Genesis 1-11

Volume 1

Andrew Louth, Thomas C. Oden, Andrew Louth, Thomas C. Oden

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780830897261
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

The rich tapestry of the creation narrative in the early chapters of Genesis proved irresistible to the thoughtful, reflective minds of the church fathers. Within them they found the beginning threads from which to weave a theology of creation, Fall, and redemption. Following their mentor the apostle Paul, they explored the profound significance of Adam as a type of Christ, the second Adam. The six days of creation proved especially attractive among the fathers as a subject for commentary, with Basil the Great and Ambrose producing well-known Hexaemerons. Similarly, Augustine devoted portions of five works to the first chapter of Genesis.As in previous volumes within the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, the range of comment contained in this volume spans from the first century to the eighth and from East to West, from Greek and Latin speakers to Syriac.This ACCS volume on Genesis 1-11 opens up a treasure house of ancient wisdom that allows these faithful witnesses, some appearing here in English translation for the first time, to speak with eloquence and intellectual acumen to the church today. Especially helpful is the volume editor's provision of Septuagintal alternative readings to the Masoretic text, which are often necessary to understanding the fathers' flow of thought.

INTRODUCTION TO GENESIS 1-11

The early chapters of Genesis had arguably a greater influence on the development of Christian theology than did any other part of the Old Testament. In these early chapters the Fathers have set out the fundamental patterns of Christian theology. Here there was affirmed the doctrine of creation, in accordance with which the created order had been brought into being from nothing by God’s Word as something “exceedingly good” (Gen 1:31). One of the most popular genres of scriptural commentary among the Fathers was commentary on the six days of creation, the Hexaemeron. Those by Basil the Great and Ambrose are perhaps the most famous. Although Augustine gave this title to none of his books, he returned at least five times to exposition of the first chapter of Genesis and three times carried his commentary beyond the first chapter (Two Books on Genesis Against the Manichaeans, On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis and City of God 11-16).

The Fathers also found in Genesis the doctrine of humankind created “according to the image and likeness of God.” In addition, they found there the doctrine of the fall and the beginning of fallen human society, as well as hints and guesses about the eventual overcoming of the fallen human condition through the incarnation. There follows an account of the establishment of the human race outside the “paradise of delight,” the constant struggle for survival in a natural environment now unfriendly or even actively hostile, the spread of sin and crime, beginning after humanity’s first disobedience, with Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, but also the discovery of music (Gen 4:21) and metal tools (Gen 4:22). That first attempt to find a way of life outside paradise soon foundered in the proliferation of wickedness by humankind, which was swept away by the flood, Noah and his family alone surviving, together with representatives of the whole animal kingdom. Such wholesale punishment of human wickedness was not, however, to be the rule, and the rainbow became the sign and pledge of God’s covenant with humankind, made with Noah (the Noachic covenant, Gen 9:8-17).

After the flood, Noah and his descendants began once again to establish a way of life in the fallen world. Noah became a farmer and planted a vineyard (Gen 9:20). His first experiments with wine making, however, were unfortunate: he succumbed to drunkenness and ended up stretched out in his tent with his clothes in disarray. In this phase of human development, cities began to be established: Babylon and Nineveh are mentioned (Gen 10:10-11). But it became apparent that human solidarity manifest in the building up of ordered human communities, such as cities, could be directed in pride against God and his purposes for humankind, and at the tower of Babel (or “confusion,” as the Septuagint has it) human solidarity was broken by the confusion of tongues, the creation of different languages.

It was in this divided world that Abram was born among the Chaldeans. (Neither the Greek Septuagint nor the Latin Vulgate recognized Ur as a place name: the Greek translates it as “place,” Jerome takes it to mean “fire” and, in a learned note, connects it with the fire worship of the ancient Zoroastrians.) Genesis 11 ends with Abraham leaving the Chaldeans and settling in Haran in Mesopotamia, where he received God’s call to journey still further and become the father of a great nation (Gen 12:1-3). With that call there commence the accounts of the patriarchs, of the revelation of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, of the calling of the people of Israel and the whole story of the Old Testament, in which there emerges, so Christians with the Fathers believe, the hope for the coming Messiah, a hope fulfilled in the incarnation of the Son of God as Jesus of Nazareth.

Critical Problems of the Text

We shall look in more detail at the theology the Fathers drew out of these chapters later on, but first various critical problems need to be discussed. Compiling a patristic commentary on any part of the Old Testament raises questions not raised by such a commentary on the New Testament. These questions are largely to do with the actual biblical text and to a lesser extent with the higher criticism of that text (that is, questions of composition and authorship). With the New Testament, the English text that we read nowadays is a translation of the New Testament more or less as the Greek fathers themselves knew it (there are sometimes minor differences where textual criticism detects early accretions to the text, for instance at Mk 9:29, but these are few). But with the Old Testament, there is a major difference. For the Christian Old Testament was the Greek Septuagint (usually abbreviated as LXX, the Latin numeral for seventy), whereas what is translated in our Bibles is the Hebrew text, of which the Septuagint was an early translation.

