Week 1 Genesis 1-11
The first eleven chapters of Genesis are a block of introductory material that precedes the Main Event of the OT – Abraham & His Family.
There are 299-verses and I broke the section down into two types of content: a) short stories (~200-verses) and b) name lists (~100-verses) – a ratio of roughly 2:1.
The five short stories are the most interesting parts to read. The little story-poem of the murderous Lamech is the shortest & easiest one to pass over. Not so much the stories of Cain & Abel or the Tower of Babel. But it’s really the Creation of the World and Noah & the Flood that are the Big Stories. They make up almost 60% of the first 11-chapters.
(Thinking about those two Big Stories I wonder how the writer got away with mashing them into 177-verses. Both are gigantic events.)
I wish the Story of Creation was a bit longer – wish it had more detail & used more precise language. But it answers a huge and basic question: where did we-all come from?
Noah & the Flood also raises a huge and important question for me: why did the original creation need to be (almost) completely destroyed? I know that people had gotten to be as bad as they could possibly be. But blowing up the whole project? What-all factors played into that?
Anyway in chapter-twelve the Lord took a decisive step to start a new program. He began with Abraham. Genesis 12 is chapter one of the Abraham- Israel OT story.