Most of the 36 books which comprise the Old Testament were written in the first millennium BC. They are works of literature produced by a literate civilisation, and Israel reached that stage only when it became a kingdom and developed complex structures of civil administration – literacy being principally a matter of record-keeping. The chief ministers of David, Israel’s second king, included a secretary and a recorder (2 Sam 8:16f), mentioned in the same context as the high priests and the commander of the army. They were important persons with important duties, and would have been responsible for tax records, official letters, royal annals, temple laws and similar, some of which would have been archived. Being unconcerned with palace and temple administration, the vast majority of the population would not have been able to read or write.

This is not to say that ancient Israel had ever been totally illiterate. The law of Moses, in the mid 15th century BC, was recorded on a scroll, and Moses, who had learned to write as a member of Egypt’s royal court, was its inscriber. The scroll was deposited in the Tabernacle next to the ark – the same work that, forgotten about since at least the time of Hezekiah and no doubt transcribed more than once onto new parchment, was rediscovered in Josiah’s reign. Along with much historical narrative, the law comprised the four books we know as Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Since they demonstrate detailed, first-hand knowledge of Israel’s time in the wilderness, including the wilderness’s geography and wild-life, there is good reason to think that Moses wrote substantially the whole of these works. This would be consistent with the fact that he did not finish writing until just before his death, long after the law itself was given (Deut 31:24ff). His successor Joshua was also literate (Jos 8:32, 24:26), as were a number of his younger contemporaries (Jos 18:8f), who, although raised in the desert, had presumably learned to write from the more educated among the previous generation. The Hebrew word for ink (dyw) is an adoption of the Egyptian word ry.t from the Middle Kingdom (the time of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt), when Egyptian r regularly corresponded to Semitic d (Quack 1992). This is also evidence that writing was an art acquired at the time of Moses.

It was probably the judge Samuel, c. 1050 BC, who brought Deuteronomy (possibly also Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers) close to its final form. Immediately after confirming Saul as Israel’s first king, Samuel ‘told the people the rights and duties of kingship; he wrote them in a book and laid it up before Yahweh’ (I Sam 10:25). Those rights and duties were recorded most explicitly in Deuteronomy, which instructed that after taking the throne, the king was to have a copy of this law written for him in the presence of the priests and to read from it all the days of his life, ‘diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes’ (17:18-19). Samuel also kept royal annals, as did both the prophet Nathan and the seer Gad after him. Their works were the main sources for the first book of Chronicles (I Chron 29:29).

Who wrote Genesis?

Since the book of Genesis does not contain any elements of the law, there is no certainty that any of it was written by Moses. Nonetheless, the amount of cultural detail – much of it verified archaeologically – suggests that the sources of information drawn upon must have been very ancient, whether written or oral. It is the quality of the information rather than the antiquity of the final text that vouches for the book’s accuracy. The process leading up to its final form is likely to have been complex, with the whole work assuming an ever more literary nature as it was updated and stylistically refined, and material was added to it. The spirit was more important than the letter. Outside the special situation where the express words of God were recorded, there was no concept of an original text, delivered immediately in its final form, perfect and inviolate.

That said, the text on occasions goes out of its way to acknowledge that the time of the patriarchs was different from the time of the monarchy, and that any process of updating the text needed to be true to that difference. So we get the comment that kings were reigning in the land of Edom ‘before any king reigned over the Israelites’ (Gen 36:31). Similarly, there are numerous instances where the mention of an obsolete place name is followed by the contemporary name. Both names are given, showing a willingness to add material where this will help later readers understand the text, but an unwillingness simply to replace the obsolete name with the contemporary one. An exception is the simple substitution of the divine name Yahweh for what would have been the current proper name, though the anachronism is pointed out later (Ex 6:3).

A further example of linguistic self-consciousness is the passage where Laban and Jacob make a covenant and mark the occasion by setting up a pile of stones (Gen 31:43ff). Jacob calls the stones ‘Galeed’, but Laban calls them ‘Jegar-sahadutha’, meaning ‘The pile of witness’ in Hebrew and Aramaic respectively. The fact that the two relatives spoke different languages – Abraham having adopted the language of Canaan when he settled there – is remembered in the tradition about them and, in this neat, unobtrusive way, specifically recorded. Everywhere else in the story Laban speaks Hebrew, not because he actually spoke Hebrew, but because it was the language of contemporary readers.

