How do you summarise the first and greatest of the books of the Torah? Let’s put it into the following portions: (i) the Creation and the early prehistory, (ii) the story of Abraham, and (iii) the son of Israel and the heads of the tribes
The most significant theme of the first three or four chapters is that God created all things in six ‘days’ as a setting and environment for a genus of creatures to whom He granted His own image: an intellect and a will by which they would govern the Creation around them as an extension of God’s own government of all things, in a joint exercise of love, intellect and will. The primordial garden is a Creation in union with the Holy One, contrasted with the darkness beyond, and the gardener creature Adam was charged with both the upkeep of the Garden (naming the creatures) and and the defence of it from the evil beyond. This is why the Garden is always there, and as Christ once said to his interlocutors: the kingdom of God (the Garden) is all around you. At a crucial point, Adam is given Eve as a helper in this task.
“So the Lord God took the man and put him in His garden of delight, to cultivate and tend it. And this was the command which the Lord God gave the man, ‘Thou mayest eat thy fill of all the trees in the garden except the tree which brings knowledge of good and evil; if ever thou eatest of this, thy doom is death.’ But the Lord God said, ‘It is not well that man should be without companionship; I will give him a mate of his own kind.’ And now, from the clay of the ground, all the beasts that roam the earth and all that flies through the air were ready fashioned, and the Lord God brought them to Adam, to see what he would call them; the name Adam gave to each living creature is its name still. Thus Adam gave names to all the cattle, and all that flies in the air, and all the wild beasts; and still Adam had no mate of his own kind. So the Lord God made Adam fall into a deep sleep, and, while he slept, took away one of his ribs, and filled its place with flesh. This rib, which he had taken out of Adam, the Lord God formed into a woman; and when he brought her to Adam, Adam said, ‘Here, at last, is bone that comes from mine, flesh that comes from mine; it shall be called Woman, this thing that was taken out of Man.'”
Genesis, 2: 15-23
But we know the sad story of their fall. At first, the defence of the garden fails and the enemy enters in the form of the serpent. For some reason, it is the woman who becomes the focus of the serpent’s plan and is convinced that the forbidden fruit will bring her and Adam not death but the knowledge that will make them gods, capable of independence from the Holy One. Following this original sin of pride, the source of eternal life is shut away from humanity, and is only opened again through Christ, in the last chapter of the book of Apocalypse/Revelation. For men cannot be permitted to live forever in a state of sin and separation from God – He will not allow us to be destroyed utterly.
“And now the Lord provided garments for Adam and his wife, made out of skins, to clothe them. He said, too, ‘Here is Adam become like one of ourselves, with knowledge of good and evil; now he has only to lift his hand and gather fruit to eat from the tree of life as well, and he will live endlessly.’ So the Lord God drove him out from that garden of delight, to cultivate the ground from which he came; banished Adam, and posted His Cherubim before the garden of delight, with a sword of fire that turned this way and that, so that he could reach the tree of life no longer.”
Genesis, 3: 21-24
We see in the following story of the fratricide, when the priest Abel’s sacrifice was accepted by God and his brother Cayin in jealousy slays him, the ongoing effect of the separation of humanity from God, and the cry of the Creation that fell with mankind into death and decay and here is forced to swallow the blood of the first wilful murder. As the story continues, we find that the depravity of mankind has grown, and even worsened by the continual involvement of demonic figures (sons of God, or fallen angels), who after that serpent in the garden took the form of monsters and brought forth children by human mothers. This intolerable situation of perversion of the original Creation became the reason first for a diminution of the lifetime of human beings and then for the Flood.
“Time passed, and the race of men began to spread over the face of earth, they and the daughters that were born to them. And now the sons of God saw how beautiful were these daughters of men, and took them as wives, choosing where they would. But God said, ‘This spirit of mine shall not endure in man for ever, he is but mortal clay; his life-time shall be a hundred and twenty years.’ Giants lived on the earth in those days, when first the sons of God mated with the daughters of men, and by them had children; these were the heroes whose fame has come down to us from long ago. And now God found that earth was full of men’s iniquities, and that the whole frame of their thought was set continually on evil; and He repented of having made men on the earth at all. So, smitten with grief to the depths of His heart, He said, ‘I will blot out mankind, my creature, from the face of the earth, and with mankind all the beasts and the creeping things and all that flies through the air; I repent of having made them.'”
Genesis, 6: 1-7
But the story of salvation continued. Long ago, God had told Adam and Eve that the son of a human mother would crush the head of the serpent and destroy his pride. And in the midst of boundless sin and destruction, Noach and his family appear as faithful and devout. They survive the flood, and Noach receives the first covenant-agreement from God.
