When was Genesis Written and Why Does it Matter? A Brief Historical Study

When was Genesis Written and Why Does it Matter? A Brief Historical Study. An essay by Peter Enns at Biologos.

A lengthy but interesting essay. The key takeaway…

… The truth, however, is that this alleged “postbiblical” period is actually the biblical period, meaning the time in which the Hebrew Old Testament as we know it took shape as a final and sacred collection of texts. There is little question that Israel documented, recorded, told, and retold parts of its own story—in writing and orally—probably for hundreds of years before the exile. Few would dispute this. It is unlikely, however, that early records of ancient deeds, court politics, and poems were thought of as “sacred Scripture” at the time. That is a later development, and the motivation for it was Israel’s national crisis.

The exile was arguably the most traumatic and therefore most influential historical event in Israel’s ancient history. The Israelites understood themselves to be God’s chosen people: they were promised the perpetual possession of the land, the glorious temple as a house of worship, and a descendent of David sitting perpetually on the throne (2 Sam 7:4-16). With the exile, all of this came to a sudden and devastating end. Exile in Babylon was not an inconvenience. It meant to the Israelites that their relationship with God had been disrupted. God could no longer be worshiped as he himself required—in the Jerusalem temple. Israel’s connection with God was severed: no land, no temple, no sacrifices, no king. Rather than prompting the other nations to acknowledge the true God, which was Israel’s national calling, Israel was humiliated by these nations. Rather than the nations streaming to them, they were slaves in a foreign land. Israel was estranged from God.

The impact of this series of events cannot be overstated. Since these heretofore ties to Yahweh were no longer available to them, the Israelites turned to the next best thing: bringing the glorious past into their miserable present by means of an official collection of writings. Some of these writings were collected or edited during the exile or afterward, while others were composed during those times. But the trauma of the exile was the driving factor in the creation of what has come to be known as “the Bible.” Walter Brueggemann summarizes well the scholarly consensus:

It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile. This premise needs to be stated more precisely. The Torah (Pentateuch) was likely completed in response to the exile, and the subsequent formation of the prophetic corpus and the “writings” *i.e., poetic and wisdom texts+ as bodies of religious literature (canon) is to be understood as a product of Second Temple Judaism [=postexilic period]. This suggests that by their intention, these materials are…an intentional and coherent response to a particular circumstance of crisis….Whatever older materials may have been utilized (and the use of old materials can hardly be doubted), the exilic and/or postexilic location of the final form of the text suggests that the Old Testament materials, understood normatively, are to be taken precisely in an acute crisis of displacement, when old certitudes—sociopolitical as well as theological—had failed.14

The central question the exilic and postexilic Jews asked themselves was, “Are we still the people of God? After all that has happened, are we still connected to the Israelites of old, with whom God spoke and showed his faithfulness?” Their answer to these questions was to tell their story from the beginning and from their postexilic point of view—which meant editing older works and creating some new ones. The creation of the Hebrew Bible, in other words, is Israel’s self-definition as a nation and the people of God in response to the Babylonian exile. …