Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name Careyeri Griffel, and Happy New Year. I know that a lot of us are starting new Bible reading plans trying to get through the Bible in a year, and as such, many of us are starting again in Genesis.
And so I thought this would be a really great time to do an episode centered on the structure of the Book of Genesis. I've talked about the structure of the Book of Genesis before, but we really haven't gone deep into looking at what that is. And so we're going to do that today. And I'm pretty excited because I also have some really cool stuff that I think many of you have not heard of before.
It's going to structure it in a way that I think makes a little bit more sense. First, I'm going to introduce you to the main [00:01:00] resource that I'm using today, and then we will get into some of the details about the purpose of Genesis, a little bit about the dating, because that kind of influences things, but we're not going to be landing anywhere solid there.
And then we're going to get into the basic structure of Genesis from the sense of the Toledotes, or the Generations. Now, many of you may have already heard about this idea of the Toledoths and the structure of Genesis, but I'm going to go a bit beyond that after we talk about the Toledoths, and we're going to talk about the broader way that they might actually fit together, and this makes a lot more sense in the narrative structure of Genesis. Because if you look at it, and you're only looking at the Toledoths, It's a bit confusing as to why it lands the way it does, because the Toledotes, they don't organize themselves really well into one single framework. There's a lot of outliers and a lot of differences between them. And so you look [00:02:00] at that and you go, why is this here?
But once you look at Genesis from the lens of the ancestor epic pattern, as we will do later on in this episode, it makes a whole lot more sense. So, I'm excited to bring that to you today. And the resource I'm going to suggest is called Rethinking Genesis, The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Pentateuch. It is by Duane A. Garrett, and it was published in the year 2000, which, in the cycle of biblical studies, that's kind of fairly old. But, he has a lot of really good ideas that I think are really valuable, and I'm surprised that I don't hear more about this. There are some other ideas that he brings out in his book that people tend to gravitate towards and focus on when they're talking about it. And those are interesting and all, but what interests me is this entire narrative structure of Genesis. The way that he presents it makes a whole lot more sense to me than the way it's usually talked about. So I'm really [00:03:00] excited to get into that.
I may also be dipping a little bit into Ariel's Bible commentary from the Book of Genesis by Arnold Fruchtenbaum. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is, I believe, a Messianic Jew, and so he is coming at the Bible from the perspective of a confessional Christian, but also from the Jewish perspective. And I'm bringing up his commentary because he delves into the Toledotes of Genesis, and he has also given certain perspectives and ways of looking at the text as a whole so that we can understand the purposes of Genesis.
All right, so a little bit about this book, Rethinking Genesis. First of all, it's kind of primarily engaged with debunking the idea of the documentary hypothesis, otherwise known as JEDP, which I've talked about before. This was an idea that kind of stemmed from the mid 1700s and went into the 1800s where some of the Germans took the idea [00:04:00] they denied Mosaic authorship and historicity of the text as a whole and eventually came out with the Documentary Hypothesis or the Four Source Hypothesis.
Now, if you're not familiar with that, this is the idea that there were four main sources for the Pentateuch which are the five books of Moses or the first five books of the Bible that we read today. A major problem with J E D P, or the Documentary Hypothesis, is that it splits up the text in really tiny bits.
And instead of looking at the stories as a whole, it cherry picks which parts of each story are from which sources. Sometimes there are entire stories in Genesis or the Pentateuch that come from a single source. But oftentimes, J E D P splits up the text in this really haphazard kind of quilt block formation. And it doesn't really make sense because, really, the stories of the Torah are complete stories. They don't really make sense if you break them up that [00:05:00] explicitly.
So, Garrett's idea in this book is that there are several sources for the Book of Genesis. that Moses used because he affirms Mosaic authorship. And those sources are the Toledotes, or genealogies that you find, and there are other narrative tales that are interspersed throughout Genesis. But the other major source documents are what he calls, Ancestor Epics. And these have particular patterns that are going to show up in Genesis and it's going to make a lot of what we see make a little bit more sense.
One of the other ideas that Garrett has is that Genesis was compiled by Moses, but it was the Levitical tribes who worked as scribes during the Exodus. And this is why also they got the jobs of the priests. When you look into reviews of his work, that's often the idea that people are latching onto and reviewing. Which, it's an interesting idea, but I am much more interested in those ancestor epics and how they [00:06:00] structure the book.
Alright, so, there are different ways that Genesis is structured, and they don't have to be either or kind of ideas. From a broad view, the first way to look at the Genesis structure is between the primeval history of the first 11 chapters and the ancestral narratives of the remaining chapters of the book.
This structure is pretty standard across the board. no one's going to deny that there is this sharp distinction between chapters 1 through 11 and chapters 12 through 50. And when we start looking at the Toledote structure, there are five Toledotes in each section here. So there's five Toledotes in the primeval history, and there's five Toledotes in the ancestral narratives.
Of course, the primeval history is much shorter than the ancestral narratives, but the Toledotes do split up like this. Or at least I should say that most people think that they split up into a five and five structure. Some people say that there are actually six Toledotes in the [00:07:00] ancestral narratives.
Another broad way of splitting up the Book of Genesis is in geographical structure. There are three divisions in this structure. The first takes that primeval history of chapters 1 through 11, because that is in the context of Babylonia. Then we have chapters 12 through 36, and these chapters are centered in the land of Canaan. Then we have chapters 37 through 50, and this is in the context of Egypt. This structure is very interesting because you have Canaan in the middle, which is of course the promised land, and on either side of it you have Babylon and Egypt. And in the book of Genesis, Babylon and Egypt are not portrayed as Israel's enemies. But they will be later.
