What if I told you that, not only do we know who wrote the book of Genesis, they signed their names to the sections they wrote? And that one of the authors was God Himself?
Seems almost too incredible to believe, doesn’t it? But this is yet another example of just how much understanding has been lost, because we simply don’t understand the culture that existed when Genesis was written.
Nowadays, in the information age, we can do a search on the internet to find a book we might be interested in by title, author, topic, or what-have-you. We also still have public and private libraries, where people can go to look up books.
When you go to a library, the books aren’t just haphazardly organized. There’s a specific system (often the Dewey decimal system) where books are organized by category (e.g. biographies, history, science fiction, and so forth) and then alphabetically. Moreover, you don’t have to take the book off of the shelf and open it, to know what’s inside. There’s a book title right on the spine of the book, that you can read when the book is still sitting on the shelf. Right?
Now, imagine that you’re living close to 6,000 years ago. Not everyone knew how to read and write back then, but not only is the skill of writing very highly prized, but anything written was carefully preserved.
Back then, people didn’t have an alphabet, the way we know it today. Instead, they started writing by using simplified pictures that represented people, animals, and things. Abstract concepts followed, by association with a more concrete concept. For instance, the concept of “strength” could be conveyed by the picture of an ox.
What were people writing on, though? They didn’t have paper as we have it today, so they improvised other sorts of writing mediums. Animal skins – primarily skins of sheep, calves and goats – were popular since they were fairly easy to come by. A person would take the skin, wash it in water, de-hair it with a specially prepared fermented brew for several days, then stretch it on a rack to prepare it for writing. The prepared skin was known as parchment.
In ancient Egypt, a type of reed plant called papyrus grew in marshy areas near the Nile river. The plants would be cut down, and the insides of the triangular stalks would be cut or peeled into long strips. These strips were then laid out in two layers, one horizontal and the other vertical, then pressed and dried into a sheet. Many of these sheets could be joined end-to-end to form a long roll of up to 100 feet long.
What about in regions where there were no papyrus plants and not so many animals, but a lot of clay? Then people would shape the clay into tablets, impress the pictograms onto the tablet while it was still wet, then fire the clay so it would harden. The fired tablets were somewhat brittle, but quite durable in terms of withstanding weather extremes.
Now, trying to inscribe pictograms onto wet clay isn’t the easiest thing to do, so these early writers came up with another innovation. Instead of more realistic-looking pictograms, they would use a stylus to make wedge marks in the wet clay, that approximated the shape of the pictogram. These wedge marks became known as cuneiform.
Storing parchment was fairly easy, as they could be rolled up and stored that way. It was a bit difficult to label them so a person would know what was on the parchment without unrolling it at least a little, however. The same would be true of papyrus. Clay tablets, on the other hand, could be easily labeled on the bottom ends.
Archaeologists discovered veritable clay tablet libraries at sites such as Mari, Nuzi and Ebla in the Middle East. The tablets were stored on shelves, with the bottom ends sticking out. Each tablet was labeled on the bottom end so that a reader would know what the contents of the tablet was, without having to pull the tablet out of position on the shelf – just like a book title!
These “book titles” were generally stylized in the form, “these are the generations of X” or, more poetically, “this is the history of X.” Some of the tablets did contain genealogies, while others contained myths and stories, and still others contained transaction receipts for trade goods. Since the Hebrew word for “generations” is “toledoth,” these “book titles” have become known as “toledoth.” Due to their position on the bottom ends of the tablets, these titles are also known as “colophons.”
British Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman was one of the archaeologists studying the clay tablets recovered from these ancient archives. He noted the general form of the colophons on the tablets, and then realized that the exact same pattern appears many times in the book of Genesis!
In 1936, P. J. Wiseman wrote a book describing his theory that Genesis was originally written in cuneiform, on a series of clay tablets, called “Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis.” His son, himself a highly respected scholar as well, published an updated version of the book in 1985.
Let’s look at where these “book titles” show up in Genesis:
Genesis 36:1Now these are the generations of Esau, who is Edom
| Genesis 2:4 | This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. |
| Genesis 5:1 | This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. |
| Genesis 6:9 | These are the generations of Noah. |
| Genesis 10:1 | Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. |
| Genesis 11:10 | These are the generations of Shem |
| Genesis 11:27 | These are the generations of Terah |
| Genesis 25:12 | Now these are the generations of Ishamael |
| Genesis 25:19 | And these are the generations of Isaac |
| Genesis 36:9 | And these are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites in mount Seir |
| Genesis 37:2 | These are the generations of Jacob |
A lot of very interesting things are going on, here. As you can see, nearly all of the sections do name specific authors, and ALMOST every single “book title” appears at the end of the section it labels.
The first exception is found in Genesis 10:1, where we find a “book title” that claims authorship by the three sons of Noah. If you look at the Flood story, you’ll notice a lot of repeated phrases, and that’s because the editor putting together Genesis from the original tablets interwove three separate tablets together from each of the three sons of Noah, to form this section. You can identify the parts that are written by Shem as the ones that mention God’s covenant.
The next three exceptions – the generations of Ishmael, and two tablets of the generations of Esau, are inserted into the tablets of Isaac and Jacob, respectively. In addition, these inserted “book titles” are at the beginning of their respective sections, rather than at the end.
So, where does that leave us? What have we learned, here?
Well, one very important thing to note is that the Creation story in Genesis 1-3 is actually on TWO DIFFERENT TABLETS! The author of the first tablet – the One who was present when the heavens and the earth were created – was God. The author of the second tablet was Adam.
That’s really critical to understand, when we’re trying to sort out the intended meaning of Creation! It’s not one single, unified story, but two stories that were expressly written to fit together.
We’ll explore exactly how they fit together in a separate article, here.
References:
Wiseman, P. J. Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis
Sewell, Curt. https://www.trueorigin.org/tablet.php