[This was first posted May 24,2012. Updated for this repost. —Admin1.]

Image from extinctmag.wordpress.com

“Inconvenience” is defined by the dictionary as “trouble or difficulty caused to one’s personal requirements or comfort” and, may we add, difficulty caused to one’s desire to do as he wishes.  God’s Truth is inconvenient to the man who would rather ignore it or listen instead to man-made ‘truths’.  God’s Way is inconvenient to the man who would rather go his way.  

The True God asks only two things of man:  

• get to know HIm through His Truth/His Revelation,
• then act on that knowledge.  

What is the use of striving to know the first without responding with obedience? Head knowledge must lead heart and will to act on God-given Truth.  

Here is the first biblical example of how God’s Truth caused trouble and difficulty to man:  

[AST] Genesis 2:16-17  And HASHEM God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree you may freely eat; but of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, you must not eat thereof; for on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.”

To whom was this commandment given?  To ‘the creature made from dust’ or .”adamah.” The next verse tells about how it is not good that man should be alone, so God makes him a helpmeet/helper “corresponding to him.”

So, this first human knew what he was to do and not do.  Did God’s communication on this matter stop there?  No, God adds a warning about the consequence of disobedience:  “for in the day you eat of it, you will die.”  Did this first human understand the word “die”; did he even have a concept of “death”?  The text does not say, but knowing the God who communicates clearly, we may presume He did not leave this first human wondering. In fact, it is we–readers–who wonder what the Creator meant, since physical death is very much a part of our experience in a much shorter lifespan than —well, let’s call him as tradition refers to him —-Adam— who lived 930 years!

We know how the rest of that story went:  It is not Adam but Eve who initiates the eating of the fruit from the forbidden tree.  Did she know the commandment as well as the warning about consequence of disobedience?  From her conversation with the serpent, she knew of the prohibition and there’s that inconvenient truth raising its ugly head this early in the history of humankind.  It got in the way of Eve’s desire.  Might the temptation be so strong that she could not have helped but succumb? She had a choice.  

And where was Adam?  Right beside her.  Could he have reminded her about God’s commandment which he was the original recipient of? Of course.  He had a choice not only to remind her, but to stop her.  Not only did he choose to do none of the two options, he chose to go along with Eve’s choice! Three wrong choices, three failures on his part. 

Could the first couple have rectified this disobedience?  Had God given them instructions about what we now know about repentance—awareness of wrongdoing, regret, confession, do not repeat the sin?  The text does not indicate that they knew what to do next . . . so they end up compounding the first disobedience with hiding, the natural behavior when one does not know what to do next.  

God calls them Where are you? 

Notice Adam’s answer:  

I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I am naked, so I hid.  

Did Adam tell a lie here?  It sounded like the truth, except he could have said “I was afraid because Eve and I violated Your commandment.”  He had been naked all the time he was interacting with God previously, so it sounds ridiculous to make nakedness an excuse for hiding. It’s an insult to God to give such an answer, who did Adam think he was talking to, how dare he beat around the [burning] bush! Does it sound like he was sorry? It sounded more like an attempt to cover up. 

Image from www.speakingtree.inc

And so the finger-pointing begins.  

The woman whom You gave to be with me—

she gave me of the tree, and I ate.

 Adam actually points the finger at two “others” instead of owning up to his triple failure:

• God, for giving him the woman, 
• and Eve, for passing on the fruit to him.   

It’s God’s fault that he ate, it’s Eve fault that he ate.  He made no choice? 

Eve does not fare any better; she too doesn’t take responsibility, and points to the serpent.

The serpent wasn’t given a chance to defend himself, give a rebuttal, deny or point the finger elsewhere—he immediately got cursed to crawl on his belly and bite the dust, plus—verse 15, the enmity between the serpent and the woman, between his offspring and hers —a verse that will be explained in another article.

So, the first inconvenient truth — God’s first ‘DON’T’ — gets in the way of Adam and Eve’s ‘I WANT TO DO!’ 

The consequences:

To Eve:   

I will greatly increase your suffering and your childbearing:

in pain shall you bear children .

Yet your craving shall be for your husband,

and he will rule over you.

To Adam:  

Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate of the tree about which I commanded you saying, ‘You shall eat of it,’

accursed is the ground because of you;

through suffering shall you eat of it all the days of your life.  

Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you,

and you shall eat the herb of the field.

