CFM HB Week of 1/17: 5 Ways of Looking at Genesis 5

This was kind of a hard week to glean insight from the Bible-portion of Come Follow Me. I found myself reading all of Genesis 5 the first morning, then identifying the name meanings of all the people in it, then trying to find meaning in all the numbers (and learning that the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint disagree on those numbers) then kind of flailing. 

I eventually found it quite useful to take the advice of the movie James and the Giant Peach and “Try looking at it another way.” So without any more intro, here are 5 ways to look at Genesis 5.

Priestly Genealogy

Compare the structure of Genesis 5 to the Structure of Genesis 1. Both describe successive periods of earthly history. Both repeat elements in the description of each period described (“Thus all the days of <Patriarch> were <# of Years>; and he died” Vs. “And there was evening and there was morning, the <numbered> day.”). Compare Genesis 2:4, which is possibly the end of the Priestly Creation story with Genesis 5:1 - 

“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” (Genesis 2:4)

“This is the list of the descendants of Adam” (Genesis 5:1) 

The two verses mirror each other in structure, and they fit together, the latter being the natural  next step in the progression of a history of the world: After describing the creation of the cosmos and the first human, then describe the generations of that human’s family. Genesis 5:1-2 also nearly quotes Genesis 1:27. The two sections contrast what is sandwiched between them (Genesis 2:4-25 through Genesis 4:26), and are generally considered to be from a P source (priestly source), interwoven with a J source (Yahwist Source, or Jahwist Source) throughout the Pentateuch. 

The Priestly Genealogy, thus, represents a different framing of the first several generations of earth from the genealogy of the J source in Genesis 4:17-22. Understood this way, it can be helpful to read Genesis 5 taking notice of how it is different from the earlier Genealogy. For one, it presents a different genealogical structure entirely. Look at them side-by-side: 

(Source: New Oxford Annotated Bible)

The verbiage is also starkly different. As Hedda Klip’s recent book identifies, Genesis 4 follows a Female-driven pattern for begetting children. She digs into the Hebrew from a scholarly perspective, but the difference is easily visible if you’re looking for it in translation as well. The J verb for begetting is “She conceived” in reference to each patriarch’s wife. Genesis 5, on the other hand, emphasizes a male lineage. Men “beget” sons as if by magic, and the women have all but disappeared from the text. Why? The answer to that question will help you understand the goals of the Priestly writer, and therefore their meaning in Genesis 5. 

Priestly Correction of J 

It is generally believed by scholars that P was written in the late exilic or post-exilic period in israelite history. J, on the other hand, was written much earlier. In some ways, it’s clear that P is correcting the story told by J. The J account of creation and the garden includes a very personal God (Named Yahweh) who almost seems surprised about the actions of Adam and Eve. His actions seem not-fully planned or formed. The God of P (referred to by the generic title “Elohim”) is fully omniscient. He doesn’t make mistakes, and he cares little for the messiness of human relationships. He is unambiguously good from the very beginning and in all things. 

Perhaps the Priestly genealogy is also trying to correct the genealogy of the J source. In J, the father of Noah is a direct descendant of Cain, who slew Abel. How can such a powerful figure such as Noah come from such a tainted lineage? The P source seems to correct that issue by claiming that he didn’t. He was descended from Adam through Seth. 

Pure lineage was important to the post-exilic priestly community as evidenced by the P text’s later insistence that only the descendants of Aaron could hold the priesthood. Perhaps this is a result of exile itself. If you have been specifically displaced from your homeland, it becomes especially important to find connection to your family past. In this way genealogy serves as a reminder of faithful and powerful heritage in the face of the trials of exile. 

So, in P’s correction of J, the writer emphasizes good lineage. Perhaps that’s why the emphasis on patriarchs, who held an elevated status in Israel’s folk history, and this is why to women appear in the Priestly genealogy. Or perhaps, the P writer was just more sexist than the J writer. 

