Book of Genesis

Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament and the opening of the five books of Moses, tells of the making of the world and of the first human beings, of the flood and the scattering of the nations, and of the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob down to Joseph in Egypt; the Church receives it as the work of Moses, and the Orthodox Study Bible gives its theme as "The early history of man and of Israel."

For Inquirers

Every family keeps a story about where it came from, and sooner or later a child asks the question that sits underneath it: where did all of this come from, and where did we? Genesis is the Bible's own answer, set at the very start of the book, and its name simply means "origin."[^og] It opens with God speaking, and a dark, shapeless deep turns into sea and sky and dry land, then plants and stars, then fish and birds and animals, and last a man and a woman, made, as the book says, "in the image of God."[^gen1] Then things go wrong, and go wrong again: the first two people lose their garden, a man kills his brother, a flood washes over the earth, and a tower meant to reach the sky ends in a babble of languages.[^summary] After that the book slows down to follow one family, Abraham and Sarah and their children and grandchildren, as far as Joseph, whose brothers sell him as a slave and who ends by feeding them through a famine.[^summary]

The Church's tradition is that the man behind it was Moses, the same Moses who later led God's people out of slavery in Egypt, and the Fathers describe him as one who spoke with God face to face.[^basil-moses][^rose-ch1] How Moses received what he passed on, whether in a vision, or from older memories kept in his people's families, or by plain teaching from God, and when the book reached the shape we hold today, are questions on which Orthodox writers differ, and the Church does not make the book's standing as Scripture depend on who its human author was.[^oca-auth][^ow-canon] Some of what the book says will also sound strange to modern ears: there is light before there is a sun, people live for nine hundred years, a serpent talks. The Fathers who wrote about the six days read them in more than one way, some taking them as ordinary days and some finding signs of something larger in them.[^basil-2-8][^theoph-15][^origen-dp] The Orthodox Study Bible says that the Church has not defined any one view of how the creation account meets the sciences, though it adds that the Fathers consistently say each kind of creature came to be at God's command.[^osb-intro] What she insists on is that God made everything, and that He looked at all of it and called it very good.[^gen1]

Christians have also read Genesis with Jesus in view. After His resurrection, Luke says, He explained to two of His friends "beginning from Moses and from all the prophets" the things in all the Scriptures that concerned Himself,[^luke24] and the apostles and the Fathers read the book in that light: Adam is a sketch of the One who was coming, Melchizedek meets Abraham with bread and wine, a priest whose beginning and end the Bible never mentions, and Abraham lays his son on an altar and receives him back.[^typ-short] The Church also hears the book read aloud in her services. Through the weeks of Lent her evening services read from Genesis a few verses at a time, moving from the creation toward the death of Joseph, and on the evening before Easter, at the Holy Saturday service, the Old Testament readings begin with the creation of the world.[^lent-short] Thoughtful readers on every side of the open questions have found the book large enough to keep reading.

Overview

• Genesis is the first book of the Old Testament and the first of the five books of Moses, the Torah or Pentateuch; its English name comes from the Greek word for "origins," and its Hebrew name is taken from its opening words, "In the beginning."[^og][^pent]
• The Church's tradition ascribes it, with the whole Pentateuch, to Moses, and the Orthodox Study Bible places its writing in Israel's forty years in the wilderness; the book itself names no author.[^osb-intro][^ow-gen]
• It stands first in each of the fourth- and fifth-century lists of the Old Testament cited here: Cyril of Jerusalem's, Athanasius's, the Synod of Laodicea's, and Jerome's account of the Hebrew order, in which "The first book is called among them Bresith, which we call Genesis."[^canon-lists]
• Its shape, as Fr. Stephen De Young describes it, is two halves: chapters 1-11, three great falls of humanity (creation and expulsion from paradise, Cain and the flood, Babel and the division of the nations); and chapters 12-50, four generations of one family (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph). The phrase "these are the generations of" recurs through the book as a structural marker.[^dy-intro][^ow-gen]
• Its central themes are God as the one Creator who makes all things out of nothing by His Word and Spirit and calls them good; the human being as the image of God; sin, death, and judgment, from the garden through the flood to Babel; and God's promise to Abraham and its unfolding through Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and the Orthodox Study Bible's summary is that, though His creation rebelled, God "still loves and cares for His people."[^osb-intro][^dy-intro]
• Among the books of the Old Testament it is the one that reaches back before Israel's own history begins. The Orthodox Study Bible sees its first three chapters "reflected in the last three chapters of Revelation," OrthodoxWiki counts "over 35" quotations of it in the New Testament and "hundreds of allusions" in both Testaments, and the Church reads it in the Greek of the Septuagint, whose chronology and some of whose readings differ from the Hebrew text that the Jewish tradition and the King James Version follow.[^osb-intro][^ow-gen][^lxx-ow]

Summary

Genesis begins before there is anything to begin with: "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," and the earth is "unsightly and unfurnished," darkness over the deep, with "the Spirit of God" moving over the water (Genesis 1.1; Genesis 1.2). In six days, each one closed with "there was evening and there was morning," God by His word brings light, a firmament, dry land and plants, the sun and moon and stars, the creatures of the water and the air, the animals of the land, and last man, male and female, made in His image and given dominion; on the seventh He ceases from His works, and all that He has made is "very good" (Genesis 1.26; Genesis 1.31; Genesis 2.2). The second chapter narrows to the man, formed of dust and given "the breath of life" so that he becomes "a living soul," set in a garden with a woman beside him (Genesis 2.7; Genesis 2.8). At the serpent's urging they eat of the forbidden tree, and God clothes them in garments of skin and puts them out of the garden, with cherubim set against the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3.1; Genesis 3.21; Genesis 3.24). Their son Cain kills Abel in the plain (Genesis 4.8); the line of Seth leads to Enoch, who "was well-pleasing to God, and was not found, because God translated him" (Genesis 5.24); and when "the sons of God" take wives of the daughters of men and the wicked actions of men multiply, only Noah, "a just man," is saved, when "all the fountains of the abyss were broken up, and the flood-gates of heaven were opened," after which God sets His bow in the cloud as the sign of a covenant with the earth (Genesis 6.2; Genesis 6.9; Genesis 7.11; Genesis 9.13). The peoples multiply, and at Babel, where "all the earth was one lip," the Lord confounds their language and scatters them (Genesis 11.1; Genesis 11.9). Then the book turns from the nations to one man. The Lord tells Abram to leave his land and kindred, promises him a land, and says that in him "shall all the tribes of the earth be blessed," and Abram "believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness" (Genesis 12.1; Genesis 12.3; Genesis 15.6). Melchisedec, priest of the most high God, brings out loaves and wine and blesses him; the covenant of circumcision is given, and Abram becomes Abraam, "a father of many nations"; Sodom and Gomorrha fall under fire from heaven; Isaac is born; and God tests Abraham by asking for his beloved son as a whole-burnt-offering, and stays his hand (Genesis 14.18; Genesis 17.5; Genesis 17.10; Genesis 19.24; Genesis 21.3; Genesis 22.2). Isaac's sons Jacob and Esau quarrel over birthright and blessing, and Jacob, on the road, dreams of a ladder "whose top reached to heaven, and the angels of God ascended and descended on it"; he is deceived into marrying Lea before Rachel, wrestles with a man through the night, and is renamed Israel (Genesis 25.34; Genesis 27.36; Genesis 28.12; Genesis 29.25; Genesis 32.25; Genesis 32.29). His favorite son Joseph is sold by his brothers for twenty pieces of gold and brought down into Egypt, where, after the prison, he is set over Pharaoh's house; when famine sends his brothers to Egypt for corn, he makes himself known to them and tells them, "God sent me before you for life" (Genesis 37.3; Genesis 37.28; Genesis 39.20; Genesis 41.40; Genesis 42.2; Genesis 45.5). Jacob and all his house settle in Egypt, and on his deathbed he calls his sons to tell them "what shall happen to you in the last days," saying of Judah that "A ruler shall not fail from Juda, nor a prince from his loins, until there come the things stored up for him"; the book closes with Joseph's death at a hundred and ten, his body "put in a coffin in Egypt" (Genesis 46.3; Genesis 49.1; Genesis 49.10; Genesis 50.26).[^summary]

Author, Source, and Intention

Genesis is a book about origins that does not say where it came from. No sentence in it names a writer, and its story closes with Joseph in a coffin in Egypt, before the man the Church credits with it has even been born in the next book.[^summary] Everything said about who wrote it, from what, and why has therefore been gathered from outside the book: from what the rest of Scripture says about Moses, from what the Fathers say about the man and the work, and from what can be learned of how the text was copied and read.

