Eugene H. Maly provides this outline of Genesis with tentative ascription to the Yahwist, Elohist, and Priestly sources (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, pp. 9-10)
I. Primitive History (1-11)
(A1) Creation of World and Man (1:1-2:4a) (P)
A. Creation of Man and Woman (2:4b-25) (J)
B. The Fall (3:1-24) (J)
C. Cain and Abel (4:1-16) (J)
D. Genealogy of Cain (4:17-26) (J)
E. Genealogy of Adam to Noah (5:1-32) (P)
F. Prologue to the Flood (6:1-22) (J and P)
G. The Flood (7:1-8:22) (J and P)
H. The Covenant with Noah (9:1-17) (P)
I. The Sons of Noah (9:18-27) (J)
J. The Peopling of the Earth (10:1-32) (P and J)
K. The Tower of Babel (11:1-9) (J)
L. Concluding Genealogies (11:10-32) (P and J)
II. The Patriarch Abraham (12:1-25:18)
1. The Call of Abram (12:1-9) (J, P)
2. Abram and Sarai in Egypt (12:10-20) (J)
3. The Separation of Abram and Lot (13:1-18) (J, P)
4. Abram and the Four Kings (14:1-24) (?)
5. Promises Renewed (15:1-20) (J, E?)
6. Hagar’s Flight (16:1-16) (J, P)
7. The Covenant of Circumcision (17:1-27) (P)
8. Promise of a Son; Sodom and Gomorrah (18:1-19:38) (J)
9. Abraham and Sarah in Gerar (20:1-18) (E)
10. Isaac and Ishmael (21:1-21) (J and P)
11. Abraham and Abimelech (21:22-34) (E)
12. The Sacrifice of Isaac (22:1-24) (E, J)
13. The Purchase of the Cave of Machpelah (23:1-20) (P)
14. The Wife of Isaac (24:1-67) (J)
15. Abraham’s Descendants (25:1-18) (P and J)
III. The Patriarchs Isaac and Jacob (25:19-36:43)
1. The Birth of Esau and Jacob (25:19-34) (J, P)
2. Isaac in Gerar and Beer-sheba (26:1-35) (J, P)
3. Isaac’s Blessing of Jacob (27:1-45) (J)
4. Jacob’s Departure for Paddan-aram (27:46-28:9) (P)
5. Vision at Bethel (28:10-22) (J and E)
6. Jacob’s Marriages (29:1-30) (J, E?)
7. Jacob’s Children (29:31-30:24) (J and E)
8. Jacob Outwits Laban (30:25-43) (J, E)
9. Jacob’s Departure (31:1-21) (E, J)
10. Laban’s Pursuit (31:22-42) (E, J)
11. The Contract Between Jacob and Laban (31:43-32:3) (J and E)
12. Preparation for the Meeting with Esau (32:4-22) (J and E)
13. Jacob’s Struggle with God (32:23-33) (J)
14. Jacob’s Meeting with Esau (33:1-20) (J, E?)
15. The Rape of Dinah (34:1-31) (J and E)
16. Jacob at Bethel (35:1-29) (E and P)
17. The Descendants of Esau (36:1-43) (P?)
IV. The History of Joseph (37:1-50:26)
A. Joseph Sold into Egypt (37:1-36) (J and E)
1. Judah and Tamar (38:1-30) (J)
2. Joseph’s Temptations (39:1-23) (J)
3. Joseph Interprets the Prisoners’ Dreams (40:1-23) (E)
4. Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dreams (41:1-57) (E, J)
