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Genesis - Where The Story Begins
We just closed the entire New Testament with the last word of Revelation, and now we’re doing something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: starting the Old Testament. But we’re not doing it the same way. Instead of walking chapter by chapter the way we did through the Gospels and the epistles, we’re going story by story, because that’s how the Old Testament is actually built. Here’s what’s ahead as we open Genesis.
Why story by story instead of verse by verse. The New Testament gave us clear letters written to clear audiences at clear moments. The Old Testament doesn’t work that way. So as we move through Genesis and beyond, we’ll follow people, places, and events, and take however many episodes each story needs, whether that’s Moses at the Red Sea or the golden calf at Sinai.
Who wrote Genesis, and when. I hold to Mosaic authorship. Genesis never names its author, but Scripture consistently points to Moses across all five books, and Jesus himself quotes Genesis as Mosaic. I also address the documentary hypothesis (the J, E, D, P theory) and why I don’t find it persuasive against the coherence of the text itself.
The toledot structure. Genesis is built around a repeated Hebrew phrase, toledot, “these are the generations,” that shows up roughly ten times and marks each transition to a new family line. It’s the skeleton of the whole book, not a patchwork of unrelated old stories.
Why the timing matters. Moses wasn’t writing ancient history for its own sake. He was writing to a specific generation, camped on the edge of a land they hadn’t entered yet, freshly out of 400 years of slavery and trying to become a nation for the first time. Genesis answers the question hanging over that whole camp: why us, and why this land?
Two audiences, not one. The obvious audience is the Exodus generation and their children. But the first eleven chapters, creation, the fall, the flood, Babel, aren’t about Israel at all. They’re about humanity as a whole, and that matters because Israel needed to understand the condition of the whole human race before they could understand why they were chosen out of it.
Where we’re headed. From here we’ll walk through creation, Eden, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Babel, and then the four generations of promise: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Every step narrows from the whole universe down to one family, and every step is God working out the same promise: descendants, land, blessing, and eventually a Messiah.
If there’s one question this whole book is answering, it’s “who.” Who made everything. Who made the rescue plan. Who kept every promise. Genesis 1 starts next time.
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