Who wrote it

The book itself is silent, and OrthodoxWiki's article on Genesis says so in a sentence: "The author does not identify himself in Genesis." The same article goes on to say that the Old Testament and the New Testament both ascribe its composition to Moses, and it lists the passages it has in mind.[^ow-gen] The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction states the tradition plainly: "Traditionally, both Jews and Christians believe Moses is the author and compiler of Genesis and of each of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch."[^osb-intro]

The law itself shows Moses writing, which is the first thing that makes the tradition more than an assumption. After the battle with Amalek the Lord tells him, "Write this for a memorial in a book" (Exodus 17.14), and at Sinai he records all the Lord's words (Exodus 24.4). Neither verse names Genesis. Asked when Moses would have found time to write, Fr. Stephen De Young answers that the Torah itself says he did, and that, raised in the Egyptian court, "he would have been literate, highly literate, in multiple languages"; Stephen's speech in Acts says the same of his schooling, that Moses "was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts 7.22).[^dy-torah][^moses-wrote]

The New Testament speaks of the same Moses and puts his writing in the service of Christ. The Lord says in John's Gospel, "if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me" (John 5.46), and after the resurrection He explained to two disciples, beginning from Moses and all the prophets, the things concerning Himself (Luke 24.27).[^moses-nt] John Behr reads the first of these as a statement about meaning: Moses certainly wrote in the past, but what his words mean lies in how they speak of the Lord Jesus Christ.[^behr-moses] None of this says in so many words that Moses wrote the book of Genesis, and a careful reader should say so; it is the ground on which the Fathers rested when they did.

Among the Fathers cited here, those who speak of the book's authorship name Moses, and the longest portrait of him is Basil's. Opening his sermons on the six days, Basil stops to ask who is speaking before he asks what is said, and he answers with a short life of Moses: adopted by Pharaoh's daughter and given a royal education, taught by the wise men of Egypt, forty years in the contemplation of nature in exile, and finally the one "who, at the age of eighty, saw God, as far as it is possible for man to see Him."[^basil-moses] Basil's reason for trusting the book is this biography, and his claim about its source is plain in the sentence that follows the portrait: the words come "by the dictation of the Holy Spirit."[^basil-moses]

Earlier than Basil, Theophilus of Antioch, writing to a friend named Autolycus, makes the point more compactly when he quotes the opening sentence and says of it that it was spoken by "Moses, who lived many years before Solomon, or, rather, the Word of God by him as by an instrument."[^theoph-10] Moses is the instrument and the Word the author. Victorinus, in his short work On the Creation of the World, speaks in passing of "the book of Moses, which he wrote about its creation, and which is called Genesis," and Tertullian, arguing against the heretic Hermogenes, appeals to the original document of Moses as common ground between himself and his opponent.[^victorinus][^tert-herm19] Jerome, describing the Hebrew books, names Genesis and the four that follow and calls them the five books of Moses, and Josephus, in the passage from Against Apion that the Wikipedia article on the development of the Old Testament canon reproduces, says that of the twenty-two books of the Jews "five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death."[^jerome-pg][^josephus]

What "Moses wrote it" means is a separate question from whether the Church says it. De Young observes that in the ancient world the attribution "never gets super defined as to what that means," and compares it to the way Proverbs is called Solomon's although parts of Proverbs name other speakers, and the Psalms are called David's although some are headed with other names.[^dy-torah] Bishop Alexander (Mileant), in a booklet of apologetics, says plainly that the tradition "does not claim that he wrote each word": the books contain additions made after his death, such as the story of Moses' death, and explanations of geographical names that later generations needed.[^mileant-sketches] De Young gives the example that Genesis supplies: the story of Abram pursuing the kings who had taken Lot says he pursued them to Dan, and Dan, as De Young puts it, was a name from the days of Abraham's great-grandson, so that "somebody had updated it to Dan so people reading it would understand."[^dy-torah][^gen14-dan]

OrthodoxWiki's article on the Old Testament records the same distinction in a sentence that a student of the critical literature will recognize: "Although scholars believe that the Law was not written by the personal hand of Moses, and that the books show evidence of being the result of a number of oral and written traditions and time periods, the Church connects the Law with Moses."[^ow-ot] The Orthodox Church in America carries the principle further. In its account of the Bible it says that the identity of the human author does not govern the interpretation or significance of the books, and that "in no case would the Church admit that the identity of the author determines the authenticity or validity of a book which is viewed as part of the Bible."[^oca-auth] OrthodoxWiki's article on the canon says that even if an existing part of the canon "were undeniably proven not to be from its traditionally ascribed author, it would not be removed from the canon."[^ow-canon] The attribution to Moses is therefore a claim about origin and authority that the Church holds as tradition, and these sources do not make the book's place in the canon depend on it.

Fr. Seraphim Rose, in the chapter of Genesis, Creation and Early Man on how to read the book, agrees that Moses and later chroniclers could have used written records and oral tradition for the acts and chronology of the patriarchs and kings, but holds that for the beginning of the world, when no one witnessed God's acts, the account "can come only from God's revelation"; he calls the widespread view that Moses compiled Genesis from other early accounts of creation a view without foundation in Scripture or Church tradition.[^rose-ch1] Bishop Nathanael (Lvov), whose book on the Holy Bible circulates on the FatherAlexander.ORG site, answers Professor Kartashev, who had lamented that the Orthodox schools had not yet put the Old Testament through critical method, by saying that for the believer the Church's two-thousand-year testimony about a book's authorship is more convincing than the "kaleidoscopically changing opinions" of scholars.[^nathanael-kart] These are the two ends of the Orthodox range in the sources cited here: a firm statement that the account of the beginning is from God, and a firm statement that the tradition outweighs the critics; the middle, in De Young and OrthodoxWiki, is a Moses who stands at the head of a tradition that, on De Young's account, was copied, updated, and finally gathered into the form we have.

What lies behind it

The book names no source, and the answer of several Fathers to the question of what Moses worked from is that for the opening chapters he worked from nothing human at all. Theophilus says it with a remark about the prophets: the prophets "were not when the world came into existence," but the wisdom of God and His holy Word, who was always present with Him, came down upon them and spoke through them of the creation.[^theoph-10] Basil's Moses is "this man, whom God judged worthy to behold Him, face to face, like the angels."[^basil-moses] The conviction appears again in Fr. Rose's quotation of St. Isaac the Syrian, who distinguishes natural and spiritual knowledge from a third kind, "bestowed by Divine power" and called supra-natural, which he says can lift the soul to a vision of what preceded the making of the world; on that view no earlier document is needed to explain how Moses knew.[^rose-ch1]

Fr. Stephen De Young gives the same conviction a name from Second Temple Judaism. Genesis, "and especially the first 11 chapters," he says, "has traditionally, starting in Second Temple Judaism with books like the book of Jubilees, been understood to be a vision that Moses received while he was on Mount Sinai," since Moses was not around for the creation, the flood, or Babel.[^dy-intro] The vision reading gives him his principle of interpretation: one does not read a vision as a laboratory report, any more than one reads Daniel's or John's visions that way. The Dead Sea Scrolls, OrthodoxWiki notes, included a copy of the Book of Jubilees among works not in the Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant Bibles, so that the book De Young names is attested in the period he places it.[^dss] Rose, quoting St. Ambrose, presses a different image: Moses "spoke to God the Most High, not in a vision nor in dreams, but mouth to mouth," so that the gift he received came, Ambrose says, plainly and clearly and not through figures or riddles.[^rose-ch1] The two accounts agree that the knowledge came by revelation and disagree about its form, and the sources cited here do not decide between them.

Behind the patriarchal chapters the sources allow more human material. Rose grants, as noted, that written records and oral tradition may lie behind the acts and chronology of the patriarchs. Bishop Alexander (Mileant) goes further in his booklet on the Pentateuch: Abraham "could have passed to his descendants some notes, which later became the basis of the Book of Genesis," and Moses' disciple Joshua mentions a Book of Jasher that has since been lost; in the booklet on the Pentateuch he says that the sacred history, formed within early Israel, "was sung beside the desert campfires" and passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation.[^mileant-sketches][^mileant-pent] That is already a theory of oral tradition, and De Young makes a related appeal when he says that in studied oral cultures one story can be told at forty minutes by one teller and two hours by another and each confirm the other got it right.[^dy-2-4]

De Young draws attention to the phrase eleh toledot, "these are the generations of," which, he says, "you don't find ... in the rest of the Old Testament." In Brenton's text it introduces the heavens and the earth, Adam, Noah, the sons of Noah, Shem, Terah, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau, and Jacob, ten headings in all.[^toledot] For him the formula is evidence that "at the end of the process of the book of Genesis, as we have it now, there was someone who had a structure in mind for the whole thing."[^dy-intro] OrthodoxWiki's article builds its outline of the book on the same recurring phrase, in nine divisions, and adds that, "Out of all historical information available to Moses, he selected only what was related to the religious life of people," and that the book "most likely has been edited for this goal over time."[^ow-gen] Brenton's Septuagint carries the first occurrence at the head of the second creation account: "This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when they were made, in the day in which the Lord God made the heaven and the earth."[^gen2-4]

The Orthodox Study Bible notes that the doctrine of creation out of nothing "stands in clear contrast to the creation myths of the surrounding cultures in the ancient world."[^osb-intro] De Young, in his verse-by-verse study, reads the first verse as a refusal of the "succession myth" of Babylonian and Greek religion, in which younger gods overthrow older ones, and the breathing of life into Adam as an inversion of the Near Eastern ritual in which a divine image was installed by "opening the mouth."[^dy-gen11][^dy-2-4] The Mesopotamian and Egyptian ritual details are De Young's own report, and nothing else here confirms them. Bishop Alexander (Mileant) goes in a different direction: he says that "Babylonian cuneiform tablets illustrate the creation and particularly the Flood, yielding amazing parallels of detail," that the longevity of the patriarchs is illustrated by the Sumerian king list, and that the biblical Flood account is "incomparably superior to the crudities and inconsistencies" of the eleventh book of the Epic of Gilgamesh.[^mileant-pent] Rose says that no one who compares Genesis with the creation myths of other peoples can fail to be struck "by the sobriety and simplicity of the Genesis account."[^rose-ch1] These are claims about the ancient Near East made by Orthodox writers who are not Assyriologists; no cuneiform text or scholar of the period is cited here, and the entry does not go beyond what these authors say.

