The Book of Genesis

The Book of Genesis

The Book of Genesis can be challenging to the modern reader, since it was written three thousand years ago in a cultural milieu that is utterly foreign to us. Even thousand years ago, Jews and Christians already found much of this book to be obscure in meaning, though they were much closer to the thought and culture of the ancient Hebrews than we are. Some of the difficulty in interpreting Genesis comes from its religious subject matter, which pushes the limits of human understanding beyond our familiar world into the contemplation of a transcendent God. Yet there are also more mundane reasons for our perplexity, such as the awkwardness of translating Hebrew into modern languages, as well as some unfamiliar literary imagery that can seem bizarre to us if taken in a physically literal sense. To understand Genesis as it was originally written, we need some knowledge of the ancient Hebrew language, including its idiomatic expressions and figures of speech. Equally important, we need some familiarity with the history and culture of the ancient Near East, in order to comprehend what certain words, expressions or images might have signified to the original audience of the text. We must also understand the literary conventions of antiquity, in order to better ascertain the degree of literalness with which we should interpret a passage, or to determine how the text was likely composed. All of this knowledge is needed in order to attain merely the literal sense of Genesis, without even trying to develop its deeper moral and theological significance.

In practice, however, most modern readers, educated and uneducated, believers and skeptics alike, simply read their favorite Biblical translation at face value, and interpret it as they would any other piece of text written in modern ordinary language. Based on this woefully superficial understanding of the text, skeptics presume to find contradictions and immoral teachings throughout the Old Testament, while believers deduce doctrines and overly literalist interpretations that are not grounded in the true literal sense of the text. A common misunderstanding shared by skeptics and fundamentalists (who ironically have very similar approaches to Biblical interpretation) is that the true literal sense must mean every statement refers to a physical event, and every term refers to a physical entity.

Instead, I understand the true literal sense to be the sense immediately expressed and intended by the author, regardless of whether this sense refers to physical events and objects. Since language imperfectly represents our thoughts, we can only imperfectly grasp the intended ideas of a speaker or writer, but we generally do so well enough to make communication practicable. When author and reader are separated by many centuries and differences of tongue, communicating intent is much more difficult. The literal sense may be divided into the "proper" and "improper" literal senses (using the terminology of St. Thomas Aquinas). The proper literal sense would be the obvious, common meaning of the Hebrew terms, as they would ordinarily be understood by the Israelites of that time. Grasping this sense is difficult enough for modern readers, but we must also be able to grasp the improper literal sense, that is, when the author deliberately uses a term or expression in a derivative or figurative sense. For example, the phrase 'drink this cup' means to drink the contents of the cup, not the cup itself. It would be a mistake to parse this phrase in a proper literal sense, as that does not convey the writer's intent at all. Deliberate use of metaphor or analogy still deserves to be called 'literal,' as long as the primary, immediate meaning of the written word is intended to be different from its proper literal meaning.

Distinct from the literal sense would be the allegorical sense, where a person, thing or event may represent something else in addition to itself. The allegorical sense does not deny the literal sense, but depends on the literal sense in order to be intelligible. An allegory is an extended metaphor; it differs from the improper literal sense in that its meaning is not primary, but secondary. To understand the deeper philosophical significance of Plato's allegory of the cave, for example, we must first understand the literal story of people living in a cave and seeing shadows. The allegorical sense is superadded to the literal sense, so if we were to miss the meaning of the allegory, we could still understand the literal sense. However, if we mistook an improper literal sense for a proper literal sense, e.g., thinking that the Apostles James and John had no earthly father because they were the "Sons of Thunder" (Mark 3:17), we would be failing to understand the text altogether.

This work is concerned primarily with expounding the literal sense of Genesis, which is the meaning originally and immediately intended by the author in his choice of expression. We will also try to determine when and to what degree the literal sense intends to relate historical events. Using the facts of archaeology and ancient history, we may try to find evidence of these events or at least provide some context so we can better understand their significance. Uncovering the literal sense of Genesis is an ambitious endeavor, requiring a breadth of knowledge in a variety of disciplines. To make this project manageable, we shall make extensive use of earlier scholarship.

