Last Updated: 3/15/2026
“God made all of humanity, male and female, as his royal family, his image. As his image, every person has the value and dignity of God himself.”
— Sandra L. Richter, The Epic of Eden
A Jewish Origin Story
Genesis is a Jewish origin story, and more. The Ancient Near East, called the birthplace of civilization, was surrounded by nations with their origin stories, mythologies, and philosophies tied to them.
Scripture engages fully in the philosophical and psychological debates of its ancient neighbors through narrative and cosmology, offering a prototype of creation, humanity, and blessing.
Genesis has a ritual architecture: sevenfold structures, repetitions in sevens and threes that teach a perceiving reader how the world holds together.
Ancient Near East Mythologies
Genesis did not emerge in a vacuum; it was birthed in the grit and confusion of the Ancient Near East (ANE), a world dominated by the empires of Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria. Israel was always under the shadow of other empires that also had sacred texts and traditions.
The major themes and movements of these other texts have common themes, as well as structures. For example, the Enuma Elish was structured across seven tablets. The Heliopolitan myth (as reconstructed by scholars) had seven major movements. And Genesis 1 is seven days of creation.
- Enuma Elish (c. 1100 BC, Babylonian): Marduk defeats Tiamat, using her body to create the world.
- Sumerian Flood Story (c. 2000 BC, Sumerian): Ziusudra survives a flood sent by gods like Enlil and Anu.
- Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC, Mesopotamian): Gods like Anu, Enlil, and Ea create humanity; creation themes throughout.
- Heliopolitan Cosmogony (c. 2000 BC, Egyptian): Atum creates the world from the chaotic waters of Nun.
- Pyramid Texts (c. 2400–2300 BC, Egyptian): Ra creates the world, establishing cosmic order.
The Epic of Eden, by Sandra Richter, and many others, note that these texts were often used in local ritual and sanctifying a new temple. Temple texts and religious mythologies explained how the gods reigned on Earth and would embody their temples. Genesis’ structure and themes were deliberately parallel.
And the meaning? Radically and subversively different.
“The literary purpose of Genesis 1 is not to describe the material origins of the world, but rather its functional origins… bringing order out of non-functional chaos.”
— John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One
Genesis 1-2: A Peaceful and Whole Creation
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.“
— Genesis 1:1-2
Genesis begins with a peaceful seven-day account of creation, emphasizing divine order. From verse on to Genesis 2:3 is one long Hebrew poem that uses structure and cadence, especially patterns to weave a narrative together. Where patterns break or overlap, there’s often a point being made.
Repeatedly, God calls His creation good and blesses it.
The biblical text challenges older myths: Unlike the Babylonian Enuma Elish, where gods battle the primeval sea-goddess Tiamat, Genesis has one sovereign God speak order into being. Notably, the Hebrew term tehom (“the deep”) in Gen 1:2 simply means the primeval waters, not a divine foe. In short, creation is presented as a purposeful, sacred act by Yahweh.
As an example of breaking a pattern, God does not name the Sun and Moon, which was completely contrary to every other ancient cosmology. Instead of humanity being created to serve them, they serve at humanity’s benefit in this narrative.
Cassuto and others do an excellent job of breaking down the patterns in Genesis. Marty Solomon is a certifiable Jewish Bible nerd with excellent resources and an old ministry friend who first introduced me to the Jewish world.
“This numerical symmetry is, as it were, the golden thread that binds together all the parts of the section and serves as a convincing proof of its unity…”
— Umberto Cassuto, From Adam to Noah
So, here are just a few examples:
- The first verse has 7 words w/ 3 nouns.
- “God” appears 5X7 times
- “Earth” appears 3×7 times
- “Heavens” appears 3×7 times
- Across the six days of creation, there are exactly 10 divine pronouncements (“Let there be…“). These are often broken into a 7/3 pattern: 7 commands direct the creation of the earthly realm, and 3 direct the heavenly/celestial realm.
- On the 7th Day of Creation, it says “the seventh day,” three times, describes God’s work three times, and states it was done three times.
The first 3 days, God creates space, while the next 3 days God fills those spaces with life (and blessing) accordingly. God’s Creation is completed with Rest on the seventh day, which doesn’t end (c.f. Hebrews 4:1).
“When we ‘rest’ on the Sabbath, we recognize him as the author of order and the one who brings rest (stability) to our lives and world. We take our hands off of the controls of our lives and acknowledge him as the one who is in control”.
