Lecture 6: Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, and the Covenant with Noah

The lecture, section by section

1. Two names, one orientation

   The Hebrews titled the Torah's sections by their opening words, so this first part is simply In the Beginning; the Greek translators called it Genesis, origin, generation, a word tied to the book's own refrain, these are the generations. Both names orient the reader the same way: here are the beginnings, of creation, of man, of marriage, of sin, of judgment, and of Israel, the foundation for everything that follows.

2. The longest reach in Scripture

   Genesis covers the longest chronological stretch of any part of the Bible, from creation to the death of Joseph around 1800 BC. When creation happened is not stated: Ussher's date of 4004 BC assumed closed genealogies, but Essex takes the genealogy of Genesis 11 to allow openness, ancestry rather than strict father-to-son descent, and most who hold a recent creation place it somewhere between about six and ten thousand BC. The pacing tells its own story: the first eleven chapters cross the vast bulk of that history at speed, then the narrative slows, spending thirty-nine chapters on roughly three hundred fifty years from Abraham, born in 2166 BC, onward.

3. How Genesis has been read

   Across two thousand years, Christians have preached and written more on Genesis than on the other four sections of the Torah combined, and within Genesis they have concentrated on chapters 1 through 11; the seminary's own president has preached those chapters verse by verse but never the rest of the book that way. Jewish interpretation runs the other way, concentrating on chapters 12 through 50, the fathers of Israel, and prizing Leviticus above every other part of the Torah. Essex's explanation is disarming: Genesis 1 through 11 is our ancestral history, Adam, Noah, and the table of nations, while Abraham as father of Israel gets less of our attention than Abraham as father of faith.

4. The reader and Jacob

   Essex names what most readers feel: the first twenty-five chapters of Genesis read more easily than the last twenty-five, because Jacob exasperates us, a man with a heart for God who deceives again and again, until the Lord turns the tables and the deceiver is deceived. Only in the final chapters does the guile give way and the patriarch stand as a man of settled faith.

5. More about the flood than creation

   A structural observation worth pondering: Moses tells us more about the flood than about creation. The longest of the generations sections in Genesis 1 through 11 belongs to Noah, running from chapter 6 verse 9 to chapter 9 verse 29. And at its head stands a first in Scripture: God says to Noah, I will establish my covenant with you. Everything else in the flood narrative unfolds under that word.

6. Noah's burnt offerings, read through Leviticus

   When the flood ends, Noah builds an altar and offers burnt offerings of every clean animal and bird. The Torah has not yet explained a burnt offering, but its first audience had grown up with Leviticus 1: the offering of one who confesses himself a sinner, a substitute consumed whole in his place, and with it a wholehearted dedication of the forgiven sinner to the Lord. Israel on the plains of Moab would have heard all of that in one clause, and heard Leviticus again in the next: the LORD smelled the soothing aroma.

7. Never again: the promise of regularity

   God's response is a promise to himself: never again to curse the ground on account of man, even though the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth, and never again to destroy every living thing as he had done. No curse will be added to Genesis 3; instead the existing curse is softened by blessing: while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. The ground still costs man sweat, but it is no longer his enemy: rain and sun come in season, sowing and reaping keep their rhythm, and every turn of the year is the Noahic covenant holding.

8. Judgment restrained by promise

   In Genesis 9 God seals it: never again shall a flood destroy all flesh. He does not say fire, and future judgment will come, but it will never again be as total as the flood that left eight people alive, because God has bound himself, ultimately through the covenant with Abraham still to come, to save some out of every family of the earth. Even the day of the Lord the world awaits will be judgment tinged with blessing.

9. The commands of the covenant

   The Noahic covenant is not command-free. God blesses Noah and his sons with the very words spoken to Adam, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, now in covenant form, and where Adam was told to subdue and rule, God himself now puts the fear of man on every creature: obey by multiplying and filling, and the rule follows. Every moving thing becomes food, a breadth Israel would later lose under its clean-and-unclean restrictions, with one requirement for all nations: no flesh with its lifeblood. And human life is fenced by the highest sanction, whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. Yet none of the commands conditions God's oath: his promise of Genesis 8 stands whatever mankind does, sealed by the rainbow.

10. Blessing means abundance

    The repeated words, fruitful, multiply, fill, populate abundantly, define what blessing is in God's economy: increase. Essex draws the lesson out to the present: the earth's capacity to support mankind is not meager but bountiful, and famine is not evidence that God's provision has run out; it is the fruit of man's rebellion against the God who gives. The cursed ground, under covenant, is still astonishingly generous.

11. A covenant with every living creature

    The covenant is made not with Noah only but with his seed and with every living creature, which is why Essex can tell the class, with a smile, that their dogs and cats stand inside it, and that on the evidence of Romans 8, where all creation groans awaiting the revealing of the sons of God, the animals wait for the blessed earth more patiently than we do. Behind the humor is the point: God has pledged himself by oath to the well-being of the world he made.

12. Scattered, and then chosen

    Mankind's response after the flood repeats its response before it, and Genesis 11 will echo Genesis 6. But God does not send another flood; he scatters the nations, accomplishing by judgment the filling of the earth they refused, and then, out of the scattered families of the earth, he chooses one man and enters into covenant with him. The covenant with Abraham is where the course turns next.

1. Noah's first act on the renewed earth was a burnt offering: confession and total dedication. What would it look like for gratitude after deliverance to take that shape in your own life?

2. Every summer and winter, every day and night, is the Noahic covenant holding. How does it change your view of ordinary weather and harvests to read them as covenant faithfulness?

3. God's oath stands whatever mankind does, yet the covenant still carries commands. How do unconditional promise and real obligation sit together, in Noah's covenant and in the Christian life?