Notes on Genesis

Notes on

Genesis

2 0 2 4 E d i t i o n

Dr. Thomas L. Constable

TITLE

Each book of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament,

called "The Pentateuch" since about A.D. 160, and called "The Torah"

["instruction"] by the Jews), originally received its title in the Hebrew Bible

from the first word or words in the book. There are three divisions in the

Hebrew Bible: The Law (Torah), The Prophets, and The Writings (cf. Luke

24:44).1 The Torah was originally one book, but the translators of the

Septuagint (Greek) version (ca. 250 B.C.) divided it into the five books that

we have. The Jews regarded the stories in the Torah as divine instruction

for them, as well as the commandments and sermons, since they too teach

theology and ethics. The word "Pentateuch" comes from the Greek words

penta, meaning "five," and teuchos, which was a case for carrying papyrus

scrolls, and in later usage, the scrolls themselves.

The English title "Genesis" has come to us from the Latin Vulgate

translation (Liber Genesis) made by the early church father Jerome (ca.

A.D. 390). The Latin title came from the Septuagint translation. "Genesis"

is a transliteration of the Greek word geneseos, the Greek word that

translates the Hebrew toledot. This Hebrew word is the key word in

identifying the structure of Genesis, and the English translators have

usually rendered it "account" or "generations" or "history" or "records"

(2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10, 27; 25:12, 19; 36:1, 9; 37:2).2

1See

Appendix 1 at the end of these notes for a table showing four canons of the Old

Testament (Hebrew Bible): Jewish, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. See

also Floyd V. Filson, Which Books Belong in the Bible? pp. 73-100. See Randall Price,

Searching for the Original Bible, pp. 36-42, for a concise explanation of the origin and

development of the whole Old Testament.

2See Jason S. Derouchie, "The Blessing-Commission, The Promised Offspring, and The

Toledot Structure of Genesis," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 56:2 (June

Copyright ? 2024 by Thomas L. Constable

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Dr. Constable's Notes on Genesis

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DATE

The events recorded date back to the creation of the world.

Many Christians believe that the earth is millions of years old. They usually

base this belief on the statements of scientists and they understand

Scripture in the light of these statements. Likewise many Christians believe

that the human race began hundreds of thousands of years ago for the

same reason.

Many evangelical Christians believe that the earth is not much older than

10,000 years. They base this on the genealogies in Scripture (Gen. 5; 10;

11; et al.), which they understand to be "open" (i.e., not complete).1

Evangelicals usually hold to a more recent date for man's creation¡ªmore

recent than the millions of years that evolutionists postulate¡ªfor the same

reason.

"The history of man on the earth may easily be more than the

supposed six thousand years and with no violence to the

testimony of the Sacred Text."2

Another group of evangelicals believes that these genealogies are either

"closed" (i.e., complete) or very close to complete. This leads them to date

the creation of the world and man about 6,000 years ago. I shall discuss

the question of how we should interpret the genealogies in the exposition

of the chapters where they occur.

Many interpreters have placed the date of composition of Genesis much

later than Moses' lifetime. Some of them do this because Genesis contains

some names that became common designations of people and places after

Moses' time (e.g., the Philistines, Dan, et al.). I shall discuss these

peculiarities in the exposition to follow as we come to them. See also the

section below: "Writer." If one accepts Mosaic authorship, as most

conservative evangelicals do, the date of composition of Genesis must be

within Moses' lifetime (ca. 1525-1405 B.C.).

2013):219-47; Jared M. August, "The Toledot Structure of Genesis: Hope of Promise,"

Bibliotheca Sacra 174:695 (July-September 2017):267-82.

1E.g., Andrew E. Steinmann, "Gaps in the Genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11?" Bibliotheca

Sacra 174:694 (April-June 2017):141-58.

2Lewis S. Chafer, Systematic Theology, 2:137.

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In Old Testament studies, some writers describe the "before Christ" (B.C.)

period as "B.C.E." This stands for "before the common era." These writers

also refer to the A.D. (Lat. ano domini, "year of our Lord") period as "C.E.,"

the "common era."

Genesis was perhaps originally intended to encourage the Israelites to trust

in their faithful, omnipotent God as they anticipated entrance into the

Promised Land from Kadesh Barnea or from the Plains of Moab.1 Moses may

have written it earlier to prepare them for the Exodus.2 But this seems less

likely to me. Another guess is that Moses wrote it during the 38 years of

the Israelites' wilderness wanderings.3 No one knows for sure.

WRITER

The authorship of the Pentateuch has been the subject of great

controversy among professing Christians since Spinoza promoted "higher

criticism" of the Bible in the 17th century. The "documentary hypothesis,"

which grew out of his work, is that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, as

most scholars in Judaism and the church until that day believed. Instead, it

was the product of several writers who lived much later than Moses. A

redactor (editor) or redactors combined these several documents into the

books that we have now. These documents (J, E, D, P, and others)

represent: a Yahwistic (Jehovistic) tradition (supposedly dating from the

ninth century B.C.), an Elohistic tradition (eighth century B.C.), a

Deuteronomic tradition (seventh century B.C.), a Priestly tradition (fifth

century B.C.), etc. The subject of Old Testament Introduction deals with

these matters.4 One reliable scholar summed up the present state of this

controversy as follows:

1Eugene

H. Merrill, "A Theology of the Pentateuch," in A Biblical Theology of the Old

Testament, p. 30. See Walther Zimmerli, "Abraham," Journal of Northwest Semitic

Languages 6 (1978):49-60.

