JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology.

Today’s podcast relates to the way Moses broke Genesis into smaller text blocks. These text blocks or chunks demonstrate Moses had a definite strategy in putting the book together. He wanted the readers to see something specific. Unfortunately, for reasons we make clear in the podcast, it can be easy to miss the clear signals Moses embeds in the text. We’ve included three PDFs from Jason DeRouchie in our show notes that will provide additional help as you listen and as you study.

TK: Welcome to GearTalk. Tom and Jason here. Today we are talking about Genesis and a way Moses put things together in this book.

So, Jason, kind of introduce the topic and you got a funny way, at least it will sound funny, a funny word to describe it, so kind of introduce what we’re talking about.

JD: Well, we are looking at this book that is dominated by genealogies, dominated by generations, multiple generations, standing from creation and moving us all the way to the one whose name is Israel, Jacob and his giving producing 12 sons and they become Israel and it’s Israel the nation that dominates the entire Old Testament. But we don’t start the Bible with the story of Israel. We start the Bible with a vision for humanity within God’s world and Genesis therefore really places Israel, who’s the first recipients of this Bible, places Israel within the context of their global mission. And we want to consider today how the structure of Genesis really enhances our hope for the coming Messiah through Israel.

All to this book is what I’ve often termed a blessing commission in Genesis 1:28. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over all the earthly creatures.” So we see this movement of command, be fruitful, man and woman, male and female created in the image of God, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, take the image of our all-glorious then caused God, take his image and fill the earth with it so that his glory may be displayed everywhere. That’s the original vision: that those made in his image would fill the earth, but not only fill it that they would subdue, that they would have dominion.

So there’s this vision of multiplication for God’s glory in a way that would represent his rule on the earth. Originally, Yahweh met with man in the garden, yet God’s responsibility was not simply to care for the garden, but to guard the ground from which Adam had been taken. And the ground is bigger. The ground is all that is outside of the garden where humanity ultimately would reside. And so the vision is that as they would work the ground, that the garden would be expanding. And therefore the sacred space of God would grow under God’s care, under God’s guidance.

Now, all those who are reading this story are living outside the garden. Though God commanded the first man and woman, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth,” by the time those words are inscripturated, written down for us in Scripture, everyone reading it as Scripture from the pen of Moses is outside the garden, underneath the curse, underneath the problem that needs a solution, the challenge that needs an answer, the true curse that needs to be overcome by a Savior, deliverer. And it’s therefore significant that God in this first command to humans, couches this command as a blessing. That’s why I call it a blessing commission, because those who are receiving this story as Scripture are living under curse, they realize that they have not done well at displaying God’s image in the world. They haven’t reflected and resembled and represented him like they should, because they’ve been influenced and infected by the curse. And yet from the beginning, it was God blessed them and God said, that is, this commission is the blessing. God didn’t do two things. The Hebrew grammar suggests he did one thing. Over and over again throughout the Old Testament, when God wants to say something, the verb to speak or to say has to be present in the Hebrew grammar. So if you want to clarify what type of saying it is, you have to add an additional verb. So he laughed and said, that is the saying is an expression of his joy. He cried and said, he declared and said, he blessed and said. In all these constructions, what we’re not seeing is two things, but one thing, one thing that God does, he blessed and said be fruitful. That is the commission is a blessing. And what it tells people is that for them to fill the earth as God intends, representing him well, it’s going to take his blessing on their lives. So the whole story is set up when man gets kicked out of the garden to show the need for God’s blessing. And then after the need is created, the rest of the story is going to clarify the hope for that blessing and both God reaffirming his blessing commission and then God declaring how it is that he’s going to allow his blessing to reach the world. This is the book of Genesis.

Now I said, it’s dominated by generations, by genealogies. And that stems out of the original hope, given in Genesis 3:15, following the fall into sin, where God promises two lines of descent. He tells the serpent, “Cursed are you more than any other beast of the field.” And then he unpacks the declaration, “I will put enmity between you, serpent, and the woman. So there’s going to be friction. There’s going to be tension and between your offspring and her offspring.” So the devil has seed and the woman is going to have seed. And this term seed, rendered offspring in my ESV, is always grammatically singular. It’s like our English word seed. We don’t say he scattered seeds plural. We say he scattered seed or it’s similar to our word for deer. We can see one deer or we can see many deer. It’s not that we see deer. So whether singular or plural, this term seed is always grammatically singular. And so we have to look into the context to discern whether the term itself is representing a singular or a plural entity. And one of the ways we do that is looking at verb forms: is that a singular or a plural verb that accompanies the noun? Or we look at pronouns.

