Historical Context (Genesis) (original) (raw)

Fleming, Daniel E. “History in Genesis,” Westminster Theological Journal 65 (2003): 251–62.

History has always mattered to Christians. "If Christ has not been raised," says Paul, "your faith is futile" (1 Cor 15:17, NIV). God's great acts in history must not be the figments of human imagination, fictional illustrations for some ancient writer's theological ruminations. Unfortunately, the Bible's memory for history is not above doubt, and, especially with the rise of modern critical scholarship, many have doubted. When it comes to the facts regarding basic events, their settings, and who was involved, the more distant past is the most susceptible to a global sense that the whole thing is made up, or at least has gone through so many stages of removal from the setting described that the product has lost any connection to its point of origin. Unsurprisingly, such stories of Israel's distant past allow the least possibility for evaluation in light of independent evidence.

A Literary and Cultural Analysis of the Creation Narrative of Genesis 1:1-2:3

[This is a DRAFT paper. In an updated paper to be released, some information will be changed and the presentation refined.] Genesis continues to defy. Centuries of attempts to shape it to conform to the prevailing paradigm have created a theoretical maelstrom, around which swirl literal theories of chaos. So unsettled are the waters that much of the Genesis text is still in darkness due to modern cultural presuppositions, prior creedal beliefs, and conflicting inherited scholarship. The effort in this study is to look afresh and minimize prior theoretical, creedal or genre expectations. The goal is to discover the original intent of the author that is obscured by cultural and literary expectations. The proposed approach is merely a grammatical-historical method with a heightened awareness of original cultural context and literary genre to overcome hindering eisegesis influences. This approach lead to the documentation of a highly detailed literary structure which is beautiful and inspiring. The structure has been outlined by others before, but the present study provides a number of tables detailing the structure to a greater level. In addition, a historical survey of selected Ancient Near East cosmologies near the time of the writing of Genesis, provides the perspective of the original audience which we can temporarily enter to review the discovered structure. It reveals the polemic purposes that motivated the narrative's structure and wording which have often been mistaken for other purposes or derived from other processes that were concomitant to the commenter's worldview and not Genesis.

The Genesis Account of Origins

2015

S have increasingly recognized that Genesis 1 through 3 is set apart from the rest of the Bible, constituting a kind of prologue or introduction.1 These opening chapters of Scripture are now widely regarded as providing the paradigm for the rest of the Bible. John Rankin summarizes the growing conviction among biblical scholars: “Whether one is evangelical or liberal, it is clear that Genesis 1– 3 is the interpretive foundation of all Scripture.”2 The most prominent theme displayed in Genesis 1 through 3 is that of creation, which involves various issues of origins.3 Here in the