Genesis

And it was so.

And God saw that it was good. He also made the stars. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. They will be yours for food. And there was evening, and there was morning —the sixth day. All rights reserved worldwide. You'll get this book and many others when you join Bible Gateway Plus. Starting your free trial of Bible Gateway Plus is easy.

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To subscribe at our regular subscription rate, click the button below. To manage your subscription, visit your Bible Gateway account settings. The descendants of Noah are Japheth, whose descendants are Gentiles; Ham, whose descendants include the Canaanites; and Shem, of whom came Peleg in whose days the earth was divided.

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All men speak the same language—They build the Tower of Babel—The Lord confounds their language and scatters them over all the earth—The generations of Shem include Abram, whose wife is Sarai—Abram leaves Ur and settles in Haran. Lot is captured in the battles of the kings—He is rescued by Abram—Melchizedek administers bread and wine and blesses Abram—Abram pays tithes—He declines to accept the spoils of conquest.

Abram desires offspring—The Lord promises him seed in number as the stars—Abram believes the promise—His seed will be strangers in Egypt—Then, after four generations, they will inherit Canaan. Abraham entertains three holy men—They promise that Sarah will have a son—Abraham will command his children to be just—The Lord appears to him—They discuss the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abimelech desires Sarah, who is preserved by the Lord—Abraham prays for Abimelech, and the Lord blesses him and his household.

Sarah dies and is buried in the cave of Machpelah, which Abraham buys from Ephron the Hittite. Abraham marries, has descendants, dies, and is buried in the cave of Machpelah—His descendants through Ishmael are listed—Rebekah conceives, and Jacob and Esau struggle in her womb—The Lord reveals their destiny to Rebekah—Esau sells his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rebekah guides Jacob in seeking blessings—Jacob is blessed to have dominion and rule over peoples and nations—Esau hates Jacob and plans to slay him—Rebekah fears that Jacob may marry one of the daughters of Heth.

Isaac forbids Jacob to marry a Canaanite—He blesses Jacob and his seed with the blessings of Abraham—Esau marries a daughter of Ishmael—Jacob sees in vision a ladder reaching up into heaven—The Lord promises him seed as the dust of the earth in number—The Lord also promises Jacob that in him and in his seed all the families of the earth will be blessed—Jacob covenants to pay tithes.

The Lord commands Jacob to return to Canaan, and Jacob departs secretly—Laban pursues him; they resolve their differences and make a covenant of peace—Laban blesses his descendants, and he and Jacob part company.

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God sends Jacob to Bethel, where he builds an altar and the Lord appears to him—God renews the promise that Jacob will be a great nation and that his name will be Israel—Jacob sets up an altar and pours a drink offering—Rachel bears Benjamin, dies in childbirth, and is buried near Bethlehem—Reuben sins with Bilhah—Isaac dies and is buried by Jacob and Esau. The descendants of Esau, who is Edom, are listed.

Jacob loves and favors Joseph, who is hated by his brothers—Joseph dreams that his parents and brothers make obeisance to him—His brothers sell him into Egypt. Judah has three sons by a Canaanite woman—Er and Onan are slain by the Lord—Tamar, disguised as a harlot, bears twins by Judah. Pharaoh dreams of the cattle and the ears of grain—Joseph interprets the dreams as seven years of plenty and seven of famine—He proposes a grain storage program—Pharaoh makes him ruler of all Egypt—Joseph marries Asenath—He gathers grain as the sand upon the seashore—Asenath bears Manasseh and Ephraim—Joseph sells grain to Egyptians and others during the famine.

There, God makes a covenant with Abram, promising that his descendants shall be as numerous as the stars, but that people will suffer oppression in a foreign land for four hundred years, after which they will inherit the land "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates ".

Abram's name is changed to Abraham and that of his wife Sarai to Sarah , and circumcision of all males is instituted as the sign of the covenant. Because Sarah is old, she tells Abraham to take her Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar , as a second wife.

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Through Hagar, Abraham fathers Ishmael. God resolves to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for the sins of their people. Abraham protests and gets God to agree not to destroy the cities if 10 righteous men can be found.

Angels save Abraham's nephew Lot and his family, but his wife looks back on the destruction against their command and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot's daughters, concerned that they are fugitives who will never find husbands, get him drunk to become pregnant by him, and give birth to the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites. Abraham and Sarah go to the Philistine town of Gerar , pretending to be brother and sister they are half-siblings.