And in this context, we have a pronoun that is found within the passage. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, serpent, the serpent and the woman, between your offspring and her. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.” So we’re talking with respect to the woman’s offspring. We’re talking about a male individual, a singular person who will apparently go head to head with the serpent. Or we could say head to foot because he will stand on the head of this serpent. And the serpent is beastly. He’s called a beast of the field. And he is a serpent. So and he’s portrayed as a deadly figure who wants the death of God’s son, humanity. And so we can envision him as a poisonous serpent. And because that’s the type of serpent he is, one that brings death. And so he strikes this individual offspring’s heel. And from that heel, the individual offspring of the woman strikes his head. So we’re assuming a death blow is brought to the serpent through injury of some nature to this individual offspring of the woman.

But we still haven’t identified the offspring of the serpent. And that’s where the genealogies in the book play a role. The generation statements and many have noted that this book has 10 headings over sections that are listed as in my ESV: “These are the generations of” and that term rendered generations is derived from the causative verb in Hebrew to produce. So the idea is these are the fruits. This is the products of what came from some individual, usually. There’s only the first of these headings in Genesis 2:4 where we have a non-person mentioned. “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth.” And so that is these are the products that came from the heavens and the earth. And we read the story of God creating the world, bringing the animals to Adam and God giving the man Eve, God commissioning the man to serve the ground to guard the ground and then giving him a helper that is fit for him, suitable for him. And after this story of the fall and humanity is being kicked out of the garden, we then read in chapter 5, verse 1, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.”

And it’s as if it’s a beginning. This is the book. This is the scroll of the generations of Adam and what follows immediately is a genealogy that moves us from Adam all the way to Noah in linear fashion, giving us only one descendant in every generation, 10 generations moving us from Adam all the way to Lamech, Noah’s father, and Lamech has three sons. Sorry, it moves us all the way through Lamech to Noah, who has three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And so this particular heading, “These are the generations of,” leads us into a linear genealogy. But that’s not how all of the generations headings take us. Some of them introduce not genealogies, but stories. And so, for example, we get in chapter 6, verse 9, “These are the generations of Noah.” And rather than it being followed by a genealogy, it’s followed by a story, a story of what came forth in the days of Noah. He has three sons and the flood story comes forth.

Now, as I said, there’s 10 of these headings, these generations headings in Hebrew. The term is toledot. And as I said, that’s a noun that’s derived from the causative verb to produce, to give birth to. And so 10 of these headings and what we’re wanting to do today, Tom, is to consider how the promise of offspring, the hope for this individual descendant is carried out in this book that is dominated by a vision to fill the earth as representatives of the living God. Those who would reflect him, resemble him, revere him in the world as those made in his image. This book is dominated by these generation statements. And there are, as we’re going to see, not only 10 of them, but of the 10, seven of them are positive, three of them are negative. That is, the story that flows out of three of the headings is a story of rebellion. Whereas the story that flows out of seven of the headings is a story of hope. And what we end up seeing is that some of these generations headings introduce what appear to be the offspring of the serpent. Whereas some of the other generations headings, indeed, seven of them introduce those that are hoping in the offspring of the woman.

Now, not only do we have 10, that’s as far as most—like if you go into a study Bible, what they’ll do is they’ll often list in the introduction the 10 headings. And they come in 2:4, 5:1, 6:9, 10:1, 11:10, 11:27, 25:12, 25:19, 36:1, and 37:2. Now, just knowing there’s 10 headings, most people say this appears to be the way Moses was structuring this book. And I agree that he’s using these headings in this way. But in this podcast, biblical theology, what we’re wanting to consider is how Moses actually does more than that than just give us 10 headings and fit them within a book dominated by this blessing commission of being fruitful and subduing the earth and fitting it in a book that is driven by two lines of descent, the offspring of the serpent and those hoping in the offspring of the woman.

It’s not only that, of these 10 generations formulas, these 10 headings, what’s often missed by commentators is that five of them begin with the Hebrew connector wow or vav and that connector is usually rendered “and.” Five of the headings start with our English conjunction and, and five of them do not. And what that means is that five of these units intentionally link to the unit that precedes, and what that does is it creates then five independent units within the book rather than just 10 that there’s groupings of these generations formulas that we are to read together. And Moses intentionally links some of them in order to communicate his message. Biblical theology grows out of the actual structures of the text and the message of Genesis is bound up not simply in the blessing commission and the gospel promise of Genesis 3:15 and in 10 generations statements, but in how Moses structures these 10 generations headings to create groupings of thought that then communicate the message of Genesis.