The language of the whole of Genesis, moreover, is late Hebrew, despite some vocabulary and turns of phrase that are archaic. Hebrew was not exempted from the rule that languages change over time. Like Aramaic, and also like Akkadian, which would have been Abraham’s mother tongue, Hebrew was descended from Semitic, which was descended from a still older language in the Afro-Asiatic family; it was not created de novo. In both grammar and vocabulary Hebrew must have changed a great deal in the eight hundred years from Moses to Josiah, and the comparative modernity of Genesis’s language indicates that there must have been occasions when the whole text was updated, just as a modern version of the Bible is very different from Wyclif’s medieval version.

For one further instance of late editorial input, consider this sentence, in the tradition about Nimrod (Gen 10:11):

The name Assyria is an anachronism, since it did not become the name for upper Mesopotamia until the Assyrians took over the country, some time after the 12th century BC. By the 8th century Assyria had become a powerful empire, ruled from three capital cities: Nineveh, Assur and Kalhu. Rehoboth-Ir (‘city of wide streets’) is unattested but probably refers to Assur, in which case the three 8th-century capitals are the three cities listed here. Genesis illuminates the significance of the rise of Mesopotamia’s first king by alluding to Israel’s contemporary experience, for in 722 BC Assyria annexed Israel’s northern kingdom and uprooted its population. It was the successors of Nimrod who brought Israel’s kingship to an end.

Nimrod was a potentate of the Late Uruk period, when writing was just developing. Urban life by then was already well established – there were several other large settlements in Mesopotamia besides those mentioned in Genesis 10:10-11 – and, as in Israel, writing developed in order to serve the administrative needs of a nascent state. Initially just a means of symbolising commodities, writing gradually became capable of representing complex sentences, until by the 26th century it was being used to record entire myths, epics, cultic hymns and the like. These writings were not original works. They were transcriptions of what already existed as elements of an oral culture, and literature was to remain subservient to the spoken word for a very long time. Even when written down, such compositions retained the character of works designed for listening to, in a communal setting. Silent reading to oneself was unknown in the ancient world.

Beginning with the Creation, Genesis 1-9 tells of a period that long predated the invention of writing. These chapters cannot therefore have been a historical text in the sense of a record based on written documents. Man had lived without writing through most of his existence, and if these first chapters of the Bible have any claim to be reliable historical information, it can only be on the basis that they rendered stories about the deep past that had hitherto been handed down orally.

The tradition amongst non-Hebrew peoples

If Genesis derived from an oral tradition, and one that ultimately went back all the way to the Creation, some traces of it ought to have survived in the traditions of peoples who could not have had contact with Genesis as a written text. In fact we find more than traces. Here, for example, is John Mbiti describing the core beliefs of traditional African religion:

Every African people has a word for God and often other names which describe him. … Some of the names, like Chiuta, Jok, Leza, Mulungu, Nyame, Nzambi and others, are commonly used in several African languages. This suggests that a long time ago, before these languages became separate, the names of God were already being used, and the belief in God had already became a major feature of African thinking and life.

God created all things, provided for his creation, and ruled over it. He was understood to be good, merciful, holy, all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere present, never changing, self-existent. The Pygmies said of him, ‘God was the first who has always existed, and will never die.’ Because, ultimately, he was unknowable, he played an insignificant part in religious life. He was not represented by images, as other gods and spirits were, and he had no priests or temples. Many traditions held that he had once been close to men and had intended that they should live forever, but soon they committed some misdeed.

The original paradise was lost: men’s direct link with God was severed or eclipsed, the closeness between the heavens and the earth was replaced by a vast gap without a bridge, the gifts of immortality and resurrection melted away, and death, disease and disharmony came.

This might well be a summary of the story in Genesis 3, where the first humans disobey their maker and eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Through that act they become intimately acquainted with good and evil. They forfeit the opportunity to eat of the tree of life and are driven out of the garden, so that now they cannot enjoy intimacy with him.

In his twelve-volume work Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (‘The Origin of the Idea of God’), published between 1912 and 1955, the anthropologist Wilhelm Schmidt showed – contrary to the prevailing assumptions of his day – that monotheism predated other forms of religion. The peoples who most clearly recognised a morally exalted supreme being, an all-powerful creator from whom mankind became alienated, were those who were historically and geographically most remote from civilisation.