So that's a very interesting structure, and it almost seems like a chiasm. For those who aren't aware of a chiasm, it's like a sandwich. You have the two pieces of bread on either side, and you have the meat [00:08:00] in the middle. And usually there's some sort of point to what is in the middle. So here we have Canaan as being prominent in the narrative.
As far as Toledotes in the geographical structure, You have 5 in the section of 1 through 11 with Babylonia. You have 4 or 5 in the section with Canaan. And then you only have 1 Toledote in the section with Egypt. So that's not very evenly spaced. But I think I agree with Garrett in his book when he suggests that we really ought not to place too much emphasis or major emphasis on chiastic structure if it doesn't parallel with other types of ideas. Chiasms serve a point in the text. But they don't always serve the main point.
Now I want to talk a minute about Babylon in Genesis. Because we wonder why Babylon shows up in the beginning of Genesis. When we're thinking of Babylon, we're often thinking about the Exile. And that's the time of the Neo [00:09:00] Babylonians, as opposed to the Old Babylonians. The Tower of Babel, for instance. We might ask ourselves, how were they worshipping other gods, if the other gods were not yet apportioned out to people? So, is this an anachronism, or are we dismissing the point? Maybe the point is that Babylon, even from early times, was a source of disobedience. And their disobedience actually set up the creation of the nation of Israel. In a sense, Babylon brought the Israelites to the land, because Abraham went out of the land of Ur, but they came out of Babylon not really as exiles, but they came to form God's people.
But as I just mentioned, it's not the case that Babylon is really the enemy here in Genesis, not like they will be later. But in either case, what we're looking at here is a narrative, a narrative of how something got established. And the point isn't really that we need to be searching for the Tower of Babel, and where is [00:10:00] that? But the point is, how were things established? Who has the ultimate power? And how do the other gods relate to the Sovereign Lord? That's what we ought to be taking away here, and in the context of Genesis 11, it's the entire people of the earth. But maybe some of that will be brought a little bit to bear when we talk about the ancestor epics.
As I mentioned, Duane Garrett takes the setting of the writing of the Book of Genesis as happening during the Exodus. And that's usually the case when people take this stance of Mosaic authorship, because of course, Moses was during the Exodus. But I end up being a little bit confused at the end of his book because he says, quote, neither the complete text of Genesis nor any individual source relates well to the Babylonian captivity, end quote.
Garrett's position is that nothing in Genesis relates to the Babylonian captivity, but we have to remember that his book came out in the year 2000, which was well before most of scholarship linked the [00:11:00] Apkallu narrative of Mesopotamia to Genesis 6. And especially in Genesis 1 through 11, I think there is a massive context that fits really well into the exile.
At any rate, before we get into the Toledotes, let's talk about the themes and purposes of Genesis. This is where I want to bring up Fruchtenbaum's work because his emphasis in the book of Genesis, and he's not the only one here, is that the main theme of Genesis is one of blessing versus cursing, and he shows how the narratives of the Toledotes actually switch between blessing and cursing and blessing and cursing. and how the story is structured around this idea. And again, I want to mention that we don't need to take just one of these ideas of how Genesis is structured and the purposes and themes of Genesis as being the only one that's there. This is the genius of the biblical writers. There are layers upon layers of meaning and purpose and intent here.
Fruchtenbaum gives six purposes [00:12:00] of the book of Genesis. He says the first is to declare the nature of God. The second is to declare the nature of God's people. The third is to show the beginning of the covenant. The fourth is to describe Israel's historical and theological basis. The fifth is to unveil the destiny of the people of Israel. The seventh is to be a prologue for the Book of Exodus.
Just as a side note here about Fruchtenbaum, I noticed that none of his purposes of Genesis include revealing the nature of the cosmos, which I agree that that's actually not a purpose of Genesis at all, but he does go at length into how we need to understand Genesis in a scientific way, because if we don't, then this absolves Genesis from being historic.
And of course, I've talked at length about how we don't have to see it that way, how trying to see it that way is actually putting our context into the ancient text. But really, one of the purposes of Genesis is [00:13:00] not to understand the cosmos. That's just not one of the purposes. And the reason for that is because the cosmos isn't a main character.
We need to understand the nature of God. We need to understand the nature of God's people. And we need to understand how those two things relate, which is what all of those other four purposes of Genesis get into. The land, or the cosmos, or the earth, or the structure of our physical reality, those things are only important in that they are to play their parts in the flourishing of God's people.
The cosmos is meant to be here as support and a way that we can flourish and grow and be fruitful. That's the whole purpose of the cosmos. As far as the Bible is concerned, we don't need to understand how and why the cosmos is the way that it is other than to understand it in those two contexts of the nature of God and the nature of God's people.
God made the cosmos in order for God's people to [00:14:00] flourish, and certainly God can have accomplished that many different ways. Duane
Garrett's understanding of the major theme of Genesis is that of alienation, and I think that's going to be very clear once we analyze the Ancestor Epics. Again, this doesn't set aside the theme of blessing and cursing that Fruchtenbaum sees, but over and over in the book of Genesis, what we see is this idea of strangers and foreigners and things becoming obstacles that cause the people to be alienated in some way.
And those obstacles need to be overcome. And the way that they are overcome is not through the work and activity of people. but rather through the work and activity of God himself. The theme of alienation is a little bit harder to see in the Toledotes, or the Generations, although it is true that in the Toledotes you see a kind of narrowing. It begins very broadly, but it narrows down into the Chosen Line [00:15:00] and other types of things.
There is a lot to explore the Toledotes, and so all I'm doing today is really giving a brief overview. And maybe hitting a few interesting highlights of the Toledotes. So if you are reading Genesis right now, this might help you kind of latch on to a few ideas to further study or think about.