So Tom, that was a big introduction, but that’s what we’re wanting to do today is to consider how all these parts, focusing on the fruit of the womb on offspring and the hope for the ultimate offspring, two lines of descent, a remnant line bound up in a positive story, a rebel line that is antagonistic to that story, and how all of that is fitting together within the 10 generations headings of the book of Genesis to communicate Moses’s message.

TK: All right, so backing up, just your reading this, your preaching from Genesis, that introduction we got right there is really helpful and framing why this is important. So Moses didn’t write chapters like we encounter the book. All of us do—we are reading Genesis chapter one, Genesis chapter two, Genesis chapter three, and so on, and we tend to think of the book that way almost as if we were writing a book, what did you do today? I wrote chapter one, right? I’m hoping to finish through chapter four tomorrow. And your point, correct me if I’m saying this in a way: Well, first of all, one of your points you didn’t say it, but it’s certainly implied here is that Moses wasn’t writing chapters like that, correct?

JD: Right. He wasn’t writing chapters. He certainly wasn’t writing the chapter divisions that we have in our English Bibles, 50 chapters in this book. We’ll normally even preach that way. Today I’m preaching Genesis 22, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m thankful we have them because we don’t have to do what Jesus did when—in the exact phrasing, but he’s talking to the people and he’s talking about the episode of the burning bush, for instance—but he can’t just take them right to the exact spot, right, and say “Go, go to Exodus chapter two,” for instance.

Are you saying that Moses is based on Genesis 1:26 to 28 in this blessing formula, “fill the earth, take dominion,” that Moses is organizing Genesis, his first book he wrote in his five-book book? So the Pentateuch that he’s dividing it into 10 chunks then, is that—I think in one of your books, you talk about text blocks.

Sure. Are we talking about he—if you imagine he—how am I going to tell this story here because I’ve got all this I’ve got to get down about how God did it? I’m dividing it into 10 chunks, but it’s not quite so simple as 10 chunks because what you said is these “toledot”—these “generations of” five of them. I’m actually putting a signal to connect these five to what came before it. So there’s only actually five major chunks. Is that fair to say in Moses’s mind as he breaks up this first book he wrote?

JD: That’s right. After the preface, the introduction—

TK: Genesis 1:1–3:3.

JD: That’s right, the way we divide it. Right after you get the blessing, commission, and this overall vision of what humanity is called to do and be in God’s world as those made in his image, then the story, as it were, begins in Genesis 2:4. And from that point on to the end of the book, like you just said, we get five chunks, five blocks of texts, and they’re introduced by these headings, but those headings that begin with “and these are the generations of” are very naturally linked to the previous grouping.

So you start out with an independent heading: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth” in Genesis 2:4, and then Genesis 5:1 is also an independent heading. “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” but then after that, you’ve got a chunk with two units in it. “These are the generations of Noah” and “These are the generations of Noah’s sons” beginning in chapter 10, verse 1. Then we have a fresh beginning again, and we get the longest unit that Moses gives us.

TK: Oh, just so backing up though, if you’re tracking in your Bible and you’re going to get here, I know. But if you got to Genesis 10:1 and what you just said, Jason was, “and these are the generation of the sons of Noah.” That doesn’t appear in my ESV. So you’re going to get there, but you’re saying though, Hebrew has an end there, and that’s significant.

JD: It is, and I’ll just make this comment that of the 10 generations formulas that we have in Genesis, five of them begin with this connector vav in Hebrew. And when we look at contemporary English translations, only the King James and New American Standard actually represent all five of those connectors in some way, usually with the particle “now.” “Now this is what happens. Now these are the generations of.” And so they’re actually representing that there is a conjunction here. The NRSV (that’s the New Revised Standard Version) and the ESV only note one of the five: in 11:27 they add “now.” But in four of the other cases, they don’t put anything. The NIV, the Christian Standard Bible—they don’t include any marker in front of any of the generations statements.

And so this is an example, I think, Tom, where Moses is using a structural feature in Hebrew that we can represent in English. When you’re going from one language to another, you can’t always represent all the elements in the new language that are present in the mother language. But in this instance, the King James and the New American Standard recognize that there seems to be something going on here that Moses is marking, and we can mark it in English.

TK: And so this is an example of a marker here.

JD: That’s right. Moses put a marker here with respect to structure.

And so I think many of our translations do a disservice to us in shaping a proper biblical theology of Genesis because they don’t communicate in English when they could have all that the Hebrew is trying to communicate. It’s awkward if every time you come to a Hebrew conjunction vav, you use the word “and”—and I recognize that. But it is signaling structure. It’s signaling, as you said, that we are amidst a text block, a block of thought that is to be read together, and often we didn’t have people reading the text; we heard them listening to the text. And I think every time they heard a generations formula that said “and these are the generations of” versus “these are the generations of,” the listeners were able to recognize this is still connected to what precedes.