Aside from the Old Testament and several apocryphal works, very little remains of ancient Hebrew literature, since the Israelites did not use the imperishable clay tables of the Assyrians, nor did they have the arid climate of Egypt to preserve papyrus scrolls through the ages. Practically all our positive knowledge of ancient Hebrew comes for the Biblical texts and the linguistic traditions maintained by the Jews. We cannot, then, reliably date the authorship of the books of the Bible on the basis of literary style or diction, sine we have no other samples of ancient Hebrew literature with which to compare. The oldest Biblical manuscripts are the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to the second century BC. By then, the Old Testament was already many centuries old, and had been transcribed repeatedly to newer manuscripts.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was widely believed that the primary spoken language of the Jews during the Roman period was Aramaic, while Hebrew had become a dead language known only to those who studied the Torah. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Hebrew texts from the period have made clear that Hebrew was still used extensively for non-liturgical purposes, and was probably a common spoken tongue, as the Babylonian Talmud indicates. [Tractate Sotah, 49b] Aramaic, or "Syrian" as the Jews called it, was also used, but this was regarded as an inferior or vulgar tongue. All of the supposedly Aramaic words found in the New Testament can be ascribed a Hebrew origin with equal plausibility, when we account for regional variations in vowel pronunciation. Hebrew was still a living language in the first century AD, so testimony from that period on Biblical interpretation carries special weight. The first-century rabbis quoted in the Talmud were all familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, as was the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who provides a valuable witness to Biblical interpretation in his day. Other firs-century witness, such as the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria and most of the New Testament authors, read the Bible in Greek translation, though they may have also been familiar with the Hebrew.

The Hebrew text of the Old Testament as we have it today is known as the Masoretic Text (MT), after the Ba'ale Ha-Masorah ("Masters of the transmission"), medieval Jewish scribes whose annotations (masorah) kept scrupulous account of spelling and pronunciation, in order to eventually establish a single uniform text for the Torah that did not vary by a single letter. The oldest extant Masoretic manuscript dates to the ninth century, but fragments from the Bar Kochba period (second century) attest to the use of similar version. The Masoretic Text group dates back to the end of the Roman period, following the destruction of the Second Temple (AD 70) and the exile of the Jews from Palestine. Although the Masoretic Text has the advantage of being in the original language of the Bible, it was but one of several Hebrew manuscript traditions before the destruction of the Second Temple.

In the second or third century BC, the Hebrew Scriptures were translate into Greek by Alexandrian Jewish scribes. According to legend, seventy translations independently arrived that the same translation, which has come to be called the Septuagint (LXX), meaning "seventy." Although the story of the Septuagint's miraculous origin is undoubtedly apocryphal, this tale attests to the great esteem in which the translation was held, being considered equal in divine inspiration to the Hebrew text. The Septuagint Old Testament was widely used by the first Christians, and continues to be the authentic version of Holy Scripture recognized by the Orthodox Church. Although it is a translation, it is the oldest surviving textual tradition of the Bible. Additionally, because translation is necessarily an interpretive process, the choice of Greek words used in the Septuagint offers the earliest testimony of how Jews interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Septuagint was not the only ancient Greek translation of the Bible. Aquila of Sinope, a second-century Christian who converted to Judaism, wrote a literal translation of the Hebrew Scriptures used by the followers of Rabbi Akiva. This version differed from the Septuagint in many respects, since it was based on the manuscript tradition that would become the Masoretic Text. Symmachus the Ebonite (a Christian Jew who believed the Mosaic Law was binding), made his own translation of the Hebrew, improving on Aquila's work by giving the sense of idiomatic expressions rather than a word-for-word rendering. Lastly, the Jewish Scholar Theodotion (late second century wrote a translation that resembled the Septuagint tradition more than the Masoretic Text. His version of the Book of Daniel was such a vast improvement over the existing Septuagint text that it was soon adopted in all the Christian churches. The great Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria (c. 185-254) compiled these three translations sided by side, along with the Hebrew text in Hebrew letters and in Greek letters, and the Septuagint, resulting in a six-column critical edition of the Old Testament known as the Hexapla. This work, unfortunately, is no longer extant, but it was available to St. Jerome when he made his famous Latin translation.

