Week 1 Genesis 1-24
Sometimes obvious things aren’t obvious until they are.
A while ago someone tipped me off to something obvious about the family name lists in Genesis. It went like this: right now you think of them as an annoying nuisance, correct? Mm-hmm, I admitted. You ever think about them as the structural key to the whole book? Not exactly, I realized. So that was a bit of a mental jump for me.
It turns things around when I think that if, when the author uses the expression ‘this is the history of’ and then gives a list of names, and does that nine times through the book, using up about 180 of his 1533 verses, taking up roughly 12% of the book, and being a smart enough author to know that reading a list of names is not as intriguing as the story of Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, then maybe he is saying something like I’m tracing this bloodline of Adam, Noah, Shem, Terah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because this family line is an important one.
Note: the formula phrase ‘this is the history of’ is used in Genesis 5:1 6:9 10:1 11:10 11:27 25:12 25:19 36:1 and 37:2