Genesis tells creation twice, a clue to its many authors
Read Genesis closely and the world is created in two different accounts, Abraham twice sends Hagar into the desert, and a wife-sister story appears three times. Those repetitions helped convince scholars that the book, traditionally credited to Moses, was stitched together from several sources and reached its final form after the Babylonian exile.
Genesis opens the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew title, bereshit, is simply its first word, in the beginning, while the Greek name means origin. The book falls into two halves: a primeval history in chapters 1 to 11, covering creation, Adam and Eve, and the flood that spares Noah, and an ancestral history in chapters 12 to 50 following Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph until 70 members of Israel's family settle in Egypt. Along the way God's covenants narrow from all humanity, through Noah, to one people.
Doubts about Mosaic authorship go back to Spinoza and Hobbes, and in the 17th century Richard Simon proposed many writers over a long period. By the late 19th century most scholars accepted the documentary hypothesis, which traces the Pentateuch to four strands distinguished partly by what they call God: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist and the Priestly source. Julius Wellhausen argued the whole was finalised in Ezra's day. Since the 1980s rival models have emerged; one, the supplementary hypothesis, treats the Elohist as merely a variant of the Yahwist.
Dating remains contested. The current majority places composition after the exile, perhaps during the fifth century BCE. Ronald Hendel and Aaron Hornkohl argue on linguistic grounds for a date before 550 BCE, while Russell Gmirkin proposes the late 270s BCE, with borrowings from Greek sources such as Berossus. A controversial but influential theory holds that Persian rulers, after taking Babylon in 539 BCE, required Jerusalem to produce a single law code, pushing priestly and landowning factions to merge their competing origin stories.
Mainstream scholars regard Genesis as primarily mythological rather than historical. Jean-Louis Ska compares its method to ancient antiquarian writing, whose guiding rule was to keep everything old and discard nothing.
Source: Book of Genesis
