Obviously it's a trick question because Genesis "is" different things to different people. Perhaps even knowing what the question is going to mean to us is a part of the challenge which will only start to be gradually resolved in the course of our study and reflections. So I will start at the easy end, which is to ask what Genesis is to some people.
If we were to carry out a general survey of the world's population I'm pretty sure that most people's answer to What's Genesis? would be that it is the first book of the Bible. I could try to pin that down by looking for a definition of first, or of book (or of of perhaps?), but let's cut to the heart of the matter and try to define the Bible first, because there may be some people here who genuinely want to know what it is.
The word bible (and its equivalents in most other languages) is a European coinage which goes back to the Ancient Greek word βιβλία biblía. Some people are under the impression that this means 'book', but no, 'book' in Greek is βίβλος bíblos. According to the dictionaries, βίβλος bíblos seems to have been a variant of βύβλος búblos which originally denoted the bark of the papyrus plant, from which papyrus was made, the material out of which books were once made. (Similarly, the Nawat word for book, amat, originally means 'paper' or rather something resembling it on which one used to write, and even more originally denominated the tree from whose bark that material was obtained; that tree, a kind of ficus, the fig family, is still called amate in local Spanish.)
So anyway, 'book' in Greek is βίβλος, and its diminutive is the neuter noun βιβλίον biblíon 'little book, librito'. The plural of the diminutive is βιβλία originally 'little books, libritos', and then more generally just 'books' (and also 'scrolls'). The reason why the Bible is today referred to by a word (βιβλία) which originally meant 'books' is that people couldn't be bothered to say the complete title which was τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ta biblía ta hágia which means 'the holy books'. It was a plural.
This was later half-borrowed half-calqued into Latin as Biblia Sacra 'the holy biblia'. Educated Romans were diglossic and it was fashionable to slip Greek words into their speech and writing. It is a bit like someone from the Salvadorean middle class today saying 'los books sagrados'. To continue with this fantastic analogy, the next step would be to shorten it to just 'los books', and the final step is to forget that it is a plural and start calling it 'la books'. That's just about what we all do today when we speak of "the Bible", "la Biblia" etc. And when we say "the Holy Bible" or "la Sagrada Biblia" we are saying something like 'la sagrada books'.
But let's get to the quid of the question (as the Spanish say) which is: which books? It seems that the Greek-speaking Jews got there first, using ta biblía to refer to their holy books, namely those constituting the Tanakh.
For anyone unacquainted with or uncertain about this term, it is a Hebrew acronym made up of the three letters ת (t), נ (n) and כ (k) which stand respectively for tora 'Torah' or 'teaching', n'viim 'prophets' and k'tuvim 'writings', the three blocks which together make up the Hebrew Bible which we may think of as equivalent to what Christians call the Old Testament (strictly speaking, only Christians should call it that, since they are the only ones who have a New Testament).
To Christians, the "Holy Bible" or just the "Bible" includes both Old (Jewish) and New (non-Jewish) Testaments which are traditionally placed in a single book in that order. Either way, Genesis (or Bereshit) is still the first book, so everyone is right.
Footnote: When I refer in the previous paragraph to the Christian New Testament as non-Jewish, I am not forgetting that some of it was written by people who had been Jews about other people who were Jews. We are talking about the Bible here, and the New Testament is not part of the Jewish Bible.
Genesis is thus the beginning of many things. It is the first book of the Torah, of the Hebrew Bible and of the Christian Bible, and it tells of beginnings, and its Hebrew name means 'in the beginning'. However, let us not jump to conclusions. It is one thing to say that Genesis is the first book because it is printed and read first in each of those items (Chumash, Tanakh, Christian Bible), and that's fine as long as we remember we're only talking about its place in the table of contents. It does not have to mean that it was the first of the books to be written (it wasn't), or that it was originally written as the beginning of each of those collections. So: when Genesis was composed or first written down, was it conceived of as the first part of the Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible? The quickest answers I have to each of these questions is, respectively: perhaps yes, not sure, and definitely not.
