Now, it's not meant to be blasphemous or sacrilegious in nature, but it is meant to look at each of the 66 books of the Protestant canon in an unbiased and non-faith based perspective.

We will be focused on one book per episode, and each episode will be Thursday at 9am central time.

To help keep us on track during each episode, we'll be going through these 10 points.

But overall, my desire throughout the course of this is to give you information that is unbiased, that is fair, and to help you learn your Bible better.

Whether you are doubting, or just want to firm up your understanding of what you are arguing for or arguing against, I hope that this provides a little bit of clarification for you.

Now, here's the caveat.

We could spend a ton of time, we could go way deeper, we could talk about way more contradictions, we could give way more historical perspective, we could analyze this to death.

That is not the goal of this.

Maybe in the future we'll pick a book and we'll go very deep verse by verse, but for now, I want to give you the 10 points we talked about earlier and just keep it a bit higher level.

I think that this will aid us in conversation in our future videos where we talk about different themes or different points of doctrine, or where the Christian is getting this concept, etc.

Just to have a really good layout, a really good foundation of just what this Bible is and how the books within it add up.

So let's start with point one here, which is book overview.

Now there's really two ways to separate Genesis.

The first 11 chapters is this primeval history, a history of people at a larger scale.

And then starting from chapters 12 through the end of the book, we get a patriarchal history.

This is focused on individual peoples and families.

So first, the primeval history.

This first 11 chapters in the first book of the Bible sets the stage.

It is so foundational for what the believer believes and what the Christian doctrine becomes.

We get the creation story, however literal or figuratively you want to take that story.

Introducing the fall, the introduction of sin, the banning from the garden, etc.

We move into Cain and Abel, showing the further pervasiveness of sin, generationally speaking now, all the way down through the proliferation of the wickedness of man's nature with God's need to flood the entire earth and start over again.

This happens so quickly.

People don't understand, like, here's our whole Bible and bam, we're starting over right here.

So the story of Noah and his ark is God's justice and wrath, but also mercy in saving Noah and one family to start over again.

Yet, the same thing happens all over again, and we get man trying to reach past heaven in the Tower of Babel to become God, to become greater than God, to meet God, however you interpret that story.

And God is so threatened by this that he confuses their languages.

And this is an excellent point just to understand that this book is an explanation of natural phenomenon.

The people in the ancient world simply did not know how to explain.

How did we get all of these languages?

Let's fill that gap with God and we make up a story about man's own sinfulness and wickedness, which is par for the course in all of these stories that brought about the confusion, that brought about the separation of man.

And that's it.

That's the first section of Genesis.

So much happens here.

And what I think is fascinating, what we're going to get into a little bit here as we go through Genesis, is that there's two huge reactions to this, right?

We have the literal interpretation, which people are going to classify as the fundamentalist view that earth was really created in six days and everything in it, that each of these people existed.

There was an actual Adam and Eve, that there is not evolution, that this is where it all started.

And you're going to have this progressive camp.

And there's so many iterations in between.

So I'm painting with a broad brush, but this progressive group is going to say that obviously this is how a narration is told.

This is a story just explaining God's divinity, his ability to create him, setting things in motion that evolution would then carry out, et cetera.

And there's so much infighting here.

But what's amazing is that however you want to justify these different groups, they have to agree on certain things.

They have to agree on this God, on this concept of sin that is introduced to the world, on some version of original sin that means we yet today are still in need of a savior.

And what I'm going to show here in the second part, as we get into the patriarchs, is that they have to believe at some point these individuals were true because it becomes the lineage down to David, the lineage down to Jesus.

So at what point do you get to pick and choose what is literal and what is metaphorical?

Because there's just as much reason to say that Abraham is a metaphorical figure pointing to God's ability to befriend man and create covenant with him as it is to say that he was a literal person who really existed by that name within that family and that those miracles really happened to him.

Why not then apply that to Adam?

