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
hydrology of a great flood on a great river, you many only be interested in parts of the book, and I would suggest looking elsewhere for more detail.
It is interesting that despite cultural differences, many cultures have similar stories relating to a great flood. These stories have been passed down through the generations. Both Aboriginal mythology and the Bible on which Christianity is based, use stories to teach lessons to their people. To demonstrate this, one only has to compare the story of Noah's Ark (Genesis 6-9) with the Bundaba Flood Story told by the Bundaba people from Western Australia, to understand that the story of a great flood appears to be similar in many very cultures.
Flood myths help to explain events which cannot be controlled, such as natural disasters. The Hebrew flood myth tells of a man named Noah, who is selected, along with his family, to survive an epic flood. The flood must occur to cleanse the world of its impurities (Leeming, 47-53). The “flood” in Mabel’s own life involves the many things she loses: her mother, her family’s money, her idea of the future. However, these losses allow her to become a stronger person, to move away from merely being a daughter or a sister and become Mabel (Lawrence, 1-15).
Most of us have probably heard the famous bible story about Noah’s Ark and The Flood. What most may not know, is that this story is just one of a great many. A variety of ancient cultures, from the Greeks and the Middle East, to Asia and the Americas, have in their mythologies a story of a Great Flood that drowns the earth. These stories mostly contain the same themes: a god or group of gods becomes angry; they flood the earth but save a small group of people. These people build a boat to survive. After the flood they repopulate the earth.
The Torah also known as The Book of Moses or the Pentateuch, refers to the first five books of the Tanakh or Hebrew bible. The religious texts found in the Tanakh come from The Torah, Neviim and Kituvim. The book of Moses is comprised of Bereshit (Genesis), Shemot (Exodus), Vayikra (Leviticus), Bedimar(Numbers) and Devarim (Deuteronomy). The Torah holds traditions, religious laws and teachings that are followed within the religion of Judaism.
Most everyone knows something about the story of Noah and the great flood. It is one of the most illustrated and common stories from the Bible. The knowledge that God was angry, Noah built an ark to carry animals and then there was a flood that killed everything. Though this is the basic picture of the story, it does not capture alone the main point of the story. God’s saving grace is the message. Believe and follow in the path of the Lord and salvation will be yours. All of God’s characteristics and boundaries he conveyed spawn off of the following of this or the ignoring of His omnipotent power and being. Just like in much of the text in the Bible, you have to read between the lines to find the meaning; the same is true for Genesis 5-9.
The Old Testament of the Bible, which includes the Book of Genesis, was also passed down through oral tradition before the Hebrews wrote it down from 1000-300 B.C. Both of these documents express the religious attitudes of these people as their story of the creation of the world and of humankind unfolds.
The Old Testament and the Bible itself has been studied extensively for centuries. Archeologists and Scholars have labored and pondered over texts trying to decipher its clues. It does not matter how many times the Old Testament has been studied there will always be something new to learn about it or the history surrounding it. In the book Reading the Old Testament: an Introduction, the author Lawrence Boadt presents us with a few different authors of the Old Testament that used different names for God and had a unique insight into the texts. These four sources are titled P for priests, E for Elohim, J for Jehovah, and Y for Yahweh (95). These four unique sources help us realize that there is more than one author of the Pentateuch. These authors took the text and adapted for their culture. This independent source is used by scholars to help gain insight into what was behind the texts of the bible so we are not left with an incomplete picture of what went into the creation of the bible. Julius Wellhausen used these four sources to publish a book to able us to better understand the sources and to give it credibility with the Protestant scholars at the time (Boadt 94). These sources that is independent of the bible as in the DVD Who Wrote the Bible? and the Nova website aide in shedding light on the history that surrounded the writers who wrote the text and what inspired them to write it in the first place. The DVD shows the discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the extensive history of the texts and all its sources in an effort to try to find exactly who wrote the bible (Who Wrote). These scrolls have aided scholars immensely by giving us some of the oldest known manuscripts of the bible in the world today. It shows that the bible w...
