How Genesis Came to Us

Genesis describes the very beginning, but it was not written at the beginning. Somewhere between the events it describes and the Bible you hold today lies a long chain of storytellers, writers, scribes, and translators. This lesson follows that chain.

Jewish and Christian tradition has long held that Moses wrote Genesis, together with the rest of the Torah, the first five books. Jesus refers to "the book of Moses" (Mark 12:26), and Moses is the great lawgiver throughout Scripture. On this view, Moses may have drawn on older family records and traditions handed down from Abraham's household. Genesis itself is organized around ten sections that begin "These are the generations of…" (in Hebrew, toledot), which some see as a sign of earlier family records woven together.

Many modern scholars see Genesis as the result of a longer process: older traditions, gathered and edited over generations, reaching their final form centuries after Moses. Some faithful readers combine the two views: Moses as the foundation, with inspired scribes later updating place names and completing the work. (The account of Moses' own death in Deuteronomy 34 is a clear example of a later hand.)

Before printing, every copy of Genesis was made by hand. The oldest complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, was copied in AD 1008. But in 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls gave us fragments of Genesis more than a thousand years older, and they show how faithfully the text was preserved. The Greek translation (the Septuagint, begun around 250 BC) and the Samaritans' own copy of the Torah give us two more independent witnesses.

Four witnesses to the text

Because these traditions were copied separately for centuries, comparing them lets scholars see where copyists made changes and work back toward the earliest wording. On the great majority of Genesis, they agree.

Three places where the copies differ

Four more manuscript questions from Genesis 12–50

Each has its own Journey of a Passage, with every witness and its reading. Together with Genesis 1:1 and the differences above, they show the full range: identical text, a scribe's slip, different counts, different vowels, and different interpretations.

Names from a later age

Several details in Genesis use names or describe things from centuries after the patriarchs' traditional dates:

• "Ur of the Chaldeans" (11:31): the Chaldeans appear in records from the 9th century BC.
• Abram pursues the kings "unto Dan" (14:14): the city was named Dan after the tribe captured it (Judges 18:29).
• "The land of the Philistines" (21:32; 26:1): the Philistines known from archaeology arrived around 1200 BC.
• Camel caravans (24; 37:25): widespread domestic camel use in the region is documented from the 10th century BC.
• "Before there reigned any king over the children of Israel" (36:31): written from a time when Israel had kings.
• "The land of Rameses" (47:11): named after Ramesses II's city of the 13th century BC.

The book's own structure

Genesis organizes itself with a repeated heading, "These are the generations (toledot) of…", eleven times: of the heavens and the earth, Adam, Noah, Noah's sons, Shem, Terah, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau (twice) and Jacob. Some scholars, notably P. J. Wiseman, proposed these mark older family records that Moses compiled; others see them as an editor's framework. Either way, the book presents itself as a chain of generations from creation to Egypt.

Retold before the New Testament

Jewish writers retold and expanded Genesis long before the time of Jesus: Jubilees (2nd century BC) and the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran rewrite the stories of Enoch, Noah and Abraham, and Philo and Josephus later explained them for Greek readers. These retellings are not Scripture in Jewish or most Christian canons, but they show how carefully Genesis was read.

How Genesis became Scripture

Genesis' place in the Torah is secure in every surviving Jewish, Samaritan and Christian canon: it opens every Bible, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Ethiopian. Nehemiah 8 describes Ezra (5th century BC) reading "the book of the law of Moses" publicly as God's law, though it does not say exactly what that scroll contained, and the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve about 20 copies of Genesis from the last centuries BC. Exactly when and how Genesis first came to be treated as Scripture is not documented. Chapter divisions were added around AD 1205 and verse numbers in the 1550s; neither was part of the original.