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INTRODUCTION TO
GENESIS
NAME AND PURPOSE
The title, Genesis, means “beginning.” It is the title of the book in the Septuagint (the pre-Christian
Greek translation of the OT). This aptly describes a book that outlines the creation of the world and
humanity (chs. 1 – 2) and goes on to describe the beginning of sin (ch. 3), the new creation (ch. 9),
God’s plan for blessing the world (12:1 – 3), and how that plan begins with the family of Abraham
(chs. 12 – 50). The Jewish title of the book, Bĕrē ʾ šît, is taken from the first word in the Hebrew text:
“In the beginning.” It also emphasizes that the book is concerned with origins.
Genesis is the first of the five books of the Pentateuch (see Introduction to the Pentateuch, p. 9).
Unlike the other books of the Torah, Genesis contains almost all narrative and few legal commands.
Its purpose is to trace the beginnings of the world, humanity, and sin and to draw a line across
human history that identifies God’s work with Abraham and his family. Thus, the book provides
the necessary background for the divinely chosen origins of God’s people Israel and for their situa-
tion in Egypt at the beginning of Exodus. It also introduces God as Creator, Judge, and Redeemer. It
describes the fall into sin and looks forward to how God will resolve his separation from the people
he loved and created.
BACKGROUND AND AUTHOR
Exod 17:14 and Deut 31:9,24 attest to the composition of much of the first five books by Moses. Moses’
composition of Genesis was assumed until the advent of critical studies of the Bible that questioned
its validity. Since then, scholars have argued for dividing Genesis into separate parts and dating
them to different times. Multiple authors would then have written the book, some of them centuries
after the time of Moses. However, it is now clear that many of the events of Genesis, when compared
to examples of ancient Near Eastern texts, date to the period before Moses, ca. 2200 – 1500 BC, and
not later.
1. The creation account of Genesis has been compared with the Babylonian Enuma Elish, a story
about how the god Marduk defeats a monster and creates the other gods from her body. Archaeolo-
gists discovered this story in the library of an Assyrian king from the seventh century BC. But a
closer parallel to Gen 1 – 11, with stories of the creation of humankind followed by a flood, with a fam-
ily and animals surviving on an ark, appears much earlier in the eighteenth-century BC Atrah̯ asis
Epic.
2. Many texts, including the Atrah̯ asis Epic, mention a worldwide flood. Most famous is the
Gilgamesh Epic. The earliest text we have dates from the eighteenth century BC. It was copied in many
places and times in the ancient Near East. Like Atrah̯ asis, Gilgamesh has parallels with the details of
Gen 6 – 9. A god decides to preserve a family, people construct a ship and bring animals into an ark
and close the door, and the flood destroys everything outside the ark. These similarities should not
blind us to the teaching of Gen 6 – 9 that God used the flood to judge the world and save righteous
Noah and all on the ark in order to make a covenant with them upon disembarking (8:20 — 9:17).
3. Personal names can also attest to an early date for Genesis. Some of the names in chs. 1 – 11
occur only in the earlier period of the ancient Near East. Methushael, Methuselah, Jabal, Jubal, and
Tubal-Cain appear only in the earlier second millennium BC, not later. In chs. 12 – 50 other names
with forms such as Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, and Joseph appear frequently in the early second mil-
lennium BC, but much less in the later second millennium BC and hardly at all in the first millen-
nium BC. How would the author(s) of Genesis have known how to use these names that are authentic
to the early period and not the later?
4. Gen 14 describes a war involving international armies from across the ancient Near East.
Many of the names of the invaders in 14:1,9 occur only in the second millennium BC: Amraphel the