And also for your benefit, I meant to mention this before. For those reading, if you don't have a list of these Toledotes, and you also want to understand the structure of the Ancestor Epic, by the time this episode is out, or at least shortly thereafter, I do intend to have some blog posts which will provide resources so that you can follow along with the Toledotes, and you can look at the structure of the Ancestor Epics as well. But let's get into a basic introduction of the Toledotes. How they show up, where you see them, and also how they help structure the Book of Genesis.
The word Toledote is the Hebrew word for generations. In many of our [00:16:00] Bible translations, this is where we see the words, These are the generations of. That's the beginning of the Toledote. It had been suggested for a while that a toledote served as a colophon. A colophon comes at the end of a section of a tablet or papyrus or parchment. A colophon would have certain types of information, such as the name of the scribe or the date of the copy of the document. Sometimes it would have a summary of the content. This was often a way that they could connect one tablet to another because of course many texts covered multiple tablets So they needed a way to be able to connect one tablet to the next and it's been suggested that a Toledote serves as this kind of information The best example of this is the first Toledote that we see in Genesis 2 4 where it says this is the generations of the heavens and the earth We want that to be a colophon because it makes a lot more sense than if it's the title or the beginning of a section [00:17:00] The trouble is, for pretty much any other Toledote, it doesn't work this way.
Almost none of the other Toledotes summarize previous sections. So it's much better to see them as introducing material and many people have thought that this might be an indication that these are the sections that were the sources that Moses had to work with. But toledotes are not regular in length.
They almost always include a generational list except for that first toledote. But if these were the sources that Moses used, it seems a bit haphazard. And so another common way you will see a Toledote described is that these are the chapter sections of the book. Or at least that's how we can equate it to our modern books.
But as modern readers, looking at the Toledotes like they're chapter sections, we want then everything that happens after the Toledote to have to do with that main character that's first mentioned right there in the generations. We want the rest of the chapter, so to speak, to be about that main character.
These are the [00:18:00] generations of Adam. These are the generations of Noah. These are the generations of Shem. These are the generations of Terah. We want everything after those sections to be about that character. The trouble is, that's not what we see. And when you read Genesis, you have major characters who are obviously very, very important to the entire structure of the book, but they don't have a Toledot.
I don't think it's necessary to see that everything that happens between one toledote to the next has to be included within the first toledote that's mentioned. Sometimes that happens, when the toledote is fairly short. That can actually be the case. But since that's often not the case, I think we need to think of them not as chapters per se.
They are useful for division of the text, however. Depending on who you're asking, there are either 9, 10, or 11 Toledotes. There are only 9 if you discount the weird one [00:19:00] in Genesis 2, which really bucks the cycle entirely. And there are 11 if you see the two mentions of Esau as two different Toledotes. If you include the Toledote of Genesis 2, and you combine the Toledotes of Esau, then there are 10 Toledotes in Genesis.
There are a couple of uses of the word Toledote that are outliers. For instance, there's two in chapter 10 about the sons of Noah, but interestingly enough, unlike the repetition of Esau in chapter 36, nobody mentions that the second Toledote of the sons of Noah is a separate one. There's also a use of the word twice in the Toledot of Ishmael, and again, here, nobody suggests that this is a separate Toledot.
It feels to me like some of the repetitions of the word Toledot are there so that there is an unbroken line back to creation, and that the middle of the book remains the middle of the book when you're counting the Toledots together.
Scholars see four [00:20:00] Toledotes as problematic. The first one is the weird one about the heavens and the earth. The second problematic Toledote is that of Noah, because his genealogical information is spread out in the narrative, and that's unusual. The third problematic Toledote is that of Isaac, which starts in 2519. And this is weird because it's divided by the narrative of Jacob. The last potentially problematic Toledote is that of Jacob, which starts in 37, 2. And this is really weird because it has the beginning of the Toledote, but then it launches right into the Joseph story, before finally getting back into the Toledote in chapter 46, verses 8 through 27.
The Toledote in chapter 2, these are the generations of the heavens and the earth. It's really strange because it's not about people.
It doesn't give a genealogical list. And Garrett's suggestion is that it didn't actually come from a genealogical [00:21:00] list like the other ones did, but that the redactor, or the editor, put it in in order to connect the book as a whole. Because if all of these different documents are being compiled together into one book, then they want to make sure that the toledotes are starting at the right place, right?
And like I said, I think this also helps even out the list. This also breaks off the first chapter of Genesis as a prologue. So it's still certainly related to the rest of Genesis, but in a prologue fashion. Which is interesting because another one of Garrett's ideas is that Genesis 1 through 11 parallels the structure of Genesis as a whole.
And so if Genesis 1 through 11 has a prologue, And Genesis 1 through 50 has a kind of a prologue in the primeval history, then that keeps the parallel intact there. And I realize that a lot of this is really hard to just listen to without any visuals or charts, and that's why I'm going to be giving you visuals and charts in my blog [00:22:00] posts.
So if you're having a hard time visualizing this as I'm talking, you might want to go find those charts so that you can follow along with what I'm talking about. In case you don't have the charts and you want to be taking notes, you Here's a list of the beginning of each Toledot. We have the first one in chapter 2, verse 4.
The second one is about Adam in chapter 5, 1. The third is about Noah in chapter 6, 9. The fourth is about the sons of Noah in 10, verse 1. The fifth Toledot is the Toledot of Shem, and this is in chapter 11, verse 10. Toledot 6 is the Toledot of Terah. In 1127, then we go all the way up to Toledot number 7, which is the Toledot of Ishmael, in chapter 25, verse 12.
