Introduction

Genesis, a book of “beginnings,” includes stories about the early Hebrew nomads who came to be known in Judaism and the NT as the Patriarchs. The “origins” in Genesis were never intended to be taken as “scientific explanations,” words the writers would never have understood. Rather, writing strictly from religious points of view, biblical writers were trying to tell others how they believed phenomena they observed in life and nature must have originated in an attempt to convince others to believe as they did. This is important to remember, as well, when reading the accounts in Genesis of how Hebrew “history” began.

Some OT scholars maintain that the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, the desert wanderings of the Israelites in the book of Exodus, including the character Moses, and the conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua are of little, if any, historical value. According to those scholars, the narratives mentioned are legends, sagas, myths, and even fairy tales, written to explain the prehistory of the nation of Israel. Other scholars regard the same narratives as some of the actual prehistory of Israel. Perhaps most scholars think the narratives contain some historical truth, although they realize the difficulty in trying to determine exactly what is historically true. The discussion that follows is intended to illustrate the theory of sources, which naturally raises some questions about historicity, and to provide the basis for insightful understanding of these OT stories.