 By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread until you return to the ground,

from which you were taken:

For you are dust. and to dust shall you return.

That is followed by God’s providing garments of skin replacing the fig leaves the couple used to cover their nakedness.  One interpretation of this act of God is that He was simply preparing them for the environment outside of Eden that would be harsh compared to what they had been used to. The significance of the garments of skin as snake skin has been explained in another article so we will no longer deal with that here.

For ignoring God’s inconvenient truth, Adam and Eve placed themselves under a lifetime of inconveniences not only for themselves but for the generations after them . . . who, like them, were given free will to make a choice to obey or violate God’s known or revealed and expressed will, at any point in the progress of the “in the beginning” narratives.  

There is no such thing as inherited sin, but there is an inclination within us to go against God’s commandments to challenge the inclination to obey.  It is all about free will and the opportunity to exercise it by having more than one option; it is never about helplessness to ‘inherited’ sin.  Read Ezekiel 18 to see how God deals with each generation.

Have you, reader, encountered any truth that is inconvenient for you?  How about the Sabbath? How about the Leviticus 11 prescribed diet? How about ridding yourself of the “I”-dol idol the gets in the way of behaving more in the image of the Creator?  What inconvenient truths have unsettled you while reading through the posts in this website?

NSB@S6K

[This was first posted May 28, 2012.  Recently Sinaites had a discussion about details of this narrative and none of us could remember exactly how old Noah was before and after the flood, how many years did it take him to build the ark . . . we don’t blame our forgetfulness on so-called ‘senior moments’ but on lazy minds and short-term memory which retains information only for as long as it is useful.  So now, our readers benefit from our memory failure. Updated with insights gained in 3 years since this was initially posted.—Admin1]

—————————

Except for his drunken stupor after the flood, what’s not to like about Noah?  

The very first mention of his name—right after the Creator had decided to blot man from the face of the earth—immediately brings hope for mankind:

6:8  But Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH.

9  Noah was a righteous, wholehearted man in his generation

in accord with God did Noah walk. 

Image from 220lily.wordpress.com

With that introduction, expect more unconditional obedience from this man to the God Who speaks to him,  as in “Yes LORD, anything You ask!

God spoke to Noah just as He spoke to the very first couple and the very first firstborn son Cain.

With no written instructions recorded for humanity, we suppose the Creator had to resort to speaking to specific people for specific reasons, in this case to prepare for the first destructive deluge that would wipe out evil humanity who, it appears, include everyone else outside of the Noah family.

 God shares with Noah His plan to flood the earth, gives Noah specific instructions about how to build an Ark, what to load on it, and best of all He establishes a covenant and saves Noah’s whole family.  

The narrative is silent about whether or not the rest of Noah’s family were worth saving;  God’s grace extends to them, evidently from the simple fact that they were related to Noah.  Here’s the first indicator that possibly, God’s wonderful grace covers not only a righteous person but extends to his loved ones as well regardless of their spiritual worthiness . . . but only to a certain extent and possibly, and applied only to physical protection.  As we will find out later, there are other reasons for saving the whole Noah family.

Later in Genesis, we see the same divine grace extended to Lot, Abraham’s nephew who merits nothing from his own righteousness but is saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by virtue of his relationship with his righteous uncle Abraham.  

But back to Noah, a “Yes” man, YHWH’s kind of devotee.

6:22  Noah did it, according to all that God commanded him so he did.  

“Noah did it” no ifs or buts!  Put yourself in Noah’s place.  How ‘inconvenient’, to say the least,  is it to start building an Ark at age 480 years that would take 120 years to finish? He could not have built the Ark by himself with the proportions instructed by God, so perhaps Noah’s family deserved to be saved with him after all, for surely they helped Noah in the construction.  Imagine doing this on dry land, amidst incredulous looks and probably jeers and mocking from people who must have thought them fools!  Why?  We surmise that since the earth was watered by mist or gentle rainfall, the ‘waters above’ described in the creation story were held back up there for this very purpose — a universal deluge.  Folklore in other countries and cultures include a flood narrative according to skeptics who don’t believe in biblical claims, so the point is . . . ???

But back to obedient Noah, the same phrase is repeated one chapter later.

7:5 Noah did it, according to all that YHWH had commanded him.

At age 600 years old,

 6:11 then burst all the well-springs of the great Ocean and the sluices of the heavens opened up.

