Book of Genesis

between 6th and 5th Century BCE

Genesis, Hebrew Bereshit (“In the Beginning”), the first book of the Bible. Its name derives from the opening words: “In the beginning….” Genesis narrates the primeval history of the world (chapters 1–11) and the patriarchal history of the Israelite people (chapters 12–50). The primeval history includes the familiar stories of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. The patriarchal history begins with the divine promise to Abraham that “I will make of you a great nation” (12:2) and tells the stories of Abraham (chapters 12–25) and his descendants: Isaac and his twin sons Jacob and Esau (chapters 26–36) and Jacob’s family, the principal figure being Joseph (chapters 37–50), whose story tells how the Israelites came to be in Egypt. Their deliverance is narrated in the following book of Exodus. Genesis must thus be seen as a part of a larger unit of material traditionally understood to comprise the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah or the Pentateuch.