Why it was written

The Orthodox Study Bible says that Genesis is divided into two parts: the account of the creation of the world and the beginning of the human race with Adam and Eve, together with the history of their descendants, and then the early history of Israel, starting with the three patriarchs and the twelve tribes that were their descendants. Its summary of the point is that "God created all things good, and although His creation rebelled and sinned against Him, He still loves and cares for His people."[^osb-intro] Bishop Alexander (Mileant) gives a purpose that fits that summary and adds a promise: the book "was written with the purpose of giving mankind a concept of the world and of mankind's history, after traditions began to be forgotten, and to preserve in purity the first prophesies regarding the Messiah, the Divine Savior of mankind."[^mileant-pent]

Fr. Stephen De Young calls Genesis the prologue to the whole Torah, "setting up the patterns for what we're going to see later": the Sabbath structure of creation before the Sabbath commandment is given, the distinction of clean and unclean animals on Noah's ark before Leviticus codifies it, and the call of Abraham in chapter 12 as the beginning of God's answer to the three falls of the first eleven chapters.[^dy-intro] Of the early chapters in particular he insists that the question to bring to them is what God is communicating, and not what curiosities of ours they might answer: "if this is teaching from God, then that means this is not a text that's here to answer my questions and my curiosities. It's: God wants to teach me certain things that I need to know."[^dy-intro]

Theophilus of Antioch says that God "willed to make man by whom He might be known; for him, therefore, He prepared the world."[^theoph-10] Basil, explaining why the book begins with the visible world, says that the world is "the school where reasonable souls exercise themselves, the training ground where they learn to know God," since the sight of visible things leads the mind, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible ones.[^basil-1-6] Both writers say that the first chapter was written to teach whoever reads it about God; for Basil this goes together with taking the text's words in their plain sense, as the section on the six days shows.

The decisive purpose, for the Church, is the one the New Testament names, and it is Christ. The Lord Himself says that Moses "wrote about me" (John 5.46); Paul calls Adam "a foreshadowing of him who was to come" (Romans 5.14); and John's Prologue opens with the same three words as Genesis, "In the beginning," and says of the Word that "All things were made through him" (John 1.1-John 1.3).[^nt-christ] Chrysostom, discussing John's opening, compares the two beginnings directly: "You have heard, that In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth; what do you understand from this beginning? Clearly, that they were created before all visible things. So, respecting the Only-Begotten, when you hear that He was in the beginning, conceive of him as before all intelligible things, and before the ages."[^chrys-jn4] Origen, a Father to be read with care, draws the same line in his commentary on the Gospel: "The term beginning may be taken of the beginning of the world, so that we may learn from what is said that the Word was older than the things which were made from the beginning."[^orig-jn]

That Christological intention shapes how the Church reads even the most literal details. Irenaeus, in the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, tells the story of Adam in Eden and then draws the line to the incarnation: "the Word was made flesh... our Lord took that same original formation as (His) entry into flesh, so that He might draw near and contend on behalf of the fathers, and conquer by Adam that which by Adam had stricken us down."[^irenaeus-dem] Behr observes that Tertullian reads "Let us make man in our image" as the Father speaking to his Son, and sees the clay already wearing the face of Christ: "that clay, already putting on the image of Christ, who was to be in the flesh, was not only the work, but also the pledge of God."[^behr-tert][^tert-res] On this reading the book is a book about a beginning that was made in view of an end, and the Fathers' practice of reading Adam in the light of Christ is the form their conviction about the book's purpose took.

Manuscripts and the text

The sources cited here describe no autograph of Genesis, and the earliest witnesses they name are the Septuagint translation of the third century B.C. and the Dead Sea Scrolls of about 150 BC to AD 75, so the history of its text is a history of copies. They set out three main streams of the surviving tradition, the Hebrew of the Masoretes, the Greek of the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, and report that the Dead Sea Scrolls show the Hebrew text of their period was not always uniform, though most of the Qumran fragments lie closer to the Masoretic text.[^masoretic][^bruce-sam]

The Hebrew text that the Jewish tradition and the King James Version follow is the Masoretic Text, which OrthodoxWiki describes as "primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the seventh and tenth centuries AD." Its consonants, the same article says, differ little from the text accepted in the early second century, yet the oldest surviving fragments of it date only from about the ninth century, and the Aleppo Codex, the oldest copy, is of the tenth century and is missing the Torah.[^masoretic] OrthodoxWiki adds that Jacob ben Hayyim's work in the Second Bomberg Bible of 1524-25 was used for the Old Testament of the King James Version.[^masoretic]

The Septuagint, which is the Church's text, begins with Genesis. OrthodoxWiki says that the name originally "referred to a 3rd century B.C. translation of the Pentateuch into Koine Greek," made at Alexandria at the wish of King Ptolemy; De Young presses the point when he says that "The Septuagint is a particular translation of the Torah" and that the other Greek versions, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, and the recension known as kaige, are not rightly called by that name.[^lxx-ow][^dy-intro] The story of its making comes from the Letter of Aristeas, which says the translators finished the Pentateuch in seventy-two days; Bruce reports (p. 44) that later legend added that the elders worked in isolation and produced identical versions, and that Philo and Josephus both confirm that only the books of the law were translated by them. De Young, asked whether to believe the tale, says: "I can't force you. I cannot compel you."[^bruce-lxx][^dy-intro] The Orthodox Church, OrthodoxWiki says, "continues to regard the LXX as its only canonical text of the Old Testament."[^lxx-ow]

For Genesis, the Greek text edited by Rahlfs rests on a rich manuscript base. OrthodoxWiki reports that his critical edition for Genesis "rests on a foundation of some 140 manuscripts (nine pre-dating the fourth century CE), 10 daughter-versions, plus biblical citations in Greek and Latin literature," and that his Septuaginta has since been "supplanted by the fully critical Göttingen" edition.[^lxx-ow] The great codices are less helpful for Genesis than for other books. OrthodoxWiki says that Codex Vaticanus, "slightly older than Codex Sinaiticus" and a fourth-century copy, has lost Genesis 1:1 to 46:28a and that "a recent hand" has filled the gap; that Codex Alexandrinus, of the fifth century, is torn in Genesis 1:20-25 and 1:29-2:3 and damaged in chapters 14-16; and that parts of Genesis, found in the binding of other books, were at one point sent to Tischendorf from Sinai.[^codices] The same article on the Septuagint says that Brenton's translation, the English text of Genesis quoted here, was made "according to the Vatican text, with the principal various readings of the Alexandrine copy"; the sources cited here do not say how Brenton handled the gap in Vaticanus, and a reader should know the gap is there.[^lxx-ow][^codices]

OrthodoxWiki reports that the Masoretic Text has "numerous differences of both greater and lesser significance when compared to (extant 4th century) manuscripts of the Septuagint" and that the Dead Sea Scrolls, "dating from c.150 BC-AD 75," show "that in this period there was not always the scrupulous uniformity of text that was so stressed in later centuries."[^masoretic] It gives two sets of percentages for the Qumran biblical manuscripts, one from Shiffman, according to which 60% were "proto-Masoretic" (and a further 20% Qumran-style texts with proto-Masoretic bases), and one from Tov, according to which 35% were proto-Masoretic, 5% proto-Septuagint, 5% proto-Samaritan, 20% Qumran-specific, and 35% non-aligned; the two accounts do not agree, and the entry does not choose between them.[^masoretic][^lxx-ow] What is agreed is the direction of the argument. OrthodoxWiki says that "Scholarship during the past half century based upon these Dead Sea discoveries has revealed a close agreement between the LXX and pre-Masoretic Hebrew texts". De Young draws the same lesson: where the Greek differs from the Hebrew, he says, it is because it rests on different Hebrew texts, and the translators did not go into business for themselves.[^lxx-ow][^dy-torah]

The differences are most visible in the numbers. Brenton's Genesis 5 gives Adam two hundred and thirty years before the birth of Seth and seven hundred more after, a lifetime of nine hundred and thirty; and Augustine reports that in the Greek manuscripts Adam lived 230 years before Seth and in the Hebrew 130, and that the period after was 700 years in the Greek and 800 in the Hebrew, so that for most of the early generations, as he puts it, "the result is the same in both."[^gen5][^aug-cog-15-10] Theophilus of Antioch's chronology uses the figures of Brenton's Genesis 5, whose nine generations from Adam to Lamech sum to 1642 years and, with Noah's six hundred, to the 2242 he reports; he puts "from the creation of the world to the deluge" at 2242 years and the whole time from creation to his own day at 5698 years.[^theoph-3] The Septuagint tradition lies behind the Church's old calendar: OrthodoxWiki says the Byzantine Creation Era, "derived from the Septuagint version of the Bible," placed creation 5,509 years before the Incarnation.[^date-creation]

