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Genesis....
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Genesis (Greek: Γένεσις, having the meanings of "birth", "creation",
"cause", "beginning", "source" and "origin") is the first book of the
Torah (five books of Moses) and hence the first book of the
Tanakh, part of the Bible; it is also the
first book of the
Old
Testament. In Hebrew, it is called (Bereshit Hebrew
word #7225 in Strong's), after the first word of the text in
Hebrew
(meaning "in the beginning of"). This follows the pattern of naming the
other five books of the Pentateuch.
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Genesis is presented as a historical work. Beginning with
the Creation of the world, it recounts the primal history of humanity and
the early history of the people of Israel as exemplified in the lives of its
patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and their families. It contains the
historical presupposition and basis of the national religious ideas and
institutions of Israel, and serves as an introduction to its history, laws,
customs and legends. |
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Based on the genealogies in Genesis and later parts of
the Bible, both religious Jews and
Christians have independently worked
backwards to find the implied time of the Creation of the world, around the
beginning of the 4th millennium BC. This dating is based on a literal
reading of the creation account and the bases that the six days in which God
created the heavens and the earth were 24-hour days, that Adam, Eve, and the
Garden of Eden existed, and that a complete trace of events from Creation to
a historically verifiable date is listed in the biblical account. |
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The book of
Genesis, written on an egg, in the Jerusalem Museum
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Genesis as a completed book makes no claims about its
authorship; Jewish tradition from early on assumed that the book was
dictated, in its entirety, by God to Moses on Mount
Sinai. For a number of
reasons, this view is no longer accepted by many biblical scholars,
non-Orthodox Jews, Catholics, and liberal Protestants. Instead, they
accept a theory whose roots are based on cultural evolution and
philosophical naturalism which teaches that the text of
Genesis as we see it today was redacted together
around 440 BC from earlier sources. |
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