Genesis: The Five Books Of The Old Testament

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The Bible begins with the book “Genesis,” which is the first book of Torah. Torah is first five books of Old Testament, Pentateuch in Greek, and also called, “Five Books of Moses” because it is a traditional idea that they were written by Moses. The first five books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. However, there has been an argument about the real author of Pentateuch since the seventeenth century. Therefore, the Documentary Hypothesis was suggested and it has been considered well explanation of the argument. In this paper, I am going to demonstrate the flood, comparing the two sources J and P from the Documentary Hypothesis in the book “Genesis.”
In order to interpret the book well, it is important to know the Documentary …show more content…

The Pentateuch, he asserted, comprises four distinct and relatively intact sources, or “documents,” labeled J, E, D, and P. The original basis for separating strands or documents in the Pentateuch was the different names used for God. In one source, J (or the Yahwist), the beginning of the worship of the god of Israel as Yahweh is placed back in the primeval age: “It was then that the name Yahweh was first invoked” (Gen 4.26). In this source in Genesis, the deity is known as Yahweh by Noah (8.20), Abraham (12:8; 15.7; 24.6), Isaac (25.21), Jacob (27.20; 28.13), and others. But according to other sources, this was not the case. In P (the Priestly source), throughout Genesis, God is known as God (elohim) or by titles such as God Almighty (el shadday), but it was not until the time of Moses that the divine name Yahweh was revealed: “God [Elohim] spoke to Moses and said to him: ‘I am the Lord [Yahweh]. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty [el shadday], but by my name “The Lord [Yahweh]” I did not make myself known to them’” (Ex 6.2-3). This inconsistency about whether God was known as Yahweh before the time of …show more content…

While J sources are so much narratives, the most important P sections are not narrative.
Genesis 1-11 talks about the origin of human and world, and Yahweh is the creator. This part is called primeval history, and it comprises two section. One is “the story,” and the other is “genealogy.” The story section deals with the creation, sin and judgement, and the flood. I would like to closely look into the flood story. The flood story is an amalgam of two texts, the J version and the P version, along with some editorial passages that harmonize the two texts. The main contents of the flood story is that God decides to judge the sin, committed by human beings, by sending the flood to sweep them out. Although God’s rage reaches its peak, he chooses to save Noah, the righteous man, along with his family and the seed of all animals on a huge boat, called Noah’s Ark. In both J and P version, you can find out that they have similar contents. So, I am going to first report the similarity between J and P source. Both J and P talk about the sin: in J, The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually (Gen 6.5), in P, Now the

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