Toledot 8 is that of Isaac, beginning in chapter 25, verse 19. Then we have the two Toledots of Esau, in chapter 36, verse 1, and chapter [00:23:00] 36, verse 9. Finally, we have the Toledot of Jacob, and this starts in chapter 37, verse 2. As you can see, the Toledotes have really odd lengths. And everyone wonders why there's not a Toledote for Abraham, and why the Toledote of Jacob is so focused on Joseph instead of Jacob.
The biggest head scratcher is probably the first Toledote, though. In Genesis 2 4, it says, These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. The rest of the chapter goes on with When no bush of the field was yet in the land, And no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, And there was no man to work the ground, And a mist was going up from the land, And was watering the whole face of the ground. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, And the man became a living creature.
Now, people like Fruchtenbaum do [00:24:00] suggest that the Toledoth serve as chapters, right? So the point of the Toledote isn't really the first person or thing mentioned. The generations of the heavens and the earth aren't really about the generations of the heavenly earth, but rather what follows from the creation of the heavens and the earth. And you might say that that's the case because, you know, Adam was formed from dust from the ground. So, in a sense here, you could see the earth as fathering Adam in some sense. Of course, God is the one creating Adam, but he's using the earth. He's using the dust of the ground. And so, as such, it seems as though this whole story after Genesis 2, up until the next Toledote, is about what comes forth from creation.
Fruchtenbaum's statement is, we need to ask, what becomes of the generations of? And that's the structure and the way that you should be reading it. Like I said though, I think that's a bit of a [00:25:00] forced idea. Yes, everything that came after this is actually what came of creation, but you could say that well past the next Toledot structure. So I feel like we're missing something here in the ancient context. It really is hard to see how this is an entire narrative structure or one chapter with Genesis two, three, and four altogether.
Genesis five, one is the beginning of the next toledoth. It says this is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. So it feels like this is repeating things from the previous toledoth.
Chapter five is basically just a genealogical list. There's really not much narrative in here, there's a few little points, but you wouldn't call them stories per se. This generational list ends with Noah fathering Shem, Ham, and Japheth. But [00:26:00] we don't yet get the next Toledot. So we do have some narrative structure in the beginning of chapter 6.
This is, of course, the story about the daughters of men and the sons of God and the Nephilim and God seeing the wickedness of man deciding to do the flood, right? But noting that Noah finds favor. Garrett suggests that the Toledote is actually only Chapter 5, and that Chapter 6, 1 through 8, is actually from a different source entirely. Like, there are different documents here. There are genealogical lists, and then there are narrative stories. And these connect, obviously, because they're the same characters, the same people involved. But they're different source documents.
The third Toledote is that of Noah. This begins in chapter 6, verse 9, where it says, These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. And Noah had three sons, Shem, [00:27:00] Ham, and Japheth. And then it launches into how the earth was corrupt. Garrett suggests that the Toledote of Noah is split up in the narrative. We have Toledot information in chapter 6, verse 9, but only the first part of the verse, where it says, These are the generations of Noah.
Then we have more information from the Toledot in verse 10, where it says, And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The next section of the Toledot for Noah is found in chapter 7, verse 6, which says, Noah was 600 years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth. Because Toledotes usually involve either the children, or the ages, or the deaths, and things like that.
Then we have to go to chapter 9, verses 18 and 19, which says, The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and [00:28:00] from these the people of the whole earth were dispersed. Then we can skip down to verses 28 and 29 of chapter 9, which says, After the flood, Noah lived 350 years. All the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died.
Garrett suggests that all of that that I just read, that is the Toledot of Noah. And that source document was interspersed with another source document that had the narrative story. The next Toledot begins in the next chapter, in Genesis 10. These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. Then it goes into the genealogical list until the end of the chapter in verse 32, which says, These are the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations, and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.
Now, the reason that this isn't seen as another Toledote is [00:29:00] because this seems to have an inclusio pattern, or an envelope, where verse 1 and verse 32 match up and enclose the middle part of the chapter. This seems to be the only envelope structure that we have in the Toledotes in Genesis. And again, I have to personally wonder if the reason this was included was the redactor adding it in so that the structure of the whole book balanced. Genesis 10 is known as the Table of Nations. And this seems out of structure because it seems like it should follow the Tower of Babel narrative. But again, I've said before that it doesn't look like the biblical writers were interested in recording chronology in the way that we would prefer them to record it in.
Garrett says that after verse 32, once we do get into chapter 11, this is where the narrative portion begins. So, again, we have a genealogical list attached to a narrative story. The genealogical list doesn't have to happen before the narrative, but rather that they are [00:30:00] associated together. So it's like the genealogical list is saying, here's all of the nations, and by the way, it happened because of this story right here.
The fifth Toledot is that of Shem, in Genesis 11. 10. And this goes to Genesis 11. 26. which mentions Terah and Abram. Toledot 6 is that of Terah in 1127. Now, these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran fathered Lot.
Now, why doesn't Abraham have a Toledot? There's a couple of options. First of all, he is mentioned in two different genealogies here. So that seems important. It also seems like the Toledots are just, they're genealogical lists. They are connected to narrative, but they aren't the beginning of a chapter.
Now, there is a rabbinic idea that Terah was the one who was called initially, but he didn't end up going all the way. He just stopped at [00:31:00] Haran. And so, God was like, OK, you don't want to play my game? I'll go to Abram instead. But, of course, there's no real suggestion of that in Genesis or elsewhere, so I don't think we should really put too much stock into that. The only reason you want that to be the case is because you want these Toledotes to play a part that they probably aren't playing.
In other words, we are looking at the structure of Genesis in a way that isn't embedded in the way that people of the time would look at the structure of Genesis. When you look at the structure of Genesis from the Ancestor Epic, Abraham does then become a very prominent player in that. It just doesn't seem to show up very well in the Toledotes.
