It’s that time again, when I finish reading Genesis…and hope my resolution holds to read the whole Bible by next January.
When Moses assembled the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, he was leading the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. The people had been slaves. They needed a history and the sense of identity that comes with it.
Genesis appears to be a chronological collection of stories, some of them kind of strange. But we can detect a direction and subtle changes in tone and perspective.
A lot of those changes occur wherever we see the phrase “these are the generations of…” (KJV). The first chapter describes the creation of the world, and provides a cosmology for the rest of the book. Chapter 2 describes creation in human terms.
Then we hear about Cain and Abel and Noah. It feels very matter of fact. God is talking to people, and we even occasionally know what God is thinking, but we feel a distance from the action.
Then the book focuses on God’s increasingly intimate relationship with Abram. We see God making promises and changing Abram’s name. We see Abraham interceding for Sodom and Gomorrah.
There’s controversy in Genesis too—whether we’re discussing how long the “days” of creation were or questioning Judah’s attitude toward women. We read about the messiness of Abraham’s family.
Then we come to the story of Joseph. God only speaks once in the last chapters and only to Jacob. But Joseph avoids Mrs. Potiphar’s advances and upholds sexual purity because of who God is. He tells Pharaoh it is God who gives the interpretation of dreams. When his brothers come to Egypt, he forgives them for selling him into slavery, because “God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20, KJV).
Somehow Joseph saw things differently than I probably would have, and maybe that’s what ties it all together. Genesis records the beginning of God’s revelation of Himself.
It teaches us to see the hand of God, despite the sinfulness of humans. So that just as Abraham believed God and it was “counted to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:6,KJV) we too may begin to see with the eyes of faith.
Genesis teaches us to see the world and ourselves in the context of who God is.
