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Genesis is the book of beginnings. It is the first book of the Bible and along with the next four books, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy make up the Pentateuch. By tradition, which the New Testament appears to accept as true, these books are attributed to the hand of Moses.

Many modern Bible scholars and historians believe that they can identify several different source documents or traditions woven into the book of Genesis, but this is not necessarily incompatible with a compilation at the time of Moses, or indeed by him, even if some of it (e.g. Deuteronomy) was later reworked. Much of Biblical scholarship regarding Genesis is taken up with identifying the influence of the supposed source documents, and with identifying the world view of the authors. Such studies may be of great interest to the historian, but form no part of this exploration of the book.

A common approach to this book is to seek to compare the story or stories of the creation which the book gives, with what can be gleaned or understood through modern scientific research. In a similar manner the accounts of the patriarchs are compared with modern knowledge or understandings of ancient history. This leads to a voluntary or involuntary conclusion about the reliability of the Bible. As a result of such an approach most of the world today would dismiss the first two or three chapters of the Bible as being unreliable, and finds the supposed accounts of the patriarchs unproven. If the opening of the Bible is unreliable, then the rest of it may be suspect also.

An alternative approach is to treat the Bible’s account of the creation as merely poetic, giving a romanticised view of the origins of life on earth. At the least this approach marginalises the Bible and discounts the ability to rely on it for really important truth.

The approach in these studies will be to treat the text as part of the message that the Bible as a whole would give us, and so seek to discover what the text tells us as part of the message of the book as a whole, and of the Bible as a whole. The task in studying Genesis is not to test the detail of the text with a scientific appreciation of our earliest history, but to seek to understand what message the text is actually giving us, and how that message may inform or be informed by other portions of scripture. Thus when we read the text we need to ask ourselves not just why did it happen this way, but also why are we told about it in this manner?

As far as the compatibility of the stories in Genesis with scientific record is concerned the position taken in these studies is that such comparisons and indeed any consideration of how God created the world is outside the scope of a true study of the book of Genesis because the story of Genesis is not written as a scientific record, and to seek to make it such runs the risk of missing the message that the text has been given to convey to us.

To put it crudely, science is concerned with how things came into being, Genesis is concerned to tell us who was behind it and why the things that we experience around us are as they are.

As with all commentaries in this series the Bible translation used is the New American Standard Bible for which thanks is recorded to the Lockman Foundation for permission to quote the NASB.

Outline and structure

The book of Genesis begins God’s message to mankind. Its big theme is the goodness of God and the purpose of God to bring blessing to mankind. The second major theme in the book is that sin, or acting outside of God’s plan, purpose or direction, is the real enemy of mankind. It is sin that man should fear, because it is sin that brings the ruination of mankind, and it is sin that destroys all of man’s relationships.

Genesis describes the inevitability of man’s failure to achieve the perfection that he often seeks, and identifies the reason for this as being separated or independent from God. The book also declares however that God has refused to abandon mankind, and it sets out how God will in spite of sin bring blessing to mankind through His grace.

In this commentary the message of the book is presented in five major sections.

1 Creation and the goodness of God 1:1 – 2:3

2. Sin, the enemy of mankind 2:4 – 11:26

3. The grace of God – righteousness through faith 11:27-25:18

4. The significance of the sovereignty of God 25:19-37:1

5 The purpose of God, blessing in righteousness 37:2 -50:26

Of all the books in the Bible, Genesis probably has the most easily identified section markers. The phrase ‘these are the records of the generations of’ or something similar appears eleven times in the book – 2.4, 5:1, 6:9, 10:1, 11:10, 11:27, 25:12, 25:19, 36:1, 36:9, 37:2. It will be observed that the major sections in our commentary often include more than one of the Genesis section-markers. Thus the section-markers at 5:1, 6:9, 10:1 and 11:10 are treated as marking a development in the argument of the book but within the overall theme of the explanation of the damage done to mankind by sin itself.

If Genesis is read as the beginning of God’s message to man, it ceases to be just a curious presentation of ancient history or myth, and becomes the outline of the revelation of an argument that is just as relevant and as pressing to mankind as it was when the book was first written, or indeed when the events recorded in the book occurred.

The reader of Genesis is invited to consider God’s explanation and argument and determine for him or herself whether this God is indeed as good as His message proclaims.