Throughout our study of these opening chapters of Genesis we have discovered traditions with roots going back many, many years. We have also seen how some of the stories in these chapters may have been used at various junctures of Israel’s history. For example, the Adam and Eve story at… Continue reading
There are four primary stories in Genesis 1-11: The Story of Adam and Eve, the Story of Cain and Abel, the Story of the Flood, and the Story of the Tower of Babel. In each of these stories we see the same pattern. There is first the sin of humans;… Continue reading
The Tower of Babel story has a profound understanding as to why empires fail in their arrogant attempts to play God and unify humanity under their imperial banners. Continue reading
In a previous sermon [Genesis 1:1-12:3 “The First Things” (Ancient Near Eastern Traditions and Historical Context) Part 2], we looked at the similarities between the flood story in Genesis and the account of a great flood in the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic—a story which dates many years before Israel ever came… Continue reading
We come to one of the strangest passages in the entire Bible. Every commentator has struggled with what this passage meant for Israel and, even more so, for our day. Genesis 6:1-4 has no connection with any of the preceding stories or materials. If we take this story as a… Continue reading
The Cain saga continues. The fugitive Cain now lives east of Eden and settles in the land of Nod. He marries a woman and she bears him a son he names Enoch. Cain then builds a city and names it after his son. Once again, we see that we are… Continue reading
We now come to our third story in Genesis—the story of Cain and Abel. The origins of this story probably explain the violent competition for land between herders and farmers at the beginning of civilization. Farmers need land to cultivate. Sheep herders need land to graze their sheep. Historically, even… Continue reading
Many people throughout church history have believed that this chapter in the Bible is the decisive text for all the rest—that it states the premise for everything that follows. But as Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann points out, this is at best a marginal passage in Scripture. It is never… Continue reading
At the beginning of this sermon series I suggested that we could better understand and interpret the opening chapters of Genesis if we realized that these traditions are primarily stories—ancient stories which have profound wisdom to impart regarding God, humankind, and creation. They are not historical and scientific accounts of… Continue reading
(based in large part on the exegesis of Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann) In an earlier sermon I shared with you the consensus of Old Testament scholars that these opening chapters of Genesis represent centuries of tradition. We now know that the final form of these chapters crystallized during the… Continue reading