And I’ll just make a note that often scholars when they are interpreting Genesis, they simply create two units. They say there’s the unit before recorded history, as it were, the “primeval history” they call it from Genesis 1 through 11. And then they have the “patriarchal history” where we’re now getting specific individuals and learning much more detail about their lives. And it carries on that way all the way through the rest of the Old Testament, this focused history.

And at one level, we definitely see the narrative time slow down when we get to Genesis 12. What likely covered at least thousands of years in Genesis 1 through 11 is now going to slow down to just four generations in the next 38 chapters. Just four generations are covered in four-fifths of the book, whereas in the first fifth of the book, narrative time is flying. So at one level, we can understand why people distinguish Genesis 1 through 11 from Genesis 12 to 50. But those aren’t the markers that Moses was giving. And in fact, usually people include all of Genesis 11 with what precedes, and actually it’s right after the Tower of Babel episode that we get these other generations of Shem. And there’s no conjunction on that.

TK: So that’s a fresh text block the way we’re talking.

JD: A fresh chunk is started at 11:10. What’s significant is that that text block is going to carry us all the way to the beginning of chapter 37. So we get these “generations of Shem” and then it says in 11:27 “and these are the generations of Terah.” And then in 25:12 “and these are the generations of Ishmael.” 25:19 “and these are the generations of Isaac.” 36:1 “and these are the generations of Esau.” So that is the largest text block or grouping in the book. And we have to notice it and say Moses is calling us to see and to spend lots of time in God’s covenant-making process with the patriarchs. That’s the unit that dominates the greatest amount of space in the book. So there’s prominence that is given through the chunking, prominence given to the patriarchal narratives. And with that then, the promise of how God will bring blessing, his curse overcoming blessing to the world.

Central to that is this hope of an individual descendant in the line of Abraham who possesses enemy gates and through whom all the world will be blessed. Abraham will become a father of many nations when the individual descendant or seed rises. And that’s the same seed that was promised as a warning to the serpent that the seed of the woman would crush his head.

So the greatest amount of space in the book, the greatest chunk runs from 11:10 all the way to 37:1. It includes five of the generations headings all linked together in a single text block by the conjunction that we usually render as “and” that the KJV and NASB rendered as “now.” So rightly, the New American Standard, for example, lets the generations heading in 11:10 begin “these are the generations of Shem.” And then in all four of the following generations headings in 11:27, 25:12, 25:19, and 36:1, the New American Standard renders the text: “Now these are the generations of Terah. Now these are the generations of Ishmael. Now these are the generations of Isaac. Now these are the generations of Esau.” And I think that’s contributing to our understanding of the book’s theology.

TK: It does tell you, I mean, just that simple thought, if Moses in thinking—how am I going to organize all this material? Obviously by the help of the Holy Spirit—but he gives a prominence to, for instance, Shem, you’re saying in the fourth chunk that he uses in this book. As someone who loves God’s Word, I am going to need to give some thought to it of why he would prioritize him. What can I find out here that might send a signal? Oh, that’s why he did it this way.

JD: Yes. Back at the end of chapter four, we learned that people began to call on the name of the Lord. And the name that should be dominant in this book, among those made in God’s image, is Yahweh’s name. And yet at the Tower of Babel, at the beginning of chapter 10 or 11 in this book, the beginning of chapter 11, the Tower of Babel episode is unpacked, and we’re told that those at Babel were seeking a name for themselves. The Hebrew term “name” is identical to Shem’s name. It is “shem.” That is what like Noah named his son. He called his son Name. And I think the focus is whose name? Not his own—Yahweh’s name. The name that people should be calling on that he represents. Shem represents the very one that the world should be focused on. And I think that’s part of the story. And so he gets this “toledot,” this generations formula attached to him. And it introduces the most dominant unit in the book of Genesis.

TK: Just stopping for one second, something I like here about what you just said is in Genesis 11:1, getting the start of the Tower of Babel story. And “name” is a priority here. And then I come to a new chunk. And it’s focused on name. There is a link from chunk to chunk. You are seeing there that it’s not like Moses said, “Hey, here’s a chunk I want to have,” and this is a disconnected chunk. They do fit together. And you’re able to read them and say, “Okay, that makes sense. These are the generations of Shem.” The previous, the end of the previous chunk was focused on a name, but not the name we’ve been led to think that God’s people are supposed to focus on. So having a link from one to another, the link is one of contrast.