The Greek text carries variants of its own. The Methuselah question is the best known: Brenton's Genesis 5:25-26 gives Methuselah a hundred and sixty-seven years before the birth of Lamech and eight hundred and two after, while the Orthodox Study Bible's printed text of the same verses gives a hundred and eighty-seven and seven hundred and eighty-two, and the arithmetic of the flood turns on which is read.[^gen5][^osb-gen5] Augustine saw the problem in his own manuscripts: with 167 years, "it is computed that he lived for fourteen years after the deluge, though Scripture relates that of all who were then upon the earth only the eight souls in the ark escaped," and he notes that three Greek manuscripts, one Latin, and one Syriac agree in saying that Methuselah died six years before the flood.[^aug-cog-15-11][^aug-cog-15-13]

In several places the New Testament's wording of the Genesis story matches the Greek text as Brenton prints it. Stephen says in Acts that Joseph summoned Jacob and his relatives, "seventy-five souls" (Acts 7.14), the total that Brenton gives at Genesis 46:27; Irenaeus gives the same figure ("threescore and fifteen souls") in the Demonstration; Hebrews 11:21 has Jacob worshiping "leaning on the top of his staff," as Brenton's Genesis 47:31 does; and Luke's genealogy names Cainan between Arphaxad and Sala (Luke 3.36), as Brenton's Genesis 11:12-13 does.[^lxx-nt] Bruce (p. 54) notes a case that matches neither Greek nor Hebrew as they stand: Stephen places Abraham's departure from Haran after his father's death (Acts 7.4), which on Bruce's account fits the Samaritan text, where Terah dies at 145, and not the Septuagint as received or the Masoretic Text; Brenton gives 205.[^bruce-acts7] OrthodoxWiki's sentence that the "overwhelmingly dominant source for their wording comes directly from the Septuagint" covers the pattern, and the examples above give it local detail.[^lxx-ow]

The Samaritan Pentateuch is the third stream. Bruce says that the Samaritan Bible was restricted to the Pentateuch, that it was in essence a popular Palestinian form of the Hebrew Pentateuch, and that it was edited to bring it into line with Samaritan tradition (p. 41); OrthodoxWiki's article on the Flood says that the Samaritan Pentateuch dates the flood to about 2900 BC against about 2300 BC in the Masoretic Text and about 3250 BC on a straightforward reading of the Septuagint.[^bruce-sam][^ow-flood] No source here lists the Samaritan Pentateuch's other differences in Genesis.

The sources cited here show no ruling that one text is the original in every place, though OrthodoxWiki says the Orthodox Church regards the Septuagint as its only canonical Old Testament text.[^lxx-ow] Origen's Hexapla, as De Young and OrthodoxWiki describe it, was an ancient critical edition that set the Hebrew, a Greek transliteration of it, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion in six columns "so you could study the Old Testament and look at all of these."[^hexapla] Augustine is a useful guide to the range of the Church's attitudes, because he says two things that pull in different directions. In one place he argues that when two texts diverge "we do well to believe in preference that language out of which the translation was made into another," so that he is willing to prefer the Hebrew on the question of Methuselah's age.[^aug-cog-15-13] In another place he says that where the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew and "the sense is agreeable to truth and illustrative of truth, we must believe that the divine Spirit prompted them to give a varying version, not in their function of translators, but in the liberty of prophesying," and that no one has presumed to emend the Septuagint from the Hebrew text in the many places where they seem to disagree.[^aug-cog-15-14] The sources cited here state no Orthodox policy on critical editions of the Greek Old Testament beyond OrthodoxWiki's note that the Orthodox Study Bible's Old Testament follows Rahlfs "with reference to the Brenton translation."[^lxx-ow]

Translations

The Greek of the Septuagint, made, as OrthodoxWiki tells it, in the third century before Christ at Alexandria, is the earliest translation of Genesis that the sources cited here describe, and OrthodoxWiki says it is the overwhelmingly dominant source for the wording of the Old Testament in the New.[^lxx-ow] Three further Greek versions of the second century, by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, each claimed to be superior to the Septuagint,[^hexapla] and De Young notes that Theodotion was a Jew who "wanted to revise the Greek translation to bring it closer to the Hebrew, and, in his mind, make it less Christian."[^dy-intro] Bruce records that in Hebrew-speaking synagogues the law was read in Hebrew and followed by an oral Aramaic interpretation, the Targum (p. 44, n. 1), and that in a few places the Syriac Peshitta agrees with the Targum's construction (p. 54, n. 33).[^bruce-targum]

For the Latin West, OrthodoxWiki reports, Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome in 382 to revise the Latin Bible; Jerome translated the Old Testament "based upon the Greek Septuagint" first, and began about 390 a version based upon existing Hebrew texts, finishing much of it by 405. "This version, however, was not accepted by many, including Augustine, who felt the Septuagint was slighted and was as equally inspired as the Hebrew text."[^vulgate] OrthodoxWiki records that the Old Latin versions before it were "considered to be crudely done."[^vulgate]

English translators have had to choose between the two texts. The first English translation made directly from the Septuagint was Charles Thomson's of 1808, and Lancelot Brenton's of 1844, "according to the Vatican text," has "continually been in print" and is the English text of the Old Testament quoted here.[^lxx-ow] The Orthodox Study Bible of 2008 gave the Pentateuch a new English rendering from Rahlfs's Greek text with reference to Brenton, keeping the New King James wording only where the Greek matched the Hebrew Masoretic text; De Young calls its Pentateuch "a really good English translation" of the Greek, in contrast to the New King James he finds less satisfactory in the New Testament.[^lxx-ow][^dy-intro] Other English versions OrthodoxWiki lists are the Eastern/Greek Orthodox Bible, a revision of Brenton; the New English Translation of the Septuagint of 2007; and the LXX2012, an American-English revision of Brenton by the maker of the World English Bible.[^lxx-ow] The King James Version is a translation of the Hebrew, from the Masoretic tradition, and the differences described above between the Greek and Hebrew chronology and wording therefore pass into English according to which of the two a given Bible follows.[^masoretic][^lxx-ow]

Controversy and Contestation

Genesis has drawn argument from the second century onward, and the arguments have come in waves. The earliest were fought with philosophers and heretics who wanted a different beginning than the one Genesis gives. The next, in the Fathers' own schools, were about how the six days are to be read. The modern ones concern who wrote the book, how its text and numbers stand in Hebrew and Greek, what the sciences allow, and how much of the early chapters is history.

The ancient objectors

The first objections came from outside the Church and were aimed at the creation itself. Celsus, whom Origen answers in the Contra Celsum, mocked the days of creation, and Origen's reply shows the case at its sharpest and his answer at its most characteristic. Celsus pointed out that some of the days passed before there was light, sky, sun, or moon; Origen replies that Moses, who had just said the world was finished in six days, would hardly have forgotten himself so far as to add, as the next sentence does, "in the day that God made the heavens and the earth," and so the words must carry "a special meaning."[^celsus-6-50] Elsewhere Celsus supposes that the members of the great Church simply take over the Jewish account of the six days and the seventh, and Origen concedes only that the subject is "extensive, and mystical, and profound, and difficult of explanation."[^celsus-5-59] The objection and the reply already contain the two attitudes that run through the rest of this section: that the text's difficulties are real, and that they are the text's way of asking to be read for more than its surface.

Within and beside the Church the heretics read Genesis with a different quarrel. Irenaeus describes a Gnostic system in which the Creator is a lesser, boastful power, Ialdabaoth, who cries "I am father, and God, and above me there is no one," and the words "Let us make man after our image" are his, spoken to the other powers; the serpent in this telling is the agent of the higher Mother who tempts Adam and Eve to disobey the Creator's command and so to gain knowledge of the power above him.[^gnostic] The reading takes the plural of Genesis 1:26 and the prohibition of Genesis 2 seriously as text and turns them against the Creator. Tertullian reports the Marcionite objection from the same chapters in a sharper form: if God is good, foreknowing, and powerful, why did He permit His own image to be deceived and to fall into death? "Since, however, it has occurred," the objectors conclude, "God must be deemed neither good, nor prescient, nor powerful."[^marcion] Tertullian answers that the works of the Creator "testify at once to His goodness, since they are good... and to His power," and that the perfection of man's being lay in the liberty God purposely bestowed.[^marcion] The objection is Tertullian's report of it; it is not Marcion's own words.

A different heresy attacked Genesis's first verse. Hermogenes, as Tertullian describes him, held that God made the world out of pre-existent matter and read "In the beginning" as the name of that matter. Tertullian replies that the Latin principium means beginning, a term suited to things that begin to exist, and that it is "simply a term of inception, not the name of a substance"; and he adds that wherever the Holy Spirit tells of a thing made from something, the narrative of Genesis says what it was made from, as with the earth bringing forth grass, so that the silence about any matter in verse one is itself the answer.[^tert-herm] Gregory of Nyssa, in On the Making of Man, argues that whoever admits a beginning of motion "surely does not doubt as to its also having an end," and answers those who hold that matter is co-eternal with God by noting what support such a view would give the Manichaean.[^nyssa-xxiii] The Church's answer to all three, to the Gnostic, the Marcionite, and the philosopher of eternal matter, rests on the same ground: that the God of Genesis 1 is the one God, that He makes all things out of nothing, and that what He makes is good.[^osb-intro][^tert-herm][^marcion]

A last objection came from the Manichaean Faustus, who denied that the prophets spoke of Christ at all, and Augustine's reply states the opposite principle, that Genesis is a book about Christ, in its widest form. He says that all the contents of these Scriptures are about Christ, directly or indirectly, and he adds that "The whole narrative of Genesis, in the most minute details, is a prophecy of Christ and of the Church."[^faustus] Augustine writes from the Latin West, and the Eastern witnesses named later in this entry, Chrysostom and Cyril of Jerusalem among them, read Genesis in the same direction.