— John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One
| Movement: Forming (The Spheres) | Movement: Filling (The Inhabitants) |
| Day 1: Light and Darkness (Time) | Day 4: Sun, Moon, and Stars (Markers of Time) |
| Day 2: Waters and Sky (Weather/Space) | Day 5: Fish and Birds (Inhabitants of Water/Sky) |
| Day 3: Dry Land and Vegetation (Food/Place) | Day 6: Animals and Humanity (Inhabitants of Land) |
| The Goal: Creating Order from Chaos | The Culmination: Establishing Blessing and Partnership |
According to scholars like Walton (The Lost World of Genesis One), Genesis 1 portrays God ordering the cosmos as His cosmic temple, not detailing physical processes. Cassuto excellently breaks down the structure of Genesis’s deliberate seven-fold pattern, a symbol of perfection, with six days of creation and a seventh day of divine rest. Days 1–6 inaugurate the world’s functions (light, sky, land, etc.), and day 7 is God’s “rest,” symbolizing His residence in His temple, creation.
As a culmination of God’s created order, He decides to create a being in His image to partner with Him in ruling over this Creation: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
In every other empire and cosmology of the Ancient Near East, humanity was an afterthought, or worse. The gods created humans as labor-saving devices to serve them, providing the food and labor necessary for the gods to exist in comfort. Within these systems, the “image of god” was a status reserved only for the King or a temple statue. Furthermore, women were often portrayed as a secondary afterthought, relegated to a subservient and solely supportive role to men. Genesis 1:27 insists on a simultaneous creation of male and female in the “Image,” which was a radical departure from the dualistic “support-only” status of the time.
The Creation story ends, before sin infamously enters the narrative, with this anthropologically loaded statement:
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.“
— Genesis 2:24-25
Genesis 3: The Fall & Birth of Shadows
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.“
— Genesis 3:1
Serpents had a long history in the Near East in mythology. In Egypt, Apep was a great serpent that coiled around the Tree of Life (an acacia tree). Every night, Ra would set and have t battle with Apep to rise the next morning. Egypt had temples for Apep worship where practitioners would crush serpents and curse Apep to help Ra.
Gilgamesh famously had a serpent steal the fruit from the Tree of Life from him. Ancient Jews would have also been familiar with these narratives and told a different story than those.
When Genesis introduces the serpent, it doesn’t just borrow an Ancient Near Eastern motif; it subverts it to explain the fracturing of the human soul. The temptation in the garden is a descent into ego and shadow. Rather than partnering with the divine order, humanity grasps for autonomy. The result is immediate alienation from God, each other, and Creation.
The consequences are laid out not as vindictive punishments, but as the natural outcomes of this fracture. Literally, God doesn’t curse much—He describes parts and fall out. God declares to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” To the woman, He outlines the multiplied pain of childbirth and the incoming reality of power struggles and domination within relationships: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
The peaceful harmony of Genesis 1 and 2 had been shattered.
Genesis 4: The Escalation of Sin and the Power of Choice
This narrative of ego and shadow bleeds directly into the next generation. In the story of Cain and Abel, we see the human condition laid bare. When Cain grows bitter over his rejected offering, God approaches him not with immediate condemnation, but with a psychological warning: “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it.”
The curse of chapter 3 was not about male and female: far from it. In chapter 4, it’s about brother and brother. “Sin” and “death” make their appearances after chapter 3, when Cain kills his brother. James 1:14-15 described this same process with, “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”
This moment also reveals that human destiny isn’t merely trapped in a binary of nature versus nurture. Rather, there is a conscious being standing in the middle of those forces that act as a determinative factor. Cain has agency. He has the capacity to rule over the shadow, but he chooses not to. Once that choice is made, descent accelerates.
By the time we reach Cain’s descendant Lamech, the violence has mutated exponentially: if Cain’s revenge was sevenfold, Lamech boasts that his is seventy-sevenfold1.
Genesis 5-8: De-Creation & The “Sons of God”
As humanity multiplies, so does its corruption. Genesis 6 2 introduces a bizarre and widely misunderstood narrative about the Nephilim and the “sons of God” who saw that the daughters of man were attractive and took them as wives. To an ancient reader, this wasn’t just a spooky story about angels; “Sons of God” was a common term used to describe the Divine Right of Kings. It was how ancient tyrants used mythology and legend to justify their oppressive leadership and harems: a political playbook that still kind of exists today. Genesis 6 makes it clear it’s talking about the same “mighty men who were of old, the men of renown,” commonly the main heroes in other narratives3.