Alright, we have to go all the way to Genesis 25 verse 12 for the next Toledote. These are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah's servant, bore to Abraham. And this one goes through verse 18, [00:32:00] and there is a little bit of narrative information in here, but not a whole lot. So this is another example of just a genealogy. And again, in verse 13, we have another instance of the word Toledot, where in the ESV it says, named in the order of their birth, that's the word Toledot. This is obviously not starting a new Toledote. It's just using the word.
Alright, then in Genesis 25, verse 19, these are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son. And once again, Garrett suggests that this one is also split up. In Genesis 25, verses 19 and 20, it says, These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son. Abraham fathered Isaac, and Isaac was 40 years old when he took Rebekah. The daughter of Bethuel, the Aramean of Padan-aram, the sister of Laben, the Aramean to be his wife, Garrett suggests skipping over to chapter 35, verses 22 through [00:33:00] 29, or rather the end of verse 22, where it says, now the sons of Jacob were 12. And then it goes through a whole genealogical list there.
Now, if we're looking at it as a chapter, the Toledot of Isaac does go to the death of Isaac, but it has a whole lot of information that seems unrelated to Isaac. There's the whole story of Jacob and Esau. There's the story of Dinah in there as well.
After the Toledot of Isaac, we have the one or two Toledots of Esau. We see this in chapter 36, verse 1, and chapter 36, verse 9. Most of this is genealogical information, and it seems like there's two points to these two Toledots. It seems like the first Toledot is about the person of Esau, and the second is about the people group, or at least that's what has been suggested.
The final Toledote is in chapter 37, and this is the Toledote of Jacob. In Genesis 37, 2, it says, [00:34:00] these are the generations of Jacob. And then right after that, it starts into the narrative story of Joseph. And again, it might be the case that this Toledote was split up, because in chapter 46, verses 8 through 27, it starts out with, now these are the names of the descendants of Israel who came into Egypt. Jacob and his sons, and then it goes into the whole list. So it's suggested that the story of Joseph is inserted where it is to make sense of the fact that they are now in Egypt here, in the middle of the Toledot.
There are so many interesting things that you can note in every different Toledot. In the Toledot of Jacob, for instance, there are five pairs of two. There's two dreams of Joseph, two dreams in prison, two dreams of Pharaoh, two imprisonments of Joseph, Two journeys made by the brothers. So even though they might not be chapters, the Toledote structures are very good sections to look at [00:35:00] as a whole. It's similar to how you can look at a chiasm as a whole. Just because a chiasm is in the text, that doesn't negate other kinds of structures of the text. But a chiasm is only useful when you look at it in itself. So a Toledote can be useful to look at as a whole section. But if you're only structuring the book of Genesis using Toledotes, it's very haphazard and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense across the entire book.
So the Toledotes are definitely used to structure the book, but it might not be that there are ten chapters to Genesis. It might be that Toledotes are used in a different way to structure it than the way that seems obvious. The Toledote may or may not have a whole lot to do with the surrounding narrative tales.
Usually they do, but sometimes there might be a bit of a disconnect. And so now, let's talk about the Ancestor Epic pattern. Garret got [00:36:00] clued into the Ancestor Epic pattern by studying other ancient literature. And of course, that's a really good way to do things. If you're trying to figure out the structure of Genesis, you need to be comparing it to literature of the same time.
Well, and this is where the source documents come into play when we're looking at structure as well. This is why source documents are important to the structure of a text. The source documents are going to play a part in the way that the text is structured. Even if the text moves quite a bit away from the source documents, that influence still might be there.
So the text that we're looking at is the Epic of Atrahasis. This is another one of those ancient Near Eastern texts that has a very close parallel to the Book of Genesis. Garrett notes that there is a structure to the Epic of Atrahasis that we can also see in various ways in Genesis. And because Genesis is more [00:37:00] than just a narrative about one person or even a single family, We see the Ancestor Epic cycle several times throughout the book.
It's also possible that some of the smaller stories that aren't technically in the Ancestor Epic cycle pattern, they still come from this same pattern, but we may have lost part of the story.
The basic structure of the Ancestor Epic is that there is an introduction, there are three incidents that are threats to whatever's going on, and then there is a resolution. Sometimes, and quite often, the resolution isn't really all that favorable, but it is nonetheless a resolution.
I won't go into how the Ancestors Epic shows up in the Epic of Atrahasis. If you're interested in delving into the detail, I do suggest getting the book. Let's go ahead and have a look at how this shows up in Genesis. And this will also tie into what we see with the [00:38:00] Toledotes as well. So noting the Toledotes first is really, really helpful here.
So the entire primeval history of Genesis 1 through 11 is our first instance of the Ancestor Epic. As I said, this epic pattern shows up in Atrahasis, it shows up in the narrative of the Trojan War, it shows up in other places in Scripture, such as in Exodus 1 and 2 and Matthew 1 through 3. I'll leave you to look at those passages to see how they fit the pattern.
But in Genesis 1 through 11, we first have an introduction. This is the initial narrative of the creation. In Genesis 1 1 through Genesis 2 3. After this, what do we have? We have our first incidence of the Toledote. I told you that Toledotes are going to play their part in how Genesis is structured. And this is where we see it. We see it [00:39:00] as part of the construction of this epic pattern. Toledotes are going to be our separation for each of these pieces.
So the introduction sets things up in order for the threats to happen. There are three threats in the primeval history. And another pattern that we see with Atrahasis is that in the second threat, there are actually two aspects to that. So we have the first threat, we have the second threat, of which there are two parts, and then we have a final threat before we get to a resolution.
Now, of course, the first threat happens in the Garden of Eden. This is from Genesis 2 4 to 3 24. While it doesn't use the word Toledote, the beginning of Chapter 4 does introduce a genealogy. This is the genealogy of Eve's sons. Now, Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the [00:40:00] Lord. And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground.