Moses and the sources

The modern challenge to the traditional account ends in a theory of several sources behind a book that names no author. The theory comes here at second hand, chiefly through Orthodox summaries. De Young's account, which he gives to a parish audience, is that the so-called documentary hypothesis grew in German Protestant scholarship out of the question of what authorized the Bible: when the Reformation made Scripture the final authority, the authority of the human author became its guarantee, and so the early critics attacked the idea that Moses wrote anything at all. Then, "in trying to defend the idea that Moses could have written the Torah, a fellow came up with the idea that he used source material, multiple pieces of source material," which became the hypothesis of the sources labeled J, E, D, and P.[^dy-torah]

On De Young's description, the critics reasoned that because some passages call God by the name Yahweh and others by the name Elohim there must have been two documents, J and E; Deuteronomy "looks kind of different than the other four," so it is D; and the ritual material was assigned to priests, so P. Behind the whole scheme he places two assumptions: that Moses probably did not write it (on De Young's telling, because he probably did not exist), and that "there's so much diverse material here that it must have come from multiple oral sources," together with a view that religion and literature develop from simple to complex.[^dy-torah] What can be said for the hypothesis from the Orthodox and Protestant sources themselves is more than its opponents sometimes allow. The book itself gives the critics material: Brenton's Genesis 14:14 has Abram pursuing the captors "to Dan," and Genesis 36:31 reads "these are the kings which reigned in Edom, before a king reigned in Israel," a sentence a reader may take to look back from the time of Israel's kings.[^gen14-dan] The Pentateuch ends with the death of Moses, and Mileant says that the story of it was added after him.[^deut34][^mileant-sketches] Mileant concedes that portions "are written in different styles."[^mileant-sketches] The Orthodox reference works go further: OrthodoxWiki's article on the Pentateuch says that Deuteronomy "is believed by many scholars to be a later summation of the first four books," and its article on Leviticus says that "Modern scholarship sees the Book of Leviticus as a product of the Priestly source and therefore dates it to the fifth century BC."[^ow-pent][^ow-lev]

De Young's response takes the evidence seriously while refusing the conclusion. He grants that the oldest identifiable parts of the Torah, Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 32, are in such ancient Hebrew, un-updated, that they are very hard to translate, and that other parts have been updated, but he reads the updating as faithful transmission, not corruption. His criticism of the hypothesis is its method: "no one has ever found a copy or a fragment of any of these hypothetical documents separately"; the sources subdivided into J1, J2, J3 and E1, E2, E3 until scholars were breaking single verses into three pieces; an attempted edition of J does not form coherent stories; and, he says, the J/E division has fallen out of favor now that it is known that ancient peoples gave their gods many names.[^dy-torah] He adds, of Genesis in particular, that the same logical problem attends any theory that divides the book: one must believe that its compiler was "both, bluntly, geniuses and idiots at the same time," skilled enough to make the whole and careless enough to leave every seam.[^dy-intro] Mileant answers the style argument directly: the Prophet Moses had to cover a wide range of topics, and the "stylistic differences depend on the content of components of the Pentateuch."[^mileant-sketches]

Bishop Nathanael's response rests on the Church. He quotes Professor Kartashev's complaint that critical conclusions have not been accepted in the Orthodox world, and he answers that the Church gives a holy book authority by receiving it into her canon, that two thousand years of her testimony outweighs "kaleidoscopically changing opinions," and that the prophets themselves show a knowledge of the Torah: Isaiah and Hosea know the book of Genesis, Amos knows the traditions of the Exodus, and Stephen's use of Amos in Acts 7:42-43 tells against Wellhausen's reconstruction.[^nathanael-kart] The two answers are compatible, and the first is the more concessive. The argument from Scripture's own later use of the Torah is an old one, and it stops short of claiming that Moses wrote every word.

Brevard Childs, a mainline Protestant scholar of the canon, observes in a book on the New Testament that scholars outside the church's own arena, among whom he names de Wette, Baur, and Wellhausen, have sometimes illuminated the canonical text where pious study had not, without thereby calling into question the search for the canon's own logic (Childs, p. 39, paraphrased).[^childs-well] Bruce reports that Childs's commentary on Exodus takes full account of what historical-critical exegesis can say while holding that the Church's canon is the context in which the text is most fully understood, and he says he disagrees with those who proclaim historical criticism bankrupt (p. 330, paraphrased).[^bruce-childs] Neither remark concerns Genesis directly; they show how a critical scholar can hold historical study and the canon together, and they give no verdict on authorship. OrthodoxWiki's page on the canon makes the Orthodox corollary: nothing in the canon would be removed even if its traditional author were disproved.[^ow-canon] Orthodox usage has also begun to absorb the vocabulary. An essay in Public Orthodoxy on the Orthodox statement about marriage speaks without apology of "the Yahwist creation narrative" at Genesis 2:18, which shows that an Orthodox writer can use the labels of source criticism without thereby adopting the hypothesis.[^public-orth] No text by Wellhausen or any of the school is cited here, and the case for the hypothesis is therefore stated as its Orthodox hearers report it.

The apparent doubling of the creation story belongs to the same debate. Genesis 1 and 2 seem to order events differently, with plants before man in the first and man before plants in the second. The Fathers here do not take this up as a question of sources. Origen, answering Celsus on days that pass before there is light or sun, reads the words "in the day that God made the heavens and the earth" as carrying a special meaning.[^celsus-6-50] Gregory of Nyssa, who in his treatise On the Making of Man reads the double statement of Genesis 1:27 as a double creation of human nature, "one made like to God, one divided according to this distinction" of male and female, and builds from it his account of human nature.[^nyssa-xvi] De Young calls the "two accounts" problem "manufactured" by reading ancient material with modern conventions, and takes Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as two visions with different purposes.[^dy-2-4] The Fathers met difficulties in these chapters and answered them as questions of meaning, and De Young answers the critics' version of the difficulty by reading the chapters as two visions with different purposes.

The six days and the sciences

The question that most readers bring to Genesis today is how old the world is and whether the days are days.

Basil takes the days as days and refuses to allegorize the creatures. In the second of his homilies he reads evening and morning as a measure of twenty-four hours filling up the space of one day, and explains the word "one" in "one day" as the Creator's way of tying the opening of time to eternity: "If then the beginning of time is called one day rather than the first day, it is because Scripture wishes to establish its relationship with eternity."[^basil-2-8] In his ninth homily he says that "I know the laws of allegory, though less by myself than from the works of others," and then, of those who change the nature of creatures to suit allegories: "For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense."[^basil-9-1] He rejects, on the second day, the reading by which the waters above the firmament are good angels and those below are fallen ones: "Let us reject these theories as dreams and old women's tales. Let us understand that by water water is meant."[^basil-3-9] Yet the same Basil begins with a world before the visible one, a realm of intellectual and invisible natures that preceded it, and he says that the Creator made the world in "less than an instant."[^basil-1-5] His reading is literal about the creatures and the days alike, yet it makes room for a creation before the first day.

Others read differently. Origen, in On First Principles, asks who of any understanding will think the first, second, and third days, with evening and morning, existed "without sun, and moon, and stars—the first day even without a sky," and says the same of God planting a garden and walking in it in the afternoon; yet in the same section he insists that the truth of the history may and ought to be preserved in the majority of instances, and names Abraham's burial in the double cave as an example.[^origen-dp] Theophilus of Antioch reads the days as signs as well as a sequence of works: the three days before the luminaries "are types of the Trinity, of God, and His Word, and His wisdom," and the fourth day is a type of man.[^theoph-15] Victorinus ties the seven days to seven periods of a thousand years each, and Augustine in his reply to Faustus sets the six days beside six ages of the world, from Adam to Noah, to Abraham, to David, to the exile, to Christ, and to the judgment.[^victorinus][^faustus]

Augustine's own account of the days is of a different kind again. In the City of God he writes that "What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!" and that the first light is either a material light or "the holy city... composed of holy angels and blessed spirits," so that evening and morning are the creature's knowledge of itself in comparison with its knowledge in the Creator.[^aug-cog-11-6] Fr. Seraphim Rose's editor says that Augustine, in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, suggested without insisting that the days were a literary device for angels contemplating a creation that occurred in an instant, and calls this view erroneous.[^rose-ch2] Kuraev, a deacon of the Russian Church, traces the Western habit of reading creation as simultaneous to the Vulgate's rendering of Sirach 18:1, in which the Greek word meaning "together" became simul, and he says that Augustine "was thus already sure that God 'created all simultaneously.'"[^kuraev] Both of these are modern comments on Augustine, and the Augustine quoted here says less than either.

