CORNERSTONE BIBLICAL COMMENTARY

TYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.

Contents

Contributors to Volume 1.................................viGeneral Editor's Preface.................................viiAbbreviations............................................ixTransliteration and Numbering System.....................xiiiGENESIS..................................................1EXODUS...................................................259

Chapter One

The title "Genesis" comes from the Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint), which uses the Greek word geneseos [[sup.TG]1078, [sup.ZG]1161] to render the key Hebrew word in the book, toledoth [[sup.TH]8435, [sup.ZH]9352] ("generations" in KJV; "account" in NLT). The Hebrew title of the book is the first word of the book, bere'shith [[sup.TH]871.2/ 7225, [sup.ZH]928/8040] (in the beginning).

Genesis is the book of beginnings, the beginning of mankind and his universe, the beginning of sin in the world and its catastrophic effects on the race, and the beginning of God's plan to restore blessing to the world through his chosen people. God's plan begins with the call of Abraham and the granting of a covenant to him. From this beginning of God's covenant program, the book of Genesis traces the promise of the blessings from generation to generation, up to the eve of the great redemption from Egypt.

Because Genesis lays the foundation for all of God's subsequent revelation and not just the law, it is no surprise that most of the other books of the Bible draw on the content of Genesis in one way or another. But beyond that, the subject matter of Genesis and the unembellished way in which it is written have captivated the minds of scholars and readers of the Bible for ages. As with all biblical truth in general, this book has been a stumbling block for those who approach it with biases that do not allow for the supernatural or for special revelation. But to those who accept that Genesis is part of the divinely inspired Word of God, the book is a source of comfort and edification.

As might be expected, different readers approach the questions and difficulties in Genesis differently. An overly skeptical approach to the material will exploit the difficulties and seek to explain them according to modern presuppositions that destroy the unity and integrity of the text; whereas an approach that accepts the integrity of the text, at the very least as good literature, will look for resolutions to the difficulties in a way that harmonizes the Scriptures. Along the way, there will be many questions that Genesis will simply leave unanswered. The believer must accept that and rather than spending the majority of his or her time trying to search those matters out, should spend the time trying to understand what God wants people to know. After all, the revelation did not come by the will of man-if it had, it would have been written very differently; it came by the will of God.

AUTHOR AND SOURCES

Given the fact that Genesis stands before us as a unified, fully developed theological treatise based on selected events and records (see discussion below), it is natural to ask, "Who wrote it?" The Bible does not say, other than to include it in the general description of "the law of Moses," which would cover the five books of the Pentateuch, or Torah. Both Scripture and tradition attribute the Pentateuch to Moses. This was sufficient to convince the vast majority of biblical scholars and readers down through the ages that Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch, could safely be ascribed to Moses, allowing for minor additions and clarifications by later writers.

For those who accept that there was a Moses who received the law at Sinai, there is no one better qualified to have written this book. Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22) so his literary skills would have enabled him to collect and edit Israel's traditions and records and to compose this theological treatise. His communion with God at Sinai and throughout his life would have given him the spiritual illumination and understanding that was needed to guide him into all truth-what we call inspiration. And the historical circumstances of the Israelites' bondage in Egypt, along with the task of delivering them and establishing a new nation in accordance with the promises made to the ancestors, provided a strong motivation to write this book: to establish the theological and historical foundation for the Exodus and the covenant at Sinai (Moberly 1992; Sailhamer 1992).

Most critical scholarship, however, does not accept the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and some do not accept the historicity of Moses or the Exodus. Doubts about Mosaic authorship are not necessarily recent. Early in the Christian era, theologians wondered if the work was written by Moses or Ezra. But the modern view that the Pentateuch was compiled from sources written by different groups of people over time seems to have developed as the product of rationalistic skepticism. Soon after the Reformation, writers like Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) were attributing the work to Ezra, who he said utilized a mass of traditions (including some by Moses). But the first attempt to arrange a documentary theory came about a century later: Jean Astruc (1684-1766) in 1753 proposed that Moses compiled Genesis using two major and several minor documents. Over the next 124 years scholars debated and developed the idea and its component features until Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), a historian, restated the theory boldly and with exacting detail in 1877.

Wellhausen's theory, along with its development and application, has been well documented and analyzed in commentaries on Genesis and introductions to the Old Testament. There is neither the need nor the space to review it at length. S. R. Driver's Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament provides a formal presentation of the theory. The commentary by J. Skinner is a prime example of how it is worked out chapter by chapter. R. K. Harrison's Introduction to the Old Testament is a particularly thorough interaction with the theory from the conservative point of view. Umberto Cassuto's Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch also gives it a critical review. And Herman Wouk's This Is My God has a classic essay from a literary point of view.

COMMENTARY ON Genesis

* I. The Primeval Universal Events (1:1-11:26) A. The Creation of All Things (1:1-2:3) 1. The beginning (1:1-2)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

NOTES

1:1-2 All expositors have to deal with the relationship between v. 1 and v. 2. The Hebrew text begins v. 2 with a Waw disjunctive, indicating that the verse is not in sequence with v. 1 and so should not be translated "and then the earth became...." Rather, v. 2 provides a series of circumstantial clauses to describe the existing conditions when God said, "Let there be light." The NLT chose not to translate the Waw as "and" or "now"; and its marginal note attempts to capture the nature of the clauses as...