Who Wrote the Book of Genesis?

 And where was the Garden of Eden? Was there a UFO connection?

 

Image from Adobe Stock.

Scriptures are pasted from biblegateway.com, NKJV.

This post will make a lot more sense to people who have at least a smattering of Bible knowledge, especially a familiarity with the book of Genesis.

WHEN

For decades of my Christian existence, I thought it was a given that Moses wrote the five books of the Torah, Genesis through Deuteronomy. In the Christian Bible, the Torah is usually called the five books of Moses. My Lutheran Bible tells me that Martin Luther never doubted that Moses wrote Genesis, and the modern study notes state clearly that Moses wrote the book. That surprises me because Genesis itself makes no pretense that he wrote it, but rather tells us that it was written well after Israel replaced the Canaanites in the land. Moses never made it to Canaan so he couldn’t have testified to the Conquest.

It’s almost as if I had to throw off my own literalist approach to Genesis before my brain gave my eyeballs permission to see the following passages:

Gen. 7:2:  “You shall take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female; two each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female.”

There are 2 Noah documents woven together, one where they take two of every kind and one where they take seven in order to offer one as a sacrifice. If Noah and the Flood occurred literally and historically even before the birth of Abraham, let alone Moses, who came much later, why is there mention of clean vs. unclean animals, which is a concept straight out of the Mosaic law? The passage is clearly an anachronism, an event combining two incompatible eras.

Gen. 12:6:  “Then Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people whom they had acquired in Haran, and they departed to go to the land of Canaan. So they came to the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh. And the Canaanites were then in the land.”

Gen. 13:7:  “And there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock. The Canaanites and the Perizzites then dwelt in the land.”

Gen. 36:31:  “Now these were the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the children of Israel.”

Deut. 2:12:  “The Horites formerly dwelt in Seir, but the descendants of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them from before them, and dwelt in their place, just as Israel did to the land of their possession which the Lord gave them.”

Israel had no king in the wilderness. Only after a long stay in the Promised Land did the people became a state with kings and an army.

The Hebrew of Deuteronomy 1:1 and 5 relates that Moses gave the second reading of the Law on the “east side” (NKJV reads “this” side) of the Jordan. That suggests that the narrative was written from the west side, the side that they possessed after Moses died. Even Deuteronomy was written after the Israelites possessed the land, became a state, and had kings to rule over them. Nor could Moses have described his own death at the end of the book. The scribe/s who wrote Genesis never anticipated that a vast portion of the readers of the book would ascribe authorship of Genesis to Moses.

Gen. 10:11:  “From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah—which is the great city.”

Jonah 1:2:  “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

Most academics attribute “the great city” as Nineveh. I admit, this “proof” is rather thin. In the Hebrew, “Nineveh, the great city,” is the same in both Genesis and Jonah. And of course, Jonah comes from the era of “kings in Israel.”

So, that’s when. It was probably late enough to be past the building of Solomon’s Temple (the united monarchy), past the split between Judah and Northern Israel (the divided monarchy), but perhaps before Nineveh was sacked by the Medes (612 BCE) or before the Babylonians torched the Judean Temple in 586 BCE.

WHO

To understand who wrote Genesis, we need to carefully inspect Genesis 1—11, especially the descriptions of Mesopotamia and the Garden of Eden. There’s no debate that the author of Gen. 1—11 is referring to ancient Mesopotamia in chapter 2. Two mighty rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, and several well-known ancient cities are referenced, as is the generally accepted movement of civilization and empires from Sumer in the south near the Persian Gulf, then northwest to Babylon, then even further northwest on the Tigris to Assyria. When Genesis was written, Nineveh and the neighboring cities in the north were already great walled cities with temples, palaces, and archives. Academia’s best guess as to who Nimrod was is Sargon the Great, who ruled his vast empire in the mid-third millennium, (c. 2500), so the Assyrian Empire was probably well established in dominance. My resource book tells me that Shinar is not just Sumer, but encompassed the Babylonian-Akkadian complex of cities.

Gen. 2:8:  “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed."

Eden was the flat plain where the rivers of Mesopotamia flowed from northwestern and northern mountains toward the Persian Gulf. Eden was in the east. The garden wasn’t Eden, it was in Eden. One of the great rivers of Eden also flowed through the garden. It may not have been one of the four mentioned because there were many channels, long dried up and buried now, in the southeast as the rivers of Sumer neared the sea (the Persian Gulf). Another thing to consider is that due to global weather changes, the head of these rivers may be under water at this time, and the garden location in the mind of the Genesis author may also be inaccessible.

Eden was east, but east of what? I suggest that the author is writing from the west, upper Mesopotamia, possibly “Nineveh, the great city.” The reason I believe the author/s were there is that he/they clearly had access to an archive full of ancient Mesopotamian literature…creation accounts, Flood accounts, wars between the gods, descriptions of the Underworld, and warnings about taking bribes, written in Sumerian, Babylonian, Hittite, Eblaite, or Akkadian, inscribed into soft clay with a stylus.

The first Flood account was a Sumerian tablet about a round boat made by weaving reeds. There was a Babylonian and Akkadian version as well, all written in cuneiform long before an Israelite existed on the earth. A scholarly examination will show overlapping themes and words tying all the narratives together. The gods and heroes are different in all, as are the motives as to why the gods flooded the earth, but it’s clear, to scholars at least, that each narrative was inspired in some way by the previous, and that includes Noah and the ark.