Humanity had become so divided, so consumed by power and violence, that God observes that the intention of human hearts “was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Genesis says this reality “grieved [God] to his heart” (v. 6). Because humanity had reduced itself while elevating itself, God issues a reset.
The Flood was not just an act of destruction but a necessary act of de-creation, returning the earth to the watery chaos of Genesis 1:2. The Created cosmology is collapsed in, and then separated again as Creation picks up from the aftermath, which serves as an allegorical illustration of the rite of baptism.
From the waters emerges Noah, whose name means “He Rests,” and the Ark, offering a temporary glimpse of the Sabbath peace God intended.
Noah to Babel: The Critique of Empire
Post-flood humanity doesn’t fare much better. After the rainbow and God’s re-blessing of Creation, Noah plants a garden, a vineyard specifically, that immediately turns into a fruit of temptation. One of his sons, Ham, does something questionable while he’s drunk.4 When Noah sobers up and realizes, he utters the first curse, not towards Ham but Ham’s son, Canaan. In the same breath, Noah also counter-blesses his other two sons.5
Migrating to the plain of Shinar, the people declare, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” This is the quintessential birth of empires.
Genesis is offering a direct polemic against Babylon. The biblical Tower of Babel directly mirrors structures like the Etemenanki, the great Ziggurat of Babylon. Kings like Nebuchadnezzar II boasted of raising their temples to heaven using baked bricks and bitumen. Historically, this massive ziggurat underwent a complex history of construction, destruction, and reconstruction. It was destroyed by Sennacherib in 689 BC, and centuries later, Alexander the Great ordered its remains demolished to attempt a rebuild, though his death permanently halted the project.
In the biblical narrative, God subverts this monument to human ego not with a lightning bolt, but with confusion. He confuses their language and disperses them over the face of the earth. Babel stands as a critique of Cain’s ego and human empire. The harder humanity tries to violently centralize its own power and “make a name,” the more fragmented and scattered it becomes.
The Call to Adventure: A Cyclical Family Narrative
With the empires of men scattered, God shifts strategy. He turns from grand, cosmic strokes of nations and ziggurats and speaks to one obscure man. Genesis provides an early narrative clue that Abram was cut from a different stock in that his family was the only one moving West, against the flow of the civilization Cain had birthed.
From this family, God calls Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you… I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” This is the call to adventure. Where Babel tried to forcefully make a name for itself, God promises to give Abram a great name for the sake of blessing all families of the earth. God renames him Abraham, and his wife Sarai becomes Sarah, with the promise that she shall become nations.
Genesis 12-36: Ancestral Cycles — Blessing, Shadow, & Choice
“God did not canonize Israel’s culture. Rather, he simply used that culture as a vehicle through which to communicate the eternal truth of his character…”
— Sandra Richter, The Epic of Eden
The remainder of Genesis (Chapters 12–50) is not a story of perfect “heroes” of the faith, but a psychological and theological exploration of a family wrestling with the same ego and shadow that plagued Cain and the builders of Babel.
This section follows a rhythmic, cyclical pattern. Each generation (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph) faces a “Call to Adventure” that requires them to choose between the safety of the known (Empire) and the vulnerability of the Promise (Blessing).
- Abraham & Sarah (Gen 12-25): Where Babel tried to forcefully “make a name,” God promises to give Abraham a name. This isn’t just about a private blessing; the text explicitly states the purpose is that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” However, the shadow remains: Abraham repeatedly lies about Sarah to protect himself from foreign kings, showing that even those “called” struggle with the fear-based instincts of the ego.
- Isaac & Ishmael (Gen 21-25): Isaac is unusally quite, retracing his father’s footsteps. Meanwhile, God continues to subvert the “Chosen One” myth. While the blessing continues through Isaac, God also hears and blesses Ishmael. Scripture insists that the “God who sees” is not restricted to our human categories of exclusion.
- Jacob / Israel (Gen 25-36): Jacob is the quintessential trickster wrestling between his nature (the “Heel-grabber” or deceiver) and his calling. His story includes an angelic vision and a literal wrestling match with a divine figure at two separate locations, one on his departure (Bethel) and another on his return (Peniel). He leaves the encounter with a limp and a new name: Israel, meaning “one who wrestles with God.” This name becomes the identity of an entire people, a people defined not by their perfection, but by their calling and struggle.
