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I.  Introductory notes and background to Genesis

The Hebrew Bible and its approximately 40 separate writings, which traditionally are classified into 24 books, was composed in stages over a period extending from the eleventh century down to the second century BCE--a span of at least 1,000 years.  The earliest writings--including the Torah (or Pentateuch), the "five scrolls" that contain the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy--were the work of multiple authors writing at diverse periods in different places.  Genesis consists primarily of two authorial elements: the so-called Yahwistic tradition (J), produced perhaps in the tenth century BCE, and the Priestly tradition (P), which was produced following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE (sixth-fifth centuries BCE).  It is thus extremely important that we keep in mind that the foundation stories which the Genesis authors wrote down are set in a "primeval" period that no written (and perhaps no contemporary oral) tradition had recorded.  Moreover, save for some fragments, we have no complete surviving Hebrew texts of these writings until the tenth century CE.  Thus, assessing the text as a work of History is highly problematic, if not impossible.

For comparison, the section of Genesis that we are reading was composed sometime before the poetry of Hesiod, but also includes elements written after Hesiod but before Plato's dialogue, Timaeus.

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Reading questions for Genesis

(1)  How does the Genesis creation account compare to those we've seen in Hesiod and Plato?  What elements are similar, what different?  Consider, for example, the role of women in Genesis (Eve, Abram's wife Sarai).

(2)  What role does genealogy play in Genesis?  Why do you think so much of the text concerns families, lines of descendents, and nations of people? (See Genesis 10, the so-called "Table of Nations")

(3)  What are the features of mankind's relationship with God?  What kind of expectations does the notion of covenant impart upon the parties to it (man and God), and how does a covenantal bond alter the relationship between a creator God and his creation? (Gen. 9.8)

(4)  Why might the first 13 chapters of Genesis be so interested in place--Eden, the garden, the lands outside it, Abram's lands given by God, the places where Abram and Noah's descendents settle?