It would have to be a priest, or a committee of same, or a prophet, impelled by the Spirit of God, that wrote the inspired accounts. Automatic spirit writing is fairly common in New Age religion, so it’s not hard for me to believe that the Holy Spirit could reveal these stories supernaturally. But they didn’t appear on paper without a human pen or stylus, and academics can perceive the clear editing process, so it’s not crazy or irreligious to follow the clues as to who wrote the Scriptures and when.

So, why would a Hebrew priest be rooting through the hard clay tablets of a Nineveh archive? My best guess is that they were prisoners there. The Assyrians conquered Northern Israel in 721 BCE and took thousands of prisoners. Nineveh wouldn’t be sacked for another century. The Assyrians closed the door to any future return by filling the northern Israelite inheritance with foreigners, so the scribes, priests, and prophets had lots of time to think about their estate and their national identity.

WHY

Genesis was written to preserve the oral and written heritage of the Israelite people. Their king was dead, their statehood gone forever. The people were a permanent diaspora and would be exposed year after year to a different culture with different gods and religions. Because the temples were all to Mesopotamian gods and goddesses and the local literature would compete with and challenge the Israelite way of thinking, it was critical for the priests to continue the process of Hebrew literature that began with Moses. A written story would preserve their ethnic identity and would codify their beliefs. So, the Noah and ark story may have been a spinoff from former tales, but it pointed to sin and violence as the motive. Gen. 1—11 explained that the Hebrew God was the Creator, that he hated violence, that he had a better plan for mankind than dark occult religions, cruelty, murder, dominance, and butchery. If any of these early Genesis narratives are not historically true, they are still true in the sense of passing on an inspired, sacred message to mankind. And folks, there was no science in the author’s day. Looking for science in the book of Genesis is a waste of time, and you’ll miss the author’s whole point.

IS THERE A UFO CONNECTION?

There are two connections in Gen. 1—11 that are known in the UFO community and a third that I may have just discovered.

The serpent in the garden is often depicted as hanging from a tree branch. But wait, this “snake” spoke fluent Hebrew and knew enough theology to challenge the command of Yahweh. It understood the power of insinuation to manipulate information. When it was cursed, it was silenced and condemned to crawl on its belly. It’s a bit confusing because we’re transitioning from a sentient interdimensional, immortal entity that opposes the Creator to a slithery reptile that swallows its prey whole. The idea is debasement. At Satan’s end, he will be no more influential than the earthly reptiles. Abductees are very familiar with “aliens” that look like reptiles. They are called “reptilians,” and they are not nice. They seem to be at the top of the entity food chain. At this time, they have inflicted immense damage on their human prey, and they can be as deceptive as the serpent of Eden.

Another common connection is Gen. 6:1-4: When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

When I attended a conservative Bible College in the 1990’s, we were told that these bene elohim, “sons of God,” were the human children of Cain. After all, cats have kittens and dogs have puppies. These are not interdimensional entities, he insisted. But our instructor was looking at the passage through the eyes of modern science. Invisible, interdimensional beings were a part of everyday life for ancient civilizations. It was the instructor’s unwillingness to believe that humans and evil entities could provide hybrid offspring, and his firm belief that every word of Genesis was divinely inspired caused him to deny that the bene elohim could be interdimensional rogue angels. Whatever you, as the reader of this post, believe about the topic, the UFO community has been hearing about hybrid entity-human offspring for decades now.

The third possible connection is Gen. 3:24: “So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

I’ve always wondered about those cherubim which sound very weird and mechanical. What kind of sword would go every which way, and what kind of angels would have such a weapon? I may have found the answer in a book about USO’s, unidentified submerged objects. Lights in the waters of lakes and oceans are as commonly known in the UFO community as are lights in the sky. In the ancient world, there were two sources of light, fire and the sun, moon, and stars. East is once again mentioned in the Scripture passage. East in the garden. Why mention east? What would it matter where the angels stationed themselves?

The further east one goes, the closer to the Persian Gulf. So the garden was in Eden, which was in the east, and the angels are at the east border of the garden. That part of Eden may well be underwater now, and may have been at the writing of Genesis. The same lore that spoke of hybrid humans may have included USO’s. In his book A History of USOs: Unidentified Submerged Objects: Volume 1: From the Beginning to 1969, Richard Dolan lists reports from all over the globe as related in every possible source. Many of the reports from the late 1800’s to the early turn of the century report “pinwheel” type lights that track ships and can be quite huge. Captains’ logs describe “beams of light” that revolve around a center. What if that is what the ancient mariners saw and reported to their communities? Surely the source of light would be a chariot of the gods to ancient sailors, and the beam of light would be impossible to describe other than a deadly sword of some kind.

When one considers what utter nonsense the author/s of Genesis could have produced, what they wrote makes an astonishing lot of sense to our modern world, both in the paranormal sense and in the ethical lessons they sanction.

This essay can also be seen at https://theologylighthouse.substack.com/p/who-wrote-the-book-of-genesis and at https://medium.com/@janetkatherineapplebysmith/who-wrote-the-book-of-genesis-7a10bc620d1d