12  The torrent was upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.

Did Noah complain at any time? The text doesn’t say so, not even when he and family had to load the Ark with a pair of every unclean animals and 7 pairs of clean animals. Not even when they were all cooped up for that length of time with the animals needing to eat and poop!  Someone suggested that God must have put all the animals in hibernation for all that time to lighten the chores of the family of eight.  Regardless, do we get a peep out of Noah? None recorded.

Question:  If we, readers, learn about “clean” and “unclean” animals only later in Leviticus 11,  how did Noah know as early as his time which is which?  Connect the dots when you read these narratives and hazard a guess: Noah must have been told by God Himself, except the narrative is not explicit about that. Noah knew, period.  [Worth investigating is the speculation that since there are two accounts of the loading of animals, the 2nd account mentioning ‘clean’ and 7 pairs comes from proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis; check out http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2010/09/24/the-documentary-hypothesis.aspx#Article.]

To Noah, there’s nothing inconvenient about the whole ordeal he and his family were put through! We have to hand it to Noah first, and second, his family who went along with him in accomplishing all that Noah was instructed to do.  But then why not, they WERE saved when everyone else perished.  

7:23  Noah alone remained,

and those who were with him in the Ark.

What a sight it must have been to see animals go in and out of the Ark; this is why the flood story is such a great visual story for children’s books. The imagery is so rich for illustrators.  But let us not miss the teaching for mankind with additional insights about this Creator God.

From Noah’s sons and their wives, the world is repopulated once more:

9:1  Bear fruit and be many and fill the earth!

We heard this first in Eden; then echoed here, implying a second chance for mankind to start afresh—-

• from a family handpicked by the Life-giving God,
• a whole family who obey all His instructions
• presumably because of the leadership of their patriarch
• whose faith in the God who spoke to him was unquestioning.

 Would that we could be like Noah in terms of trust and obedience!  

The rainbow covenant assures us that God will not do an encore of this particular manner of destroying all living things

8:21 I will never curse the soil again on humankind’s account,

since what the human heart forms is evil from its youth;

I will never again strike down all living-things, as I have done.  

9:12-17  This is the sign of the covenant

which I set between me and you

and all living beings that are with you,

for ageless generations:  

My bow I set in the clouds

so that it may serve as a sign of the covenant

between me and the earth.

 It shall be:  

when I becloud the earth with clouds

and in the clouds the bow is seen,

I will call to mind my covenant

that is between me and you and all living beings—

all flesh: never again shall the waters become a Deluge,

to bring all flesh to ruin!  

When the bow is in the clouds,

I will look at it,

to call to mind the age-old covenant

between God and all living beings—

all flesh that is upon the earth.  

God said to Noah:  

This is the sign of the covenant that I have established

between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.

For the first time, meat is introduced in man’s diet; prior to the flood, man was vegetarian, but since the earth was submerged in water for up to 150 days, all vegetation was soggy and unfit for food.  

The reason for 7 pairs of clean animals now becomes clear; they were fit for food [9:1-6] and the only prohibition is that the animal is not eaten alive. 

9:4 However: flesh with its life, its blood, you are not to eat!  

To us today, that sounds like a ridiculous prohibition, for who would want to eat a live chicken? Though, is eating a dead chicken more palatable . . . come to think of it, the flesh of dead animals is what we DO eat.  

At Weimar,  a 7th-Day Adventist Lifestyle Change Program called NEWSTART, [acronym for Nutrition/Exercise/Water/Sunshine/Temperance/Air/Rest/Trust in a Divine Power] they cure chronic diseases from lifetime lifestyle-abuse simply by returning to biblical principles on health and they do this primarily by recommending a strictly plant-based diet, in effect VEGAN. No animal products of any kind plus no substances that are addictive (throw out coffee and alcohol).  One sentence from one lecturer effectively sticks to one’s mind:  “Why do you turn your stomach into a cemetery for dead animals?”

It makes sense to be vegetarian and eat LIVE plant foods; “live” meaning the potential for life is there, throw the seeds of a tomato in your backyard and soon, a tomato plant sprouts up.  But going back to eating a live animal, God would not add a prohibition about eating live animals unless something was customary during the times.  [Why enact a law against jaywalking if the practice is not rampant and posing hazards to both motorists and pedestrians?]

Clean animals were fit for sacrifice:

 8:20 Noah built a slaughter-site to YHWH.  