Why is Adam a figurehead to represent man's beginning and Abraham is meant to be so literal?

It's just absolutely insane to me the cherry picking that has to go on throughout the course of the Old Testament and we're going to see that book by book by book.

So getting into the patriarchal history within Genesis 12 through the end of the book.

It's a few generations here.

We start with Abraham and obviously this is the birth of God's covenant with man.

We see that Abraham is justified by his faith and then enters into the specific literal contract with God for him and all of his descendants until that contract is rearranged, broken, or renewed through Jesus.

However, you want to view what happens in the gospel narratives.

And from Abraham, we go down to Isaac and Jacob.

An important part here is Jacob getting his name changed after wrestling with God to Israel, thus signifying the origin of the nation of Israel.

We end with the story of Joseph, who becomes a prominent figure in Egypt and is supposed to show God's forgiveness and mercy and reconciliation to the sinful nature of a family torn apart.

So those are our two narratives for Genesis and they introduce a fundamental theological and thematic thread that will course through the entire rest of the Bible's narrative.

Creation and creator, human disobedience and sin, covenant with God, faith and obedience, and the chosen people and the blessing of the nation of Israel.

So that was our short overview of the book of Genesis.

I'm not sure if that was as short as I needed it to be to get through this in a timely fashion.

So let's quickly move on to point two, authorship and date.

Genesis and really the Pentateuch or the first five books of the Bible or the Torah are all going to be relatively the same in this regard.

So I'm going to be more detailed here and then I'll be a little bit more brief in the following four books as we get into them.

The traditional Jewish and Christian perspective originally is that Moses wrote these books, which is problematic for many reasons.

One, because in some of these first five books, we hear about the death of Moses from the author, which you can see the issue there.

But even more so speaking specifically about the book of Genesis, we are writing about things that only God can know.

So a lot of progressive Christians that are trying to hold on to some idea of these being written down by witnesses and accounts and a collaboration of information and material from where?

The only place that if Moses is our author here, he could have got the information is divine revelation, which is a problem for many Christian sects that don't want to hand that much over to the spiritual.

Many fundamentalists have no problem with this.

God met with Moses on a mountaintop, told him about everything.

He wrote it all down.

Great.

Maybe even foretold his own death.

Not a problem.

The scholarly debate, though, is wide and there are many iterations, but I'm going to share with you the most popular scholastic theory, which happens to be the documentary hypothesis, which is just to say it is a compilation of sources, specifically four sources.

J, the Yahweh source based off the use of Yahweh or more commonly Lord is going to be our oldest source.

Then the Eloah source where we use the word Elohim for God.

Then P, the priestly source.

We get the priestly concerns about ritual and divine understanding.

And then our D source, which just reflects the themes found in that fifth book of the Pentateuch.

So according to the documentary hypothesis, these sources were put together and crafted and edited and organized over a significant amount of time with the main process of compilation happening during the sixth century BCE during the Babylonian exile or shortly thereafter.

So this is probably how we got Genesis.

Again, there are other belief systems, even by scholars who say, well, it could have been this or what about the introduction from this people group here?

It didn't really get totally compiled until later here, but this is the one that is most agreed upon at this time.

On to point three, which is historical background.

Now, this one is a bit hard with a book like Genesis, because we're just going to kind of leave the literal translation behind at this point and focus on the mythology of it.

Genesis has theological implications that are more important than being consistent with time and place.

Not to mention that combining and compiling that we just mentioned from the previous section has a lot to do with why there are different accounts that don't necessarily match up.

We'll get into this more in our future point about contradictions, but we're going to have messy timelines and incorrect places here.

Now, there are some parts that are representative of real places and real people groups.

Let's start with ancient Mesopotamia.

Genesis draws on cultural and literary traditions that were very common in the ancient Near East, specifically that of Sumer and Babylonia, where we see the borrowing, if not straight up stealing of things like creation myth, flood myth, genealogies, etc.