The King of Gerar takes Sarah for his wife, but God warns him to return her, and he obeys. God sends Sarah a son to be named Isaac , through whom the covenant will be established. At Sarah's insistence, Ishmael and his mother Hagar are driven out into the wilderness, but God saves them and promises to make Ishmael a great nation.

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God tests Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice Isaac. As Abraham is about to lay the knife upon his son, God restrains him, promising him numberless descendants. On the death of Sarah, Abraham purchases Machpelah believed to be modern Hebron for a family tomb and sends his servant to Mesopotamia to find among his relations a wife for Isaac, and Rebekah is chosen. Other children are born to Abraham by another wife, Keturah , among whose descendants are the Midianites , and he dies in a prosperous old age and is buried in his tomb at Hebron.

Isaac's wife Rebecca gives birth to the twins Esau , father of the Edomites , and Jacob. Through deception, Jacob becomes the heir instead of Esau and gains his father's blessing. He flees to his uncle where he prospers and earns his two wives, Rachel and Leah. Jacob's name is changed to Israel, and by his wives and their handmaidens he has twelve sons, the ancestors of the twelve tribes of the Children of Israel, and a daughter, Dinah.

Joseph , Jacob's favorite son, is sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers. But Joseph prospers, after hardship, with God's guidance of interpreting Pharaoh's dream of upcoming famine. He is then reunited with his father and brothers, who fail to recognize him, and plead for food. After much manipulation, he reveals himself and lets them and their households into Egypt, where Pharaoh assigns to them the land of Goshen.

Jacob calls his sons to his bedside and reveals their future before he dies. Joseph lives to an old age and exhorts his brethren, if God should lead them out of the country, to take his bones with them. Genesis takes its Hebrew title from the first word of the first sentence, Bereshit , meaning "In the beginning [of]"; in the Greek Septuagint it was called Genesis , from the phrase "the generations of heaven and earth". The Qumran group provides the oldest manuscripts but covers only a small proportion of the book; in general, the Masoretic Text is well preserved and reliable, but there are many individual instances where the other versions preserve a superior reading.

For much of the 20th century most scholars agreed that the five books of the Pentateuch —Genesis, Exodus , Leviticus , Numbers and Deuteronomy —came from four sources, the Yahwist , the Elohist , the Deuteronomist and the Priestly source , each telling the same basic story, and joined together by various editors. The Deuteronomistic source does not appear in Genesis. Examples of repeated and duplicate stories are used to identify the separate sources. In Genesis these include three different accounts of a Patriarch claiming that his wife was his sister, the two creation stories, and the two versions of Abraham sending Hagar and Ishmael into the desert.

This leaves the question of when these works were created. 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 , 10th century BC, 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 BC, and the Priestly final edition was made late in the Exilic period or soon after.

As for why the book was created, a theory which has gained considerable interest, although still controversial is "Persian imperial authorisation". 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.

Genesis is perhaps best seen as an example of a creation myth , a type of literature telling of the first appearance of humans, the stories of ancestors and heroes, and the origins of culture, cities and so forth. In David Clines published his influential The Theme of the Pentateuch — influential because he was one of the first to take up the question of the theme of the entire five books.

Clines' conclusion was that the overall theme is "the partial fulfillment — which implies also the partial nonfulfillment — of the promise to or blessing of the Patriarchs".

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By calling the fulfillment "partial" Clines was drawing attention to the fact that at the end of Deuteronomy the people are still outside Canaan. The patriarchs , or ancestors, are Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with their wives Joseph is normally excluded. Through the patriarchs God announces the election of Israel, meaning that he has chosen Israel to be his special people and committed himself to their future.

The promise itself has three parts: The ancestors, however, retain their faith in God and God in each case gives a son — in Jacob's case, twelve sons, the foundation of the chosen Israelites. All three promises are more richly fulfilled in each succeeding generation, until through Joseph "all the world" is saved from famine, [29] and by bringing the children of Israel down to Egypt he becomes the means through which the promise can be fulfilled.

Scholars generally agree that the theme of divine promise unites the patriarchal cycles, but many would dispute the efficacy of trying to examine Genesis' theology by pursuing a single overarching theme, instead citing as more productive the analysis of the Abraham cycle, the Jacob cycle, and the Joseph cycle, and the Yahwist and Priestly sources. To this basic plot which comes from the Yahwist the Priestly source has added a series of covenants dividing history into stages, each with its own distinctive "sign". The first covenant is between God and all living creatures, and is marked by the sign of the rainbow; the second is with the descendants of Abraham Ishmaelites and others as well as Israelites , and its sign is circumcision ; and the last, which doesn't appear until the book of Exodus , is with Israel alone, and its sign is Sabbath.

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