The rest of Genesis serves to answer questions the children of Israel would have had as they emerged from their 400-year exile from Canaan. Each of these components seems intended to counteract pagan accounts of creation.

The fundamental message of the Creation Account has five components: 1) all of world history is linear rather than cyclical, with a chronological beginning 2) the one true God is the creator of the universe and everything in it 3) nothing in all of creation is a competing god or deserving of worship 4) every created thing was made to be good and 5) human beings are the pinnacle of the creation activity-they function as God’s agents to manage his world.

The content of Genesis 1 and 2 seems consistent with the need Moses would have had to explain origins to the Israelites just coming out of Egyptian bondage. Mosaic authorship of Genesis, in other words, has made a come-back in recent times. More recently, however, some scholars have recognized that much of the repetition, variation, and diversity in Genesis can be attributed to the highly sophisticated literary artistry of one author, a style very alien to the rationalistic higher critics of the 19th and 20th centuries. As the years progressed, the analysis became more and more detailed, and scholars competed with one another, proposing ever more elaborate and contradictory theories. They asserted that Genesis is a compilation of at least two written sources, distinguished by the use of two divine names in various portions of the document. Higher critics from the 19th century onward have repudiated this claim of Mosaic authorship. Anonymous books of the Old Testament GenesisĪlthough Genesis is called the First Book of Moses, nowhere in Genesis, or in the rest of the Pentateuch for that matter, is there any hint about who wrote it. Let’s look closer at each one of these 18 books. Of the 27 New Testament books, six are anonymous: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, and Hebrews. When we examine closely the books of the Bible, we discover that 12 of the 39 Old Testament books are anonymous: Genesis, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Esther, Job, and Ecclesiastes. If the author has chosen to be anonymous, however, this procedure becomes impossible. The usual procedure for studying a biblical text is to begin with who wrote it and under what circumstances.

Greek New Testament by Anonymous