it to every human being. The man ploughing the field is the image of God. So is his wife. So is his slave.

That is the first page of the scriptures I grew up on. Hold on to it. A great deal of what I did makes sense only if you believe it.

And on the seventh day God rested (Genesis 2:2–3). The rest comes before any law about it. That is why I told the Pharisees, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).

Brothers

The first death in the scriptures is a murder, and it is a brother.

Cain kills Abel in a field. God asks where his brother is, and Cain answers with the oldest excuse there is: Am I my brother’s keeper? Then God says, The voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground (Genesis 4:9–10).

I named Abel when I spoke against the Pharisees and the experts in the law. All the innocent blood since Abel’s, I said, would be charged to that generation (Luke 11:50–51).

A few verses after Abel, Cain’s descendant Lamech boasts that if Cain is avenged seven times, he will be avenged seventy-seven times (Genesis 4:24). Remember that number. When Peter asked me how often he had to forgive, I told him seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22). The English differs, but in the Greek translation my followers used, Lamech’s phrase is exactly the same as mine, and it can be read either way.⁴ Lamech kept count of vengeance. I told Peter to keep the same count for forgiveness.

The flood

The flood story is older than Israel. Other peoples told it first. In a Babylonian version, the gods decide to wipe out mankind because people make too much noise and the gods cannot sleep. In another, a man survives in a boat, it comes to rest on a mountain, and he sends out birds to find dry land.⁵

Genesis tells the same kind of story with a different reason. The earth was filled with violence (Genesis 6:11). God is not annoyed by noise. God is grieved by what people do to each other.

When I spoke about the end, I used Noah, and the warning was not about wickedness at all. It was about ordinary life. They were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ship, and they didn’t know until the flood came (Matthew 24:38–39). The danger was not that they were monsters. It was that they were busy.

Go deeperThe flood stories that are older than Genesis

For most of history, nobody could read the clay tablets that show how old and how widespread the flood story is. That changed in 1872, when a young engraver turned scholar at the British Museum named George Smith was sorting clay tablets dug up at Nineveh, the old Assyrian capital. He found a broken tablet about a ship resting on a mountain and a bird sent out to look for dry land. It was the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the news caused a sensation in London.⁶

Since then, older versions have turned up. The oldest is probably the Sumerian one, in the first written language of Mesopotamia, and its hero is a king called Ziusudra. The Babylonian epic of Atrahasis, from about 1700 BC, tells the whole story from creation to flood, with the gods sending the waters because human noise keeps them awake. In Gilgamesh, the survivor is called Utnapishtim. He builds a boat, takes his family and the animals aboard, comes to rest on a mountain, sends out a dove, a swallow and a raven, and then offers a sacrifice. The gods smell it and gather around it “like flies.”⁵

Genesis keeps the shape of the old story and changes its heart. There is one God, not a crowd of quarreling ones. The reason is violence, not noise. And the story ends with a promise made to every living creature, not just to one favored man.

The strangers at the tent

Abraham is the father of my people. God calls him to leave his country and promises, All the families of the earth will be blessed through you (Genesis 12:3). All the families, not one.

The most beautiful thing Abraham does is in Genesis 18. Three strangers appear near his tent in the heat of the day. He runs to meet them. He bows. He has bread baked and a calf killed, and he stands by them while they eat.

The very next story is Sodom. Two of those same strangers come to the city, and the men of the town surround the house and demand to rape them (Genesis 19:4–5).

You may have been taught what Sodom’s sin was. Here is how one of my own prophets summed it up: Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters. She also didn’t strengthen the hand of the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16:49).⁷

When I sent my friends out to the villages with nothing, no money, no bag, I said that any town that refused to welcome them would be worse off on the day of judgment than Sodom (Matthew 10:14–15; Luke 10:10–12). In the way I used it, Sodom was a story about how a town treats a stranger at its door. Abraham ran to the strangers. Sodom surrounded them.

And when I warned people not to cling to what they were leaving behind, I said, Remember Lot’s wife (Luke 17:32). She looked back.

The knife on the mountain

In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac up a mountain and sacrifice him. Abraham goes. At the last moment an angel stops his hand, and a ram is offered instead.

It is a terrifying story, and it is meant to be. But notice where it ends. Other peoples around Israel did sacrifice children to their gods, and some kings of Judah later did it too, in the valley outside Jerusalem (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6). This story ends with the knife put down. The God of Abraham does not want the boy.

Go deeperClues that these stories were written down long after Abraham

The stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are set before Israel existed. But here and there they show the world of the people who wrote them down, many centuries later.