Genesis 37-50: Joseph — The Resolution of Evil & Good
The final movement of Genesis focuses on Joseph, the favorite son sold into slavery by his brothers. Themes of Genesis reach their resolution as Joseph’s journey takes him from the “pit” of family betrayal to the second in power of the Egyptian empire, and then his past comes to him. Decades after being sold as a slave, Joseph’s betrayers come to him for aid, and they know not who he is.
When Joseph finally confronts his brothers, he does not respond with Lamech’s seventy-sevenfold vengeance. Instead, he demonstrates the ultimate integration of the human experience. He utters the theological climax of the book:
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
— Genesis 50:20
Forgiveness resolves the entire arc that began when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and put themselves in God’s position. Genesis recognizes the human condition (ego, shadow, violence) while asserting a Higher Purpose that utilizes even the wreckage of human choice to bring about life and preservation.
Forgiveness is how humanity gets back to Eden.
Exodus’s Setup: From Refuge to Empire
Genesis concludes with a “Happy Ending” that is intentionally fragile. The family of Israel is safe, fed, and reunited, but they are in Egypt. The book ends not in the Promised Land, but in a foreign land that welcomed them as guests.
Genesis leaves off with a lingering tension. The same Egypt that acted as a place of “refuge” for Joseph and his family is the budding superpower of the Ancient Near East. As Genesis 50 closes, we see a people who have “multiplied and grown exceedingly strong,” setting the stage for the inevitable clash of the next book, Exodus.
Genesis isn’t the end of the Story, but it is the beginning of a Good one. It identifies the human condition or our propensity to scapegoat, the strategy (relational blessing), and the destination (a restored Humanity and Creation).
As Genesis’s curtain closes, the family of Israel was still in the kingdoms of the world, waiting for the moment they would have to wrestle with the next great Empire.
“Evil is anything that departs from God’s good intentions in creation, breaks our relationship with God and our neighbor, or tries to take what does not belong to it.”
Resources:
- The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament by Sandra L. Richter.
- The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate by John H. Walton.
- A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One: From Adam to Noah by Umberto Cassuto.
- A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part Two: From Noah to Abraham by Umberto Cassuto.
*Footnotes (& Leftovers)
- In Matthew 18:21-22, Jesus’s response to Peter is a deliberate linguistic echo of Lamech’s claim to seventy-sevenfold revenge. By using this specific number, Jesus identifies the deep-seated human propensity for escalation and commands an equally exponential escalation of forgiveness as the way to integrate and resolve the fracture. ↩︎
- There are a couple of genealogies (ch. 5 & 10) that this survey leaves out, but serve both narratively and as an underlying chiastic structure. Each tells the “generations,” which is from the same root as genesis, and mirrors the spread of shadows and curses that proliferate through families and civilization. ↩︎
- Gilgamesh begins his character arc as a king who is 2/3 god and 1/3 man, yet his power is unchecked; he famously claims the right to sleep with brides before their husbands. In response to the people’s cries, the gods send Enkidu, a being equal to him, to challenge his arrogance. Their epic wrestling match becomes the catalyst for an unlikely friendship and the beginning of Gilgamesh’s transformation. Following Enkidu’s death, his journey leads him to a Noah-like figure, the sole survivor of a global deluge, from whom he finally learns the limits of human power and what it truly means to be a wise and just king. ↩︎
- What Ham literally did was see’ his father’s nakedness and tell his brothers. However, his brothers’ extreme reaction, walking backward to cover Noah, suggests a deeper transgression. A key linguistic clue is found in Leviticus 18:7–16 and 20:11–21, where ‘uncovering the nakedness’ of a relative is a specific legal euphemism for sexual boundary-crossing or a direct assault on the father’s dignity and authority. ↩︎
- This is alluded to by James when he talks about how blessing and cursing shouldn’t come from the same mouth. For a further read, check out the guest piece, The Impossible Task of Taming Our Tongues, on Progressive Christianity, and its sequel here. A longer draft of the one on Progressive Christianity can be read here. ↩︎
More Musings On Genesis
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A Jewish Origin Story (Genesis 1-2:3)
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Good Fruit & Fresh Springs: Unraveling the Chiastic Structure & Old Testament Allusions of James 3:9-12
In a guest post on Progressive Christianity covering the first part of James 3:1-8, we looked at some Noahic allusions, illustrating our personal communication’s constructive and destructive nature. All of…
