Origins of the Book of Genesis

Biblical scholars largely concede that Moses did not write Genesis. Some biblical scholars identified five separate authors of the five “books of Moses.” This idea is called the Documentary Hypothesis. According to this theory, the first five books of the Old Testament (called the Pentateuch) were compiled from several different sources no earlier than the Persian Period (539 to 334 B.C.). We don’t actually know who the authors or scribes were who wrote or compiled the Torah, possibly from older oral stories and perhaps religious liturgical material. Each of these writers has been given the a letter by which they are identified:

1. The Jahwist (or J) - the oldest written source (c. 950 B.C.) probably compiled in the southern kingdom of Judah. It is named according to the use of the name “YHWH,” or Jaweh, in German, a Hebrew name for God  (called the Tetragrammaton) in its text.
   

2. The Elohist (or E) - written c 850 B.C. The northern kingdom's (i.e. Israel) interpretation. As above, it is named because of its preferred use of “Elohim” for the deity.
   

3. The Deuteronomist (or D) - written c 650-250 B.C. Dating specifically from the time of King Josiah of Judah and responsible for the book of Deuteronomy as well as Joshua and most of the subsequent books up to 2 Kings.
   

4. The Priestly Source (or P) - written during or after the exile, c 550-400 B.C. So named because of its focus on Levitical laws.
   

5. The R Source (for Redactor) which consists of the joined together writings of J, E, D and P to form a single, coherent work. In some cases the R scribe or scribes compiled large blocks of text from a particular source. In other cases R mixed and matched text to create a “patchwork” block.
   

So, how did this work? Under this hypothesis, looking at the Creation story:

1. Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 were written by P.
   

2. Genesis 2:4 was written, or perhaps compiled, by R.
   

3. Genesis 2:5 through 4:26 were written by J.
   

The Documentary Hypothesis idea has gained in popularity since it was first proposed in the late 19th century. However, increasingly, since the 1970s, the Documentary Hypothesis has come under criticism. Many recent Biblical scholars argue that the Torah  was compiled from a multitude of small fragments rather than a handful of larger source texts. These scholars generally argue that the Torah was gradually assimilated from these mini-stories and sayings over many centuries and through many hands, finally to be compiled into a whole sometime in the 4th century B.C.  One thing that most biblical scholars generally agree upon is that the Torah is a text that came to be as a result of many people working over a long period of time. Opponents of this research of a more Fundamentalist  mindset argue that it is difficult to reconcile with the historical, miraculous, and prophetic elements which they claim to be basic to the first five books of the Bible. According to this Jewish and Christian conservative religious tradition, the Torah was written entirely by Moses at the direct dictation from God. The so-called Mosaic Authorship is problematic from a logical point of view for several reasons. First, Moses’ death is described as a past event in Deuteronomy. Other events in the Torah actually took place after the death of Moses. To make up for some of these rather rather difficult contradictions, some Jewish scholars began to argue that the parts of the Torah that were impossible for Moses to have written were produced at a later date, under divine dictation, by Joshua.

The composition of Genesis argues that the God of the Hebrews had always been YHWH, the Creator. But the scholarly tradition starting in the late 19th century, has increasingly found that this theme within Genesis was the work of the various authors of the book who lived in a later period, by which time the Hebrews had developed into exclusive monotheists. In 1929, the German biblical scholar, Albrecht Alt, wrote an article in which he argued that the various early Patriarchs were unrelated for the most part, and had wandered into Canaan at different times, and in different Hebrew nomadic groups.  These Patriarchs had partially assimilated Canaanite religion and begun to worship a Canaanite god named El (hence the “Elohim”). Alt argued that El and YHWH were essentially the same and that this god of the Hebrews revealed Himself and aided the Hebrews in their wanderings and established them in Israel. From the 1930s, biblical scholars, on the evidence of an increasing quantity of discovered Near Eastern texts, began to argue that the various Patriarchs identified in Genesis may have made “covenants” with various Near Eastern deities, and that it was not until the Mosaic Period when the Hebrews made a “national covenant” with YHWH, that the Hebrew people began to see themselves increasingly as exclusively monotheistic. Synopses of scholarly wrangling on the subject may be seen here.

Contents of Genesis

Genesis can be divided into two parts: The first part, sometimes called the “primeval history” contains the Creation, the story of Adam and Eve, the recounting of their “generations,” and the story of Noah and the Flood, and the “generations” of Noah. The second part contains the stories, or in more epic terms, the “cycles” of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. The book ends with the death of Joseph. Robert Alter, the translator of your text, argues that Genesis is thematically whole. For Alter, it is comprised of a story beginning with the creation of man, and continues to follow the “seed” of Adam and the peopling of the world from thence, through the founding of a fledgling Hebrew nation and the spread of it through the known world, from the Middle East and to Egypt. It is, thus, a story of civilization.

Other scholars have noted that Genesis appears to have two rather jarring themes that indicate different sources and different methods of accumulation. The first part, the “primeval history,” appears to have been influenced by written sources from Near Eastern myth, especially the Enuma Elish. The recounting of the various generations of Adam and Noah may have been influenced by “Table of Nations” stories written by Greeks in the 7th century. The second part, the Patriarch cycle, appears to have been taken from accumulations of Hebrew and other Near Eastern oral traditions, and may have been compiled from three or more separate Hebrew patriarch story cycles.