JD: And that now draws me to a fresh observation. What introduced that previous generations formula “and these are the generations of Noah’s sons” in 10:1? What follows is a genealogy in that unit, but it’s not like the genealogy that we had in chapter five that grew out of “this is the book of the generations of Adam.” In chapter five, it’s a linear genealogy. And it’s dominated by the same default story verb that colors all Old Testament narrative.

What I want to draw attention to right now, Tom, is that of the 10 headings, “these are the generations of,” every one of them is followed either by genealogy or by story. Five of them are followed by story. And in every instance, the story focuses on a positive character who is hoping in the coming offspring. It could be Adam and Eve. It could be Noah. It could be Terah, Terah is the father of Abraham. It could be Isaac, who’s the father of Jacob, or Jacob himself. All of these we have individual stories, and they’re driven by this default Hebrew verb that is the main story verb in Hebrew. It’s called wayyiqtol. And so the generations headings introduces in five instances a story of individuals who are hoping in the coming offspring. These are the remnant few in a world filled with those living under curse, the remnant few who are experiencing God’s blessing.

But then there’s five other generations headings that introduce genealogies. And in Genesis 5 and in Genesis 11, the generations of Adam and the generations of Shem both introduce linear genealogies. In each instance, we have a 10-fold pattern of genealogy, and only one descendant in each generation is focused on. The individual who retains for that generation hope in the offspring promise is addressed. A gives birth to B and other kids. B gave birth to C and other kids. C gave birth to D and other kids. That’s how a linear genealogy works.

And these linear genealogies focus on—just like the headings that introduce the positive narratives—these linear genealogies include the default story verb. So the story is still being told, and that story is focused on the positive line of hope. So you take the five stories plus the two linear genealogies, which are also telling a story, and you have seven—which is not by chance—seven of the generations units in Genesis are focused on the positive line hoping in the offspring promise.

Well, that leaves three, and this relates now to the contrast that you were seeing with respect to the name. The unit that the Tower of Babel episode concludes begins with “and these are the generations of Noah’s sons.” And this comes in chapter 10 and begins what we call the table of nations, and it lists specifically 70 nations that come out of—that descend from the three families that came out of the ark. So they’re originally listed as Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and they come to us as the sons of Japheth, then the sons of Ham, and then the sons of Shem.

And this genealogy gives clarity to all of Israel’s neighbors. So let’s think about Moses as the author. Israel is just one people in a sea of nations through whom God wants to impact the whole world. And we have to say why would God give us this book of Genesis and actually take time to list all 70 of these nations growing out of the Tower of Babel when God dispersed the peoples all over the face of the earth and confused their languages. The language that’s used is these are the families of the sons of Noah according to their genealogies in their nations, and from these nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood. That word for families is the same word that’s going to occur in Genesis 12:3 when God says, “Abram, the ultimate result of what I’m commissioning you to is that in you all the families of the ground will be blessed.” That’s the same word that we see at the end of chapter 10: “These are the families of the sons of Noah.” Now that yes, we rendered it cleanse unhelpfully, but it’s the exact same word, Mishpahah, or Mishpahot is the plural. These are the families of the sons of Noah. And it’s those families then that become the target of God’s blessing. The families of Genesis 10 that give rise to 70 nations are the target or the mission field of God’s blessing.

So many scholars will just say, “Oh, the genealogy in Genesis 10 is just an origins genealogy. It’s just clarifying where all the peoples came from and it goes no further with respect to the purpose of Genesis.” And I say, “No, no, you’re missing something within the book of Genesis, the line hoping in the offspring promise bear a mission to all the offspring of the serpent.” So the offspring of the serpent are the rebels who are standing against God and standing against his people. And the 70 nations listed in Genesis 10 are among these rebels. And yet they become the target of God’s global blessing through Abraham and ultimately through the individual singular offspring of Abraham.

Now what’s significant in Genesis 10 is that the structure of the genealogies in Genesis 10 are not linear like they are in Genesis 5 and in Genesis 11. The structure of the genealogy with respect to the generations of Noah’s sons are segmented. They don’t tell a story. They don’t use the story verb. Instead, they’re all broken up. It’s of the structure Tom that says, “A gave birth to B, C, and D. These are these kids. Sorry, A gave birth to B, C, and D. These are these kids. These are C’s kids. These are B’s kids.” That’s the structure of this genealogy. In contrast to “A gave birth to B and other kids, B gave birth to C and other kids.” This is a segmented genealogy that by its very nature is cumbersome Hebrew. It slows the reader down. It doesn’t take part of the overall story.

TK: We feel it in reading it also.