To work through these backwards: I will quote from p. 4 of Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction (second edition, Paulist Press, New York, 2012; my emphasis) by Lawrence Boadt in order to make it clear that this is not just a Jewish viewpoint:
Both [Jews and Christians] share a conviction born from the Old Testament that God has revealed himself to his people Israel. Jews, however, do not see in Jesus a binding revelation from God. Christians do. It is customary in writing about the Bible to respect the unique quality of each Testament so that we do not mistake the meaning of faith in the one as the same as in the other.Thus from the point of view of those who profess "faith in the one" it is not necessary to read the Old Testament with faith "in the other". And even without faith in anything it is not necessary or even sensible to think of somebody writing a book as if it were a prologue to another book that was not going to be written until hundreds of years later. Genesis was not written as the first book of the Christian Bible because there was no such thing as the Christian Bible when Genesis was written; it may, however, have been written as a prologue to the Jewish "Bible" (though it wasn't referred to as "the Bible" until much later, as we have seen); this all depends on the historical process through which the Jewish Bible came into existence and the order in which its books were composed. And that is all I can say for now about the second part of the question. As for the first (whether Genesis was written as a prologue to the Torah, Pentateuch, "Books of Moses" or Chumash), it is possible that it was, although quite obviously it drew on previously existing materials which had no doubt evolved over a very long time.
Even a prologue, like the overture of an opera, can often be listened to as a self-contained composition despite the fact it also forms part of something larger, so, even if Genesis is merely the opening act of the Torah, it holds up well as a composition in and of itself. But coming back to today's question (What is Genesis?), the best answer we have come up with so far is that it is the beginning of the Torah. And we can hardly make much sense of that without facing the next question: what is the Torah?
The Torah (תורה tora) is the first part of the Tanakh (תנ"ך), but that is a bit circular since the תנ"ך was just defined as the three components after which it is named, of which the first is the Torah (it is the T in Tanakh). Besides, the Torah is often spoken of as an autonomous entity, so what is that entity? It consists of five books (or scrolls), whence two of its other names: Chumash (חומש xumash) which comes from the Hebrew word for five, and Pentateuch, a Greek formation meaning five scrolls. The five books or scrolls in question are usually referred to in English by their Greek names, found in the Septuagint, which have been borrowed into Latin and thence into most languages of the world: in English these are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
I have always thought it is a shame that we give them these names because to non-Greek speaking ears they sound... well, Greek, and neither immediately meaningful, or evocative, or memorable, or inviting. This is terrible marketing. Today we try to make titles of things catchy, eye-catching, memorable or at least pronounceable (deuteronomy???). And not sound silly (numbers??). Exodus has probably been the most successful, but thanks more to Leon Uris and above all Bob Marley than to anyone in the naming committee. This is a shame particularly considering these were not even the original names. The original names (the ones use in Hebrew) are in comparison much more exciting. The original name of Numbers is bammidbar meaning "In The Wilderness": not bad. With some decent artwork it could sell. Some of the others are a little more mysterious: "Things" (or "Words", the name's a bit ambiguous) and "Names" are the Hebrew titles of Deuteronomy (d'varim) and Exodus (sh'mot), although (geek alert!!) sh'mot really means 'names of' as it's in the construct state; so perhaps I'd have anglicized this as "Their Names", which sounds considerably more intriguing! Leviticus is known in Hebrew as wayyiqra which translates as "He called" (unless we did it like King James, and then we'd have to say "And He Called"!). But perhaps the award winner would still be Genesis, with its unbeatable headline: "In The Beginning".
Hebrew name:
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Greek name:
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English name:
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My proposal:
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בראשׁית (b’reshit)
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Γένεσις
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Genesis
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In The Beginning
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שׁמות (sh’mot)
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Εξοδος
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Exodus
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Their Names
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ויקרא (wayyiqra)
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Λευιτικός
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Leviticus
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He Called
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במדבר (bammidbar)
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Αριθμοί
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Numbers
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In The Wilderness
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דברים (d’varim)
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Δευτερονόμιον
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Deuteronomy
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Things
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Torah itself is often translated into English as 'The Law', and this translation is wrong. That usage may have arisen from the New Testament where there are frequent references to "the law and the prophets" (ο νομος και οι προφηται) which I believe is assumed to refer to the Torah and the N'viim (the T and the N of Tanakh). Be that as it may, תורה comes from a Hebrew verb root meaning 'teach', so Torah is 'teaching'. That is not to deny that large parts of the Torah (Genesis constituting a major exception) consist of laws and may be considered, therefore, legal tracts.
Which brings us to another question about Genesis which we certainly would like to know how to address: if the Torah is (not in name but in content) largely a set of laws, what is Genesis doing there - a book which reads more like a novel than a legal text? This is a key question, both for its general interest and its pertinence to a discussion about translating the book, since we would very much like to know what sort of a "book" it is, what it's place and purpose is in the framework of the larger literary body (the Torah) within which it is found, and thus hopefully gain some insight into the genre of the text and how to read it. It is also a difficult question and one about which much can be, and has been, said. I cannot really do justice to this subject at present; I may wish to return to it later if my readings or musings turn up some relevant thoughts or data. For now let me be very brief, and speaking briefly say - and I greatly fear I am only stating the obvious here - that if the Torah is fundamentally a body of laws, then Genesis looks like the preamble.
