Joe the book of Genesis first book of the Bible and the face of it looks like history going from creation down to the time with the Israelites go down to Egypt now looking at it we see three different segments in the book that fall out fairly obviously the first one being the primeval history which would take us down to Genesis 11 then we have the story of the patriarchs and then at the end of Genesis you have the story of Joseph which is a much longer story than anything else that we have in the book
now that's obviously one way of dividing the book you know as scholars we tend to see a different division in this where you have different strands woven together yeah Genesis is actually the the book where scholars first discovered or theorized that there was maybe more than one author at work here we have developed names for these authors one of them we call the J source made famous by Harold Bloom among others in his book the J source this is you want to explain I just write they call it why we call this J we call
it J it was developed in Germany so there J is ry and it stands for the divine name Yahweh which is God's proper name according to this author who has characters using it from the very beginning the very beginning based they're using this name for God whereas in the two other sources they don't they refer to God as Elohim or just a familiar title God there are two of those that that use the title Elohim one we call the L o hist for the very reason that he uses that name and one who we called
the priestly source because eventually that author's priestly inclinations and interests particularly in the entirety of the Book of Leviticus will become prominent and obvious but these three authors each wrote works that span from part of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy telling much the same story they're telling it differently and we can trace which texts belong to which one of these authors on the basis of what they think happened and whether they think that the characters knew the divine name Yahweh and and other details like this of course is something that all scholars agree on
the basic assumption of multiple hands is something that most scholars agree and that necessarily need the division of them right but no you mention Deuteronomy a lot of people will have heard of four sources so Deuteronomy is the fourth source there is the bulk of Deuteronomy is the source that we call D for deuteronomist but insofar as there's no Deuteronomy in Genesis in Genesis we deal only with the three sources je and P E and now we start out obviously enough with P yes because the first creation story and then we have the J creation
story which makes a very nice contrast with that and then at the L o hist only Tunes in when Abraham comes on the scene that's right it's not clear whether there was a beginning to the elohist that went back further that we've lost there's no need to say so just because J and P decided to start with creation doesn't mean everybody needs to yeah II story kicks in with Abraham well we'll come back to that division of sources from time to time as we go along but I thought maybe we should start out here by
talking a little bit about the nature of this book of Genesis as a whole I think a lot of people picking this up would figure this is history this is actually the story of what happened when I was in graduate school a couple of years ago from Brazil is saying that this was essentially reliable history now I think most people would grant it down to the flood okay that's something else yeah I remember teaching I remember teaching our introductory course and having a student come up to me and I I'm totally fine with creation and
the flood and the Tower of Babel being in the realm of mythology but the patriarchs and had a little more trouble with that because we do think of these in part it I think it has to do with the fact that we understand Abraham as being the beginning of Israel traditionally for Judaism the first Jew right there's a far stronger claim to those characters being real because that's really where our story tends to begin our specific story the problem is at least in the biblical chronology the patriarchs would have to live quite early I think
Abraham around 2100 BC if you if you work out the math yes but as as you know there are some significant anachronism then in the text yeah there are quite a number of them for example the camel wasn't even domesticated until the end you write Miriam they do write these shows up Beersheba which is a place we'll come across and some of the stories wasn't even settled apparently Abraham is supposed to have come from were of the cattle tease and now at least I think the majority opinion at the moment would say that or wouldn't
have been known as ur of the chaldeans until the neo-babylonian period which would get you down into the 600's and 700s anyway right so several hundred years my favourite anachronism is certainly their multiple encounters with the Philistines indeed whom we know yet did not arrive in that area until about the 12th century so more or less the same time that Israel was supposed to have come after thee after the Exodus right and so but but but nowhere near the patriot over near the patriarchs and then that leaves us with the problem of how do we
make of the patriarchs are these to be regarded as historical figures at all are they just legendary figures are the characters that somebody made up it's in my opinion least it's hard to imagine and that they are fully fully invented yet you know complete from scratch invented I don't know how you come up with the names and the individual episodes especially when multiple authors as we said all shared the same characters right it's not as if somebody came up with Abraham and then everybody else thought well that sounds like a night character I'll write a
story about him too but they all seem to have thought that there was somebody named Abraham and Isaac and to Jacob to say that this is history though is probably going too far I think what we have more here is ancestral legends who would we think of as analogies King Arthur maybe King Arthur he leaves even even a theory Robin Hood Yeah right a historical figure like Arthur also or SOI storable figures you can say there was someone maybe with a name like that who might have lived in that area yeah but about whom stories
have been told generation after generation mostly orally yep and in the case of the patriarchs stories being told about them orally that only quite late were written down and in different forms which i think is another indication that you have a variety of orally transmitted it reminds me of a joke about the sword of William the Conqueror which was supposedly in the British Museum at one point and somebody asked is that really the sword of William the Conqueror and they said oh yes it's had about ten new blades and twenty new handles in the meantime
but it's the sword of William the Conqueror and I think the same here that who knows whether anything that's told about these characters corresponds to what happened but it would agree with you there must be some kind of a historical nucleus to it there's something to the name is also right one of the one of the data the data that's always brought up is that the names that they have Abraham Isaac and especially Isaac and Jacob match very well with names that we know to have exist did not in the 2100 s but but but
you know reasonably early on yeah in this in in the period you know before we think of before David before the monarchy before we think of Israel proper now one of the great advances in the study of Genesis I think was about a hundred years ago German scholar named Hermann Gunkel man who invented what was called form criticism and really it works probably best on Genesis his idea was that what you should ask is why was a story like this told and there are many stories here that you can see we're told to explain phenomena
that were known we'll have a couple of examples of cultic etiologies why is this a holy place questions of that sort and i think that will give us some opportunity to come back later on maybe and talk more about the kind of material that we have in these patriarchal stories yeah and we should probably say something though at the outset about the religion of the patriarchs these they weren't Jews right not only were only were they not Jews they were they were effectively non-israelite that's yes that's right I mean when we think of the religion
of Israel we tend to think about the religious tenets and practices that are handed down at Sinai that we see in all of the sacrificial laws and in Deuteronomy particularly where you know there's everybody worships in Jerusalem and there's festivals and there's a real structure to it the patriarchs are very haphazard with their with their religious practices they are go they go from place to place and everywhere they go they build an altar and they sacrifice and then they move on and they leave that altar behind and this is remarkable because later on and the
biblical tradition you will get a lot of polemic against people offering sacrifices under every Green Tree Deuteronomy will say you should only offer sacrifice in one place you might say the patriarchs to some degree are illustrating the kind of religious practice the Deuteronomy was again I don't think there's any question I think I would even say that you could you could view it in terms of right the rest of the Bible especially the rest of the story of the Pentateuch looks back on the characters and generous in Genesis as sort of they were worshipping the
god gods in the old way right there was an old an old time religion that was has we don't we don't practice it that way anymore but but they did so it's it's there's some nostalgia it looks like for a bygone period at least he's learning the perspective of the text yeah it's worthless prehistory for the biblical period and we'll have opportunities as we go along now to talk about what we now make of all of this but perhaps that's enough to set the scene for the start