This sets things up for the second threat, which, again, there's two parts to this. First, we have Cain and Abel. And then we have the incident at the end of the chapter with Lamech. They're both very similar. Both of these incidents have murder and the idea of revenge. Embedded in the second threat is a type of genealogy. It's not using the Toledote language, but this might form a bit of an inclusio. The first part of the chapter introduces Cain and Abel. The last part of the chapter introduces Seth.
The third and final threat is, of course, the flood. This goes from Genesis 5 1 to Genesis 9 29. It begins with the genealogy of Adam, and it includes the genealogy of Noah. But as I've mentioned before, the genealogy of Noah does buck [00:41:00] the system in that it's not just a Toledote. It is integrated into the narrative structure of the story.
The resolution of the Primeval Ancestor Epic occurs in Genesis 10. 1 through 11. 32. Again, we have the genealogy. This is the one of the sons of Noah. We have the incident of the Tower of Babel and we have the dispersion and we have yet another genealogy at the end of this section.
Now, you might wonder, how is this a resolution of anything? It seems to end in a really sour note, although it is ending with Abraham. The way to see the Tower of Babel as a resolution connects back to the introduction. What were God's goals in creation? He created humanity in order to spread out to the earth, right? He wanted us to go out and to bring Eden to everyone. This goal was hijinked by A, the incident [00:42:00] in the garden, B, the Cain and Abel and Lamech story, and C, the flood.
We might be tempted to see the Tower of Babel as a type of threat as well. That is a threat. It's directed towards God, not towards the people themselves, because the people are actively doing this. So the people don't think that this is a threat, but if God's goal is to get people out into the world and spread and multiply and be fruitful, well, the Tower of Babel does meet that requirement, even if it's not doing it in a great way.
Like I said, resolutions don't have to be happy endings. They don't have to be perfect. They just have to resolve the problem in some way. So, with the idea that genealogies link these different sections, this is why we have the generations of the heavens and the earth. Suddenly, that part makes a little bit more sense.
It's interesting, too, to note [00:43:00] that both Atrahasis, as well as Genesis 1 through 11, have the same basic problems. Both stories involve a problem with population increase. Of course, with Atrahasis, the gods didn't want the population to increase. And in Genesis, God does want the population to increase. So these are opposites in that way, but it's still the same basic topic for the problem.
The second problem is geographical expansion. And this is why the tower is a resolution. Both the purposes of the population growth and The geographical expansion are solved in the story of the Tower of Babel.
Now, because the patriarchs of Israel are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we expect those three characters to be the main characters of Genesis, right? They're the patriarchs. They should be the main characters. However, what we actually see are the main characters of [00:44:00] Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. This doesn't have to throw a wrench into the idea of the Patriarchs at all. This is just how the Book of Genesis itself is structured.
This strengthens Garrett's idea that the theme of Genesis is alienation. The reason Isaac doesn't really play a massive role in the Book of Genesis is because Isaac never wanders away from the land. So he doesn't fit into the concept or theme of alienation so much
So the main characters of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, those fit into the overarching idea that Genesis itself is an ancestor epic, because Genesis 1 through 11 is the introduction. We have the three threats to the nation of Israel in Abraham, Jacob, and also Joseph, and then at the end, there is a resolution. The resolution at the end of the book of Genesis is that the people of God are all again brought together in peace and [00:45:00] harmony, at least for the moment. Again, it's not a perfect situation at the end of Genesis, but it doesn't have to be a perfect solution or a perfect resolution. In the end, the threats are neutralized. And once again, remember how I said that the second threat had two threats to it? Well, in the Jacob cycle, he is threatened twice by Esau.
So in the pattern we saw in Genesis 1 through 11, the sections are broken up by genealogies or genealogical information. We can also say the same of the major framework of Genesis as a whole. These sections too are broken up by genealogies. The overall picture looks like this. We have the prologue or the introduction of the primeval history in Genesis 1 through 1126. Then we have a genealogy in 11, 27 through 32. This is Toledot 6. Then we have the Abraham cycle. This goes from Genesis [00:46:00] 12, 1 to Genesis 25, 11. This is where we have Toledot 7, from Genesis 25, 12 through 18. Then we have the Jacob cycle. This starts in Genesis 25, 19 and goes to 35, 22. After this cycle, we have the two Toledotes of Esau. Then we have the Joseph cycle. This goes from 37 1 to 46 7. And once again, we have that Toledote, or the end of the Toledote, in Genesis 46, 8 29.
After that, we have the Resolution, which is settlement in Egypt. This goes from Genesis 46 28 to 50 26. Now, again, I will be putting out blog posts that will lay out all of this information for you. In addition, you can always go into my transcript, search that, and find everything you need in order to make your own chart, or write your own notes, or whatever it is you [00:47:00] need.
We can also spend some time looking at these individual epic cycles within the Book of Genesis. Just like Genesis 1 through 11 has a cycle, we also see the cycle showing up several times again, And sometimes we see it showing up almost, where it doesn't quite have all of the elements, but it almost does. And this is suggestive of an original source that had the pattern, but all of the pattern just didn't end up in Genesis itself.
And I don't know about you, but to me, this makes so much more sense than just looking at the Toledotes individually. To me, looking at the Toledotes individually Always felt incomplete. They are so clearly part of the structure of Genesis, but it's not really straightforward if you're just reading it from start to finish. If, however, you realize that there might be various source documents behind the book, and that those source documents have the same structure [00:48:00] as other ancient Near Eastern literatures, then suddenly things start falling into place.
This also gives me a lot of answers to a lot of questions that I have had about Genesis myself. Like, what is the deal with Joseph? Why is he so prominent in the book when he's technically not a patriarch? Because the line from Joseph only is two tribes and not the whole nation. So that makes him the patriarch of only a couple of the tribes, not the whole nation.