Konrad Preuss, director of Germany’s National Museum in Berlin and a pioneer of the theory that magic lay at the root of all religion, came to a similar conclusion. In a paper entitled ‘The high god amongst culturally impoverished peoples’ he observed (1922):

All students of the subject who have deliberately concerned themselves with these supreme deities now agree that they are not the last stage of a development, the headstone of the corner in the temple reared by human thought to its gods, but may be an early religious testimony. In fact there are cases in which the only information we possess is that such a single god exists.

This was also the finding of Mircea Eliade in his far-ranging study Patterns in Comparative Religion. Monotheism not only predated but was ancestral to polytheism. Gods multiplied in response to the need for a more personal, accessible and useful religion, and myths developed to explain their origin and character. In the process the supreme being lost much of his significance as creator and sustainer of the world.

Wherever scholars came into contact with peoples yet untouched by Western civilization, they discovered that the Hebrew story about the beginning of things was far from alone. Memories of a cataclysmic flood were as widely distributed across the earth as traditions of a Creator were (e.g. Riem 1925). Eliade mentions one example:

In the Andaman archipelago, among one of the most primitive peoples of Asia, Puluga is the Supreme Being. … Puluga created the world, and the first man, Tomo. Mankind multiplied and had to disperse, and after the death of Tomo grew ever more forgetful of its creator. One day Puluga got angry and a flood covered the whole earth and destroyed mankind: only four people escaped. Puluga had mercy on them, but men still remained recalcitrant. Having once and for all reminded them of his commandments the god withdrew, and men have never seen him since.

How does one account for the similarity of such stories to the Hebrew tradition? It cannot be ascribed to direct contact between the peoples concerned, or to contact with modern bearers of the Hebrew traditions, such as European missionaries. Often the parallels are closest amongst tribes who, at the time their traditions were documented, were the most isolated from European culture. Often it is clear that the stories arose before the arrival of Western visitors, and in cases where contact with missionaries may have been a possibility, the degree of their transformation makes recent borrowing unlikely. The natives related the events as if they had happened in their own country and been remembered through their own traditions. James Frazer ventured the opinion that the similarities were due mostly ‘to similar, but quite independent, experiences either of great floods or of phenomena which suggested the occurrence of great floods, in many different parts of the world’. But this too is problematic. In some cases the similarities to the Hebrew story are too specific for them to have been generalised from different events, and nearly always there is a strong sense that the deluge happened at a time remote from the present, when the deity was more visibly involved with the lives of men: the event was unique, not such as might have occurred at any time and occasionally have been repeated.

The obvious explanation is that, long ago, a uniquely devastating deluge had in fact occurred, with the shared elements in the traditions deriving from survivors who had told of their experience. Now distributed across the world, the traditions point back to a time before the Stone Age when man was concentrated in one community, spoke the same language and shared a single tradition. After the Deluge, God continued to abide with man and to look after him, as some myths testify (consider the Andaman tradition, for example). That was why man had not then dispersed across the earth. He had lived in the presence of God, under his rule, and so long as God remained with him, his memory of the Deluge and the events leading up to it had passed down the generations intact. The ancient Egyptians referred to this place as God’s Land and located it in Cush, or modern Ethiopia. People did not begin to explore lands beyond Africa until near the end of the Pliocene.

There is thus a strong case for supposing that Genesis is grounded in a primeval tradition that was once common to all mankind. Man once maintained a memory of how the world came into existence, and lost that memory only as writing came to replace oral tradition as the medium in which knowledge was handed down. Fortunately, western anthropologists of the 19th and first half of the 20th century wrote down the elements of those traditions before they were lost, performing thereby a task similar to that which the writer of Genesis had performed in his own time. What they found was that the rest of the world had much the same memory of the deep past that the Hebrews had once had, albeit subsequently obscured by four thousand years of degradation and sometimes radical changes in theological perception.

That has not generally been the interpretation placed on these discoveries, however. No longer having an oral tradition of their own, and unable to believe that traditions about the Creation and the Deluge could have been rooted in history, scientists seek to work out an account of the world that is independent of historical knowledge. Their own account is jarring in its contrast. ‘We are survival machines,’ writes one, ‘robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.’ This is Darwinism at its most extreme: a theory produced by a machine without so much as a ghost inside him, programmed by no intelligence. In claiming to find the truth in these dark paradoxes, our intellectual leaders are denying not only their own human nature but mankind’s collective memory.

See also:
The tradition in ancient Sumer