Where Genesis I describes a more ordered creation - the manifestation of a more primitive cultural influence than was responsible for the multi-layered creation in Genesis II - the second creation story focuses less on an etiological justification for the physical world and examines the ramifications of humankind's existence and relationship with God. Instead of Genesis I's simple and repetitive refrains of "and God saw that it was good" (Gen 1:12, 18, 21, 25), Genesis II features a more stylistically advanced look at "the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens" (Gen 2:4). While both stories represent different versions of the same Biblical event, Genesis II is significantly more complex than its predecessor and serves both to quantify the relationship between God and his creations and lay the foundation for the evolving story of humankind as well.
The story of Noah’s Ark begins with God being upset at mankind's wickedness. He decides to destroy it with a flood. God new Noah was righteous and told him to build an ark so he would be safe from the rain. Noah did so and took aboard his family and pairs of every kind of animal. It rained for forty days and nights, until the highest mountains were covered. Then God sent a wind and the waters receded, and the...
Before going any further, the story of Noah and the Flood will be summarized according to the book of Genesis in order to be able to make the comparison later in this paper. The story begins in Genesis chapter 6 describing the then current state of “wickedness.” The descendants of Adam and Eve grew in number and many of them intermarried with anyone of their choosing. God saw in them great “wickedness” and most people only had evil in the...
Growing up the story of Noah and the ark was one of my favorites; Quite simply because of the drawings depicting the story. They appeared so beautiful, when after many years I'm realizing the whole of the story. The story of the destruction of mankind, and the story of regrowth. I chose this topic because I realized how little I really do know about Noah and the ark. I will relay the story of Noah and the ark as well as answer a couple questions I have. Who was Noah, and why was he chosen by God? What did he possess that God didn't see in others? I will also look at what was going on at the time as far as why God wanted to erase all of life. “The story of Noah and the ark is one of the most cherished episodes and the most terrifying.”(Readers Digest)
In the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, we read of the fall of man. As we study the Bible and recognize it’s importance in our lives today we must realize the role these stories play in our time. The Bible is not simply a history book or a book of stories of morality, but it is a book that speaks to us today of how we should live and interact with God. We are confronted with this fact in Genesis “through a graphic and dramatic representation it gives a
The bible is more than history though, it is a map that leads us to the words of God, and the Pentateuch especially tells us the story of God and his plan for humanity. Just like all history though, it has to be questioned and examined in order to have a strong belief that the stories passed down through generations is true. The Pentateuch’s history can be analyzed by dates, genealogy, archeology, and traditions. The writing of the Pentateuch spanned over many centuries, so in effort to present the history The Book of Deuteronomy will be the base. Deuteronomy is said to be written around 621 B.C., making it the time of Joshua. This is because the Judean and Assyrian kings were against the work of Deuteronomists, which was the central focus of Joshua in his efforts to make one “central shrine” in Jerusalem where all could gather to worship the Lord. Joshua had to wait until the kings fell out of power before his work could be available. Joshua and the Deuteronomists determine that the shrine will be located in Jerusalem, whereas the The Book of Deuteronomy does not make reference to a central shrine being located in Jerusalem. This inconsistency caused for the higher critics to determine that the central shrine would have already been created when the author was writing this because the Deuteronomy or any books before it do not
Genesis is the first creation story. God creates, establishes, and puts everything into motion. After putting all of this in motion he then rests. He creates everything on earth in just seven days. Before creation Gods breath was hovering over a formless void. God made earth and all of the living creatures on earth out of nothing. There was not any pre-existent matter out of which the world was produced. Reading Genesis 1 discusses where living creatures came from and how the earth was formed. It’s fascinating to know how the world began and who created it all. In Genesis 1 God is the mighty Lord and has such strong power that he can create and banish whatever he would like. His powers are unlike any others. The beginning was created from one man only, God.