And why, oh why, is Isaac such a small part of the book of Genesis if he's an entire patriarch? This also fits in with the fact that when we look at the Bible, we can see just how very layered it is. There is so much repetition. We see that Genesis 1 through 11 is a guide or a pattern for the rest of the book of Genesis.
But it also forms a part in that pattern. And that's just, that's such a fascinating way to do things, but it's a very [00:49:00] common thing that you see in ancient literature. It's almost like the first section of a story or a text is the table of contents, or the guide to how you're supposed to read the rest of it.
And you can see how the idea that you're supposed to get from this pattern of Genesis 1 through 11 versus Genesis 1 through 50, is that you see that God did this good thing for the people of the earth. He brought the people out in the early days, and he will do the same for the covenant people.
We can see that the story of Genesis indicates that Israel was threatened even before it began as a nation. Abraham was threatened by the Canaanites. Jacob was threatened by the land of Laban and by his brother. Joseph was threatened by his brothers and also the nation of Egypt. But they all succeed, they all rise and find deliverance. And the question is, how and why did they do that? Yes, they were involved in all of the process, but really, the glory [00:50:00] belongs to God. It is God who is the deliverer. Neither Genesis 1 through 11, nor Atrahasis or Genesis entirely end perfectly, but they set the stage for later things. And they indicate that faith needs to be placed in God. And that God really does have things in hand, even if things seem to be going a direction you don't want them to go.
A key concern of the Ancestor Epic is the survival of the race or the group. God's goal is to fill the earth or to fill the land of Canaan. And the act of filling ought to be done in a way that is very flourishing for the people. Now, if you're wondering how this theme of alienation fits in here,
these are the different ways we can see it in some of the sections in Genesis. We see it in the expulsion from Eden. We certainly see it with Cain. We see it in the division and the scattering of the people. We see it where Abram has to leave his homeland, his family, and in his [00:51:00] constant wanderings around Canaan and down into Egypt. We see the theme of alienation in the story of Lot. We see it in the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob goes to Haran and sometimes, by no fault of his own, , he keeps getting cheated out of what deserves. We see the alienation in the story of Joseph. He is alienated from his brothers. The sons of Jacob are alienated by the famine. And even in the end, Joseph remains alienated because he dies outside of the land.
But this pattern that God is the one who is delivering them should remain in the back of our minds as we read. And this should form the basis of the reader's hope. I'm going to read a quote from Garrett about this theme of alienation. He says, quote, The full text of Genesis, an ancestor epic, stresses above all that Israel is the most alien of peoples in an alienated world. The sense of estrangement and [00:52:00] homelessness is mitigated only by the promises of God. In that, there is hope of finally finding a home. End quote.
Garrett admits that Abraham has the most complex story in the book of Genesis. The story of Abraham doesn't quite fit into the ancestor epic pattern, but it's close, and Garrett believes that there's reasons for this itself.
If a story breaks a common pattern that you're expecting, then you ought to be paying attention closely to that. I think I will probably go ahead and dedicate an entire episode just looking at this pattern of Abraham, because I think it is that important. But the other thing about Abraham is that he is not just The patriarch of the Israelites, he is the patriarch of many nations. We have Israel, we have Ishmael, we have Moab, we have Ammon, we have other tribes from Keterah. Because he is the source of so [00:53:00] many nations, he doesn't really fit the exact pattern, although there are indications of it in his story, and probably other people within his story that are very much attached to Abraham fit into this cycle. And maybe we'll talk about that here in a second.
But the Ancestor Epic of Jacob is probably the easiest one to see. This goes from 2521 to 3522. Although it seems like there's a couple of little incursions of other stories within this cycle. But this is very much centered on Israel and not the other nations.
In Jacob's cycle, we have the prologue. This goes from 2521 to 34. This is with the introduction of Esau and Jacob, and the conflict begins. His first threat is from 271 to 2822. This is where Jacob gets his blessing, and he has to flee. The second threat is in 291 [00:54:00] through 3155. And again, here we have two different parts to the second threat. In 2915 through 27, Laban cheats him, and then in chapter 31, Laban hates Jacob.
The third threat goes from 32 1 to 33 20, and this is where Jacob faces Esau. The final resolution to Jacob's story is in 35 1 to 22. This is his return to Bethel. Benjamin is born, and Rachel dies. Again, it might be worth going into this more in depth and really getting into all of these passages and looking at them more specifically, especially with Jacob, because it's so very centered on the nation of Israel. And because it's so centered on the nation of Israel, that's going to affect how we read the entire Bible itself. That's what makes it important for us as faithful readers of the text to note all of this.
[00:55:00] Instead of going into specifics of something that we could talk about at much greater length later, I think we can go ahead and talk about some of these so called parallel epics in Genesis. These are stories that almost fit the pattern, but they're missing some elements, and they don't quite fit. But they also fit inside these other larger ancestor epics. Again, this is just the way the Bible works. You have structures within structures within structures. It doesn't negate the overall structure, it just gives you a smaller piece of it in order to see a major point there.
So, Garrett calls these parallel epics. They don't have all the content or the structure of the full epic, and each head of the epic is threatened two to three times instead of the full three times, with the second time being a two fold structure.
The first parallel epic we'll look at is the wife sister narrative. For people who have read Genesis more than once, [00:56:00] you've almost certainly noticed this strange pattern where the same story happens different times. Now, many scholars who look at biblical sources want to say that these are examples of stories that just got recorded multiple times. It's like the scribe said, Oops, we didn't realize we put that in over there.