Line of authority

One thought I had about why the Genesis 5 genealogy is the way it is is that it functions not only as a line of ancestry, but a line of authority. As a priesthood holder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, I was given my own “line of authority” and taught to cherish the path through which I received authority as a 12-year old boy. It’s a big deal to a church that claims that priesthood authority is restored in the latter days, and it was similarly a big deal to the Israelites restored to its homeland which re-established temple rites after Babylonian captivity. 

Seam of the Torah

Adherents of the Documentary Hypothesis of Torah authorship (the theory where all these letters–J, E, D1, D2, P, R1, R2 etc. came from) have a theory about Genesis 5 that actually separates it from P. That theory is that Genesis 5:1-28,30-32; 7:6; 9:28-29; and 11:10b-26,32 are all snippets from a single hypothesized source called The Book of Generations, a Book that perhaps pre-dates the P source and was used by the biblical Redactor (author who combined all the other sources into a single Biblical text and known as R1) used the Book of Generations as a way to stitch together these different narratives with the unifying force of family generations. 

When I learned about this, the first thing that stuck out to me is that missing verse in what Richard Eliot Friedman labels as this Book of Generations: Genesis 5:29, which reads, 

“He named him Noah, saying ‘Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.’”

Friedman doesn’t offer an explanation for why this verse is not seen as part of The Book of Generations. I find it an awkward fit right at the end of Genesis 4, which doesn’t have the precursor language I would expect–something like “Then Lamech’s wife conceived and bore another son.” But maybe it fits better somewhere between verses 19 through 22 in Genesis 4. 

Perhaps it is clear from the evidence, that the J writer thought Noah to be the son of Lamech and descendent of Cain.It does seem to me like Genesis 5:29’s  reference to a curse on the land is more likely referring to the curse upon the land of Cain (Genesis 4:11-12)  than the curse on the land brought about by Eve and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Obviously after Noah, people would still eat their bread by the sweat of their faces, but maybe he was foretold to reverse the effects of his great-great-great-great (etc.) grand-daddy Cain. 

This week’s Pearl of Great Price reading also has an interesting connection to the theorized Book of Generations. Moses 6:8 says that “a genealogy was kept of the children of God. And this was the book of the generations of Adam, saying: In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him.” Not only does this seem to refer to the Book of Generations, but it also interweaves the text of Genesis 5:1. If the Book of Moses is a revelation from God, is God validating this part of the Documentary Hypothesis, and in the process giving possible credibility as a whole? Maybe. I’d be curious to learn if Joseph knew about the Documentary Hypothesis, which I think was in its early stages of development in the 1830s. 

At any rate, the possible existence of the Book of Generations is further evidence for the Documentary Hypothesis and all that comes with it–namely that an inspired redactor stitched together the Torah into a somewhat cohesive mix of very different elements to create a work that has inspired so many and has illustrated an incredibly multifaceted God. In Who Wrote the Bible, Richard Elliot Friedman writes inspiringly about the parts of the Torah coming together to something greater than the parts themselves: 

“And so the two religions developed around a Bible that pictured God as a loving and faithful but sometimes angry parent. To whatever extent this picture makes the Bible more real for its readers, to that extent the redactor was more successful than perhaps he even intended to be. To whatever extent the tension between God’s justice and mercy itself became an important factor in the Bible’s story, to that extent the Bible is, once again, more than the sum of its parts.” 

Template for P 

One more thought about the Book of Generations and its relation to the P source. If the text of Genesis 5 was created separately from the P source, then how do we explain the way Genesis 1 mirrors Genesis 5? My initial thought about these mirrored elements was that the Priestly writer was continuing the pattern they set up in Genesis 1 in their genealogies, but maybe it was the other way around. Perhaps the Book of Genealogies was a sort of template for the creation story of Genesis 1 and the rest of the P source. This elevates a part of the Bible I’m sure many people skip or get bored with to an especially critical position in the text. Maybe the desire to know about and write about the origin of all things necessarily stems from the desire to learn about family origins. I think that’s a cool thought.