5. First Encounter of Joseph with His Brothers (42:1-38) (E, J)
6. Second Journey to Egypt (43:1-34) (J, E)
7. Judah’s Plea for Benjamin (44:1-34) (J)
8. The Recognition of Joseph (45:1-28) (J and E)
9. Jacob’s Journey to Egypt (46:1-34) (J, E, and P)
10. The Hebrews in Egypt (47:1-31) (J and P)
11. Jacob Adopts Joseph’s Sons (48:1-22) (J and E, P)
12. Jacob’s Blessings (49:1-33) (J?)
13. The Burial of Jacob and the Final Acts of Joseph (50:1-26) (J, E, and P)
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Lasor, Hubbard, and Bush write:
“The first five toledoth structure the primeval prologue, with the major divisions set off by and clustered around them. Thus ch. 1 is closed by 2:4a and the next unit—Eden and the Fall—is concluded by 5:1, which introduces the roll of Adam’s descendants, setting off 2:4b-4:26 as a unit. In 6:9 the formula introduces the narrative of Noah, separating the story of the sons of God and the daughters of men (6:1-4) and the sketch of man’s sin (vv. 5-8), both expressing the extent of the corruption leading to the Flood. Gen. 10:1 begins the Table of Nations, setting off this repeopling of the earth from the flood story of 6:9-9:29; 11:10 introduces the roll of patriarchs after the Flood, setting off the Tower of Babel story in vv. 1-9.” (Old Testament Survey, pp. 69-70).
John S. Kselman writes:
“The theme of God’s promise (Gen. 12:1-3, 7) and its partial or incomplete fulfillment touches both the promise of descendants and of land. The promise of descendants is organized around a series of questions: how will Abram (Abraham) be the father of numerous descendants when he has not even one son? Which of his sons (Ishmael or Isaac) will be the bearer of the promise? Will the chosen son survive to carry on the line (chaps. 22, 27)? The partial fulfillment of the promise of descendants is recorded in the genealogy in Gen. 46:8-27. The promise of land is also delayed in fulfillment. The ancestors to whom Canaan is promised spend more time outside the promised land than in it: Abraham and Sarah in Egypt (chap. 12) and Gerar (chap. 20); Isaac and Rebekah in Gerar (chap. 26); Jacob in Haran (chaps. 29-31); Joseph in Egypt (chaps. 39-50); and Jacob, Joseph’s brothers, and their families also in Egypt (chaps. 46-50).” (Harper’s Bible Commentary, p. 86).
Jay G. Williams writes of the first creation story:
“The liturgy ends with the joyous assertion that after the creation of man, God rested on the seventh day and hallowed it. The notion of a seven-day week did not originate among the Israelites but was observed by both the Mesopotamians and the Canaanites. Among these peoples the shabbatu was regarded as a day of evil portent and hence as a day when all usual activity should cease. In Israel the seventh day was regarded as a day of rejoicing. Why? Because after God created man, he rested. That is, he ceased and desisted; he did not go on creating super and super-super men. The seventh day is holy, because it is a reminder that man is meant to be the dominator of the created world. He is God’s vice-regent and is responsible only to him.” (Understanding the Old Testament, pp. 77-78)
Lasor, Hubbard, and Bush write:
“Literary device also is found in the names used. The correspondence of the name with the person’s function or role is striking in several instances. Adam means ‘mankind’ and Eve is ‘(she who gives) life.’ Surely, when an author of a story names the principal characters Mankind and Life, something is conveyed about the degree of literalness intended! Similarly Cain means ‘forger (of metals)’; Enoch is connected with ‘dedication, consecration’ (4:17; 5:18); Jubal with horn and trumpet (4:21); while Cain, condemned to be a nad, a ‘wanderer,’ goes to live in the land of Nod, a name transparently derived from the same Hebrew root, thus the land of wandering! This suggests that the author is writing as an artist, a storyteller, who uses literary device and artifice. One must endeavor to distinguish what he intends to teach from the literary means employed.” (Old Testament Survey, p. 72)
Samuel Sandmel writes:
“J, the oldest source interspersed in P, is the born storyteller. He is simple and brief. He uses adjectives only when they provide a characterization necessary to the plot. Thus, in the tale of Eve’s temptation by the serpent, he tells us that the serpent is wily; thereby we are led to understand why the serpent does what he does. J, moreover, is a teller of folk tales. He will relate stark tragedy, such as Cain’s murder of his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy. But like any teller of folk tales, J has a very rich sense of humor. (It is unfortunate that the Tanak is often approached so lugubriously that its humor and wit are neither noticed nor appreciated.) Sometimes J’s humor is broad and almost course; he portrays Rachel as sitting on the gods of her father, and unable to rise at her father’s entrance with the excuse that she is in her menstrual period. At other times his humor is more delicate, as when Ephron the Hittite discloses the price of the cave Abraham wants to buy with the words, ‘What are four hundred pices of silver between you and me?’ J has a fondness for puns (these are known technically as paronomasia, a term calculated to obscure the fun in them); he tells us that the wily (‘arum) serpent disclosed to Adam that Adam was naked (‘arom).” (The Hebrew Scriptures, pp. 340-341)
J. Alberto Soggin writes:
“Foremost among the biblical scholars at the end of the last century and in the first decades of this is the figure of Hermann Gunkel. We have already noted the fact that he was the first to introduce the study of literary genres into Old Testament and oriental studies, a method which is appropriate for the anonymous or even pseudonymous character of the writings. Indeed, in the majority of cases it is the only one applicable, if a method is to be used which is not totally alien to the material studied. Gunkel’s commentary on Genesis is fundamental to our theme; in the introduction, which is still a classic and can be considered as setting out a basic programme, he established that Genesis is: (i) a collection of legends, (ii) originally transmitted orally, (iii) which had already been collected into cycles at the oral stage. However, (iv) the sources are more the product of redactional than of creative work, and simply furnished the pre-existent material with a framework and connections; besides, (v) they are not the works of indivudals, whether authors or collectors, but of schools of narrators (scholars now tend to prefer the word ‘tradents’). Therefore (vi) the individual material in the collections has its own history and its own setting, quite independently of its later position in the sources, so that (vii) every lesser unit must be examined by itself, leaving aside its present context.” (Introduction to the Old Testament, pp. 89-90)
James King West writes:
“The reader of Genesis has little difficulty recognizing the unity which inheres in the remainder of the book, chapters 12-50. Even though it is none too easy finding the precise literary classification with which to distinguish these chapters from chapters 1-11 (‘legend’ is the more commonly applied label), in respect to subject matter the differences are apparent. In these chapters we find longer, sustained accounts, centering around the four major patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. The brief and highly compact stories of Genesis 1-11, with their universal themes of human beginnings, here give way to cycles of stories associated with the several Semitic fathers and their families. In the real sense, God is still the chief actor in the drama, but there is less anthropomorphism and more of the localized saga concerning specific tribes and their movements, particularly as these are associated with well-known sacred sites. Through every episode, there runs like a red thread the theme of God’s election of Israel. The pattern of promise and fulfillment, which gives theological substance to the entire Hebrew-Christian history, is here portrayed as having its start in God’s call of Abraham. From this point onward, the tracing of the promise, its renewal with Abraham’s successive offspring and the anticipation of its eventual fulfillment in the Israelite successes of Canaan, is the chief concern of the patriarchal narrative.” (Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 75)
Walter Harrelson writes:
“The great bulk of the remainder of the Book of Genesis (chaps. 37-50) is concerned with one dramatic theme: God’s providential direction of the fortunes of Joseph which resulted not only in the deliverance of the forefathers from prolonged famine in the Promised Land but also in the multiplication of the number and the increase of the wealth of Jacob and his descendants. The story contains materials out of the two basic traditions, J and E, supplemented by priestly materials and by some materials brought into the narratives for special purposes, but apparently not a part of any one of the three narratives.” (Interpreting the Old Testament, p. 67)
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Book of Genesis Dating 📜
As others have said, there’s no consensus. The terminus ad quem or latest possible date is generally considered to be the translation of the Septuagint, which itself cannot be pinpointed exactly but probably occurred in the mid-to-late 3rd century BCE. The terminus a quo (earliest possible date) would depend on anachronisms in the text and references to datable events and locations. If you watch the dozens of lectures by Thomas Römer at Collège de France about Genesis and Exodus, he notes plenty of items that would be difficult to date earlier than the exilic period, like references to cities that didn’t exist yet. I think the development of Hebrew as a literary language with a scribal culture around the 8th century would be the earliest you could go for any biblical text. You also get cascading dependencies where the DH seems to know about the conquest of Jerusalem as a past event, and the other books of the Pentateuch seem to know about Deuteronomy, and many Psalms know about events from the Pentateuch but not necessarily the canonical version, and so on. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/en-thomas-romer/_course.htm&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1677769636202742&usg=AOvVaw0ju8H-29hOTs-RflZTVmsb
This addresses a large number of dating-related items in the Joseph story specifically in this article. For that story in its present form, a dating earlier than the Saite period (664–525 BCE) seems improbable, and a Hellenistic dating (c. 300 BCE) is entirely possible. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2020/01/26/from-robes-to-riches-the-fairytale-of-joseph/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1677769669054298&usg=AOvVaw19TQpViIuZk5bFpaTJxtCh
While the garden/flood both seem to draw on the Sumerian stories, to the best of my knowledge the only other tale in the Mediterranean talking about there being an initial first born couple with one discovering fruit from a tree is the Phonecian creation myth as credited to Sanchuniathon, claimed to have been writing around the time of the Trojan War (currently dated to the mid 13th century BCE):
…were begotten two mortal men, Æon and Protogonus so called: and Æon discovered food from trees.