Why such a very long preamble? (Not that anyone is complaining: it's a wonderful preamble!) The answer that is usually suggested is something to the effect that it creates a discursive framework within which the laws of the Torah are contextualized and legitimized. So: here are the laws of our people. But how do we know that these are the laws of our people? Because God gave them to us. How do we know that God gave them to us? Well, here's what happened: Moses went up Mt. Sinai and God spoke to him and gave him the laws; then Moses came back down and spoke to the people of Israel and told them the laws he had received from God. That may not be how laws get passed nowadays, but times were different, that's how it was done back then, and this explanation is perfectly coherent. Except wait a minute: Moses, who was he? And what was he doing on Mt. Sinai anyway? What's the story?? Well, this is the story...
Except that actually, that story is not told in Genesis, it's told in the first eighteen chapters of the second book, Exodus. The Exodus story, one of the great stories of the Hebrew Bible and indeed the central story, I believe, of the Hebrew Bible and the characterization of the Israelite (aka Jewish) people as a people and a nation, begins with the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt under an unjust Pharaoh and climaxes with their liberation when they finally take things into their own hands. But wait a minute: who were these people and what were they doing in Egypt and how did they get to be slaves? Well, there is a good book about that. It's called In The Beginning - although some people call it Genesis. So actually, Exodus 1-18 is the preamble. Genesis is the pre-preamble. Why have a pre-preamble?
Jumping genres (always fun) along with a time-warp or two, I am reminded of two terms which I believe have only come into general circulation since I was born: backstory and prequel. Backstory is defined and summed up as
a set of events invented for a plot, presented as preceding and leading up to that plot. It is a literary device of a narrative history all chronologically earlier than the narrative of primary interest. Generally, it is the history of characters or other elements that underlie the situation existing at the main narrative's start. Even a purely historical work selectively reveals backstory to the audience.The word invented in the first line should not be allowed to bother or distract us. Granted, if this is taken as a rigorous definition, Genesis could not be called a backstory if and to the extent that its content is not considered "invented", in which case by calling it a backstory I might be offending some readers, but that is not my intention, nor is it the point of the allusion. In any case, I think we can all agree, on purely literary (rather than theological) grounds, that Genesis was not, because it couldn't have been, merely invented on the spot for the purpose of providing the plot of the rest of "the Israelite saga" with more depth, because Genesis simply doesn't look like anything that could have been invented on the spot by anyone. (Not even by Moses: see my post "The beads of the necklace (2)".)
So if there was anybody (perhaps a committee) who once decided to write Genesis to provide the rest of the Torah with a backstory, they certainly didn't concoct it there and then. I mean, they didn't begin the process with the question: "Now what would be good names for the first two human beings?" because they were writing about the beginning of the world, and people already knew about how the world began: it was called history.
Some of us today may not think that world history went the way it is told in Genesis, but that is not the point: ideas about history change with each generation or at least each historical period, we have our ideas and the writers of the Torah had theirs, but we call our idea history so it is history to us, and this was history to them. And you don't invent history. Well, some people might argue that history does get invented, but my point is that if so, the invention takes place gradually, over centuries or millennia, not ex nihilo when the committee decides a plot should have a backstory. When you write history you are supposed to work with the materials and knowledge available, and that is what it certainly looks like was being done when Genesis was written (see my post Between documentary hypothesis and textual fact). The hypothetical committee's work, then (assuming that Genesis did not already exist before the rest of the Torah was written, which is apparently unlikely), was one of either compilation or redaction or a combination of such steps. It is more plausible that at some stage the Genesis we know was pieced together from stuff already lying around, not spontaneously "invented". Once that is cleared up, and provided the definition of backstory can be doctored to allow for the possibility of it not being just invented, then perhaps Genesis does indeed act as a backstory for Exodus and everything that follows it.