Differences between the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint. The text of the Hebrew Bible and that of the Septuagint display some major differences. The Septuagint includes books such as Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach, an abbreviation of the full title The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach) and the Wisdom of Solomon that are not included in the Hebrew Bible. Some books in the Septuagint seem to be later expanded versions of the Hebrew original: for example, Esther and Daniel, which in the Septuagint includes stories about Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, and an expanded account of the Three Young Men in the fiery furnace (including the songs sung by them in praise of God and creation). In other cases, the Septuagint presents the text in a rearranged order (e.g., the book of Jeremiah, which has additions as well). There are also many minor disagreements between the Greek and Hebrew versions.

It is generally held that the Septuagint is a later, embellished version of the original Hebrew text. But this is only partly true. Sometimes, as the Qumran discoveries have revealed, the Septuagint preserves works that might have been included by the rabbis in the Hebrew Bible had the Hebrew original not been lost by the early centuries of the Christian era (or the common era, though it is not clear to whom it is common, apart from Christians and post-Christians); such is the case with Sirach. Furthermore, the text of the Hebrew Bible that we have, the so-called Masoretic text, is the result of critical endeavors on the part of rabbis in the second half of the first millennium. It is, then, a good deal later than the Hebrew text that would have been available to the Greek translators of the Septuagint. Variants in it may well be witnesses to older and better readings than those found in the Masoretic text. (This, too, has been supported by the biblical texts discovered at Qumran.)1

The Septuagint: The Christian Old Testament. The early Christians were well aware of these discrepancies between the Greek Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, but almost universally they regarded the Septuagint and translations from it, notably the Old Latin version, as the authoritative text of the Old Testament of their Christian Scriptures. The main reason for this was that the Septuagint was the version of the Old Testament that they were accustomed to using. It was in Greek that Christianity had spread throughout the Mediterranean world, and it was the Septuagint to which Christian preachers and missionaries appealed as the Scripture. The Septuagint is the version quoted and referred to, for the most part, in the New Testament, which is, of course, in the Greek of the first Christian missionaries and Christian communities. The Old Latin version (or versions) was a translation of the Septuagint and remained the principal text of the Scriptures for those who spoke Latin throughout the patristic period.

When Christianity established itself among the Armenians, the Copts and the Georgians, the Septuagint formed the basis for their vernacular Old Testament. Even among the Syrians, who spoke a Semitic language, Syriac, their translation, the Peshitta, though naturally a translation of the closely related Hebrew, is not without the influence of interpretations inspired by the Septua-gint.

The earliest dissenting voice from the primacy of the Septuagint seems to have been the Latin scholar Jerome, whose translation, now called the Vulgate, was inspired by his ideal of Hebrew truth (Hebraica veritas), though even here, despite his shrill defense of the priority of the Hebrew, his version frequently follows the text of the Septuagint.2 At the Reformation, the Renaissance ideal of ad fontes (“to the sources”) led to Protestant vernacular translations of the Old Testament being based on the Hebrew, and thence to the idea that the Hebrew Bible is the Christian Old Testament.

Although the Roman Catholic Church initially resisted this and insisted on the authority of the Latin Vulgate, Roman Catholic scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century has tended to follow the Reformers. Christians of the Orthodox tradition (whether Greek, Russian, Romanian or other strands) stick to the traditional notion of the Septuagint or translations of it as the Christian Old Testament, and they are shored up in this position by the enormous importance of the liturgical texts that are soaked in allusions to and quotations from the Greek text of the Septuagint. In the West, Orthodox Christians are a minority, but it is worth noting that recently a few scholars have called for a return to the original Christian tradition, according to which the Christian Old Testament is the Septuagint.3

The legend of the Septuagint. For the Fathers, this tradition was virtually unquestioned. Furthermore, it was enhanced by the widely accepted tradition of the way in which the Septuagint had been translated. According to a legend, first witnessed in the Letter of Aristeas, probably written in the second century B.C., the Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, commissioned by the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (287-247 B.C.) for his library in Alexandria. The Jewish high priest Eleazar was approached and selected seventy-two scholars, six from each of the tribes of Israel, who traveled to Alexandria and there finished their translation in seventy-two days.4 Later versions of the legend exist, for instance that recorded by the Christian bishop of Lyons in the later second century, Irenaeus. According to his version the translators numbered seventy and were required each to produce individual translations of the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures, which were miraculously found to be identical.5 Such stories of its miraculous translation naturally enhanced the authority of the Septuagint (the title derived from the number of the translators) among Greek-speaking Jews, especially in Alexandria, and then among Christians.