https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/af/af01.htm
Textual clues:
After ~1300 BC. Iron was not in use before this time. (ch. 4.22)
After ~1200 BC. The presence of the Philistine is anachronistic, since they were one of the Sea Peoples that came to the region at this time. (ch. 21.32)
After ~1200 BC. Lydia didn’t exist until this time, but its height was the eighth century BC. (ch. 10.22)
After ~1100 BC, at least if Genesis is taken in unison with Exodus. Egypt ruled Canaan up to about this time, but the Torah as a whole shows absolutely no knowledge of this fact.
After ~950 BC. There have been at least a few kings of Israel. (ch. 36.31)
After ~930 BC. Domesticated camels were not in the Levant before this time. (ch. 12.16)
After ~600 BC. Cherubs are not mentioned in any other biblical texts that predate the Neo-Babylonian Empire. (ch. 3.24)
Rutgers Professor Gary Rendsburg makes an interesting case for the origin of Genesis coming during the Davidic reign:
https://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/docman/rendsburg/117-the-genesis-of-the-bible/file
How to get the people to go along with all these major changes of the 10th century? Monarchy—an international empire—the centrality of Jerusalem — Zadok as priest. The answer is: write a national epic incorporating all of the earlier traditions back to Abraham, and embed into that narrative anticipations of the present. That is to say, there is a social, religious, and indeed political message in the book of Genesis (less so in the other four books of the Torah, though even there occasional points shine through). Or in other words: tell the story about the past, but reflect upon the present. This was the major accomplishment of the anonymous authors in Jerusalem who created the book of Genesis, to be dated, in my opinion, to the 10th century B. C. E .
For more:
Gen 10 is rather helpful for removing early datings for Genesis.
10:2 The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras.
Gomer refers to the Cimmerians who pushed into northern Anatolia in the 8th c. BCE.
Magog, called Mat-gugu in Assyrian records, literally means the land of Gyges, the Lydian king (died ~650 BCE) in central western Anatolia. (Gog of Magog, being Gyges of Lydia.)
Madai refers to the Medes, who fought the Battle of the Eclipse with the Lydians (~585 BCE).
Javan (LXX ιωυαν) = Ionia.
Tubal is the post-Hittite state of Tabal with known kings dating from ~850-650 BCE.
Meshekh is referred to in the sources as Mushki and is the land of the Phrygians.
All point to a concern with northern Syria and Anatolia with the earliest date to ~850 BCE, but gravitating a few centuries later. (Tiras has not successfully been identified.)
10:3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah.
Ashkenaz refers to the Scythians, called Ashkuza by the Assyrians. They dislodged the Cimmerians from the upper Euphrates.
Riphath = Arpad, established in the 9th c. BCE. Current name, Tel-Rifaat. Beseiged by Tiglath-Pileser III ~740 BCE.
Togarmah refers to the city of Til-Garimmu & called Til-kar-me by the Assyrians (in a Tiglath-Pileser stele). It lies just south-east of Tabal.
Consistent in location with the previous verse, all within Anatolia & northern Syria. All places strongly dated to the time of Tiglath-Pileser III.
These two verses point to a dating in the first millenium BCE, no earlier than ~650 due to the Magog reference. (Other parts of Gen 10 are also helpful.)
