Introduction

Introduction to the Study of Genesis

Lesson 1

December 1

Most of you know that I taught through Genesis in Chad recently with the Pastoral Enrichment program (PEP). However, PEP has asked me to rewrite their notes on Genesis, so what you’re going to get is kind of a first draft towards that project. 

This course is not designed to be a course where you’re taught every passage in Genesis. There are 50 chapters in the book of Genesis. If we took a chapter a week, we would be in Genesis for a year. If we took 2 chapters a week, that would take half a year, and that’s without any introduction whatsoever or any framework for how to understand the book.

Rather than teaching through every verse, I’m going to try to give some tools that are necessary for someone to be a good interpreter of Genesis. My hope is that you will be equipped to read the book of Genesis well. 

In addition to that, I think that if you understand how to read Genesis well, there are also tools that will help you to read the rest of the Pentateuch well – that’s Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. And in addition, I think it will help you as you read what we call “narrative”.

In the long run, God willing, we will have a rather lengthy introduction. We’re going to spend several weeks on the introduction to the book of Genesis, and then we’re going to go through some key sections and passages in the book of Genesis, dealing with some particularly important themes in the book. And then in the long run, I hope to produce something similar to what’s in a good study Bible – key notes to what is in the book of Genesis, what you need to know to interpret it.

Most of you have really good study Bibles, but the kind of places where this is going to be taught overseas, they may or may not have that. So we’re going to try to provide some things that they can have in their hand for key cultural background issues to help them understand key points in the book of Genesis. Actually, since this course is going to be taught to pastors, the long-term goal is to have about 3 or 4 sermons that demonstrate how you preach or how you teach through Genesis. I have a tentative goal to have this done in 18 months. Hopefully this will be ready for the printers in mid 2026.

Now, in general, we want to understand the book of Genesis as a whole. This is actually a key question as we think about how to interpret Genesis or any book of the Bible: What is Moses trying to accomplish in this book? If we have that answer, we’ll have interpretive keys to help us as we move our way through Genesis. This will also help us as we think about how Genesis applies to our context and our lives today.

Let’s talk about the importance of Genesis. The book of Genesis is fundamental in several respects:

Genesis is the first book of the Bible on which all others are built. We should note that the book of Job was probably written before Genesis. We do not have, for instance, in the book of Job any reference to the people of Israel. There’s no reference to Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. There’s no reference to a fully developed sacrificial system, though there are sacrifices that are mentioned. But of course there are sacrifices before the people of Israel as well. However, as the Jewish people arranged the canon of scripture, and also Christians did the same, Genesis is  first. The rest of the Bible does not make much sense without the book of Genesis.

Chronologically, Genesis tells us the beginning of all things. This includes everything – the universe, who we are as people, where sin came from and where mortality and death come from. Genesis tells us about the origin of family. We can also add marriage, ethnicities, where the peoples of the Earth come from, where languages come from, tribes of Israel, how the people came to be in Egypt. And as we are going to see even this morning when we’re preaching from Genesis 3:15, we’re going to see the beginning of God’s plan of redemption.

These things underlie some of the most important questions that people ask. Where did we come from? Why is the world the way it is? Why is there evil in the world? Why is there death in the world? Where did sin come from and where did language come from? How do the peoples of the Earth become so spread out and diverse? People ask those questions, and they fund all sorts of research grants for people who don’t believe the Bible to try to answer those questions. They come up with some rather bizarre theories. But Genesis asks and answers these questions.

Essentially all biblical doctrines find their source in the book of Genesis. You want to know about God – that’s what we mean by “theology” – “In the beginning, God.” God is just dripping all over Genesis. In fact, specifically, God’s sovereignty and His providence is everywhere in this book. Even if you want to know about Christ, we see Christ specifically prophesied about in Genesis 3:15. Also Genesis 49 talks about a scepter that shall come out of Judah. The scepter shall not depart from the house of Judah, the line of Judah. And along the way, there’s also other inclinations towards Christ.

Even if someone wants to argue those are not clear prophecies about Christ specifically, Christ doesn’t make sense without Genesis. There’s no reason to have Jesus come if Genesis doesn’t exist. And in fact, that’s the way Matthew took it. Remember how Matthew starts his gospel? He starts by going through the genealogies that trace through Genesis.

We can see inclinations towards the doctrine of the Holy Spirit – that’s what we mean by Pneumatology. Pneuma is the Greek word for spirit or wind or breath. We see the doctrine of man – Anthropology. The doctrine of sin – Hamartiology, salvation, angels, and Eschatology – the last things. All of these find their source in Genesis.

That does not mean that Genesis actually gives us the complete picture of all those things. But the rest of the Bible and what we know about these things doesn’t really make sense without Genesis. Thus we can say that the message of the Bible can only be understood if you have studied Genesis, and even more, the message of the gospel can only be understood if you have studied and understood Genesis.

This is really important these days, even on a really practical level. When people share the gospel message today, we need to understand that most of the people we talk to know either next to nothing or literally nothing about Genesis. They might have a cartoon-like image in their mind about Noah’s Ark – and it literally will be cartoon-like – or they might have in their mind a picture of half-naked people with fig leaves covering the important parts about Adam and Eve. But that’s the extent of what most people know about Genesis.

You can’t make sense of not only the Bible but even our preaching of the gospel without a basic understanding of man’s condition and what God has planned to do about it. And that starts in Genesis. That’s not even to mention all the foundational aspects of a Christian worldview that come out of Genesis. So it’s a really, really important book, and practically what that means is that if we want to be effective communicators of the saving message of Jesus, this is one of those books that we really just have to have fixed in our minds.

