Who wrote the Book of Genesis?

Moses! Why do you ask? The Book of Genesis (Genesis from this point forward) and the other four books in the beginning of the Old Testament of the Christian Scripture (these collection of books is also called the Pentateuch) have always been attributed to Moses.

Well, the reason why I write this post is, first, to confirm that Moses is the essential or substantial author of the current text of Pentateuch that we posses (from AD 11th century). What do I mean by that? Well I'm getting to that later. Second, I will debunk one theory about the authorship of Genesis that, in my opinion and others, do not have a solid foundation.

(In my previous post, I alluded to the fact that my small group is currently studying Genesis. This post should have been written a long time ago.)

The Authorship of Moses

Now, why do I say that Moses is the essential or substantial author of the current text of Genesis (and the Pentateuch) that we posses? Well, consider these verses:

Genesis 14:14 And when Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he led out his trained men, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.

Genesis 36:31 Now these are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the sons of Israel.

In Abram's time that city was not named Dan (14:14) but Laish, and the reference to the kings of Israel (36:31) which comes much later (and the context of the 36:31 is not discussing prophecy) shows that the text of Genesis was later revised, modernized and supplemented as needed for later generations.

From the perspective of the content of text, whether Moses personally wrote all of Genesis or not, is not important. Genesis is an artistic masterpiece, with concentric patterns and unity of contents. The modern references to the city of Dan and kings of Israel did not change the core contents of Genesis at all. Moses is the main driving force for the structure, content, and purpose of the Genesis, and all of the Pentateuch.

You may ask, do I still believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of the Scripture? Yes and yes! Do I believe that the Scripture is the product of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? Yes! Those will be topics for another day.

The Documentary Hypothesis

Now, let's move on to something else. The so called, critics, those who emphasizes the higher criticism approach to the biblical text (we refer to them as critical scholars from this point forward), would like to tell you that Genesis, and all the Pentateuch, is put together by 4 groups of people at different times with different agendas (they focus on the author and the motivation for writing the text, for example, instead of on the text itself).

This misguided approach is called documentary hypothesis. The critical scholars look at the different names use for the Divine: Yahweh (LORD), Elohim (God), the repetitions of certain sections, changes in style, differences in theology throughout the Pentateuch. They concluded that a later redactor pieced together four separate documents to compose the final work: J (Yahwist, 905 B.C.), E (Elohist, 850 B.C.), D (Deuteronomist, 620 B.C.), and P (Priestly Code, ca. 500 B.C.).

The variations in divine names are easy to explain, Yahweh is used to emphasize covenantal relationship with Israel, Elohim is used to emphasize His universality with all the nations. Furthermore, the usage of the different divine names, was littered among sections that it is so hard to isolate a certain divine name to a section that is claimed from one source. This difficulty brings us to another point that it is so hard to classify which part belongs to which source that there was never a consensus among the critical scholars on how to classify different parts of the Pentateuch into J, E, D, P. Might it be that a single ultimate author, the Holy Spirit, is behind all that?

There are other critical approaches that are not discussed here: Fragmentary Approach, Supplementary Approach, Form Criticism and Tradition Criticism.

The Return to the Text

According to Raymond Dillard and Tremper Longman III, in their book, An Introduction to the Old Testament,

The cutting edge of scholarship is devoting less and less energy (there are exceptions; see Emerton) to the question of sources and more and more to the final composition of the Pentateuch and the individual books within it.

This trend away from documentary analysis is attributable to two causes: (1) problems with the method and (2) newer and more holistic approaches to the text.

Fortunately, the critical scholars have returned to emphasizing on the thematic unity of the Pentateuch in recent years.

When they did that, they discovered that Genesis has a "literary unity that displays artistic brilliance" (Dillard and Longman).

*Emerton, J. A. "An Examination of Some Attempts to Defend the Unity of the Flood Narrative, Part II," VT38 (1988)

Literary Approach to the Pentateuch

in the 1980s and 1990s, biblical scholars' attention was capture by literary approach to the Bible. The questions concerning origins and historical references are put aside and the focus is put on the literary quality of biblical narratives.

This is where we should be spending the most of our attention and energy, on the final form of the text, "given to the Church by God as canon for its edification" (Dillard and Longman).