“God said to Noe, and to Noe’s sons: ‘Here is a covenant I will observe with you and with your children after you, and with all living creatures, your companions, the birds and the beasts of burden and the cattle that came out of the Ark with you, and the wild beasts besides. Never more will the living creation be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again a flood to devastate the world. This,’ God said, ‘shall be the pledge of the promise I am making to you, and to all living creatures, your companions, eternally; I will set My bow in the clouds, to be a pledge of My covenant with creation. When I veil the sky with clouds, in those clouds My bow shall appear, to remind me of My promise to you, and to all the life that quickens mortal things; never shall the waters rise in flood again, and destroy all living creatures. There, in the clouds, My bow shall stand, and as I look upon it, I will remember this eternal covenant; God’s covenant with all the life that beats in mortal creatures upon earth.’ Such was the pledge God gave to Noe of His promise to all living things.”
Genesis, 9: 8-17
In a long line through Noach’s son Shem, whose family gives us the name Shemites/semites, we find the patriarch of the Hebrews, Abram, a man who is able to place great faith and trust in the Holy One. This allows him to put one foot in the primordial garden of Eden, recovering the original faith of Adam and beginning the reliance upon God that would bless his family and eventually bring from it Miryam, the mother in the flesh of the Holy One, through Whom all the tribes of mankind would be permitted to re-enter into Eden and recover the original purpose for Creation. To provide for this extraordinary plan, Abram is given the Land where his people would be established in the future. Abram is a priest, and he builds an altar to the Promise:
“When Abram had parted from Lot, the Lord said to him, ‘Look about thee, turn thy eyes from where thou art to north and south, to east and west. All the land thou seest I make over to thee, and to thy posterity for ever. And to that posterity I will grant increase, till it lies like dust on the ground, past all counting. Up, then, and journey through the land at thy ease, the length and breadth of it; to thee I will give it.’ So Abram moved his tent, and went to live by the valley of Mambre, at Hebron, and there he built an altar to the Lord.”
Genesis, 13: 14-18
You may have heard it said that the Old Testament is the story of Israel’s ongoing struggle against polytheism and idolatry, and that it was mostly a struggle with self. Because polytheism was the way of men everywhere in ancient times, even as it very much is today and increasingly so. It was a tendency of the chosen People to copy the culture they found themselves surrounded by and re-assume the idolatry that their ancestors had rejected. I believe this was the reason for the several tests of Abram, before the great promises of the Land were made to him in the second great covenant.
“So Abram put his faith in God, and it was reckoned virtue in him. And now God said to him, ‘I AM the Lord, who brought thee out from Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee possession of this land instead.’ And when he asked, ‘Lord God, what assurance may I have, that it is mine?’ the Lord answered, ‘Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, and a three-year-old ram, and a turtle-dove, and a pigeon.’ All these he brought to him, and cut them in half, laying the two halves of each on opposite sides, except the dove and the pigeon; he did not divide these. The whole day long Abram stood there, driving away the carrion-birds as they swooped down on the carcases; but when the sun set, deep sleep fell upon him, and in the darkness a great dread assailed him. So a voice came to him, ‘This thou must know, that thy race will live as strangers in a land not their own, reduced to slavery and ill-used for four hundred years. But I am there to pass judgement on the nation which enslaves them; and when this is done, they shall come back rich in possessions. For thyself, thou shalt be buried with thy fathers, grown old in comfort; but the fourth generation will have come before these return hither; the wickedness of the Amorrhites has not reached its full term.’ So the sun went down, and when the darkness of night came on, a smoking furnace was seen, a torch of fire that passed between the pieces of flesh. And the Lord, that day, made a covenant with Abram; ‘I will grant this land, he told him, to thy posterity, with its borders reaching up to the river of Egypt, and the great river Euphrates; the land of the Cinites, and the Cenezites, and the Cedmonites, the Hethites and the Pherezites, the Raphaim, too, and the Amorrhites, and the Chanaanites, and the Gergesites, and the Jebusites.'”