JD: And we should. That’s right.

TK: We feel almost a burden like, “Oh, do I have to read through this list here?”

JD: Yes. “These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah.” I mean, it slows us way down. The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, Dodanim. It is slow going. And we’re like, “I can’t even pronounce the names.” It’s tough moving.

In contrast, when we get to chapter 11, verse 10: “These are the generations of Shem. When Shem was a hundred years old, he fathered Arphaxad two years after the flood. And Shem lived after he fathered Arphaxad 500 years and had other sons and daughters. And when Arphaxad had lived 35 years, he fathered Shelah. And Arphaxad lived after he fathered Shelah 403 years and had other sons and daughters.” It’s part of the narrative. It moves us through this linear genealogy and allows us to see in every generation that singular individual who is carrying on the hope of the promise. And it’s easier to read because it’s part of the story.

But the slowing down in the generations of Noah’s sons and in the generations of Ishmael and in the generations of Esau, the slowing down through the use of segmented genealogy forces the reader to say, “So what? Why are they here?”

TK: Yep.

JD: And instead of saying, “Who cares about them,” what we should say is, “Oh, God cares enough about them to slow us down to not forget them.” These are Israel’s neighbors and Israel is to be living on mission. And I think the very structure, the way that Moses is going about structuring his book is helping us understand the message of the book that we are moving from generation to generation, even telling us how old they lived so that you can actually draw a linear line from Adam to the Christ, from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham all the way through Israel to David and beyond until we get to Jesus. That’s how the genealogies are intended. These linear genealogies, but the segmented genealogies play their own role. And that is to slow us down and recognize that we’re not supposed to forget our neighbors. And within a book that has hope for blessing and God says through Abraham’s offspring, “The families of the ground will be blessed.” That is, all the nations of the earth will regard themselves blessed in Abraham’s offspring. Families, nations—who are they that are the target of God’s mission? It’s those that are bound up in the generations of Noah’s sons and the generations of Ishmael and the generations of Esau, the three generations headings that introduce segmented genealogies and stand out in the book because of that, give us the focus of Israel’s mission.

TK: That’s really helpful. It, first of all, tells you Moses is not going through a random list of names and saying, “I’m going to throw these all down on the page.” he has something in mind as he’s writing Genesis. He has a purpose he’s writing it for. We have to discover it.

Jason, I’m wondering, let’s say somebody hearing this and says, “Okay, that I understand at least in part what we’re talking about here, how we get these ‘These are the generations of’ and Moses writing five chunks versus 10 chunks, but I might read the CSB (the Christian Standard Bible) or the ESV as my daily reading text. I don’t see it there.” First of all, both of us would affirm we don’t want to be those who say the editors of these Bibles had some sort of agenda to keep that away from us.

JD: Not at all.

TK: There’s no—we both love these translations and use them. It’s difficult to go from one language to another. But we are saying, when you see a signal in the text, it’s good to recognize it and say, “What’s that there for?” I wonder if it has any significance. Jason, what would you recommend for somebody who would say, “I don’t know Hebrew or Greek. How would I talk about these things?”  Let’s say my congregation uses the ESV. How would I talk about these things without leading people to distrust their Bibles? Like saying, “Hey, they’re keeping things out.”

JD: Yes. You’re absolutely right, Tom, that the translators of these texts are doing their best at giving us what they believe is God’s intended word. And it highlights two aspects that I’ll draw attention to. And we could unpack this further on a later episode, just regarding the theory of Bible translation, that different translations are intended for different purposes. And it’s no coincidence that the King James and New American Standard are the only two translations that included representations in English of the Hebrew conjunction. Because their translation theory, the translation theory associated with those translations included a desire to represent in English as closely as possible even the grammar of the Hebrew. Whereas the translation theory of the NIV, for example, is to create a dynamic equivalent in English of the Hebrew. Even if we depart from the grammar, we’re going to maintain the history. And we’re going to, but what we’re going to try to communicate, we’re even going to maintain as closely as we can an association with the words themselves, but we’re willing even to depart from that if it means communicating in English what we think the Hebrew is trying to communicate. But often that can come at the expense of certain things.