On the Eastern side, St. Ephrem the Syrian is the plainest. In the commentary on Genesis posted at TrueOrthodoxy.org he begins: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," that is, "the substance of the heavens and the substance of the earth. So let no one think that there is anything interpretive (turgama) in the works of the six days."[^ephrem] He says that the day and night of the first day each lasted twelve hours, and that "the light and the clouds were created in the twinkling of an eye."[^ephrem] On one point Ephrem differs from Basil, who takes the Spirit of God over the waters to be the Holy Spirit:[^basil-2-6] Ephrem reports that some make that identification, says "the faithful do not make this connection," and points out that "an evil spirit of God consumed Saul."[^ephrem] The Fathers who read the days as a plain sequence did not therefore read every verse alike.

The modern Orthodox positions have been sorted by OrthodoxWiki into two camps, "Compatibilism" and "Incompatibilism," and the article on evolution says that no ecumenical council has addressed how to integrate modern science with revelation and that there is no dogmatic treatment of it, with some early Fathers "happy to use the primitive science of their day" and others who saw conflicts and resolved them in favor of their understanding of revelation.[^ow-evo] The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction says the same of the Church's own teaching: "the Orthodox Church has not dogmatized any particular view," and what is proclaimed is that the Triune God created everything and that man alone is made in His image and likeness; it adds that "the Church Fathers also consistently affirm that each species of the animate creation came into existence instantaneously, at the command of God, with its seed within itself."[^osb-intro]

Fr. Seraphim Rose, who is among the incompatibilists on OrthodoxWiki's list, writes that the days cannot be forced into an evolutionary time scale because in Genesis land plants exist "for a whole day... before the sun was created," that the Six Days are God's work and not a natural process, and that nothing obliges one to fix their length: he notes that Ephrem and one or two others state precisely that they were twenty-four hours long while "most Fathers do not say anything at all on the subject."[^rose-ch2] Kuraev, whom OrthodoxWiki lists among the compatibilists, writes that "unprejudiced reading of Scripture makes one notice a certain degree of activity that created matter has," because the text says "Let the earth bring forth grass," and not "God created grass"; he finds one root of Protestant creationism in the assumption that matter is passive.[^kuraev] The OCA's article on creation is bolder in its opening: God created "the first foundations of existence, and then over periods of time (perhaps millions of years, see 2 Peter 3:8) this first foundation of existence—by the power which God had given to it—brought forth the other creatures."[^oca-creation] Bishop Alexander (Mileant) goes furthest in the same direction and sets the six days beside the findings of astronomy, geology, and paleontology, holding that Moses named them symbolically as days, that the seventh day has been lasting for thousands of years, and that "the universe started to exist in exactly the sequence outlined by the prophet Moses."[^mileant-sketches] These are the positions of Orthodox writers; they are not the Church's dogma, and each of them is disputed by the others.

De Young diagnoses a related difficulty in the quarrel between critics and evangelicals. He says that when nineteenth-century critics went looking for scientific errors, evangelicals answered "There aren't any scientific errors!" by taking the same modernist approach and arguing for the opposite conclusion, so that both treat Genesis as making scientific claims. On his reading Genesis 1 is a vision given to Moses on Sinai, and "if God wanted me to know exactly how old the earth is, he could have told us."[^dy-intro] He notes that Genesis 2:4 speaks of the whole of creation as made "in the day," a use of the Hebrew word for day that shows it is not a clock-measure.[^dy-2-4] The Orthodox writers cited here can be sorted into three groups, which is this entry's own arrangement and not OrthodoxWiki's two: the plain-sense incompatibilists, who hold the order of the text against the findings; the concordists, who find the findings in the text; and the visionary reading, which asks for neither.

The Church's own plain statements are modest. The Longer Catechism of Metropolitan Philaret asks why the seventh day is kept holy and answers, "Because God in six days made the world, and on the seventh day rested from the work of creation," and Pomazansky, in his Dogmatic Theology, quotes Augustine's remark on the difficulty of imagining the days and adds that time itself began with the world's creation.[^catechism][^pomazansky] Augustine in the Confessions gives a warning that bears on the whole debate. Interpreters, he says, should not insist that Moses meant exactly what they themselves mean, for "how foolish it is, in so great an abundance of the truest opinions which can be extracted from these words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses particularly meant."[^conf-12]

Numbers, the age of the world, and the history of the earliest chapters

The Greek and Hebrew texts disagree about the lengths of lives and the intervals between generations, and the disagreement reaches the Church's calendar.[^aug-cog-15-10] The Byzantine reckoning of creation in 5509 BC rests on the Septuagint, and Theophilus and Julius Africanus, the earliest Christian writers on the subject, put the age of the world at about 5,530 years at Christ's birth by the same text.[^date-creation] De Young says the Fathers' dating, which by modern dating standards would make the earth about 7500 years old, does not come from adding up the genealogies in either the Greek or the Hebrew: he gets closer to 6500 from them, and says that the Fathers "weren't approaching the text that way."[^dy-intro] The sources cited here do not explain how the Fathers did arrive at their figures, and the entry does not either.

Augustine's treatment of the difference is careful and states both sides. He reports the objection that the Jews corrupted the Hebrew to undermine the Christian Scriptures and rejects it: "far be it from any prudent man to believe either that the Jews... could have tampered with so many and so widely-dispersed manuscripts; or that those renowned seventy individuals had any common purpose to grudge the truth to the nations."[^aug-cog-15-13] He proposes instead that a copyist's error in the first copy from the library of Ptolemy spread the Greek figures, and for that reason holds that where the two disagree because of such an error the original language should be believed, while allowing in the next chapter that where a difference is no copyist's slip the Spirit may have prompted the Seventy to give a varying version. He also rejects, as a plausible but false device, the idea that the early years were short, with ten of them equal to one of ours: Genesis counts the flood from "the second month, the twenty-seventh day of the month," which makes no sense unless the months and years were as long as ours.[^aug-cog-15-14] His reasoning shows how an ancient reader tried to keep the faith of the text and the facts of the manuscripts together, without denying either.

The questions about the early narratives themselves, Eden, the fall, the flood, and the sons of God, have the same shape: the Fathers read them as history and as figure, and modern Orthodox writers differ on the weight to give each. Origen, as shown above, doubts that God "planted trees in paradise" like a husbandman, and takes the garden as figure. Rose, as a counterweight, says that St. John Damascene "specifically states that the allegorical interpretation of Paradise is part of an early heresy."[^rose-ch1] Theophilus argues that the account in Genesis is true because its signs can still be seen: "And do we not see also the judgment of the serpent—how hatefully he crawls on his belly and eats the dust"?[^theoph-23] Pomazansky's Dogmatic Theology writes that "the Christian Church has always understood the serpent, the tempter, to be the devil" and that God's gift of freedom made the fall possible.[^pomazansky-fall] John Behr, from a different corner of Orthodox scholarship, argues that Genesis itself does not call what Adam and Eve did "sin" (the term first appears in Genesis 4:7), does not say they were immortal before it, and describes them as "mortal beings who had the chance of attaining immortality, yet by that very act failed."[^behr-fall] Behr's reading is a challenge to the common picture of "the Fall," and the sources cited here do not set it beside Pomazansky's; a reader should do so for themselves.

On the flood, Augustine sets out a rule for reading such narratives. "[N]o one ought to suppose either that these things were written for no purpose, or that we should study only the historical truth, apart from any allegorical meanings; or, on the contrary, that they are only allegories, and that there were no such facts at all."[^aug-cog-15-27] He then answers the objection that the ark could not hold the animals by pointing to its three stories, and to Origen's suggestion that Moses, "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," meant geometrical cubits.[^aug-cog-15-27] OrthodoxWiki's article on the flood reports that Philo, Josephus, and many Fathers "firmly believed in a global extent of the flood," that the main modern readings are the global and the local, and that Peter himself makes the ark a type of Christ and the Church and the flood a type of baptism (1 Peter 3.20-1 Peter 3.21).[^ow-flood]

Who the "sons of God" were in Genesis 6 is a standing disagreement. Augustine, in the City of God, takes them as "the citizens of the other city which sojourns in this world," who fell by preferring the beauty of the daughters of men to the good they had; he says he "could by no means believe that God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen."[^aug-cog-15-22] OrthodoxWiki's articles on the Book of Enoch and on the flood describe the other reading, in which the "sons of God" are angels who fathered the Nephilim.[^ow-enoch] The entries on The Sons of God, Nephilim, and The Watchers take up that second reading.

On the ancient Near Eastern parallels, finally, the sources cited here divide by what they take the parallels to show. Mileant takes them as illustrations of the truth of Genesis and judges its flood account incomparably superior to Gilgamesh; Rose and the Orthodox Study Bible take them as proof of its difference from the myths; Kuraev grants that the subjects of Moses and the Gilgamesh epic overlap but calls the similarities distant; De Young treats the parallels as a world of shared forms whose meaning Genesis reverses.[^mileant-pent][^rose-ch1][^kuraev][^dy-gen11] None of them quotes a cuneiform text, so the questions of dependence and borrowing, which a critical commentary would take up first, are beyond what these sources can ground.

Methods of Criticism

The methods modern scholars bring to Genesis are the same as those they bring to every book, and Genesis tests them differently, because its first chapters claim to tell what happened before any witness, and its last thirty-nine tell a family history on which a nation's identity rests.

