Old Testament · Law · book 1 of 66 · 2 min read
The book of Genesis
A book about beginnings that spends four fifths of its length on one dysfunctional family, because the point is not how the world started but who is keeping a promise inside it.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
At a glance
- Chapters
- 50
- Author
- Traditionally Moses; most scholars now see a compilation of older sources
- Written
- Reaching its final form around the sixth century BC, from much older material
- Written for
- Israel, being told where it came from
- Themes
- promise, family, blessing and rivalry, exile and return
What it is about
Genesis divides almost exactly in two and the halves are nothing alike. Chapters 1 to 11 move at enormous scale — creation, a flood, a tower, whole civilisations dismissed in a verse. Then chapter 12 arrives and the camera drops to one childless couple in their seventies, and it stays with their family for the remaining thirty-nine chapters.
That change of scale is the argument. The book is not primarily interested in cosmology; it is interested in whether a promise made to one family can survive that family, and the family it chose is a catalogue of deception, favouritism and violence. Abraham lies about his wife twice. Jacob cheats his brother and is cheated in turn. His sons sell one of their own into slavery and tell their father he was eaten.
It ends with that son running Egypt and the family fed, and with a sentence that has been read as the book's whole thesis: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Nothing has been tidied up. The promise has simply not failed.
Where to start
Chapter 12, where the promise is made, unless you specifically came for the creation accounts. Reading 1 to 11 first is what stalls most attempts at Genesis — the genealogies in chapters 5 and 10 are where people stop.
The chapters worth knowing
- Genesis 12 — The promise to Abraham, which the remaining thirty-nine chapters are about keeping.
- Genesis 22 — The binding of Isaac, the passage that has troubled readers for three thousand years and has never been made comfortable.
- Genesis 50 — You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good — the sentence the whole book has been building toward.
What people get wrong about it
That it is mainly about creation. Two chapters are; forty-eight are about a family. Reading it as a book of origins produces endless argument about the first page and no acquaintance with the rest, which is where the book actually lives.
From this book
Questions
Who wrote the book of Genesis?
Tradition attributes it to Moses. Most modern scholarship sees it as a compilation reaching its final form far later, drawing on older written and oral sources — a view held by a great many Christians as well as by critical scholars.
How many chapters are in Genesis?
Fifty. The first eleven cover the whole world; the remaining thirty-nine cover four generations of one family.