2E.g., Kenneth Kitchen, "The Old Testament in its Context: 1 From the Origins to the Eve

of the Exodus," Theological Students' Fellowship Bulletin 59 (1971):9.

3H. C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis, 1:8.

4See especially Tremper Longman III and Raymond B. Dillard, An Introduction to the Old

Testament, pp. 42-51. Or see Gleason L. Archer Jr., A Survey of Old Testament

Introduction, pp. 81-104. For a more extensive discussion see R. K. Harrison, Introduction

to the Old Testament, pp. 3-82.

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"¡­ the documentary hypothesis is shaky at best and before

long may have to be given up entirely by the scholarly world."1

The evidence that Moses wrote the Pentateuch seems conclusive if one

believes that Jesus Christ spoke the truth when He attributed the

authorship to Moses (Matt. 19:8; Mark 7:10; Luke 16:29-31; 20:37; 24:27;

John 7:19, 22; cf. Acts 15:1). Jesus Christ did not specifically say that

Moses wrote Genesis, but in His day the Jews regarded the Pentateuch

(Torah) as a whole unit. They recognized Moses as the author of all five

books.2 Consequently they would have understood what Jesus said about

any of the five books of Moses as an endorsement of the Mosaic authorship

of them all.3

"Just west of Abydos in southern Egypt, the Wadi el-Hol site

yielded an alphabetic inscription carved on the underface of a

ledge. Palaeographically it resembled a text found at Serabit

al-Khadem in the Sinai Peninsula from 1600 B.C., which until

1993 was the earliest alphabet ever found. But the Wadi Hol

example is at least two hundred years older, dating from the

time Jacob and his sons lived in Egypt. The argument that

Moses could not have written the Torah in alphabetic form that

early (ca. 1400 B.C.) thus has no basis."4

How did Moses receive the information that He wrote about in Genesis? He

may have done so in either of two ways: Perhaps Adam and Eve told the

creation story to their descendants and they passed it on to succeeding

1Kitchen,

p. 78.

for example, the testimony of Flavius Josephus, a first-century Jewish-Christian

writer, to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, in Against Apion, 1:8.

3Oswald T. Allis' The Five Books of Moses is a classic rebuttal of the denial that Moses

wrote all five books. No one has discredited it, though many liberal scholars have ignored

it. More recently, Kenneth Kitchen's series of six articles, "The Old Testament in its

Context" in Theological Students' Fellowship Bulletin (1971-72), especially the sixth

article, refuted "the fashionable myth" (p. 9) of the evolution of Israel's religion as

proposed by Julius Wellhausen and his followers. Another excellent rebuttal by a Jewish

scholar, Umberto Cassuto, is his The Documentary Hypothesis. For a review of other

subsequent approaches scholars have pursued in the study of Genesis (i.e., the formcritical, tradition-historical, and rhetorical-critical), see Allen P. Ross, Creation and Blessing,

pp. 27-35; Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1¡ª17, pp. 11-38; Herbert

M. Wolf, An Introduction to the Old Testament Pentateuch, pp. 71-78.

4Eugene Merrill, "The Veracity of the Word: A Summary of Major Archaeological Finds,"

Kindred Spirit 34:3 (Winter 2010):13.

2See,

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generations orally and/or in written form (i.e., tradition). Moses' mother

may have told him these stories as a child. If so, God guarded the true

account of what happened before Moses' lifetime and kept it from error.

The other ancient Near Eastern accounts were perversions of what really

happened.1 Another possibility is that God revealed this information directly

to Moses.2

The New Testament writers quoted or alluded to Genesis over 60 times in

17 books. They believed that it contained an accurate account of

humankind's early experiences.

SCOPE

The events recorded in Genesis stretch historically from Creation to

Joseph's death, a period of at least 2,300 years. The first part of the book

(ch. 1¡ª11) is not as easy to date precisely as the second part (ch. 12¡ª

50). The history of the patriarchs recorded in this second main division of

the text covers a period of about 300 years.

The scope of the book progressively and consistently narrows. That is, only

a few selected events are recorded in the first 11 chapters with intervening

gaps of unspecified time. But with chapter 12 many more events are

recorded in much more detail with much shorter gaps in time.3 Genesis

begins with the creation of the cosmos and ends with the death of one

man: Joseph.

PURPOSE

The selection of content included in Genesis points to the purpose of the

divine author: to reveal the history of and basic principles involved in God's

relationship with people.

Genesis provides the historical basis for the rest of the Pentateuch and the

Bible. Chapters 1 through 11 give historical background essential to

1See

John D. Davis, Genesis and Semitic Tradition, pp. 1-22.

an extended discussion of Mosaic authorship, see G. Herbert Livingston, The

Pentateuch in its Cultural Environment, pp. 205-68.

3See the chart "Chronology of Genesis," in John J. Davis, Paradise to Prison, p. 29.

2For

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