But by incorporating elements of this cultural milieu of the time, Genesis provides, though a theological reinterpretation, still a reinterpretation or interpretation of what was common and happening in ancient Mesopotamia around this time period.

For example, the flood myth found in Genesis is a direct copy of what happens in the Epic of Gilgamesh and is a perfect example of Genesis taking something that was just an epic myth.

It's the same story.

You have an individual who is chosen to save humanity from a great flood that also needs to take the animals and even the kinds of birds that are sent out to see if there's dry land, etc.

Like, go read the Epic of Gilgamesh, which we know predates Genesis.

Genesis takes it and adds in the theological and moral messaging of God's judgment and wrath and mercy, etc.

This is what happens with so much of the Jewish tradition and scriptures.

They are just taking well-known myths that they've incorporated into their own culture and civilization and are adding on their morality.

So, still talking about historical background, we can learn something about the time and place when we look at just the patriarchal practice.

This patriarchal age is an era that constitutes somewhere in the 2nd millennium BCE and is associated with pastoral tribal communities and nomadic lifestyles.

This was common practice and custom and social structure at the time that focused on things like lineage and kinship ties and the inheritance of the firstborn male.

So, yes, this reflects the social and legal norms that were prevalent in ancient Near East during this time frame.

And for that, we can still see that historical background and context come through.

So, the last iteration I would show you of this is the Canaanite context.

We can learn about Canaanite society, which was a real society that lived in Canaan before it was taken over for the promised land that would be handed to God's people.

And we see interactions between the patriarchs and the Canaanites that shed light on the social practices and norms and customs of those people.

An excellent example of this is when Abraham meets with the priest king of Salem, Melchizedek.

This is a biblical story that represents a meeting with an individual who is representative of a Canaanite tribe.

And we see their customs and practices as described within that interaction.

So, I'd like to point out here that none of this is to point to the validity of the Bible as being any kind of divine truth material.

It is simply to say that, of course, the writers who were writing of this time and about these people, in addition to their exaggerated mythologies, still were able to document some historical facts.

So, let's move on to point four.

So, four is literary analysis, which is something that's near and dear to my heart.

If you know, my first channel was Brandon's Bookshelf.

That's where I started talking every once in a while about a book that had something atheistic in nature and slowly led to this channel being formed.

So, I do love to talk about these different concepts.

And for literary analysis, we're going to focus on four different things.

Literary genres, narrative structure, themes and motifs, and literary technique.

For genres, we really see three things here.

Myth and legend, genealogy, and historic narrative.

Then for narrative structure, we have, of course, the two camps we already mentioned, primeval and patriarchal.

But the narrative structure is really actually well done in Genesis.

It's laid out very simple, either by theme, by event, or by person.

And even though it's conflicting, and even though it gets some things wrong, it goes through this lineage that is meant to show a unity.

You can tie everything back together.

You can walk straight up the genealogy, or you can look at the succession of events that one led to another that led to another.

Genesis is very fast moving.

Again, the amount of time that it's actually supposed to cover, if you were able to take it literally, is pretty impressive to squeeze it in and pack it in with so much meaning, tying these events that used to be just epic in nature to theological and meaningful in a divine sense.

As for themes and motifs, I mean, good lord, you could draw a billion things out.

This reminds me of like Jordan Peterson.

Have you ever heard Jordan Peterson talk about just Cain and Abel?

Like him, hate him, or love him, the amount of meaning that he's able to extrapolate.

I've read his book, Maps of Meaning, back from 1995, and this is what he does.

He takes these Old Testament stories, these archetypical characters and plot lines, and he just pulls them apart for everything they're worth.

And it's actually pretty impressive.

And it's what you can do with a story that is told so simply with these higher levels of theme and motif.

Think about how many countless stories you know are further extrapolations of these themes that are believed to be first found in Genesis, but are not.

Again, the Sumerian myths that predate all of this, the gods that predate Yahweh, or when Yahweh was a different god, El, who was a son of a different god, and who was married, etc.