The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version

by Michael D. Coogan

Jewish tradition calls the first book of the Bible after its first word, Bereshit, which can be translated as “in the beginning” or “when first.” It was common in the ancient world to name a book after its first word(s); for example, the Mesopotamian epic that narrates the world’s creation, Enuma Elish, gets its name from its first words, which mean “When on high.” Bereshit also highlights the character of the book as the beginning of the Bible.

Christian tradition takes its name for the first book of the Bible, “Genesis,” from the ancient Greek translation of the Torah, the Septuagint. Genesis in Greek means “origin” or “birth,” and it appears throughout the Greek translation of book, starting with two labels that refer to a “book of origin/birth” (2.4; 5.1). This name highlights an important dimension of the book of Genesis: its focus on genealogical origins. Though Genesis contains some of the most powerful narratives in the Bible, these stories occur within a genealogical structure, starting with 2.4 and ending with 37.2. Within this framework, the book may be understood as an expanded genealogy of the “children of Israel” who will be the focus of attention in the book of Exodus and subsequent books.

In the ancient Near East, most literary compositions, including Genesis, were anonymous. Only during the Greco‐Roman period do we start to see statements in early Jewish texts that Moses wrote Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. By this time Judaism had been influenced by Greek culture, where author attributions were important and the writings attributed to Homer enjoyed the highest prestige.

Most scholars agree that the texts now found in Genesis began to be written down sometime after the establishment of the monarchy in Israel in the tenth century bce or later.