Sources include Mario Liverani, The Ancient Near East, and Tadmor & Yamada, The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, v.1.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315879895-22/old-assyrian-period-mario-liverani?context=ubx&refId=1bbff6fd-b5c1-4ec5-a6a6-e7d151f450b1
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Full analysis on late-dating of the Torah:
The allusions to realities from the seventh century BCE and later are good representations of the best arguments for late dating the Torah. The Table of the Nations in Genesis 10 contains numerous examples. Genesis 10:2-3 states: “The sons of Japheth were Gomer and Magog and Madai and Javan and Tubal and Meshech and Tiras. The sons of Gomer were Ashkenaz and Riphath and Togarmah”. Many of these names (Magog, Meshech, Tubal, Gomer, Togarmah) appear in Ezekiel 38:2-4, which either served as a source for the names in Genesis 10:2-3 or demonstrates that the list reflects the political situation in the exilic period. The name Magog here is generally thought to be a transliteration into Hebrew of the Assyrian mat-Gugi “land of Gyges”, which is a designation for Lydia (cf. mat-Aššur as the Assyrian name for “Assyria”). The historical Gyges (seventh century BCE) made Lydia into a regional power, threatening both Greek Ionian cities and Assyrian territorial claims in Asia Minor (i.e. the peoples mentioned in Genesis 10:2-3 and Ezekiel 38:2-4), and the passage in Ezekiel envisions a future eschatological Gyges (Gog of Magog) who will threaten the East again. The name Magog in Genesis 10:2 could only date to the seventh century BCE and later. Genesis 10:4 then mentions Tarshish as among the descendents of Javan.
This name is the same as the Iberian region called Tartessos where the Phoenicians established a mining and trading colony. According to Benjamin Noonan (in Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible; Penn State, 2019), this name is probably a borrowed Tartessian toponym and was unknown in the East before Phoenician colonization. What is notable here is that the toponym was borrowed into Hebrew as the name of a semi-precious stone, probably chrysolite which was indeed mined in Spain according to Pliny the Elder (Historia Naturalis 37.43.127). This stone is mentioned in Ezekiel 28:13 as one of the jewels adorning the king of Tyre (cf. also 1:16, 10:9) and it occurs also in the Pentateuch in Exodus 28:20, 39:13, anachronistic for the narrated era of Moses and reflecting the period when Phoenician trade was at its height in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Genesis 10:8-12 is the famous section on Nimrod, a name unknown as such in Mesopotamian sources but occurring in Micah 5:6 (written in the late eighth century BCE) which calls Assyria the “land of Nimrod”. The Assyrian toponyms (particularly Ninevah, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen) suggest knowledge of the Neo-Assyrian period in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE when Ninevah and Calah were the capitals of the empire. The story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 appears to reflect the rebuilding of Etemenanki in the reigns of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II (with the language in the story echoing the foundation cylinder’s “make its top vie with the heavens…mud bricks without number and mold-baked bricks…asphalt and bitumen”).
Similarly, the city of Ur is associated with the Chaldeans in 11:28 which reflects the Chaldean rule of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty (cf. Ezra 5:12, Ezekiel 12:13), with Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus both building significantly in Ur. The sons of Ishmael in Genesis 25:13-15 correspond to the Shumu’il coalition of Arabian tribes that existed during the period of Assyrian hegemony from the late eighth to the late seventh centuries BCE. The tribes of Shumu’il mentioned in Assyrian cuneiform texts are identical with the names listed in the biblical text: Nebayot, Qedar, Massa, Teima, etc. The twenty pieces of silver in Genesis 37:28 (as currency that is counted out rather than weighed), the thirty shekels of silver in Exodus 21:32, and the twenty shekels of silver in Leviticus 27:5 presume the Lydian invention of coinage in the seventh century BCE. Then there is the evidence of literary dependence between Dtr and Neo-Assyrian vassal treaties and the Esarhaddon loyalty oath in particular which dates to 672 BCE (see Bernard M. Levinson’s “Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty as the Source for the Canon Formula in Deuteronomy 13:1” in JAOS, 2010 and C. l. Crouch’s Israel and the Assyrians: Deuteronomy, the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon, and the Nature of Subversion; SBL, 2014).