He took from all pure animals and from all pure fowl

and offered up offerings upon the slaughter-site.

 Noah was grateful to God for sparing him and his family and his expression of gratitude took the form of “burnt-offerings.”  When Cain and Abel brought “offerings,” we are not sure from the text if they were “burnt” as specified in Noah’s offerings.  Later, offerings to God would be categorized for specific purposes, but for now, at this point in biblical history, the reader is not privy to more details.

We do know God’s reaction:

 8:21 And when YHWH smelled the soothing savor

YHWH said in his heart:  I will never curse the soil again . . .

A side comment about a pair of unclean animals — obviously, a pair means two, presumably male and female of each species and why? Obviously for procreation of their kind.  Let us connect this with the burning issue today about homosexual marriages.  Just think, if only one gender of every species, even if there were two of the same gender were loaded on the ARK, that would have been the end of man and beast. God so designed His living beings in such a way that some organisms could reproduce all by themselves, but others need two genders to successfully do it. 

It is taught that capital punishment as in the death penalty, is exacted here by divine justice: 

9:5 However, too:  for your blood, of your own lives,

I will demand satisfaction-

from all wild-animals I will demand it,

and from humankind, from every man regarding his brother,

demand satisfaction for human life.  

Whoever now sheds human blood,

for that human shall his blood be shed,

for in God’s image he made humankind.

Today, there are such groups called Noachides . . . TRUTH-seeking gentiles like ourselves who wish to abide by YHWH’s commandments except that they make a distinction between commandments for Jews and commandments for non-Jews.  They have figured out that what man would have known of YHWH’s requirements by the time of Noah are what they will apply to their lives.   We, Sinaites, claim that the Sinai Revelation (TORAH) has superseded the Noachide laws, and since TORAH is for all humanity, Jews as well as Gentiles, what we propose in this website is what we understand as applicable to non-Jews, those outside of Israel.

NSB@S6K

——————————–

Here’s the article about Noachides:

Image from arvin95.blogspot.com

The Seven Noachide Laws By Hillel ben David (Greg Killian)

[This was first posted October 25, 2014.  These are introductions to the first book comprising the TORAH.  They are from two of our MUST READ/MUST HAVE resources:  

• one is from our translation of choice — Everett Fox (EF), The Five Books of Moses
• while the second is from Robert Alter (RA) who has also done his own translation of the same, with exactly the same title as Fox.

 We provide these supplementary readings to aid our web-visitors in understanding the Torah books.  As much as our featured favorite commentators have helped us in our study and discussions, we offer to share our Sinaites resources to those who might not have access to the original books.  Reformatted for this post.—Admin1]

Everett Fox [EF]:

Part I: THE PRIMEVAL HISTORY (I-II)

THE COLLECTION OF STORIES WHICH FORMS PART I OF GENESIS HAS BEEN ASSEMBLED for a number of purposes:

1.  History is traced from the creation of the world, in a direct line, down to Avraham, father of the People of Israel.  Through use of the leading-word toledot, “begettings,”  we are meant to view him as the logical end point in God’s preliminary plan in history

2.  The nature of God, as he will appear throughout the Hebrew Bible, is firmly established.  He is seen—

• as a Creator who is beyond fate, nature, and sexuality;
• as an all-powerful orderer and giver of meaning to history;
• as a bestower of blessing to living creatures;
• as a giver of choice to human beings;
• as a just punisher of evil
• and, simultaneously, a merciful ruler;
• and as a maker of covenants.

The one quality of God which does not unfold until the Patriarchal stories (Parts II-IV) is his shaping of human destiny through focusing on the people of Israel.  It is portrayed as the logical outcome of the characteristics just mentioned.

3.  It appears that the Mesopotamian origins of Israel are reflected in such narratives as the Creation, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, and are transformed or repudiated in the biblical versions.  What in the older culture appears arbitrary and chaotic has been changed in the Bible into stories that stress morality and order.  Further, human beings in Genesis Chapters I-II, despite their failure to live up to God’s expectations, are nevertheless considered capable of doing so, in contrast to the Mesopotamian view that humankind was created merely to be slaves to the gods.

