The Journey Begins

Genesis Ch. 1-11

Everything has a beginning. Every trip, every relationship, every story, every life has a beginning. The Book, too, has a beginning. The chapters are short so we should be able to get through this in a couple of weeks. I want to watch out for this beginning, though, because this is a story that many of us think we know very well. I think for most people the story of the seven day creation, Adam and Eve, and the Flood are the main topics that come to mind when they think of the book of Genesis. A lot of people get into science vs. religion arguments over the stories of the Creation and the Flood, and the journey can get stuck before it’s even off and running. I mean its only eleven chapters out of fifty!

These first five books of the Bible are also the first five books of the Jewish holy book called the Torah. It is used by Christians as the events leading up to their savior, Jesus, and it is respected in Islam as a message from Allah that is confirmed by the Holy Quran.

The Torah consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Torah is both a written and spoken tradition and was passed down first as stories told from one generation to another then later as written 'books' when the Jewish people began to keep written records. Tradition says that the Torah was dictated to Moses directly from God at Mt. Sinai up until the last verses of Deuteronomy that details the death of Moses. However, modern biblical scholars believe it was probably written much later when the Jews were prisoners in Babylon. In fact, the story of the creation and the flood can actually be traced back to Sumerian and Babylonian origins. They would have been known to the Jews who could have easily incorporated them into their own histories to fill in the gap between their story of Abraham and the beginning of all time.