One other consideration is the ignorance of many of the laws in the Pentateuch in earlier eighth and seventh century BCE prophets. In Hosea 2:13, Isaiah 1:13, and Amos 8:5 the sabbath is still a full moon festival (= Akkadian šapattu), with the cultic sabbath in Exodus 31:12-17, 35:1-3 (belonging to P) representing an exilic merger of the non-cultic day of rest with the sabbath, according the latter new cultic functions. According to Rainer Albertz, the weekly sabbath arose as a substitute for “the offering of firstfruits, sacrificial meals, and sacrificial vows” which “could not be performed in a foreign land without a shrine of Yahweh” (Israel in Exile, p. 108; SBL, 2003). Dtr legislates the forbidding of head-shaving in mourning and the erection of standing stones (Deuteronomy 14:1, 16:22), which Isaiah was unaware of (Isaiah 7:20, 15:2, 19:19, 22:12). There are many more examples of this as noted by many scholars, also there is the evidence from Elephantine in Egypt showing discrepancies between cultic worship (such as resting on the sabbath) and what is legislated in the Pentateuch.
Sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23044955
For more,
Karel Van Der Toorn’s “Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible” (Harvard, 2007) spends much of its ink discussing Mesopotamia and Egypt for information on “scribal culture”, for the simple reason that the Bible itself is so skimpy in revealing anything about the people who actually did the writing. This leads to other questions, like what kind of a society even had a “scribal culture”, and schools to train scribes? A certain level of political and social development is required for a society to make these things necessary. Complex administration, diplomacy, and taxation need writing to operate. The state of affairs that existed in the early first millennium in Israel would not support the need for such things.
“The Making of the Bible” by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schroter (Harvard, 2021), estimates that the total population of Israel in the early 1st millennium was about 55,000, with an army of maybe 1,500. This early polity didn’t need much of a bureaucracy. Scribal culture was still a couple of hundred years down the road. Another point made by both these books is that the societies of the the time, even the literate ones, were primarily oral. Schmid and Schroter say the earliest scriptures were stories, songs, proverbs and prayers that date from the 9th and 8th centuries (though these may have been transmitted orally from earlier times). Writings at the time didn’t play a central role in in the religious cult. “Like the religious paraphernalia in the temple, they (stories, songs, prayers) formed one aspect of cultic activities.”
Another aspect of the dating regards larger political and social exposures. For instance, why would the core of Deuteronomy be in the form of an Assyrian vassal treaty? Both knowledge of Assyrians and the existence of such treaties is required. Books as different as “The Bible Unearthed” by Finkelstein and Silberman, and “Who Wrote the Bible?” by Richard Elliott Friedman, push the dating of significant portions of the Torah into the 7th century.
In “The Bible and the Believer”, Peter Enns’ essay, “Protestantism and Biblical Criticism”, points out the use of the legend of Sargon in the story of Moses (among other things). How would Torah author/editors have been acquainted with Akkadian literature before living in exile in Babylon?
In the same book, Marc Zvi Brettler’s essay, “My Bible,” raises an interesting question: when does the Bible start to refer to the Torah as a collection of five books, rather than to specific instances of “law’ or “instruction”? He looks particularly at Chronicles to see that it now refers to the Law of Moses, or the Law which was written by Moses, rather than the more limited use of “law” which occurs in Lev.6:2, or Ex.12:49. This puts knowledge of the larger Torah into the Persian period.
Authorship of the book of Genesis
Why the traditional authorship cannot be Moses:
I already showed arguments for dating it late, which is way after the traditional Moses timeline.
Here are some arguments (not made by me, but I find it very convincing):
Genesis contains many doubled narratives, or narratives with duplicate motifs. Take for example the two Creation narratives, God giving two commands to Noah, God giving two promises to Noah after the Flood etc. Now if we take these doublets, and organize them into two categories, we’d notice the following:
Firstly, each category will have the same name for God. One category will consistently call God Yahweh, while the other consistently calls God Elohim.
Secondly, the category that consistently calls God Elohim will consistently share the same style and vocabulary, while the one that calls God Yahweh will likewise be the same.
Scholars generally agree, from a textual-critical perspective (among others), that Genesis is at least compiled from two different sources. Therefore, not Moses.
Now, on to more specific locations in Genesis:
The geneaology of Genesis 10 clearly has an interpolation from verses 8 – 12. The order of genealogy is disrupted here. The sons and grandsons of Cush were alreaady mentioned in Genesis 7. However, verse 8 takes it back to Nimrod being a ‘son’ of Cush. It is akin to a family tree where we have reached the level of ‘grandson of X’, before seeing another line on the same level, where it says ‘son of X’. This is clearly an addition.
