Book of Genesis
The Book of Foundations
Paul J. Bucknell
________________________
Reliability of the Genesis Hebrew texts
Genesis, the first and oldest book of the Bible, surprisingly has one of the clearest outlines of all 66 Bible books. If one wants to understand the end, then one must first discover the beginning. Genesis is the Book of Beginnings.
Each of the ten sections are introduced. Just a number of years ago, people were debating whether Moses could even have written down the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, because writing was not invented. Not so, anymore! We have since then discovered writing was alive and well back in Abraham's age around 2000 B.C.
Others protested that Genesis was not written by Moses but by a number of copy editors. This perspective was very popular until lately because the latest texts we had on Genesis were from the Masoretic Text (11th century A.D.). Yes, there was the Septuagint (LXX - a Greek translation of scriptures) from the 3rd century B.C., but they were all in the Greek - no Hebrew texts. There was no older Hebrew copy. It was easy to allege Genesis was full of corrupt editing by more recent clever individuals.
This idea was shattered when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in the 20th century. Fragments of 15 manuscripts dated about the first century B.C. were discovered. There were so few variants with the traditional text that all the alleged attacks on the integrity of Genesis were lost. Because the Hebrew texts were not influenced by the LXX, it has now come to be accepted that the Hebrew text was standardized well before 300 B.C.. The text of Genesis is very trustworthy.
_____________________________________________________
________________________
Continue -> Other book introductions or BFF's resource store
Learn more about Biblical Foundations for Freedom or Paul J. Bucknell