Genesis Rediscovered

By David Foley

No two readers can understand a passage in Scripture in the same way, because reading the Bible is a voyage of self-discovery. What do these authors say about themselves? What does my understanding of their stories say about me?

Readers cannot hide from Scripture behind literary theories, cultural hypotheses, or any other form of make-believe. We are all created to be aware of God in his creation and his creation in ourselves. Only by looking outward can we see inward. Thats why our first parents lost themselves in a labyrinth of shattered images when they sought their real selves in ground-molded bodies.

Of course, it did not help that their quest for inner discovery began with attempted suicide

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490855356

David Foley

David Foley was born in Dublin, where he still lives with his wife and two children, and he has worked there as a solicitor for nearly thirty years. He always had the desire to write murder mysteries but making the time to do so proved a perennial problem. Fortunately, the passing of the years has brought with it an easing of commitments and given David the opportunity to pursue his literary interests. This is his first novel.

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Copyright © 2014 David Foley.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-5535-6 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 11/04/2014

Contents

Introduction

Tablet One (Gen 1:1-2:4a)

Tablet Two (Gen 2:4b-5:1a)

Tablet Three

Part One (Gen 5:1b-32)

Part Two (Gen 6:1-9)

Tablet Four (Gen 6:9b-10:1a)

Tablet Five (Gen 10:1b-

Tablet Six (Gen 11:10b-27a)

Notes

Introduction

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Ambiguous Illusions

The book of Genesis is not what it seems. It is the verbal version of an ambiguous illusion, one of those illustrations that contain two alternating pictures. First, you see one picture; then you see the other. In one popular example, a young woman in an evening dress looks at you over her shoulder; an image that changes in the blink of an eye to the partial profile of an ancient crone.

This change is known as a perceptual switch. Psychologists use these illustrations to demonstrate how the gestalt, or frame of an image organizes how we perceive its contents.

The version of Genesis in modern Christian Old Testaments and Jewish Bibles is framed by a 50-chapter structure that was added to the text in the 13th century AD by Stephen Langton, an instructor at the University of Paris. Before that, for the best part of 2000 years, the Hebrew books of the Bible were read in proto-Hebrew, and Aramaic, Greek and Latin translations, without benefit of chapter breaks or verse numbers (or punctuation.).

Once these chapter-breaks are removed, readers are no longer able to view Genesis as a single fifty-chapter narrative. Instead, before their eyes appears a collection of eleven individual documents. This first and most important perceptual switch completely changes how readers view the overall structure of Genesis.

The boundaries between the eleven tablets are marked by ten toledot verses. They are like highway signs that tell you when you are leaving one state and entering another.

Toledot is a Hebrew word for the act of birth. It is used in Genesis to indicate, variously, descendents and ancestors, birth-records and genealogies.

The most popular translation of this word in English is the equivocal term generations (King James Version.) Some English translations prefer unequivocal terms like descendants or accounts. Now, if there is any single rule for understanding the contents of Torah in general and Genesis in particular it is this: Always chose the equivocal over the unequivocal meaning of any given word.

Two Frames, Two Perceptions

Every toledot verse connects two tablets, but they do not always connect them in the same way. This variety of uses has led to a dispute between Traditionalists and Tablet Theory advocates. The former claim that the generations verses introduce the tablets that follow them; the latter insist that the same verses both summarize the tablets that precede them and introduce the tablets that follow. As usual in such disputes, both sides are partially correct.

Below is an outline of the Traditional framework of Genesis, adapted from the Catholic Encyclopedia. (1.)

Introduction (Genesis 1:1-2:3)

General History (2:4-11.26)

History of Heaven and Earth (2:4-4:26)

History of Adam (5:1-6:8)

History of Noah (6.9-9:29)

History of the Sons of Noah (10:1-11:9)

History of Sem (11:10-26)

Special History (11:27-50:26)

History of Thare (11:27-25:11)

History of Ishmael (25:12-18)

History of Isaac (25:19—35:29)

History of Esau (36:1-37.1)

History of Jacob (37.2-50:26)

In the outline above, Tablet One stands alone as an introduction to the following ten tablets. In the Traditional view, apparently, introductions do not require toledot verses because verses that introduce tablets are not required to introduce tablets that introduce other tablets. Fair enough.

The General History is contained in Tablets Two through Six; the Special History, in Tablets Seven through Eleven: Five Tablets and Five Tablets, combined, make up the Complete History contained in the book of Genesis. Tablet One has been shunted off to the children’s room while the adults discuss creation, the Fall, et. al.,as depicted in the Ten Toledot Tablets.

The Traditional framework contains an undeniable integrity based on strength of internal structure: toledot in every transition verse can be translated descendents. Adam and Eve in the garden are the descendants of the heavens and the earth. The genealogy between Seth and Noah in Tablet Three is the scrolls of the descendants of Adam, and so on.

The Traditional framework has been accepted for millennia by Christians and Jews. Both set aside Tablet One. The passage from the Catholic Encyclopedia should answer for the former, and the following passage from Martin Luther for the latter.

Hence, it was forbidden among the Jews (according to the authority of Jerome) that anyone should read these things (the account of the six days of creation) himself, or speak of them to others, until he had attained his thirtieth year. The Jews would have the whole scripture to be first well known by everyone, before they came to this first chapter in ‘the book of Genesis.’ (2.)

However different their motives, both Christians and Jews have traditionally set aside Tablet One, and given all the preference due to primacy to the alternate account of creation found in Tablet Two.

The Tablet Theory, on the other hand, upholds the primacy of Tablet One. To understand how and why, we must understand the evidence on which the Tablet Theory is based.

In the late 1920s, a cache of clay tablets was unearthed on the coast of Syria at the site of