Perhaps it could be described as a prequel to the other books of the Torah. Prequel is defined as (my emphasis):
a literary, dramatic, or filmic work whose story precedes that of a previous work, by focusing on events that occur before the original narrative.... All "prequels"... are, by definition, essentially sequels in that they expand on a previous or preceding work.The difference between backstory and prequel? As I understand it, a backstory is a tool used by authors to help them construct the text of the story, which can be presented to the reader of the story in a variety of ways: through occasional passing references within the main story (such as mentions of Abraham dotted around the place), or incorporated in some significant way into the plot or used to provide the plot with greater coherence (such as understanding how the Israelites had come to be slaves in the first place), or even not presented at all and just kept in the back of the authors' mind as a device to assist the creation process. Or, the authors may decide to present the whole backstory to readers or viewers in the form of a book, episode or film (à la Star Wars), and that's when it becomes a prequel. It isn't caled a prequel if it is merely the first book, episode or film in the series, given the second sentence quoted: it is a prequel if it was written after the central story.
So which came first in the composition of the Torah: Genesis, or the giving of the laws which Genesis eventually leads up to? Genesis appears as the first book, but does that necessarily mean it was the first part to be written? No. The question of when Genesis was written is terribly difficult because (apart from the fact that we don't actually know) it requires us to define written. Does it mean written down as opposed to transmitted orally? Does it refer to written in its final form as we know it as opposed to earlier "drafts" or source documents (cf. the documentary hypothesis)? Or do we really mean canonized, declared to be Holy Scriptures? Referring to the main sources of Genesis, the hypothetical J (the Yahwist) and P (the Priestly author), it has been said that:
Scholars in the first half of the 20th century came to the conclusion that the Yahwist was produced in the monarchic period, specifically at the court of Solomon, and the Priestly work in the middle of the 5th century BC (the author was even identified as Ezra), but more recent thinking is that the Yahwist was written either just before or during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century, and the Priestly final edition was made late in the Exilic period or soon after.If these speculations (and that is all they are, let's not forget) are taken at all seriously, and we should recall that the whole documentary hypothesis is currently being questioned by biblical scholarship, then since they refer to the composition of the source documents, the date of their compilation into the textual whole we recognise as Genesis must have been later than any of these dates. So anyway, it's complicated.
Even if we don't ever find out exactly when the text crystallized as we have it, it would be extremely useful if we at least could be sure about the specific purpose for which it was written, regarding the Torah in general but, in the present context, Genesis in particular. And we don't. We can imagine and suppose but we don't know. It is a wonderful text that has been passed down to us for thousands of years and we are lucky to have it; together with the rest of the Hebrew Bible, it tells us the history of a small nation, as told by that nation itself, a posteriori like any history, filtered through that nation's own perspectives and traditions and selective memory again like all histories, together with some of what may have been that nation's literary gems (unless it had even more brilliant gems that have been lost), and while it is certainly not the whole picture and hardly could be, it is fantastic that we have this much, these echoes from a distant past which still sing and talk to us and even inspire and entertain us to this day. But this wonderful text that we have does not tell us clearly its own history; it doesn't fully explain who wrote it, where, when and above all why. No doubt there was a time in the text's history when that was assumed common knowledge. Then there was a time when the answers were provided by myth and legend. Now, we are in a time when we can only conjecture and wonder.
There is one theory about this that has been put forward in recent years, and is currently the topic of debate but which has apparently met a lot of scholarly opposition. So I shall call it a hypothesis, a mere idea which may or may not hold any truth, but which it is nonetheless interesting to think about, or so it seems to me, simply because it is suggestive and because it forces us to wonder: well, why was all this written down? I will let Wikipedia explain the idea, since whether or not you think Wikipedia knows what it is talking about, it still knows more than I do:
As for why the book was created, a theory which has gained considerable interest, although still controversial is "Persian imperial authorisation". This proposes that the Persians, after their conquest of Babylon in 538 BC, agreed to grant Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire, but required the local authorities to produce a single law code accepted by the entire community. The two powerful groups making up the community—the priestly families who controlled the Temple and who traced their origin to Moses and the wilderness wanderings, and the major landowning families who made up the "elders" and who traced their own origins to Abraham, who had "given" them the land—were in conflict over many issues, and each had its own "history of origins", but the Persian promise of greatly increased local autonomy for all provided a powerful incentive to cooperate in producing a single text.Fascinating stuff! True? I couldn't tell you. But one way or the other (or even remaining prudently neutral on matters we know nothing about), this imaginative theory sets off chains of thought and encourages us to focus on issues that we might not have thought about, as curious laypersons. I find it quite invigorating!
Luckily we have the text, and if we learn Hebrew we can read it, so we can have a decent idea of what it says, even if we're not quite certain what it is. And that is certainly something. I'd say the glass is half full, wouldn't you?
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