Textual criticism asks what the original wording was in a book whose autograph is lost and whose copies disagree. What it has claimed about Genesis is largely what has been described above: that the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch each preserve readings the others lack; that the Dead Sea Scrolls show a plurality of text-forms before the Masoretes fixed one; that the Greek and Hebrew chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 diverge, as in Augustine's report that Adam's years before Seth are 230 in the Greek and 130 in the Hebrew; and that the Greek has internal variants such as the age of Methuselah.[^masoretic][^lxx-ow][^gen5][^aug-cog-15-10] Orthodox reception is straightforward on the point of principle: the Church reads the Septuagint, and OrthodoxWiki says "the Orthodox Church continues to regard the LXX as its only canonical text of the Old Testament."[^lxx-ow] Origen's Hexapla was an ancient undertaking of the same kind: it set the versions side by side, and OrthodoxWiki says he sought to reveal the true text of the earlier Hebrew Scriptures.[^hexapla] The sources cited here state no Orthodox policy on critical editions, and the Orthodox Study Bible's Old Testament follows Rahlfs's edition, which is itself a critical text.[^lxx-ow]

Source criticism asks what earlier materials stand behind the book and, for the Pentateuch, has meant the documentary hypothesis. It has claimed that the Pentateuch combines strands of different date and temper, one calling God Yahweh and another Elohim, one marked by priestly concerns and another by the style of Deuteronomy, and that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are two accounts of creation from different hands, as De Young reports the argument. No source critic's own text is cited here, so these claims are given as Orthodox writers report them. The Orthodox reception, as shown above, runs from De Young's critique of the method's coherence, through Nathanael's rejection on the Church's authority, to the quiet usage of the vocabulary in Public Orthodoxy, with OrthodoxWiki saying only that "scholars believe" the Law was not written by Moses's own hand and that the Church nonetheless connects it with him.[^dy-torah][^nathanael-kart][^public-orth][^ow-ot]

Form criticism asks about the small units, the stories and sayings, that circulated orally before they were written, and the sources cited here say little about what it has claimed of Genesis in particular. The Orthodox writers accept the existence of oral tradition behind the Pentateuch's history: Mileant says the sacred history was sung beside the desert campfires, and De Young appeals to the study of oral cultures to explain why two tellings of the same story can differ in length and detail and both be true.[^mileant-pent][^dy-2-4] The method's more particular claims, such as that stories like Cain and Abel or Babel were originally explanations of how things came to be, are not found in these sources and are not asserted here.

Redaction criticism takes the book as it stands and asks what its editors did with their material. For Genesis the sources point to the toledot formula, "these are the generations of," which De Young reads as evidence of a single mind that gave the book its architecture, and on which OrthodoxWiki builds its outline of the book.[^dy-intro][^ow-gen] Mileant says the book follows a schema that can be divided into five parts built on the same principle, which gives "evidence for the existence of an editor," and OrthodoxWiki says the book has most likely been edited over time to select what bore on the religious life of the people.[^mileant-sketches][^ow-gen] Mileant and OrthodoxWiki thus allow an editor while holding that the editing served the book's religious purpose, and De Young argues from the same formula for unity of design.

Historical-critical and comparative study sets the book in its ancient setting. The claims it has made about Genesis are the ones taken up under the ancient Near Eastern background above: that its creation and flood stories have Mesopotamian counterparts, that the long lives of its patriarchs have a counterpart in the Sumerian king list, and that its cosmology belongs to the ancient world. Mileant, as already said, takes the parallels as confirmation; Rose and the Orthodox Study Bible take the differences as the point; De Young takes the cosmology of the second day, with its raqia or dome and its waters above, as ancient imagery used in a vision and not a scientific claim.[^mileant-pent][^rose-ch1][^osb-intro][^dy-gen11] Childs's commentary on Exodus, as Bruce describes it, takes full account of what historical-critical exegesis can say and holds that the Church's canon supplies the context in which the text is most fully understood.[^bruce-childs] The Orthodox objection, in Behr's phrase, is to the study of Scripture "dominated by the presuppositions of a historical-critical method," concerned with what a text meant and not what it means.[^behr-12]

Narrative, literary, and canonical approaches read the book in the form the Church received it, and Genesis rewards them. De Young's own reading is of this kind: the six days fall into two sets of three, in which the first three days give order to the formless and the second three fill the spaces made, and the Sabbath structure, the clean and unclean animals, and the call of Abraham each prepare for what the rest of the Torah says.[^dy-gen11][^dy-intro] Bruce's report on Childs's Exodus commentary describes a canonical approach: to ask what a passage means within the context of the Pentateuch and then within the Church's canon, which Childs calls the plenary sense (p. 330, paraphrased).[^bruce-childs] The Orthodox Study Bible's remark that the first three chapters of Genesis are reflected in the last three of Revelation is a canonical observation of exactly this kind.[^osb-intro]

The patristic and Orthodox alternative takes its stand elsewhere, and it is older than the modern methods above. OrthodoxWiki describes the Fathers' practice: Scripture has a literal or historical sense, an allegorical or typological one, a tropological or moral one, and an anagogical or mystical one, and "that a text had an allegorical or typological meaning did not negate the historical sense of the text."[^ow-typology] The New Testament itself reads Genesis in these ways. Paul calls Adam "a foreshadowing of him who was to come" (Romans 5.14); says that "as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive" and calls Christ the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15.22; 1 Corinthians 15.45); and tells the Galatians of Hagar and Sarah, "These things contain an allegory" (Galatians 4.24).[^nt-types] Hebrews reads Melchizedek, "without father, without mother, without genealogy," as "made like the Son of God" (Hebrews 7.3), and says of Abraham's offering of Isaac that "Figuratively speaking, he also did receive him back from the dead" (Hebrews 11.19); Peter reads the ark as "a symbol of baptism" (1 Peter 3.21).[^nt-types]

The Fathers go in the same direction without ceasing to be literal about the history. Chrysostom, preaching on Hebrews, says of Melchizedek that the apostle read it mystically, and that, because the text gives him no beginning or end, "as this man is so, from his genealogy not being given, so is Christ from the very nature of the reality."[^chrys-heb] Cyril of Jerusalem, in his catechesis, tells of Abraham's faith: "having bound his son, and laid him on the wood, he did in purpose offer him, but by the goodness of God in delivering to him a lamb instead of his child, he received his son alive."[^cyril-5] Augustine, against Faustus, finds Christ in the ram caught by the horns and in Joseph, "persecuted and sold by his brethren, and after his troubles obtained honor in Egypt."[^faustus] Irenaeus, who reads the story from Adam onward as the beginning of an economy, writes that Adam was a child in a paradise where the Word of God walked and talked with the man, that "Adam should be summed up in Christ... and Eve summed up in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin's intercessor," and he reads Jacob's ladder as the cross, the tree set up from earth to heaven.[^irenaeus-dem] The Church's christological reading of Genesis follows the apostles, and Chrysostom and Origen each set the "In the beginning" of Genesis beside the "In the beginning" of John.[^chrys-jn4][^orig-jn]

The Orthodox Church in America says that the Bible "lives in the Church," and "It is only within the living Tradition of the Church under the direct inspiration of Christ's Spirit that the proper interpretation of the Bible can be made," although scholars of the Bible "can help men to understand its divine contents and meaning."[^oca-interp] Behr says the same from within the academy, insisting that the meaning of Moses's words lies in how they speak of Christ and is not a meaning to be retrieved by reconstructing the past.[^behr-moses]

The Church lives this reading in her worship. In Great Lent, OrthodoxWiki says, the weekday readings are taken only from the Old Testament, chiefly Genesis, Proverbs, and Isaiah, and the Presanctified Liturgy's readings begin the first week with Genesis 1:24-2:3 on Wednesday and Genesis 2:20-3:20 on Friday, move through Cain, Noah, and Abraham, and end the book on the sixth week's Friday with Genesis 49:33-50:26, so that the Lenten journey runs from creation to Joseph's death.[^lent][^presanctified] The OCA adds that "Each of these books is read nearly in its entirety during the lenten period," though the Presanctified list above is a run of selected passages, and the two accounts are not reconciled in the sources cited here.[^lenten-services] On Holy Saturday, at the vesperal liturgy, the fifteen Old Testament readings begin with Genesis 1:1-13, so that the Church opens her Pascha with the creation of light; OrthodoxWiki's Genesis article adds that at Vespers before the Nativity of the Theotokos the reading is Genesis 28:10-17, Jacob's ladder, "the union of God with men which is realized most fully and perfectly... in Mary the Theotokos."[^holy-saturday][^ow-gen] A Passion Week booklet on FatherAlexander.ORG says that on Great Monday the Church sets before believers the Savior's sufferings in the "Old Testament exemplar of the righteous Joseph, innocently sold and belittled due to the jealousy of brothers, but later restored by God to great glory."[^passion-week] The book that begins "In the beginning" is thus the book the Church reads at the start of her fast, at the threshold of her Pascha, and at the feast of the Theotokos's nativity, where Jacob's ladder is read as the union of God with men in Mary. The Book of John, with its own "In the beginning," answers it at the Paschal liturgy, where its opening verses are the gospel reading,[^pascha-john] and the doctrines of Original Sin, the The Image of God, Recapitulation, and Typology in Scripture each begin where this book begins.