Camels. Abraham owns camels, and his servant takes ten of them to find a wife for Isaac (Genesis 12:16; 24:10). In 2013 two Israeli archaeologists dated the oldest bones of domesticated camels in the southern part of the land, at copper mines in the Aravah valley, to the late 900s BC, the time of the first kings of Israel. Camels were known earlier elsewhere, but in this land they seem to arrive late.⁸

Philistines. Abraham lives in the land of the Philistines, and Isaac goes to Abimelech king of the Philistines (Genesis 21:34; 26:1). The Philistines settled on the coast of Canaan in the 1100s BC, long after any date anyone gives for Abraham.⁹

Chaldeans. Abraham’s family leaves Ur of the Chaldees (Genesis 11:31). The Chaldeans first appear in Assyrian records in the 800s BC. A Chaldean chief, Merodach-baladan, held the throne of Babylon for a few years in the 700s, and the Chaldean dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar ruled it in the 600s and 500s.⁹

Kings. One list in Genesis names the kings of Edom before any king reigned over the children of Israel (Genesis 36:31). That sounds like the words of someone who already had a king.

None of this means the stories were made up from nothing. It means they reached their written form in a much later age, and the people who wrote them down described the past in the words of their own day.

Jacob and the ladder

Abraham’s grandson Jacob is a liar and a cheat. He tricks his brother out of his birthright and his father out of a blessing. And God chooses him anyway.

Running for his life, Jacob sleeps on a stone and dreams of a ladder between earth and heaven, with angels going up and down on it (Genesis 28:12). Later he wrestles all night with a stranger and comes away limping, with a new name: Israel, the one who struggles with God (Genesis 32:28).

My people are named after a man who wrestled with God and limped. I always liked that.

John remembers me telling a new follower that he would see heaven opened and the angels of God going up and down on the Son of Man (John 1:51). That is Jacob’s ladder.

Joseph and the land

The last part of Genesis is the story of Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, who rises to run Egypt for Pharaoh.

Most people remember the forgiveness, and they should. When Joseph finally tells his brothers who he is, he weeps so loud the whole house hears it (Genesis 45:1–3). At the very end he tells them, As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good (Genesis 50:20).

But read Genesis 47, which almost nobody preaches. During the famine, Joseph sells grain to the starving Egyptians. When their money runs out, he takes their livestock. When the livestock is gone, they offer him their land and themselves together: Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants to Pharaoh (Genesis 47:19).¹⁰

Genesis tells you this without comment. Then you turn the page into Exodus, and a new king arises who does not know Joseph, and the whole system Joseph built is turned on Joseph’s own people.

The scriptures I grew up on noticed how debt becomes slavery. They noticed it on the last pages of the very first book.

Who wrote it

Tradition says Moses wrote the five books of the Law. Genesis never says that, and Moses is not even born until the next book.

In the 1700s, scholars began to argue that Genesis was woven from several older sources, each with its own name for God and its own style. In the 1800s that idea grew into a full theory. Many details of that theory are disputed now. But most scholars still agree that the book combines older traditions and was edited into its final form late, likely during or after the exile in Babylon.²

That does not make it less true to what it is trying to tell you. It means a people kept these stories for centuries, through slavery, kingdoms and exile, because they needed to remember who they were.

Go deeperHow scholars came to think the Law has several sources

People noticed the problem early. Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Law, reports the death and burial of Moses (Deuteronomy 34:5–6), so Moses can hardly have written every word. In the 1100s, a Jewish scholar from Spain, Abraham ibn Ezra, hinted that a few lines in the Law, such as At that time, Canaanites were in the land (Genesis 12:6), had been added after Moses. In 1670 the philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued in print that Moses did not write the five books.¹¹

In 1753 a French doctor named Jean Astruc noticed that some stories in Genesis call God Elohim while others use God’s own name, and he suggested that Moses had worked from older documents. Others followed his lead. By 1878 the German scholar Julius Wellhausen had set out the theory taught in universities for the next hundred years: four sources, which scholars call J, E, D and P, written at different times and woven together.²

Today scholars no longer agree on that tidy picture. Many doubt that one of the four, E, ever existed as a separate document, and many think the old stories were gathered in blocks, not in long parallel strands. But the main point has held. The Law grew over centuries and was put into its final shape late, most likely in the Persian period, after the return from exile.²

They were the image of God. They were their brother’s keeper. They were supposed to run to the stranger.

From the beginning, that is what it was supposed to be.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Genesis 1:1–2:3, then Genesis 2:4–25.

You will find: two creation stories with different orders and different names for God.

Then read Genesis 47:13–26. Watch what happens to the people of Egypt, step by step, as they run out of money.

The Short Version

• Genesis contains two creation stories, set side by side by the people who put the book together.
• It gives the title image of God, a royal title, to every human being.
• I went back to Genesis on marriage, because it shows how things were meant to be before people bent them.
• In the way I used it, Sodom was a story about refusing the stranger. Abraham, a chapter earlier, runs to welcome three.
• Genesis ends with Joseph turning hungry people into Pharaoh’s slaves, which sets up Exodus.