Guardian: The Book of Genesis, part 2: In the beginning Jane Williams
In the beginning, Genesis was not a book, or even part of a book. We are so used to the ease and convenience of printing that it is hard always to remember the processes that lay behind books as ancient as the Bible.
In the beginning, a lot of Genesis was probably passed on by word of mouth. In its written form, several different styles can be detected, which suggests that the material comes from different hands, different sources, at different times. From the advent of modern literary critical scholarship until quite recently, these different sources in Genesis were identified as J, E and P. J was thought to come from the ninth century BCE, and generally calls God "Yahweh" (or "Jahweh" – hence J). E, who calls God "Elohim", was thought to come from about a century later, and P, the Priestly writer, or school of writers, was thought to be the collector or editor of the whole, adding more material of his own, after the Exile, in the fifth or sixth century BCE. On the whole, this is still the consensus, though scholars are less assured than they used to be about assigning different parts of the text to different authors.
Then, when Genesis was brought together as one collection, it was copied, over and over again, by many different hands, and translated into many different languages. No copyist was perfect and each translator made decisions, good and bad, about the best match in translating. Ancient Hebrew text did not include letters for the vowels, so a system was developed for indicating vowels above and below the consonants in Hebrew. Again, decisions had to be made, on the basis of memory and traditions of reading and repetition, about which vowels went where. ...
When and where was the "beginning"?
Were you there to witness and/or participate in IT?
How far and where is up?
How big is light?
Posted by: Sue | Dec 20, 2010 at 11:10 PM