And one of them is what I would call macrostructure, not just the structure of a clause that has a subject and its predicate, a connector in various modifiers, but thinking about texts as having grammar also, and I think that’s the level at which this connector, the Hebrew word vav is functioning. It’s functioning at the level of texts rather than clauses. So the NIV may very well be representing the clause grammar very reasonably in English, but in leaving out the textual link between clauses, it actually causes the reader to miss these macro units. And so this leads me to the second element. It’s not only translation theory, it’s just that we—if one is an English Bible-only scholar, then it’s good to be reminded—like this podcast is doing—be reminded that there are those who are working in the Hebrew and one person working in the Hebrew may see things that another doesn’t. And there’s even a growing awareness of certain features of the Hebrew language that may have been missed in previous generations. And I’m drawing attention to one of those in the book of Genesis, the role of the conjunction that we render as “and” as a macro-structuring function—a macro-structuring word that is guiding our understanding of how a whole book hangs together. And that when we see that five of the headings, “these are the generations” headings include “and” in front of them, Moses did that intentionally. And I can fully appreciate the fact that it gets cumbersome because their use of this conjunction vav in Hebrew occurs so often, it seems awkward to simply begin every sentence in English with “and he did,” “and he went,” “and he jumped,” “and he said,” “and he did,” “and he ran,” “and he spoke,” “and he threw.” It becomes awkward English. When we’re reading the text, it seems cumbersome. And yet we have to remember also on the flip side that the Hebrews were reading the text and they were hearing “the,”  “the,”  “the,”  “the”  sound or potentially “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa” at the front of every single sentence or at the beginning of five of these headings, and it was telling them something about structure. And so I just think that translators have—they’re not trying to be mean or bad or to twist God’s Word. They’ve just missed, I think, a structuring feature of the Hebrew text that those who are asking questions of structure can find helpful to look at a more formal translation like the New American Standard. The ESV and the NIV and the CSB—I mean, we use the ESV in our own church—just demands that we celebrate that God does raise up some church leaders to work in the original Hebrew text and we can learn from them and we can benefit from a commentary that’s engaged the Hebrew. And then we see the benefit of using different types of translations. So the NIV or the CSB might really communicate well in English. It might be sweet to the ear, but when I’m preaching, I’m likely going to have to make greater corrections or observations because naturally the NIV is doing more interpretation than the New American Standard is in the way that it’s communicating in English. And so that’s just a small parenthesis there, Tom. We shouldn’t necessarily be frustrated with our ESV and want to throw it out because it failed to communicate. I wish that it would do a better job in the Old Testament highlighting the conjunctions because I think they’re important with respect to macrostructure, but the New American Standard attempts to retain more of them, and so we do have a translation that we can look at even if we don’t know Hebrew for more of those connectors.

TK: That’s helpful. So, Jason, as we wrap up and we’re going to put a PDF in the show notes—the statements here will show where the Hebrew vav, or as you said “and,” appears before each of these “these are the generations” headings—as we wrap up, think about Moses considering all this material. We started with a story of God’s glory filling the earth, a commission of blessing given to mankind. Moses is thinking it’s a big story, and I’ve got actually five books of material to tell, but I’ve got this introductory book, Genesis. He’s not naming it that right there, but I’m going to tell it. How would you describe it as he’s making his five major chunks? And real briefly, what’s he thinking? I’m going to break this story up?

JD: Yeah, what’s in his mind? I think, first of all, I’ll draw attention to the fact that if we just look at the five chunks where we get a generations heading that has no conjunction preceding i

TK: that vav you’re talking about—there’s no “and” starting it.

JD: If we just consider where each of the five chunks start, what we see is a movement from the heavens and the earth to Adam, to Noah, to Shem, to Jacob. What that means is that we’re moving from all creation in the heavens and the earth to humanity in general in Adam, to all living humanity after the execution of the rest in Noah, to a subset of living humanity through a shift in genealogical focus—now it’s focused on Shem—and then to Israel in Israel’s birth from Jacob. So we start with all creation and we narrow down to Israel. That’s the movement

TK: it’s like a funnel, exactly.

JD: When we just consider the five major units in this book, most of the Old Testament is focused on the end of that funnel. It’s focused on Israel. So Genesis, what it does is give clarity for Israelites to know their place in the bigger story. It shows how they fit in the whole creation, and that’s a beautiful part of Moses’s purpose.

TK: Yeah, he didn’t start with the fourth chunk, for instance, the Shem part. That’s right. He didn’t start with Shem, but he fits the story of Shem—that is, the generations of Shem—within a greater story reaching all the way back to the Garden of Eden and the commission of mankind to fill the earth with God’s glory.