Yeah, no, I don't think that is how any of this ends up there. That doesn't make any sense, because the scribes are so very careful, and they certainly did redaction at times. So it's not like they were afraid of editing things. So the idea that this is just the same story, and they just happened to put a new person into it, because they felt like it? That answer doesn't fly. I'm sorry. It just doesn't.
However, if you see that these are potentially from the three fold cycle of an ancestor epic, Then suddenly it makes all the sense in the world that there are three of them. These [00:57:00] may have fit into a full ancestor epic at some point. The stories are in Genesis 12, 10 through 20. This is with Abram. In Genesis 20, 1 thru 18, with Abraham, after he's received his new name. And then also in 26, 1, and 7 through 17. This is the incident with Isaac.
Another ancestor epic shows up with the figure of Lot. This one is a very dark epic. The first of Lot's threat is the crisis with the pastures. All of their sheep and goats do not fit on the land, so they need to split it up. Abraham saves him from this crisis by letting him choose, but of course, in that choice, he ends up going to Sodom. The second crisis for Lot is the war that he is abducted in. And Abraham has to go, again, save him. The third crisis is, of course, at Sodom.
There is a resolution in the [00:58:00] book of Genesis for Lot. It doesn't end up being a great end, because there ends up being a curse on his seed in the nations of Moab and Ammon. The cycle of Lot fits really well into the cycle of Abraham. But we could also see it as a foil for Abraham. Instead of being faithful to God and doing what he's supposed to be doing, He keeps making the dumb choices.
One final parallel epic I want to mention is the one with Hagar. This one is twofold rather than three. Her first crisis is in chapter 16, verses 1 through 16, where Sarai complains. Hagar runs away and the Angel of the Lord sends her back. The second crisis for Hagar happens in chapter 21, verses 1 through 21. This is where Sarah is finally fertile. And she sends out Hagar. There is a resolution to Hagar's story. Ishmael is saved, and Hagar gets Ishmael a wife.
Now, [00:59:00] there's probably quite a bit that I could say about these parallel epics in bringing out the themes and reasons for their stories. But I'm going to hand a lot of that off to you to think about. Because, now that you have some interesting new ways of looking at Genesis in your reading, I hope that this will promote some meditation. And if you want to come talk about it in my discussion group with me, that would be awesome.
The last thing I will mention is that Garrett brings out the fact that not everything in the Book of Genesis seems to fit really neatly into one of these ancestor epics. And so instead of epics, he calls these stories tales. They don't exist in a three fold structure. They're not always a threat, but they do often involve family traditions. Examples of these are the negotiation tales, the death and burial of Sarah, the betrothal and marriage of Isaac, the story of Dinah and the Shechemites.
Now, a word [01:00:00] on structure. Some people might be concerned at having so many sources to the book of Genesis, but why should that be a problem? If we don't take to the dictation model of inspiration, then we already question the idea that God just downloaded the information into Moses. In addition, much of this information is very highly detailed, and while we do ascribe to the fact that many ancient peoples had oral narratives, we also need to be cognizant of the fact that they really did write things down. They wrote down genealogies, okay? They just did. Yes, a lot of that was going to be memorized, but that doesn't preclude them from writing things down. So when we see things that are detailed, like the Toledotes, and those are combined with narratives, and we look at that and we go, we can't quite sort out these puzzle pieces as to how this creates a linear narrative. Well, the fact is it's less of a linear narrative in like our modern [01:01:00] idea of a novel or something like that, but it was linear and cohesive in the way that they wrote.
You know, a lot of times I look at Genesis 1 through 11 and I'm thinking about the three falls. The Fall in Genesis 3, the Fall in Genesis 6, the Fall in Genesis 11. Each of those incidents involved spiritual beings crossing the boundaries of heaven and earth in a way that they shouldn't have been. But the Fall narratives do not encompass everything that happens in Genesis 1 through 11. And so looking at it with the structure of the introduction, the three threats, and the resolution, it just makes a whole lot more sense of the structure of the passage. It also very much explains the inclusion of Genesis 4, which is something that a lot of us tend to kind of skip over or wonder, why the heck is this in here?
As I said, I'm very surprised that this is information that I don't see commonly elsewhere, because it's super cool. And the Book of Genesis is [01:02:00] really hard to understand when you're just breaking it up into those 10 or 11 pieces of the Toledotes. Even as deeply into Genesis as I am, When I try and remember the structure of the entire book, I have a hard time keeping it in mind. It reminds me of how I had such a hard time when I was little keeping the Days of Creation in mind, because I didn't have a logical structure to it. But once I understood that the Days of Creation really do have a logical structure, and it just wasn't a linear one, then suddenly I am able to remember it, because it makes a lot of sense.
And again, with this structure of the Ancestor Epics, The entire book of Genesis just makes a whole lot more sense to me. So I hope that can also be said for you, that this was very helpful to you in your reading of Genesis. If you're interested in looking further, you can check out that book. You can look on my blog and in my Facebook group and in my newsletter for all of those images and ideas that I'm going to [01:03:00] be sharing with you in order to help you study.
I might not have all of the toledotes and the narrative structures exactly on my blog for a little bit, but I'll be working on that. So, with that, I will go ahead and wrap up this episode by thanking you all for listening. Thank you all to my Patreon and PayPal supporters. You guys are such a great blessing, and I just want to really thank you for that.
Thank you for those of you who share my episodes and who rate the podcast. If you have not done so, I would really appreciate it if you did. You can do so wherever you listen, and you can also rate my podcast directly on my website at genesismarksthespot. com. This is also where you can contact me if you have any questions.
I'd love to get more questions for future Q& A episodes or other topics you'd like to see me address. I hope the new year sees you all blessed and hopeful for what is coming up for this year. But for now, I hope you have a blessed week, and we will see you [01:04:00] later.
