As to how the Genesis text was understood by those living in the culture that it ultimately generated, we have the evidence of the Old and New Testaments to show us that they took the Genesis material as history. The Jewish historian Josephus, in his introduction to his famous Jewish Antiquities, written around AD 110, demonstrates an acute awareness of the difference between a carefully researched factual account of history, on the one hand, and fables and deliberate fabrications on the other.