Genesis, 15: 6-21
This promise of Land was followed by one of great posterity so that the Holy One made a play on Abram’s name, calling him Ab-raham, or Father-of-many (chapter 17). But the threat of polytheism and idolatry lay continually about, and in the book of Genesis itself, we find that Abraham was taught devotion to the one God gradually, in the course of all those stories about him that we know so well: the gift of Isaac, and the almost-sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham wished to preserve his son from the pollution of idolatry in the Holy Land and sent to Haran in Mesopotamia, to find a wife among his own clan, where the true God was worshipped (although, as one among others). Then, later on, Isaac is called to obedience of the God of his father Abraham, as if asked to choose this Deity over others he was probably surrounded with and attracted to. In fact, he is favoured as a result of Abraham’s devotion, rather than his own:
“From there he went to Bersabee; and here, the same night, he had a vision of the Lord, who said to him, ‘I am the God of thy father Abraham; fear nothing, I am with thee. I mean to bless thee, and give increase to thy posterity, in reward of Abraham’s true service.’ So he built an altar, and invoked the Lord’s name, and pitched his tent there, and bade his servants dig a well.”
Genesis, 26: 23-25
And when it came to Isaac’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau, we find the old problem of infidelity to the God of Abraham, for Esau (to his parents’ displeasure) married outside religion and so risked and endangered the blessing of God on the children of Abraham. Isaac’s reaction was to send Jacob off to find a wife in Mesopotamia, once more. When Jacob had the vision of the staircase going to Heaven, he was in flight from his brother Esau (who meant to kill him), and he renamed the place he was at (Luza) as Beth-El (literally, the house of God), and promised God to be faithful only to Him if He were to protect him from Esau’s rage:
“When he awoke from his dream, Jacob said to himself, ‘Why, this is the Lord’s dwelling-place, and I slept here unaware of it!’ And he shuddered; ‘What a fearsome place is this!’ said he. ‘This can be nothing other than the house of God; this is the gate of Heaven.’ So it was that, when he rose in the morning, Jacob took the stone which had been his pillow, and set it up there as a monument, and poured oil upon it; and he called the place Bethel, the House of God, that was called Luza till then. And there he took a vow; ‘If God will be with me,’ he said, ‘and watch over me on this journey of mine, and give me bread to eat and clothes to cover my back, till at last I return safe to my father’s house, then the Lord shall be my God.’“
Genesis, 28: 16-21
Through tribulation therefore, the ancient patriarchs were led towards devotion to the one God. Later, in chapter 31, we discover that Jacob’s uncle Laban, whose daughters he had married, was himself either a polytheist or a syncretist, for when Jacob travelled back to the Holy Land from Mesopotamia, his wife Rachel smuggled away some of her father’s household gods:
“Upon this, Jacob waited no longer; he mounted his children and wives on the camels, and set out on his journey; taking with him all his possessions, his cattle and all the wealth he had gained in Mesopotamia; he would return to his father Isaac, and the land of Chanaan. Meanwhile, in the absence of her father Laban, who had gone to shear his sheep, Rachel stole his household gods from him. Jacob had given his father-in-law no warning of his flight, and it was not till he and all that belonged to him had gone away, and crossed the Euphrates, and were making for the hills of Galaad, that a message came to Laban, three days too late, Jacob has fled.”
Genesis, 31: 17-22
And then we arrive at the point at which Jacob (now renamed Israel by God) decided to permanently consecrate not only himself but his entire family to the one God at Bethel. The rest of the Old Testament is the story of Jacob’s children falling away from and reconciling themselves to the one God, and that’s one reason for the importance of the story of our Hebrew ancestors in the Faith: we have the same human inclinations to turn away from God, and we must repeatedly turn back towards Him. The picture below is the foundation story for Bethel (the end of Genesis 28).
“In the meanwhile, too, God had said to Jacob, ‘Bestir thyself, go up to Bethel, and make thy dwelling there; there build an altar to the God who revealed himself to thee when thou wast in flight from thy brother Esau.’ Whereupon Jacob summoned all his household; ‘Cast away, he told them, whatever images of alien gods you have among you, purify yourselves, and put on fresh garments. We must leave this, and go up to Bethel; there we must build an altar to the God who listened to me in time of trouble, and escorted me on my journey.’ So they gave him all the images of alien gods that were in their possession, the rings, too, which they wore on their ears, and he buried them under the mastic-tree, close to the town of Sichem. Thus they set out on their journey, and God inspired terror into the hearts of all who dwelt around them, so that they durst not pursue them as they went. Jacob, then, with all his clan, made their way to Luza, which is now called Bethel, and built an altar there. It was he who called the place Bethel, the house of God, because it was there God appeared to him when he was in flight from his brother.”
