Genesis: the 50 word summary
God creates. Adam and Eve eat forbidden fruit; God curses them. Cain kills Abel; God curses Cain. Noah builds an ark; God sends floods. God smites Babel. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their families wander around squabbling and deceiving each other over women, land, inheritance and sheep, ending up in Egypt.
Genesis is absolutely packed with stories. Nearly all the familiar Old Testament stories are here, with a few more in Exodus. Outside that there's only David and Goliath out of the stories one might be asked to colour a picture about at Sunday School.
So my first question was: when was Genesis written and who by? Summarising lots of complicated arguments I don't fully understand, scholars seem to think it was composed in lots of different bits between about 800 and 500 BC and then combined into one book (or rather, scroll) round about 400 BC. Some of the actual material is much, much older, for example the flood story. It certainly feels like a patchwork of different authors. There's a natural break between the bundle of disconnected early stories and the more connected accounts of the Patriarchs.
This all brings up an interesting question about the Bible and other texts - how to read them? The automatic choice is to read it like a novel or play, suspending disbelief. Then I can talk about the literary character 'God' or 'Abraham' as I would discuss Jane Eyre or Hamlet. This is similar to the inerrantist way of reading the Bible, except that an inerrantist suspends disbelief permanently.
But that seems inappropriate for the Bible, written over many hundreds of years by different authors, with different backgrounds and agendas. For a start, any contradiction plays havoc with the suspension of disbelief and makes me ask: who wrote it? why? what was their agenda? For example, the contradiction between the two creation stories. In this case, Robin Lane Fox suggests that the first creation story was written much later by someone who wanted to emphasise the importance of keeping the Sabbath.
Is it fair to examine God as a literary character? From Genesis I might get the impression that God is powerful, insecure, short-tempered and arbitrary.
After creation, God's acts have been to forbid people to learn wisdom, and after they disobey, to increase their suffering and shorten their lives. Then he decides to kill nearly all of them. Then he worries they are getting too powerful (because of their ability to communicate and work together cooperatively), so he breaks that by confusing the languages. During the stories of the patriarchs, God punishes and rewards people for inscrutable reasons. God continually reminds them that he is giving them this land and that they should despise the other tribes that live there and not intermarry and so on.
But it seems unfair to try and sketch God's character by this kind of surface reading. A more reasonable question might be what the different authors thought God was like - but that would require me to know who wrote what when. More background reading needed.
A question for you bible-readers out there: How do you read it?
Genesis is absolutely packed with stories. Nearly all the familiar Old Testament stories are here, with a few more in Exodus. Outside that there's only David and Goliath out of the stories one might be asked to colour a picture about at Sunday School.
So my first question was: when was Genesis written and who by? Summarising lots of complicated arguments I don't fully understand, scholars seem to think it was composed in lots of different bits between about 800 and 500 BC and then combined into one book (or rather, scroll) round about 400 BC. Some of the actual material is much, much older, for example the flood story. It certainly feels like a patchwork of different authors. There's a natural break between the bundle of disconnected early stories and the more connected accounts of the Patriarchs.
This all brings up an interesting question about the Bible and other texts - how to read them? The automatic choice is to read it like a novel or play, suspending disbelief. Then I can talk about the literary character 'God' or 'Abraham' as I would discuss Jane Eyre or Hamlet. This is similar to the inerrantist way of reading the Bible, except that an inerrantist suspends disbelief permanently.
But that seems inappropriate for the Bible, written over many hundreds of years by different authors, with different backgrounds and agendas. For a start, any contradiction plays havoc with the suspension of disbelief and makes me ask: who wrote it? why? what was their agenda? For example, the contradiction between the two creation stories. In this case, Robin Lane Fox suggests that the first creation story was written much later by someone who wanted to emphasise the importance of keeping the Sabbath.
Is it fair to examine God as a literary character? From Genesis I might get the impression that God is powerful, insecure, short-tempered and arbitrary.
After creation, God's acts have been to forbid people to learn wisdom, and after they disobey, to increase their suffering and shorten their lives. Then he decides to kill nearly all of them. Then he worries they are getting too powerful (because of their ability to communicate and work together cooperatively), so he breaks that by confusing the languages. During the stories of the patriarchs, God punishes and rewards people for inscrutable reasons. God continually reminds them that he is giving them this land and that they should despise the other tribes that live there and not intermarry and so on.
But it seems unfair to try and sketch God's character by this kind of surface reading. A more reasonable question might be what the different authors thought God was like - but that would require me to know who wrote what when. More background reading needed.
A question for you bible-readers out there: How do you read it?