The second element I would note, Tom, along with that narrowing is what appears to be some intentional parallelism that gives us a greater understanding of the book’s overarching structure. That is, we start with the generations of the heavens and the earth, and then “this is the book of the generations of Adam.” That generations heading introduces the first of two linear genealogies in the book. Each of those units that are introduced by linear genealogy has two overarching units. That is, there’s the linear genealogy followed by a greater story. First, it’s the linear genealogy associated with the generations of Adam, followed by the generations of Noah and Noah’s sons, where a story is given followed by that segmented genealogy. What I’m proposing is that it may be that Moses intends us to read each of the linear genealogies—the linear genealogy of Adam and the linear genealogy of Shem—as introductory to the units that follow. They stand in some way in parallel. If you’ve got the first unit of the book as the preface, the introduction in Genesis 1:1 through 2:3, the second unit of the book is the generations of the heavens and the earth, where the need for blessing is highlighted. Then, if we’re seeing two parallel units side by side, it’s as if we get unit three A and three B. Three A is the unit that runs from Adam through Noah’s sons, that’s introduced by that linear genealogy of Adam, and then three B would be beginning with the linear genealogy of Shem that stretches all the way down to the generations of Jacob. And it’s intriguing that after the problem is introduced, what follows is hope for the answer. If the problem is the lack of blessing or the need for blessing, then from chapter 5:1 with that introductory linear genealogy all the way to the end of the book, it’s dominated by this vision of hope for blessing. In 5:1 through 11:9, God reaffirms humanity’s blessing commission, even using some of the same language: “be fruitful, multiply.” he affirms his covenant with creation, now given through Noah. And then after the fall at the Tower of Babel, we get the next unit that runs from 11:10 to 25:26, where God declares how his kingdom blessing will indeed reach the world. He’s going to do it first by perpetuating kingdom hope through the life of Abraham and his sons, and then by preserving this promise line through famine as they hope for this coming royal deliverer from the line of Judah.

The handout that will be put in PDF form for our listeners will unpack this further. But I think that we’re actually seeing the five units where the last four units are actually standing in parallel with one another, each introduced by a linear genealogy. And it’s creating this overall structure for Genesis where the introduction is focused on God’s blessing commission. Then you get the need for blessing in the only generations heading associated with non-human members—the heavens and the earth—and then the rest of the book is dominated by the hope for this blessing in chapters 5:1 through 50:26. There are two parts in that unit, each of those parts introduced by the linear genealogy. So that’s how I’m seeing the macrostructure of the book, and it really plays into our understanding of the theology of the book itself.

So I summarize in a very short way the overarching message of Genesis this way: God will restore the blessing of being part of his kingdom to all the nations. He will do it through Jesus, the offspring of Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah. This is the message of Genesis, and that message springs out of a book that’s dominated by genealogy and generations—the hope of God’s glory filling the earth through those made in his image and the ultimate hope that curse will be overcome by blessing through the work of this individual seed.

So what we’ve done is look at macrostructure and how it’s informing biblical theology today, specifically within the book of Genesis.

TK: That’s really helpful. By the way, we had Taylor DiRoberto talking about Ecclesiastes in his dissertation. You have spent quite a bit of time yourself thinking about this because this theme—at least the macrostructure—was the focus of your dissertation, wasn’t it?

JD: Well, the idea of macrostructure, not the book of Genesis structure, was a focus of my dissertation now completed twenty years ago. But it’s influenced how I approach all of Scripture—when I am thinking about biblical theology, how does the whole Bible progress and integrate, climaxing in Jesus, it all starts by understanding structure and how units are communicating and how they relate to other units to shape books, which in turn fit together with other books and create portions of our Bible like the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. And how all those units and those books and those major sections of Scripture then communicate and work together to magnify the person and work of Jesus. So biblical theology really does stem out of a careful reading of books, and that’s what we’ve tried to do today with the book of Genesis.

TK: I love it. I love it—looking for signals that the authors are sending that are not pedantic or nitpicky sort of things, but you’d say no, the authors, in this case Moses, had something in mind and he’s wanting his readers to see it. Well, go to the show notes, check it out. This will be a blessing to you. Also, just need to say, Jason, you have focused on this not in total, but your Delighting in the Old Testament. The book that came out more recently, you talk about this and also How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament—both of those talk about this in a way that is accessible for, I would think, anybody and will be a blessing to people as you read and preach and teach from this book.

JD: That’s right, Tom. Thank you for pointing that out. In “Delighting in the Old Testament,” it’s on pages 110 to 115, and in “How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament,” I discuss this feature of Genesis on pages 107 to 109. So both discussions include different elements based on the specific purpose within the book. So you’ll benefit from both of those. And, as you said, we will put a PDF for listeners in the show notes.

TK: Okay, well, Jason, blessings to you. Thanks for taking the time today.

JD: Thank you, Tom. Bye.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. Go to our show notes to download the three PDF resources related to today’s topic. For resources related to biblical theology, go to handstotheplow.org and jasonderouchie.com.