 

Aside from the Greek and Hebrew traditions, there is also a Samaritan manuscript tradition for the first five books of the Bible. The Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) has been preserved in Aramaic by the few hundred surviving descendants of the northern tribes of Israel. The oldest Samaritan manuscript, the Abisha scroll, was probably written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, notwithstanding its claim to haven written by the great-grandnephew of Moses. The Samaritan text has a few ideologically motivated insertions, most notably its version of the Tenth Commandment, stating that sacrifice is to be offered only on Mount Gerizim. In general, it agrees with the Septuagint against the Masoretic text more often than the other way around.

The relative authenticity of the Masoretic, Septuagint, and Samaritan editions of the Old Testament has been disputed over the centuries. Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most scholars assumed that the Masoretic text was the most authentic, while the Septuagint and Samaritan texts were generally in error to the extent they differed from the Hebrew. The discovery of extensive Biblical fragments among the scrolls at Qumran has discredited this position. The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) prove that there were several distinct manuscript editions of the Old Testament during the second and first centuries BC. The Masoretic text type is most common, but there were also many fragments that agree with the Septuagint or Samaritan text against the Masoretic version. From analysis of these findings, it has become clear that the attempt to impose a single manuscript edition of the Old Testament began no sooner than the first century AD. After the destruction of the Second Temple, most Hebrew manuscript traditions were either lost in the devastation or supplanted by what would eventually become the normative Masoretic version. The Septuagint is a translation from a no less authentic Hebrew manuscript tradition dating to the third and second centuries BC, while the Samaritan Pentateuch has also proved to be faithful to its Hebrew sources, apart from a few ideological glosses. Any attempt to reconstruct the authentic text of the Old Testament must accept that (1) in the Second Temple period, there was no single authentic editions; and (2) the Septuagint and Samaritan versions are not necessarily less authentic where they differ from the Masoretic text.

Ideally, we would like complete texts of all the ancient Hebrew manuscript traditions that existed before the Masoretic text became the only accepted Hebrew edition. Failing that, we might at least work from translations of such documents, made by competent scholars of the time. The oldest complete manuscripts of the Pentateuch are the fourth century Greek Codex Vaticanus and Condex Sinaiticus, which follow the Septuagint tradition. Unfortunately, these codices may not have been typical of their time, as they contradict each other as well as most later Byzantine renderings. It is not always to be assumed that the oldest surviving texts are the most authentic. On the contrary, master editions were periodically copied onto newer parchment or vellum, while the older material was destroyed or reused. The fact that a Greek or Latin codex has survived to the present day may indicate that this was not a master copy. Indeed some marginal notes in Vaticanus identify scribal errors, and Sinaitcus is missing many pages, including most of Genesis. Sill, where the ancient manuscripts agree, an authentic tradition is likely retained. 

St. Jerome (c. 340 - 420) studied all of the great manuscript traditions preserved at the school of Caesarea founded by Origen, including the Hexapla. He learned the Hebrew language and its idiomatic expressions from Rabbi Baranina, and over the course of his life he translated almost the entire Old Testament into Latin, relying mainly on the Hebrew text to correct the existing Latin edition. Contrary to popular perception. St. Jerome did not write the first Latin Bible; on the contrary, there were already countless Latin Scriptures in liturgical use, based mainly on translations from the Septuagint. There early Latin editions have been collectively dubbed "Old Latin" (Vetus Latina), though they varied widely in content, being full of errors and omissions. St. Jerome was commissioned to compose a normative Latin edition, correcting the Old Latin with the authentic text. His final product, now called the Vulgate, was the result of extensive study of the best manuscripts of his day, including Origen's Hexapla (Especially the translation by Symmachus the Ebonite) and the Hebrew Scriptures. St. Jerome's original Vulgate, if it could be reconstructed would be on a par with our oldest Greek and Hebrew manuscripts in terms of its value of reconstructing the authentic text, since it was based on the best manuscripts of the fourth century. 

[Daniel J. Castellano, "The Literal Sense of Genesis," pp. 7-12]