> > First off, Genesis did not come from folk-lore, it was written by Moses, who in turn heard it from the Man Himself.


Well.

Ahem.

I've done a lot of reading on this subject (and taken several courses on it, too) and I beg to differ. Biblical scholars believe that the book of Genesis, and the Pentateuch as a whole (the Pentateuch is the first five books of the Bible, which in long-standing Jewish tradition are supposed to have been composed by Moses. Personally I find Moses's account of his own death and burial in Deuteronomy compelling) were in fact written by a number of different authors, whose work was at some later time edited into the form we know and love today. This is called the source hypothesis.

There are many different, competing theories of exactly what the different sources are, how they should be divided, and how they were put together, but almost all serious biblical study today is done in the context of the source hypothesis (in this sense it's a bit like evolution, which is also almost entirely accepted by an establishment that likes to bicker about the details.) Most people say there are at least two major strains of tradition and authorship in Genesis. These are known as the J (for Jehovah, which is a bad translation of YHWH, the unspoken name of God) and P (for Priestly) sources.

How do we know these sources are different? By doing a whole lot of close-reading. Compare the events of the creations stories in Gen 1 and Gen 2-3 -- they're very different, both in the specific order and purpose of events but especially in tone. In Genesis 1 God is aloof, majestic, dramatic; Genesis 2-3 he's widely anthropomorphized, going so far as to fashion man from clay with his hands. In Genesis 3 God goes walking in the Garden of Eden in the evening, in the breeze -- presumably because, like for any of this, it's more comfortable to go walking in a garden in the evening, when it's cool.


This personal, physical God is the star of the J source, so-called because (until Exodus, anyway) it refers to God almost exclusively as YHWH Elohim, translated in most bibles as the LORD God. The P source, featured in Genesis 1, calls him Elohim, usually translated as just God. (Elohim is a Hebrew noun that can be either proper or casual, as well as either singular or plural.)

Later in Genesis, it becomes easy to tell the difference between the two sources and the two very different views of God they represent. In the story of Noah the two sources are mixed together -- we can tell because many events are repeated with slight contradictions and discrepancies. It's a fun scholarly game to try to decide where exactly one source begins and one ends in Noah.

Throughout Genesis we see hints of the relics of Oral tradition -- Enoch, for example, was most likely a folk character the priests who wrote Genesis 5 expected everyone would be familiar with. There are many others.

Basically, the composition of the Book of Genesis certainly could have been inspired by God, but it almost certainly was not written down by Moses. It shows every characteristic of being a text cobbled together (whether with a divine hand or not!) at a late date, perhaps sometime during the second temple period.


I'll be happy to elaborate or explain further upon request, from what knowledge I do have.

And remember, again, that we don't know much at all for certain about where these texts came from, how they were put together, or exactly where to draw the lines between them -- but that there are conceptually and literarily distinct traditions within the Book of Genesis is almost indisputable.

>Also, most of the new testament at least was written down soon after the actual events took place, and was told by people who experienced these things first hand.

I won't even touch this one. :)

>
> > So what about interpretation and translation? Well obviously there has been translation, but there is pretty strong evidence that it's meaning hasn't been altered. (Revelations 22:18-19 probably had something to with that)
>
> Um, exactly what evidence do you have for those statements (especially the first paragraph)?
>

Yes, I'd like to know what evidence you have that "its meaning hasn't been altered" too.


T"hopefully this won't offend anybody"om
tmschm@wm.edu