The Septuagint between Christians and Jews. By the second century A.D., however, the use of the Septuagint among Christians was producing a reaction against it in Jewish circles, especially those circles influenced by the growing rabbinic movement, which emphasized the supreme authority of the Hebrew version. This division between Christian Greek and Jewish Hebrew was deepened by Christian interpretations of verses from the Greek Septuagint that had no support from the Hebrew text, the most famous of these being the use of Isaiah 7:14 (Isaiah’s prophecy that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name shall be called Emmanuel”) as a prophecy of the virginal conception of Jesus Christ (already found in the New Testament at Mt 1:23). While the Septuagint parthenos unambiguously means “virgin,” the Hebrew word so translated ((almāh) means a “young woman.” Such discrepancies between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible, especially where the Greek version could be read as a prophecy of Christ, became one of the principal issues of early Jewish-Christian polemic (see especially Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, a work belonging to the mid-second century).

New translations, the Hexapla. In the course of the second century, various translators—Aquila, and later Symmachus and Theodotion—provided Greek versions closer to the original Hebrew. These translations, which were presumably intended for Greek-speaking Jews, have not survived, probably because of the supreme value attached by the rabbis to the Hebrew text and the consequent encouragement to learn Hebrew within rabbinic Judaism, save in the fragments that survive of a massive tool for biblical scholarship, the Hexapla, compiled by the great third-century Christian scholar and theologian Origen. The Hexapla, so-called because of its six columns, was a massive synopsis of the versions of the Old Testament with columns containing side by side the Hebrew text, that text transliterated into Greek, and the texts of Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint and Theodotion (though there is some dispute about the exact shape of the Hexapla6).

It is not clear what its purpose was, though it would alert Christian apologists to places where the Hebrew text did not support the Septuagint. What happened was that the Hexapla supplemented the text of the Septuagint and provided a broader textual basis for scriptural interpretation: this may have been Origen’s purpose, for it is borne out by his exegetical practice in his commentaries and homilies. But it also enabled Origen and other scholars to correct the Septuagint against the Hebrew (where it was obscure, for instance), to supplement the Septuagint by the Hebrew where the latter was fuller and to alert the Christian scholar to places in the Septuagint where the Hebrew was lacking. Origen apparently used the marks of ancient scholarship, the obelus (÷) and the asterisk (*), to indicate passages unique to the Septuagint and those passages that had been added to the Septuagint from the Hebrew version.

This text—the Septuagint augmented by passages from the translations of the Hebrew, sometimes with the obeli and asterisks written in, sometimes with them omitted—came to circulate among Christians, especially from the fourth century onwards, when the expansion of the now tolerated Christian church led to the demand for copies of the Scriptures (e.g., the fifty copies of the Scriptures ordered from Eusebius of Caesarea by the emperor Constantine for use in churches; see Life of Constantine 4.36-37). Such acceptance of both the Hebrew and Septuagint versions of the Old Testament—with the Hebrew supplementing but not correcting the Greek Septuagint, by now traditional among Christians—became the norm among Christians. Augustine gave eloquent expression to this understanding of scriptural authority:

For the same Spirit that was in the prophets when they delivered those messages was present in person in the seventy men also; and he surely had it in his power to say something else, just as if the prophet had said both, because it was the same Spirit that said both . . . so as to show that the work was not accomplished by a man enslaved to a literal rule of thumb but by the power of God flooding and guiding the intelligence of the translator. . . . If, then, we see, as it behooves us to see, in these Scriptures no words that the Spirit of God did not speak through men, it follows that whatever is in the Hebrew text but not in that of the seventy translators is something that the Spirit of God did not choose to say through the latter, but only through the prophets. On the other hand, where anything that is in the Septuagint is not in the Hebrew text, the same Spirit must have preferred to say it through the former rather than through the prophets, thus showing that these as well as those were prophets. Likewise he spoke, as he pleased, some things through Isaiah, others through Jeremiah, still others through one or another prophet, or the same things but in different form through the latter prophet as well as the former. Moreover, anything that is found in both places is something that one and the same Spirit chose to say through both kinds of instruments, but in such wise that the one kind led the way in prophesying and the other came after with a prophetic translation of their words. For just as a single Spirit of peace inspired the former when they spoke true and concordant words, so the same Spirit manifested himself in the latter when without mutual consultation they nevertheless translated the whole as if with one mouth. (City of God 18.43)

Jerome and the Vulgate. Among the Greeks, this view held sway without any serious opposition. The only real dissent came in the West from Jerome,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note Regarding this Digital Edition
• General Introduction
• A Guide to Using This Commentary
• Abbreviations
• Introduction to Genesis 1-11
• Genesis 1-11
• Appendix - Early Christian Writers and the Documents Cited
• Biographical Sketches & Short Descriptions of Select Anonymous Works
• Timeline of Writers of the Patristic Period
• Bibliography
• Authors/Writings Index
• Notes
• Praise for the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture
• About the Editor
• Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright Page