Sources

[^og]: OrthodoxWiki, "Genesis"; The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Genesis; Jerome, Prologus Galeatus. [^gen1]: Genesis 1.1-Genesis 1.2; Genesis 1.26-Genesis 1.27; Genesis 1.31 (Brenton). [^summary]: Genesis 2.7; Genesis 2.8; Genesis 3.21; Genesis 3.24; Genesis 4.8; Genesis 5.24; Genesis 6.2; Genesis 6.9; Genesis 7.11; Genesis 9.13; Genesis 11.1; Genesis 11.9; Genesis 12.1; Genesis 12.3; Genesis 15.6; Genesis 14.18; Genesis 17.5; Genesis 17.10; Genesis 19.24; Genesis 21.3; Genesis 22.2; Genesis 25.34; Genesis 27.36; Genesis 28.12; Genesis 29.25; Genesis 32.25; Genesis 32.29; Genesis 37.3; Genesis 37.28; Genesis 39.20; Genesis 41.40; Genesis 42.2; Genesis 45.5; Genesis 46.3; Genesis 49.1; Genesis 49.10; Genesis 50.20; Genesis 50.26; Exodus 2.2 (Brenton). [^basil-moses]: Basil the Great, Hexaemeron, Homily 1.1. [^oca-auth]: Orthodox Church in America, "Authorship." [^osb-intro]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Genesis. [^luke24]: Luke 24.27; Luke 24.44 (WEB). [^typ-short]: Romans 5.14; Hebrews 7.1-Hebrews 7.3; Hebrews 11.17-Hebrews 11.19 (WEB); Genesis 14.18 (Brenton). [^lent-short]: Orthodox Church in America, "Lenten Services"; Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Saturday"; "Passion Week" booklet, FatherAlexander.ORG. [^pent]: OrthodoxWiki, "Pentateuch." [^ow-gen]: OrthodoxWiki, "Genesis." [^canon-lists]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.35; Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.4; Synod of Laodicea, canon 60 (of doubtful genuineness); Jerome, Prologus Galeatus. [^dy-intro]: Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Introduction to Genesis" (July 17, 2023). [^dy-torah]: Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Introduction to the Torah" (July 10, 2023). [^moses-wrote]: Exodus 17.14; Exodus 24.4 (Brenton); Acts 7.22 (WEB). [^moses-nt]: John 5.46; Luke 24.27 (WEB). [^behr-moses]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 44, on John 5.46. [^theoph-10]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.10. [^victorinus]: On the Creation of the World (attributed to Victorinus). [^tert-herm19]: Tertullian, Against Hermogenes 19. [^jerome-pg]: Jerome, Prologus Galeatus. [^josephus]: Josephus, Against Apion 1.8, as quoted in Wikipedia, "Development of the Old Testament canon." [^mileant-sketches]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), Apologetic Sketches, "The book of Genesis." [^gen14-dan]: Genesis 14.14; Genesis 36.31 (Brenton). [^deut34]: Deuteronomy 34.5 (Brenton). [^ow-ot]: OrthodoxWiki, "Old Testament." [^ow-canon]: OrthodoxWiki, "Biblical canon." [^rose-ch1]: Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, ch. 1, "How to Read Genesis," 98-100; 76. [^nathanael-kart]: Bishop Nathanael (Lvov), The Holy Bible (English trans. T. Pavlova and N. Semyanko), appendix "Concerning the Book of Professor Kartashev." [^dy-2-4]: Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Genesis 2:4-7" (August 7, 2023). [^dss]: OrthodoxWiki, "Dead Sea Scrolls." [^mileant-pent]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, part 2: The Pentateuch. [^dy-gen11]: Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Genesis 1:1-8"; "Genesis 1:9-31, 2:1-3." [^gen2-4]: Genesis 2.4 (Brenton). [^basil-1-6]: Basil, Hexaemeron 1.6. [^nt-christ]: John 5.46; Romans 5.14; John 1.1-John 1.3; Colossians 1.15-Colossians 1.17 (WEB). [^chrys-jn4]: Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John 4.1. [^orig-jn]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 2.4. [^irenaeus-dem]: Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 11-12, 25, 31-34, 45 (Robinson translation). [^behr-tert]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 100 (quoting Tertullian). [^tert-res]: Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 6. [^masoretic]: OrthodoxWiki, "Masoretic text." [^bruce-sam]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 41. [^lxx-ow]: OrthodoxWiki, "Septuagint." [^bruce-lxx]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 44. [^codices]: OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Vaticanus"; "Codex Alexandrinus"; "Codex Sinaiticus." [^gen5]: Genesis 5.3; Genesis 5.5; Genesis 5.25; Genesis 5.27; Genesis 5.28; Genesis 5.32; Genesis 11.10; Genesis 11.26; Genesis 11.32 (Brenton). [^aug-cog-15-10]: Augustine, City of God 15.10. [^theoph-3]: Theophilus, To Autolycus 3.24, 28; Genesis 5; Genesis 7.6 (Brenton). [^date-creation]: OrthodoxWiki, "Date of Creation." [^osb-gen5]: The Orthodox Study Bible, Genesis 5:25-26. [^aug-cog-15-11]: Augustine, City of God 15.11. [^aug-cog-15-13]: Augustine, City of God 15.13. [^lxx-nt]: Acts 7.14 (WEB); Genesis 46.27 (Brenton); Hebrews 11.21 (WEB); Genesis 47.31 (Brenton); Luke 3.36 (WEB); Genesis 11.12-Genesis 11.13 (Brenton); Irenaeus, Demonstration 25. [^bruce-acts7]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 54 and n. 34. [^ow-flood]: OrthodoxWiki, "Great Flood of Noah." [^hexapla]: OrthodoxWiki, "Hexapla"; Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Introduction to Genesis." [^aug-cog-15-14]: Augustine, City of God 15.12, 14. [^bruce-targum]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 44 n. 1; 54 n. 33. [^vulgate]: OrthodoxWiki, "Vulgate." [^celsus-6-50]: Origen, Against Celsus 6.50, 60. [^celsus-5-59]: Origen, Against Celsus 5.59. [^gnostic]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.30.5-9. [^marcion]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.5. [^tert-herm]: Tertullian, Against Hermogenes 19-22. [^nyssa-xxiii]: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 23.1-4. [^faustus]: Augustine, Against Faustus 12.7-8, 14, 25, 28. [^ow-pent]: OrthodoxWiki, "Pentateuch." [^ow-lev]: OrthodoxWiki, "Leviticus." [^childs-well]: Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction, 39. [^bruce-childs]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 330. [^public-orth]: Public Orthodoxy, "Marriage, Family, and Scripture" (2016), on Genesis 2.18. [^nyssa-xvi]: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 16.7-9. [^basil-2-8]: Basil, Hexaemeron 2.8. [^basil-2-6]: Basil, Hexaemeron 2.6. [^toledot]: Genesis 2.4; Genesis 5.1; Genesis 6.9; Genesis 10.1; Genesis 11.10; Genesis 11.27; Genesis 25.12; Genesis 25.19; Genesis 36.1; Genesis 37.2 (Brenton). [^pascha-john]: Orthodox Church in America, "Easter Sunday, The Holy Pascha." [^basil-9-1]: Basil, Hexaemeron 9.1. [^basil-3-9]: Basil, Hexaemeron 3.9. [^basil-1-5]: Basil, Hexaemeron 1.5-6. [^origen-dp]: Origen, On First Principles, bk. 4. [^theoph-15]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.15. [^aug-cog-11-6]: Augustine, City of God 11.6-7. [^rose-ch2]: Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, ch. 2, 106-11. [^kuraev]: Andrey Kuraev, "Orthodoxy and Creationism." [^ephrem]: Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis. [^ow-evo]: OrthodoxWiki, "Evolution." [^oca-creation]: Orthodox Church in America, "Creation." [^catechism]: Philaret of Moscow, The Longer Catechism, Q. 536. [^pomazansky]: Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, "The manner of the world's creation." [^conf-12]: Augustine, Confessions 12.25. [^theoph-23]: Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.23. [^pomazansky-fall]: Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, "Man's fall into sin." [^behr-fall]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 71-74. [^aug-cog-15-27]: Augustine, City of God 15.27. [^aug-cog-15-22]: Augustine, City of God 15.22-23. [^ow-enoch]: OrthodoxWiki, "Book of Enoch"; "Great Flood of Noah." [^behr-12]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 12-13. [^ow-typology]: OrthodoxWiki, "Typology." [^nt-types]: Romans 5.14; 1 Corinthians 15.22; 1 Corinthians 15.45; 1 Corinthians 15.47; Galatians 4.22; Galatians 4.24; Hebrews 7.3; Hebrews 11.19; 1 Peter 3.20; 1 Peter 3.21 (WEB). [^chrys-heb]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews 12.2-3. [^cyril-5]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 5.5. [^oca-interp]: Orthodox Church in America, "Interpretation." [^lent]: OrthodoxWiki, "Great Lent." [^presanctified]: OrthodoxWiki, "Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts." [^lenten-services]: Orthodox Church in America, "Lenten Services." [^holy-saturday]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Saturday"; "Passion Week" booklet, FatherAlexander.ORG. [^passion-week]: "Passion Week" booklet, FatherAlexander.ORG.