4.  Like virtually all other creation stories, Part I is concerned with the origin of the world and its institutions.

• Chapter I expounds on the origins of earth, sky, vegetation, animals, and human beings (as well as the Sabbath);
• Chapter 2, of sexuality, death, pain in childbirth and work;
• Chapter 4, of sin, hatred, and murder, as well as of cities and crafts;
• Chapter 6, of giants; and
• Chapter 10, of nations (including the low status of the Canaanites) and languages.

In sum, Part I serves as a fitting Prologue, not only to Genesis but to the entire Bible.  The reader’s chief task in interpreting it is to be able to determine the reason for the inclusion of any one section into the whole.

God as Creator (I:I-2-2:4a):  Three principal themes emerge from the great creation account with which Genesis opens.

• The first is the total and uncompromised power of God as creator;
• the second, the intrinsic order and balance of the created world; and
• the third, humankind’s key position in the scheme of creation.

These themes are brought home as much by the form in which they are presented as by their actual mention.

God (Heb. elohim, a generic term) is introduced into the narrative without any description of origins, sex, or limitations of power.  As the only functioning character of the chapter, he occupies center stage.  There is no opposition, no resistance to his acts of creation, which occur in perfect harmony with his express word.

As a sign of both God’s total control and his intent, the world unfolds in symmetrical order.  The division of God’s labor into six days, plus a seventh for rest, itself indicates a powerful meaningfulness at work, as well as providing the external structure for the narrative.

Interpreters have tended to divide these into either three groups of two days or two groups of three, with always the same results:  a balanced and harmonious whole.

In addition, the number seven is significant (as it will be elsewhere in the Bible) as a symbol of perfection, not only in Israel but in the ancient world in general.

The narrative uses several repeating words and phrases to both unify the story and underscore the theme of order.  These include,

• “God said,”
• “Let there be . . .,”
• “God saw that it was good,”
• “It was so,” and
• “There was setting, there was dawning . . . .”

Robert Alter [RA] :  

Excerpts from the  INTRODUCTION

A FEW brief remarks about the structure of Genesis as a book are in order.  Genesis comprises two large literary units–

• -the Primeval History (chapters 1-11) and
• the Patriarchal Tales (chapters 12-50).

The two differ—

• not only in subject
• but to some extent in style
• and perspective.

The approach to the history of Israel and Israel’s relationship with God that will be the material of the rest of the Hebrew Bible is undertaken through gradually narrowing concentric circles:  

• first an account of the origins
  • of the world,
  • of the vegetable
  • and animal kingdom
  • and of humankind,
• then a narrative explanation of the origin
  • of all the known peoples from Greece to Africa to Mesopotamia and Asia Minor,
  • and of the primary institutions of civilization,
  • including the memorable fable about the source of linguistic division.

 The Mesopotamian family of Terah is introduced at the end of this universal history in chapter 11,

• and then when God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees
• at the beginning of chapter 12 we move on to the story of the beginnings of the Israelite nation,
• though the national focus of the narrative is given moral depth because the universal perspective of the first part of Genesis is never really forgotten.  

Some critics have plausibly imagined this whole large process of biblical literature as a divine experiment with the quirky and unpredictable stuff of human freedom an experiment plagued by repeated failure and dedicated to renewed attempts:

•  first Adam and Eve,
• then the generation of Noah,
• then the builders of the Tower of Babel,
• and finally Abraham and his seed.

Although the Creation story with which the Primeval History begins does look forward to the proliferation of humanity and the human conquest of the natural world, by and large the first eleven chapters of Genesis are concerned with origins, not eventualities—with the past, not the future:  “he was the first of all who play on the lyre and pipe” (4:21), the narrator says of Jubal, one of the antediluvians.  The literal phrasing of the Hebrew here, as in a series of analogous verses, is “he was the father of ….”   That idiom is emblematic of the Primeval History, which is really a record of the archetypal fathers, a genealogy of human institutions and of ethnic and linguistic identity.

 Although the Patriarchal Tales are in one obvious way also the story of a chain of fathers—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the horizon these tales constantly invoke is the future, not the past.  God repeatedly tells Abraham what He intends to do with and for the offspring of Abraham in time to come, both in the impending near future of Egyptian enslavement and in the long-term future of national greatness.  It is perfectly apt that the Patriarchal Tales should conclude with Jacob’s deathbed poem envisaging the destiny of the future tribes of Israel, which he prefaces with the words, “Gather round, that I may tell you what shall befall you in the days to come” (49:1).

