Critical Problems of Composition and Authorship

Most modern readers of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible that constituted the Hebrew law, or Torah, are aware of something of the results of modern scholarship as to composition and authorship. For nearly two centuries it has generally though not universally been held that the Pentateuch was compiled in the postexilic period (that is, after the exile or Babylonian captivity, which lasted from about 597 to 539 B.C.), making use of earlier materials – histories, legends and law codes–and giving them a narrative structure beginning with the creation of the world or perhaps working them into an already existing narrative structure.

The basis for this theory (for it is no more than that) is the existence of parallel passages in which the same event seems to be treated twice and the way in which God is referred to in different passages. So, in the chapters we are concerned with, there seem to be two accounts of creation, Genesis 1:1–2:4a and one beginning with Genesis 2:4b that starts with human creation and continues with an account of the fall. Also, in the account of the flood, there are discrepancies in the number of animals taken into the ark: one account seems to envisage pairs, while the other envisages two groups of animals, those ritually clean and those ritually unclean, the former being preserved in groups of seven, while the latter are preserved in pain (cf. Gen 6:18–22 with Gen 7:1–5).

The difference in the way God is referred to appears in our chapters in that in Genesis l:l-2:4a, 5:1–32, 6:9–22, 7:6–10, 8:1–19 and 9:1–17 God is referred to as God (Hebrew elohim; Greek theos). Elsewhere God is reffered to by using the sacred Tetragrammaton, YHWH (translated into Greek as kyrios, “Lord,” a practice preserved in English translations until recently and written in capitals, Lord, as in the RSV text), the divine name, only pronounced by the priest in the temple liturgy (as a result we do not know how it is pronounced and can only guess). Following up these clues, scholars have distinguished several different sources for the Pentateuch, often referred to by initials: J (the Yahwist, or Jahwist, source, where God is called from the beginning by the divine name YHWH), E (the Elohist source that calls God elohim), D (the Deuteronomic source, connected with the reform just prior to the exile) and P (the Priestly source, much concerned with liturgical and legal matters).

For Genesis 1–11 the principal sources alleged are J and P (which adopts the Elohist practice of referring to God as elohim prior to his revelation to Moses in Exodus 3:13–15).

The Fathers knew nothing of all this, chough they were aware of the differences that have led to the postulation of these sources. Such differences they tended to interpret in terms of the pedagogical purpose of the narrator who is telling a story on different levels (in this they might be claimed to have anticipated some of the more recent fashions in Old Testament scholarship). For them the narrator was Moses. This conviction the early Christians shared with the Jews, but the theological importance of Genesis, to which we shall shortly turn, and especially its account of creation, led to a shift in the Christian perception of the significance of the figure of Moses, as compared with that of the Jews.

For the Jews, Moses was the great legislator, the one who had received the law on Mt. Sinai; the Pentateuch was for them the Torah. Christian interest in the law had been deflected by the central significance they 21 See the passages cited below on Genesis 5:25–27.

attached to Christ and to faith in him. Moses is still the lawgiver, the one who received the law on Sinai, but as author of the book of Genesis, he is the one who gave an account of creation, one who could contemplate and accurately describe the created order as God intended it. The story of the creation and of the fall was full of hints and guesses about the coming of Christ and the restoration of the cosmos in him, according to the Fathers. Consequently Moses was as much a prophet as a lawgiver and as much prized for his insight into creation as for his authority as receiver of the law.