Okay, lets get started in our adventures in blogging the Bible.

Our story begins once upon a time, in a land far far away…. Scratch that. Sorry got my stories mixed up.

Genesis 1:1 begins with the most apporpriate beginning imaginable with the famous line “in the begginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Judaic-Christian Scriptures begin with two key premises. First God exist. Second man is created by God. There is no debating this one. The early scriptures just took for granted that God existed. They didn’t bother trying to prove it, they just took it on faith. Much like I take on faith that the world is made up of qwa-billions of tiny little things called atoms, the authors of the Bible and the author of Geneis in particular just states it as fact that God exist.

I am not going to get into a debate on this one. For the sake of taking the author at his word lets take that as a true premise. God exist. What is perhaps more remarkable is that the author notes that God exists before creation. “In the beginning God created”, well then that presupposes that God is not material in any sense, atleast whenever Genesis 1:1 is written (the Christian idea of the incarnation is that God took upon himself literal flesh thus there is a period in history where God becomes material).

Before we begin with what we can learn from reading Genesis, lets cover what we can’t learn from reading Genesis and what we can infer from reading Genesis.

Genesis doesn’t begin with any information about the author, instead it begins with the subject of what the work is all about. It is about God, creation, and the role of man. It is about specifically the God of the Jewish and later the Christian community. We know this because the author is first writing to some Jewish audience telling them how the world came about and why it is in the shape that it is in. The problem is we don’t know according to the text, who the author is, when he is writing, or what occasion sparked the writing of these stories. We may assume (but that is always risky business) that some of these stories originally existed in oral form. I take that the author had some divine insight on the matter. After all, Genesis 1 through say 25 or so does predate the genesis of the Jewish people. The author records names and events that had most likely been lost from history at the time of the writing. This is not problematic if we take the presupposition that all scripture including these stories is ultimately inspired by God.

We will probably never definately know who the author of Genesis is until the return of Christ. I believe that the traditional interpretation that Genesis was probably written by Moses as part of what is now known as the Pentatuch (first five books of the OT) by Christians and as the Torah by the Jews. Some editing probably occured under Moses and perhaps under Joshua’s reign. I really don’t even have a problem with some light editing during the time of Josiah (one of the last kings in Judah), though I do think that is rather unlikely. For the sake of argument lets assume Moses is the primary author, which is the common view of most biblical scholars up until the 1900s. The question that we must ask next is why was the first half of Genesis written at all?
Genesis 1 in general and specifically 2 and 3 may be seen as both the creation story and as a explanation of the theodicy of the human condition. A theodicy is a attempt to explain why a good God would allow evil things to happen. If Genesis was written after the Jews escaped Egypt, and as they wandered through the desert of the Negev, then it is more than likely that atleast some of the people wanted to know why on Earth they were going through such tough times. Genesis 1 through 3 explains what God had originally created and why things were so far from what had been originally created. Long before Rick Warren and the Purpose Driven Life, Moses wrote a description of creation, including man and woman, what they were put on the Earth to do and what caused that plan to go wrong.

Genisis 1 and 2 are the good parts of the creation story. Genesis 3 explains the problem that caused everything to go wrong and what must be done to fix it. In the next blog post we will look at creation itself.