In Genesis 10, we see verse 20 saying that the ‘sons of Ham’ already had multiple languages. Yet, in Genesis 11, we see a chronological disjunct: when Gen 11:1 claims that ‘the whole world had one language and a common speech’. Again, we cannot take this to be a smooth historical narrative. Clearly, these are multiple pre-Genesis stories juxtaposed and redacted into one later text.
Sources:
From Prof. Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible (1st 3 chapters): https://biblebrisket.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/first-3-chapters-of-who-wrote-the-bible-by-richard-elliott-friedman.pdf
From Yale Divinity School: https://divinity.yale.edu/sites/default/files/session-1-genesis-introduction_0.pdf
From the Biologos Foundation, by Bible scholar Joseph Lam: https://wp.biologos.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/lam_scholarly_essay.pdf
NRSV New Interpreter’s Study Bible, Genesis Commentary
Did Moses write the Torah? The Wellhausen/”Documentary”/J E P D theory claims Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). Instead, it asserts that multiple authors or “sources” wrote them. (Here we’re putting aside such issues as whether or not Moses used pre-existing sources for Genesis and Joshua’s apparent writing of the postscript in Deut. 34 that describes Moses’ death). Hence, the abbreviation comes from the hypothesis that one writer used “Jehovah” as a name for God, another write used “Elohim,” another one developed the Priestly code, and finally one wrote Deuteronomy. This 19th century higher critic theory, was developed and restated especially in its standard form by the German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, in two books published in 1876 and 1878. The Documentary theory, which is another name by which Wellhausen’s theory is known, denies that Moses or any single human author wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (the five books of the Pentateuch). In the English-speaking academic world where religious liberals predominate in various schools of divinity, seminaries, and religious studies departments, this theory still holds sway by default, as if it were still 1880. The deep irony is that from a liberal theological perspective (i.e., one that denies the Bible was inspired by God) the somewhat newer Form Criticism school (as applied to the Old Testament) has generally blown the Documentary theory to bits! That is, later liberal scholarship basically wiped out earlier liberal scholarship concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch, but the “default setting” for religious liberals in the English-speaking world concerning the Pentateuch’s authorship remains the Documentary theory basically as Wellhausen told it.
What’s usually agreed on is that there were multiple authors whose texts were combined into one to form the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Different scholars disagree on how to divide up those source texts, but they usually agree that one source called the “Priestly source” (so named because a lot of its material pertains to the priesthood and the tabernacle, and called P for short) can be singled out. It’s agreed that P was combined with the rest of the material, called “non-P,” at some point, but there are competing theories for the details beyond that (Did P rewrite non-P, adding their own material throughout, or did a later editor take copies of P and non-P and combine them into one? How many authors’ works went into non-P: can we identify it as the interweaving of two long narratives, or is it a compilation of several shorter fragments?).
This article and this accompanying video look at the story of Noah’s ark as a case study in how the sources can be distinguished from each other and argue for one possible way that they were put together (P tried to write their own version of non-P as a replacement, but a later editor decided to combine the two versions into the text as we now know it). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdXLafLOAoY), (https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/reading-the-fractures-of-genesis-noahs-flood/)
Or, “ The Supplementary Hypothesis–This revision of the older hypothesis contended that underlying our Pentateuch is a work completely or relatively unified (a so-called “E document” which favored the title Elohim for Israel’s God), which was subsequently expanded by one or several hands, rather like the growth of a snowball, as extra materials were added to the original source from other traditions or from the editor’s own imagination.”
This quote can be found in :https://www.emmausinstitute.net/_media/documents/Critical_Study_of_Pent.pdf
Tradition credits Moses as the author of Genesis, as well as the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and most of Deuteronomy; however, modern scholars, especially from the 19th century onward, place the books’ authorship in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, hundreds of years after Moses is supposed to have lived.[3][4] Based on scientific interpretation of archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence, most scholars consider Genesis to be primarily mythological rather than historical.
