What's GENESIS about?

The book of Genesis is a compilation of ancient stories collected and arranged around 500 B.C., soon after the Persian king had released the Israelites from Babylon where they had been exiled seventy years earlier. The religious thinkers of the time had struggled with what God was doing, first allowing them to be captured and then arranging their release. In some sense this didn’t make sense. The explanation they came up with was that their capture and exile to Babylon was God’s response to their being unfaithful over many generations to God’s call to make their nation as just and the people as fully of joy as God had originally created the world. In the end God couldn’t allow the people and their leaders to continue internal oppression and degradation. The exile to Babylon was the result. But then God arranged their release, and that was explained by the revolutionary idea that God remained committed to their fulfillment in spite of their rejection of God’s call. And one astonishing implication was that the local Israelite god was in charge of the entire world—that’s how their God could use the king of a super-power, Persia, to release them.

In presenting this revolutionary idea of a God who maintained loyalty to people who were disloyal to God, thinkers and scribes took all the ancient stories they could find and put them in an order which illustrated this amazing discovery about the nature of God. The fundamental idea was that God had had the same character from the beginning of the universe, and made that character explicit through what they called a “covenant” in which God committed to care for the people regardless of whether they carried out God’s will for a fulfilled community.

The book is arranged in two sections. The first, shorter section, describes how God created the world using mythological stories of pre-history from two different accounts of how the world was created, through the flood and God’s rescue of Noah and human and animal life, through to the story of the tower of Babel and how languages began. The second section deals with stories describing how the Israelite people became a self-aware people from Abraham through their rise to power in Egypt under Jacob.

In summary, the book of Genesis is the way thinkers about 500 B.C. arranged their ancient stories so as to help their people grasp the character of this God who was always faithful to them. The used this re-arranged sequence of ancient stories to illustrate what had just happened to them when they were unexpectedly released back to Jerusalem from the captivity in Babylon.

Discovering God in history

The book of Genesis illustrates over and over the ways in which God manages history. This guiding of history is described in surprisingly sophisticated ways. Seldom does God appear as a “being” physically doing things, rather God is experienced in dreams and visions (which can be understood as a person’s “dream” or “vision” for their future), and sometimes God functions entirely unseen and is not even mentioned such as happens through the various serendipitous events which enable Joseph to rise to supreme leadership in Egypt without any explicit intervention by God. No doubt the compilers of these stories, returning from their long exile in Babylon, had realized that their release wasn’t accomplished by legions of angels, but by circumstances which could equally be seen as the normal outcome of historical events. That’s an extraordinary insight which may be of great assistance to us in our time.

How Genesis is helpful to us

Genesis traces the various ways in which circumstances (often the barrenness of an ancestral mother) or betrayals such as the murder of Abel by Cain, or natural disasters such as the great flood appear to prevent God’s intention for a fulfilled humanity from coming to fruition. But, despite all the setbacks, the compilers describe how God is in charge of all aspects of life and finds ways to ensure that creation can come to fulfillment. In our day we face overwhelming forces of destruction and this book calls us to see more deeply into what’s going on so that we become solidly grounded in the fact that behind the chaos and worry of our world lies a creative process still enabling us to become a fulfilled planet.