Part of studying history is the methodology involved. Every historian needs to know how to find the information from the sources they pull from. In this case, we are looking at the Bible. The word Bible has a meaning to it. It comes from the Greek and Latin word, biblia, meaning books. The best way to look at this is it is a multi volume collection of works, by different authors, that all have different theses on who God is. Each book has a different style of genre. Some are histories, some are proverbs, some are gospels, some are narratives, and some are letters. Part of the methodology of a historian is knowing the source: I call them the who, what, where, when, and why. Sometimes, you can get all of them, and other times you will only get a few of these to work with. In order for this to work, you must have a sound methodology, the historian needs to read broadly. To fully comprehend what the original authors wanted to say, we need to seek out as many sources as possible. For example, the first part of our study is the creation story; in order to understand the paradox of creation and God, we will need to read other creation stories (i.e. Mesopotamian creation myth, and the Egyptians). Do not let this scare you, because what we will find out is that our God is very different than those of the other cultures. Reading fully also helps us to understand the people and their cultures. Here we will be looking at the who, when, and why of the text.
Tradition tells us, as well as Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, that the first five books of the Bible (Torah in Hebrew, Pentateuch in Greek) were written by Moses. I believe that the source of the material in Genesis (as well as the other books of the Pentateuch) belong to Moses. I believe he orally passed on the stories, possibly wrote them down, after all he was a prince of Egypt, which means he could read and write. There is a theory out there by some scholars that think any writing in the ancient times (Ancient Mesopotamia up to the birth of the Middle Ages) were written by pseudonyms. The reasoning goes like this: most of the writings were penned after the supposed author, therefore whoever wrote this did so meaning to give it the authority of the supposed author. Back then, plagiarism was not a thing, as well as not citing sources. However, I do not believe every ancient manuscript was created under that pretension. It is possible that Genesis, or the rest of the Torah/Pentateuch were written this way, but there is no reason to believe this. Holding to a Mosaic authorship is ok. Who wrote it, at this point, is not important. What is important is that it gives us a clear message of who God is, why God does what He does, and how God is relate able to us.
The text never gives us an actual date of composition. This makes knowing when harder, but not impossible. Some scholars say it was written, or compiled, or added to in different periods: Judges epoch, United Kingdom era, post-exilic period. For me, I hold to a Mosaic authorship, which Deuteronomy ends after Moses’ death, so therefore someone else finished the work or edited it all with his permission before Moses passed. So, to place a date, I would have to say that most of it was put together during their desert wandering. It’s not to difficult to see that Moses would have done this then. They left Egypt, after having been slaves to another nation for around 400 years. Now, when one is a slave under someone they usually pick up the culture, habits, and religion of the master. In this case, it is an entire nation enslaved by another, which means that they would have taken on some of the Egyptian culture and religion. For Moses, who is being led by God, there needed to be change and understanding. Moses, educated under the Egyptians, would have understood and known Egyptian and Mesopotamian creation myths and other stories, so also would have the newly freed ancient Israelites. It’s easy to see then, that Moses would have been influenced by these stories (changing them to fit his theology), to make a difference of their (our) God and the other so called gods/ess of the neighboring cultures. When I say influenced, I do not mean that Moses took the whole story, changed them, therefore making our Genesis account sacrilegious. What I mean is this, Moses used what the people would have known and changed it, added some things he knew of his God, and came out with the book of Genesis. I am thankful to Jeremy Myers for this knowledge, it has really helped me get a grasp on God in Genesis (Myers, “Genesis 1:1, In the Beginning,” One Verse Podcast). This understanding of the period in which I believe Moses wrote is known as the Sitz im Leben (German, pronounced seets eem ley-ben, which means setting in life).
Why is this book important for us to study? First off, Genesis is not an answer book for scientific information (Myers, “Genesis 1:1, In the Beginning,” One Voice Podcast). I am not going to put creationism against science (evolution or intelligent design). As Myers has said, we have to look at the text with questions that the original audience would have asked, not what we would ask today (Myers, “Introduction,” One Verse Podcast). Alister McGrath holds, as do I, that creation was in conflict with and victorious over chaos, which matches with ancient Mesopotamian creation mythologies. McGrath states it like this:
It is clear that there are parallels between the Old Testament account of God engaging with the forces of chaos and Ugaritic and Canaanite mythology. Nevertheless, there are significant differences at points of importance, not least in the Old Testament’s insistence that the forces of chaos are not to be seen as divine. Creation is not to be understood in terms of different gods warring against each other for mastery of a (future) universe, but in terms of God’s mastery of chaos and ordering of the world (McGrath, Christian Theology an Introduction, 296-97).Secondly, this book is about God and his relationship with us. Martin Luther, in his Small Catechism, writes that God created him and everything else, that within the everything else is meant to be a way for man to support himself, and that this is a divine gift from God as our heaven father (Luther, Small Catechism, bookofconcord.org). Thomas Oden, in his first volume of systematic theology The Living God, states that the creation story is more of a ‘drama’ than a scientific observation. He continues to say that it’s a story of a relationship. Oden puts it like this:
The creation narratives do not pretend to describe in empirical detail, objectively, descriptively, or unmetaphorically, the way in which the world came into being; rather, they declare the awesome primordial fact that the world is radically dependent on the generosity, wisdom, and help of God, the insurmountably good and powerful One (Oden, Living God, 233).Basically, God is seen as the all powerful deity who places order out of chaos. As Myers has stated several times in his podcast, God is seen combating chaos peacefully, not with violence as the other so-called gods had done (Myers, “Genesis 1:2, Formless and Void, One Verse Podcast).
Beginning with Genesis, we find the starting point of everything. We will look at who God is, why He is important, and what kind of relationship exists between God and humanity. We will learn about God, His character (as best as we can, since God is still a mystery, even today), and maybe even why He cares so much for us. We will be using the historical method, the who, what, when, where, and why, to find all the information to our questions. The goal, will be to combine what we learn in the Old Testament readings with what we find in the New Testament. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comment section. I will read them and respond as best as I can. I look forward to this study and what we can learn together.
Bibliography
Luther, Martin. Small Catechism. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1921.
http://bookofconcord.org/smallcatechism.php#creed
McGrath, Allister. Christian Theology: Introduction. 3rd ed. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Myers, Jeremy. "Introduction." One Verse Podcast. Itunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/one-verse-
podcast/id1037949897
--------------- "In the Beginning." One Verse Podcast. Itunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/one-
verse-podcast/id1037949897
--------------- "Formless and Void." One Verse Podcast. Itunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/one-
verse-podcast/id1037949897
Oden, Thomas C. Living God. Systematic Theology. Vol. 1. Peabody: Prince Press, 1998.
Love where you are going with this. I have subscribed in my Feedly account so I can read future posts. Thanks for writing about this important topic.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jeremy.
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