Genesis, 35: 1-7
So Jacob, the grandson of the faithful Abraham, grew in prosperity as a result of the blessing he inherited from Abraham, and brought his whole family to a high degree of monotheism. From now on in the books, only the Hebrew God is referred to, by Jacob and by Joseph his son. Pious Jews and Catholics refuse to pronounce the ancient name of God, which simply means to be, or I am, and when pronounced in Hebrew sounds like the wind in the trees (the breath of God?). Jews simply replace the Holy Name as they read with Adonai, which means my Lord; a similar use is also found in good Catholic bibles.
The book of Genesis ends with the Joseph story, where we discover the wickedness of Jacob’s sons, and in particular the first three, Ruben, Simeon and Levi. Ruben had had incestuous relations with one of his father’s wives, Bala, and Simeon and Levi had led a genocide on a people called the Hevites, and brought dishonour to the family. Lastly, the whole lot of them had managed to sell their half-brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt and convinced the old man that he had been killed in the wild. Joseph, who inherited the priesthood of Abraham and was finally granted the birthright forfeited by his eldest brothers by his father, is rescued from slavery and becomes a prince of Egypt. His sons Manasseh and Ephraim become the heads of the most prosperous of the twelve tribes of Israel in later days.
“In these years before the famine came, Joseph’s wife Aseneth, daughter of Putiphare that was priest at Heliopolis, bore him two sons. He called his first-born Manasses, Oblivion; God has bidden me forget all my troubles, said he, forget my home. The second he called Ephraim, as if he would say of God, Hiphrani, he has made me fruitful, in this land where I was once so poor. So the first seven years passed, years of plenty for Egypt; and now, as Joseph had prophesied, seven years of scarcity began; famine reigned all over the world, but everywhere in Egypt there was bread to be had. When food grew scarce, there was ever a cry made to Pharao for bread, and still he would answer, ‘Betake yourselves to Joseph, do what he bids you.’“
Genesis, 41: 50-55
The book of Genesis ends with blessings for all the sons but those first three. And the blessing on the fourth son, Judah, is memorable, and this is later very important to the claim of King David to the kingship of all Israel (for David was of the tribe of Judah), and is also central to the Messiah’s claim to kingship of all nations (and all things), as David’s son. Here is the blessing on Judah:
“But thou, Juda, shalt win the praise of thy brethren; with thy hand on the necks of thy enemies, thou shalt be reverenced by thy own father’s sons. Juda is like a lion’s whelp; on the hills, my son, thou roamest after thy prey; like a lion couched in his lair, a lioness that none dares provoke. Juda shall not want a branch from his stem, a prince drawn from his stock, until the day when He comes who is to be sent to us, He, the Hope of the nations. To what tree will he tie his mount; the ass he rides on? The vine for him, the vineyard for him; when he washes his garments, it shall be in wine, all his vesture shall be dyed with the blood of grapes. Fairer than wine his eyes shall be, his teeth whiter than milk.”
Genesis, 49: 8-12
Similar language was later used by King David, when he composed the famous Messianic psalm, Psalm 109 (110), which the priests and Religious recite every Sunday evening at Evening Prayer:
To the Master I serve the Lord’s promise was given, Sit here at my right hand while I make thy enemies a footstool under thy feet. The Lord will make thy empire spring up like a branch out of Sion; thou art to bear rule in the midst of thy enemies. From birth, princely state shall be thine, holy and glorious; thou art my son, born like dew before the day-star rises. The Lord has sworn an oath there is no retracting, Thou art a priest for ever in the line of Melchisedech.”
Psalm 109 (110): 1-4
And Christ Himself quotes this psalm in his famous defence to the Pharisees:
“Then, while the Pharisees were still gathered about Him, Jesus asked them: ‘What is your opinion concerning Christ? Whose son is he to be?’ They told Him, ‘David’s.’ ‘How is it then,’ said He, ‘that David is moved by the Spirit to call him Master, when he says: The Lord said to my Master, Sit on my right hand while I make thy enemies a footstool under thy feet? David calls Christ his Master; how can he be also his son?‘ None could find a word to say in answer to Him, nor did anyone dare, after that day, to try Him with further questions.”
Gospel of S. Matthew, 22: 41-46
Reading the book of Genesis is always easy, because the language used is so simple, and the narrative style is story-telling. The book of Exodus is very similar. I would start to worry when I get to Leviticus, the priestly book; the liturgical detail there is extremely detailed. The picture below is of the patriarch Jacob blessing his grandsons by Joseph, shown on the right. Joseph tried to present them by putting the older boy Manasses on Jacob’s right, so he would get the blessing of the first-born. But Jacob crossed his arms over and gave his right-hand blessing to the younger boy, Ephraim, from whom would come the greatest of the tribes of Israel in her heyday.
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 