Sources cited for this there are: Van Seters (1998), p. 5 and Davies (1998), p. 37
Richard Elliott Friedman: The Bible With Sources Revealed – take a look at that, for example, as it shows which sources are thought to have written the Pentateuch (which includes Genesis): https://merrimackvalleyhavurah.wordpress.com/torah-study/who-wrote-the-torah/the-documentary-hypothesis-evidence/
Decent summary:
https://www.quora.com/What-evidence-is-there-for-the-documentary-hypothesis-other-than-disputed-Biblical-verses/answer/Earnest-Farr?ch=10&oid=82955048&share=f7d31bde&srid=u44UW8&target_type=answer
https://bible.org/article/genesis-1-2-light-ancient-egyptian-creation-myths
Traditional Mosaic authorship holds simply that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, which was then passed on through the generations. There’s very little evidence apart from tradition to support this, and there are basically no mainstream scholars who still subscribe to it as a serious theory.
There are some minimalists from the Copenhagen School that hold (or held at some point) that the Pentateuch is a product of the Second Temple Period, and that none (or virtually none) of the biblical books predate the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus (late-6th century BCE). See e.g. Thompson (1993), The Bible in History; Davies (1992), In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’. The most extreme position is held by Lemche (1998), The Israelites in History and Tradition, who dates the bulk of the Hebrew Bible to the Hellenistic period. While their positions are probably more solidly supported by archaeological data than the maximalist positions are, there’s a great counterpoint to the Copenhagen School in Dever (2001), What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?. (NB: Dever has since shifted his position more closely to minimalism; his 2017 book Beyond the Texts is well worth reading.)
Few mainstream biblical scholars – even those on the more critical side of biblical historical reliability – hold either extreme; Mosaic authorship has not really been a serious academic position since the Documentary Hypothesis took hold, and very few scholars support a complete postexilic composition date for the bulk of the Hebrew Bible (let alone a Hellenistic date!). The generally agreed-upon date for final-form Genesis is sometime during the Babylonian Exile, with strands (e.g. potentially the Garden of Eden) predating that time. There’s also a general sense that some parts of the Pentateuch are much older than that, e.g. the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah might be as early 11th or 10th century BCE.
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Is the Genesis story literal? 📜
Most of the Church fathers took the Genesis account, as well as the rest of the bible, entirely literally. For example, St. Basil writes (Source):
There are those truly, who do not admit the common sense of the Scriptures, for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who see in a plant, in a fish, what their fancy wishes, who change the nature of reptiles and of wild beasts to suit their allegories, like the interpreters of dreams who explain visions in sleep to make them serve their own ends. For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel.” [Romans 1:16]
Nonetheless there were some notable exceptions in the early Church. St. Augustine notably argued the the six days of creation were symbolic (though he believed the rest of the Genesis was literal), while Origen was willing to take a much more figurative approach to the Bible as a whole (Source):
Nor was it only with regard to those Scriptures which were composed down to the advent of Christ that the Holy Spirit thus dealt; but as being one and the same Spirit, and proceeding from one God, He dealt in the same way with the evangelists and apostles. For even those narratives which He inspired them to write were not composed without the aid of that wisdom of His, the nature of which we have above explained. Whence also in them were intermingled not a few things by which, the historical order of the narrative being interrupted and broken up, the attention of the reader might be recalled, by the impossibility of the case, to an examination of the inner meaning. But, that our meaning may be ascertained by the facts themselves, let us examine the passages of Scripture. Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars — the first day even without a sky? And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood, so that anyone eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil? No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it.
The departure of Cain from the presence of the Lord will manifestly cause a careful reader to inquire what is the presence of God, and how anyone can go out from it. But not to extend the task which we have before us beyond its due limits, it is very easy for anyone who pleases to gather out of holy Scripture what is recorded indeed as having been done, but what nevertheless cannot be believed as having reasonably and appropriately occurred according to the historical account. The same style of Scriptural narrative occurs abundantly in the Gospels, as when the devil is said to have placed Jesus on a lofty mountain, that he might show Him from thence all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. How could it literally come to pass, either that Jesus should be led up by the devil into a high mountain, or that the latter should show him all the kingdoms of the world (as if they were lying beneath his bodily eyes, and adjacent to one mountain), i.e., the kingdoms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians? Or how could he show in what manner the kings of these kingdoms are glorified by men? And many other instances similar to this will be found in the Gospels by anyone who will read them with attention, and will observe that in those narratives which appear to be literally recorded, there are inserted and interwoven things which cannot be admitted historically, but which may be accepted in a spiritual signification.
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