The Book of Genesis
Introduction and Study Guide
Did ever another story start with so much literary bang as, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”? Who could read that hook and not want to know more? It turns out that YHWH is not only the Almighty but also he is the original wordsmith.
The book of Genesis is the ultimate book of “beginnings.” The name Genesis is derived from the Greek word γένεση which means beginning or origin. This opening book of Scripture tells us about the beginning of the universe when YHWH made all things (time, space, and matter) ex nihilo (Latin: “from nothing”). It also tells us of the beginning of man’s troubles when sin entered the world by our first parents, Adam and Eve. Genesis tells us of the first promise of God to save mankind from their rebellion through a savior. It is the beginning of covenant promises, the beginning of salvation, the beginning of different languages, and beginning of every nation on earth. Genesis is a very aptly named book.
Genesis has sometimes been called the key to the whole Bible and this is a fair claim. It would be hard to understand much of the rest of the Bible without first understanding the story of Genesis. The gospel of Jesus Christ makes little to no sense at all if one has not first learned about Adam’s story which brought all men into strife with God. Further, God’s promise to crush the head of the serpent through the seed of a woman (Gen. 3:15) is crucial to understanding the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It would be difficult to fully appreciate the situation mankind finds itself in apart from the unfolding story of sin entering the world, and it would be difficult to understand how we are saved from our sin without seeing the example of Abraham who believed God and had whose faith was credited to him as righteousness.” (Gen. 15:6) Understanding Genesis really is crucial to unlocking the rest of Scripture and there couldn’t be a better place to start reading the Bible.
Genesis is also the first of five books traditionally (and appropriately) attributed to Moses as their primary author. The first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are all categorized as Torah (Hebrew for “law”) although they contain an awful lot of narrative history as well. This set of books is sometimes called the “Pentateuch” which is the combination of two Greek words meaning, you guessed it, five books.
Although Moses “penned” these five books around 1500 B.C., the stories in Genesis would have been passed down by wrote memory for centuries prior the book’s composition. Some have suggested this makes the information found in books like Genesis unreliable. However, this kind of “memory culture” is common in the ancient world and the ancients were known for their incredible capacity to memorize large amounts of information with phenomenal accuracy. You need look no further than the Jewish rabbis who had the entire Torah, and more, committed to memory or the Greek rhapsodes who had Homer’s Iliad committed to memory. It was actually for this reason that Socrates opposed the technological advancement known as “books” because he believed they would make people lazy and stupid. With the ability to write down stories and philosophy, etc., he feared people would no longer need to remember anything (e.g. For this old enough I might ask you how many phone numbers did you know prior to carrying a cell phone? How many do you know now?).
Regardless, the apostle Peter tells us that the Scriptures are not merely a product of good memory but that they are a product of divine inspiration. He tells us, “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:21) Paul likewise stated, “All Scripture is God breathed and profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16) Christians are completely justified in believing in the divine inspiration of Scripture because Jesus himself spoke of the Scriptures in this way, quoting the Old Testament prophets as though they had binding authority over all men (Mt. 5:17-20 for just one example). Jesus left us with the ultimate proof of his own authority, and thereby the Scriptures given to us by the prophets, by rising from the dead after having been crucified publicly and buried for 3 days. Paul makes a powerful evidential case for the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. We can reason thus: If Jesus is God (as he claims) then whatever he teaches is trustworthy, Jesus proved he is God by rising from the dead, so then Jesus’ teaching that the books of Moses (and the other writings of the prophets) are the very words of God is trustworthy. In light of this, Christians are completely justified in trusting the full reliability of the contents of Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament. Jesus also extended authority to his apostles (c.f. Matthew 16:13-20; 28:16-20, and elsewhere) to speak the word of God which means he vouched for the New Testament in the same way he did the Old.
This page serves as a very brief introduction to a study of the Book of Genesis. This study will not be exhaustive (can any be?) but it is meant to help guide the reader through the text while giving them many questions to ponder about its message, its relationship to the rest of the Bible, and its place in history, culture, and literature. May this be only one of many fruitful studies you endeavor upon in the study of the greatest book of beginnings ever written.