The Primeval History, in contrast to what follows in Genesis, cultivates a kind of narrative that is

• fablelike or legendary, and sometimes residually mythic.
• The human actors in these stories are kept at a certain distance, and seem more generalized types than individual characters with distinctive personal histories.
• The style tends much more than that of the Patriarchal Tales to formal symmetries, refrainlike repetitions, parallelisms, and other rhetorical devices of a prose that often aspires to the dignity of poetry, or that invites us to hear the echo of epic poetry in its cadences.
• As everywhere in biblical narrative, dialogue is an important vehicle, but in the Primeval History it does not have the central roles it will play later, and one finds few of the touches of vivid mimesis that make dialogue in the Patriarchal Tales so brilliant an instrument for the representation of human—and human and divine—interactions.

 In sum, this rapid report of the distant early stages of the human story adopts something of a distancing procedure in the style and the narrative modes with which it tells the story.

God’s very first words to Abraham at the beginning of chapter 12 enjoin him to abandon land, birthplace, and father’s house.  These very terms, or at east this very sphere, will become the arena of the narrative to the end of Genesis.  The human creature is now to be represented not against the background of the heavens and the earth and civilization as such but rather

• within the tense and constricted theater of the paternal domain, in tent and wheatfield and sheepfold,
• in the minute rhythms of quotidian existence,
• working out all hopes of grand destiny in the coil of familial relationships, the internecine, sometimes deadly, warring of brothers and fathers and sons and wives.

In keeping with this major shift in focus from the Primeval History to the Patriarchal Tales, style and narrative mode shift as well.  

The studied formality of the first eleven chapters—epitomized in the symmetries and the intricate repetition of word and sound in the story of the Tower of Babel—gives way to a more flexible and varied prose.  Dialogue is accorded more prominence and embodies a more lively realism.  When, for example, Sarai gives Abram her slavegirl Hagar as a concubine, and proudly pregnant Hagar then treats her with disdain, the matriarch berates her husband in the following fashion:  “This outrage against me is because of you!  I myself put my slavegirl in your embrace and when she saw she had conceived I became slight in her eyes” (16:5).  Sarai’s first sentence here has an explosive compactness in the Hebrew, being only two words, ^hamasi ‘alekha, that resists translation.  In any case these lines smoldering with the fires of female resentment convey a sense of living speech and complexity of feeling and relationship one does not encounter before the Patriarchal Tales:  the frustrated long-barren wife at cross-purposes with herself and with her husband, first aspiring to maternity through the surrogate of her slavegirl, then after the fact of her new co-wife’s pregnancy, tasting a new humiliation, indignant at the slave’s presumption, ready to blame her husband, who has been only the instrument of her will.  Such vivid immediacy in the representation of the densely problematic nature of individual lives in everyday settings is an innovation not only in comparison with the Primeval History but also in comparison with virtually all of ancient literature.

What nevertheless binds the two large units of the Book of Genesis is both outlook and theme.

• The unfolding history of the family that is to become the people of Israel is seen, as I have suggested, as the crucial focus of a larger, universal history.
• The very peregrinations of the family back and forth between Mesopotamia and Canaan and down to Egypt intimate that its scope involves not just the land Israel has been promised but the wider reach of known cultures.
• National existence, moreover, is emphatically imagined as a strenuous effort to renew the act of creation.
• The Creation story repeatedly highlights the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, while the Patriarchal Tales, in the very process of frequently echoing this language of fertility from the opening chapters, make clear that procreation, far from being an automatic biological process, is fraught with dangers is constantly under threat of being deflected or cut off.
• Abraham must live long years with the seeming mockery of a divine promise of numberless offspring as he and his wife advance childless into hoary old age.
• Near the end of the book, Jacob’s whole family fears it may perish in the great famine, and Joseph must assure his brothers that God has sent him ahead of them to Egypt in order to sustain life.
•  Genesis begins with the making of heaven and earth and all life, and ends with the image of a mummy—Joseph’s—in a coffin.

But implicit in the end is a promise of more life to come, of irrepressible procreation, and that renewal of creation will be manifested, even under the weight of oppression, at the beginning of Exodus.  Genesis, then, works with disparate materials, puts together its story with two large and very different building blocks but nevertheless achieves the cohesiveness, the continuity of theme and motif, and the sense of completion of an architectonically conceived book.  Although it looks forward to its sequel, it stands as a book, inviting our attention as an audience that follows the tale from beginning to end.