Often today you hear people preach the gospel with no real reference to sin and the actual full extent of man’s fallen condition. They say things like, “Well, we’ve got this guy Jesus, he loves you, believe in him.” That’s really not enough – that’s not the way the New Testament authors such as Matthew, Mark, Luke, John presented the gospel.

Let’s talk about the title of Genesis. This title is not something Moses slapped on the book. The title of Genesis comes from the Septuagint version, which says in Genesis 2:4 

“αὕτη ἡ βίβλος γενέσεως οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς.” 

Literally what that means is “this is the book of the origin of heaven and Earth.” Thus the title became in the Septuagint “Genesis Kosmos” – the origin of the cosmos.

This Septuagint version was prepared shortly before the time of Christ. It was the first book of the Pentateuch. This title was followed in the Latin Vulgate – that was an early translation done by Christians of the whole Bible into Latin – and it was “Liber Genesis,” book of Genesis, and it’s kind of stuck as a title, and been shortened to Genesis today.

The word Genesis means lineage or origins. Therefore, this is a very appropriate title because the book tells us about the origin of a number of things – creation of universe, mankind and human culture, people of Israel, and so on. Martin Luther preferred to call it “the First Book of Moses,” and so if you were to read the German and Hungarian versions, that’s the title of it. Jews often use the title “Bereshit,” which is from the first word of the text in Hebrew, meaning “in the beginning.”

Now let’s talk about the theme and objectives of the book. The title “The Beginning” describes well the general theme of the book. However, to discover the theme more accurately, we need to first observe the content of the book and second situate it in its historical context.

You can divide the book into two major sections. This isn’t the only way to divide the book, but clearly there’s some sort of structure here. In chapters 1 through 11, there are 4 major events:

1. Creation
2. Fall
3. Flood
4. Tower of Babel

In chapters 12 through 50, there are 4 major characters:

1. Abraham (dominates from chapters 12 through basically chapter 25)
2. Isaac (though he’s somewhat incidental – important to the story but not a lot is said about him beyond the key event at Mount Moriah)
3. Jacob (much more is said about the grandson of Abraham than about Isaac)
4. Joseph (roughly the last 12-14 chapters of the book)

From the point of view of the organization of the book, we notice that there are only 11 chapters to cover more than 2000 years of history before Abraham, while there are 38 chapters for the roughly 300 years between Abraham and Joseph. This shows us that God is particularly interested in giving Israel a historical summary of its origins, as well as its place in the world.

In this sense, the first 11 chapters can be considered the prologue of the book. When we say prologue here, very carefully, we are not saying that the prologue is unimportant. It sets the context of where Israel came from. It’s also important as we talk about the progress of revelation – it sets not only the context of where Israel came from but where we came from and what God is intending to do in the world.

Now let’s talk about the historical context of the book. Genesis was written by Moses at the time when Israel was emerging from 400 years of servitude in Egypt. They would be fully formed in the Promised Land as a distinct nation with its own institutions and beliefs. The purpose of Genesis can be formulated this way: The book seeks to recount how Israel was selected from among the nations of the world to become God’s chosen people.

Part of that account is learning where they came from – there’s a history that’s given from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, Abraham to Jacob, Jacob and his sons to how they came to be in Egypt. Yes, Isaac is in there too, but he’s really largely an incidental figure in the book.

When we read Genesis (or any book of the Bible), the first thing we do is try to read it as close as we can to how the original readers would have read it.  Here are the people of Israel – they’ve left Egypt and probably by the time they receive Genesis, they’re either somewhere in the middle of their wilderness wanderings or at the end of their wilderness wanderings, probably at the end.

Moses likely wrote the Pentateuch – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – while they were on their way through the wilderness wanderings and obviously finished it up before he died. Then the children of Israel went into the Promised Land. So they’ve left Egypt, they are probably at the end of the 40 years of wilderness wanderings. And they’ve got important questions that they need answered – Genesis answers key important questions for them.

Now let’s interpret Genesis as narrative in its historical context. When speaking about narratives in the Bible, we speak about stories. This next sentence is very, very important – it’s very confusing today: Stories are not always fiction.

Narratives are arranged for a purpose. You can have a true story that you arrange to communicate something. Thoughtful narratives are designed and arranged to communicate ideas and values. There are such things as not very thoughtful narratives and stories – if you go to the books section at Walmart, there are tons of them and the only goal of most of them is that  they just want to entertain. But then there are narratives, stories that are constructed to communicate something that’s very deep, very important.

We certainly know that in the case of a good biography – a good biography is written like a story. It arranges the details of someone’s life or a series of people’s lives and knits them together to communicate something. The same can be true for true things – we can arrange material in such a way to communicate values and ideas. And Moses has done that with this book.

Questions from students:
“Shouldn’t Noah be one of the major characters?”

I suppose you could argue that, but I think that the major thing is actually the flood itself and the destruction that it brings. But that’s probably semantics. There is a lot written about Noah.

Student: “People in the New Testament – people think their stories are not true, but actually I’d say they are more true than you know, because if they see them as a story that is made up, they don’t get the value out of them.”

The other thing to mention is Luke 16, which basically says if you don’t believe Moses and the prophets, you won’t believe someone who comes back from the dead – which Jesus did. So if people understand that from the beginning, they’ll understand the importance of getting Genesis correct..