How to Read Book of Genesis

These tools I am going to give you will help you to learn and to appreciate so much more than a surface reading of the book of Genesis.  These same tools can be used for a deeper understanding of just about every book of the Bible.

BE PATIENT

One of the first and most obvious issues most people face in reading the book of Genesis is impatience.

A guy will read the book of Genesis and find little or nothing to relate to, so he moves on.  Someone else likes stories, and so she likes the drama, but finds all the incest and violence strange.

I like to compare reading Genesis to a gold miner who works in his own mine.  There is a lot of gold in the mine, but most of it can only be found through time and work  The miner can settle for the pieces that are easy to reach, and most do.  But with patience and the right tools the miner can and will find the mother load.

There is a lot to be discovered in Genesis, but to find the best material, you need to be patient and dig in.

CONNECT THE DOTS

Like much of the Bible, Genesis is best understood by connecting episodes.  There are many episodes/stories in the book of Genesis that seem to have little to do with the ones following or the ones that went before, but in reality these are connected very much to each other.

Let me illustrate this.  In Creation and several times later in the early chapters of Genesis God blesses people and tells them to go out and to multiply.  Then to avoid in  chapter eleven a group of people band together to avoid spreading out.  The connections between all of these stories become obvious.   God says spread out and man says "Let us build a tower so that we don't spread out."

Another connection that is lost to even some of the best of scholars is the connection between the tower of Babel and the call of Abraham.  The people of Babel wanted a name for themselves, they wanted to avoid spreading out, and they wanted to reach the heavens.  One chapter later, heaven reached down to Abraham and God told Abraham that if he went out (as the blessings mentioned above) God would make a name for Abraham.  All the things that the people of Babel wanted, God gave to Abraham.

Another way to put this is with the word "context."  Any Bible School worth its weight will tell the students to find the context for any verse.  The same is just as true for story sections in the Bible.  Every time you read a story section, you should ask what story went before it and what story goes after.  Look into the stories before and after and see if there is anything that connects.  Like a gold mine, dig in and find what can be extracted.

STEP INTO DIFFERENT SHOES

Most people make sense.  When someone doesn't make sense, chances are, you are not digging deep enough into his/her story.  Once you dig into someone's story you will begin to understand who they are and why they do what they do.  This does not mean that everyone is right in what they do, it just means that you will understand better why they do the things they do.

This is true in real life as it is true in the Bible.  Step into the shoes of Bible characters and you will begin to understand them in new ways.  Certain characters jump out from the pages of the Bible such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and most readers gravitate toward them in order to   But there were a lot of other people in Genesis who help make the entire book come alive. 

Step into the shoes of Sarah to understand this point.  Reread the every passage that mentions Sarah and put yourself in her world - put yourself in her shoes and ask a lot of questions such as who are the others in my life?  What are they doing?  Why are they acting like they are?  Why are you doing what you do?  And on and on.  Eventually, you will find that her life makes sense and it won't make sense in the way you expected, because when you dig into the world of Sarah, you will discover a very unhappy woman on many levels.  And...you will know some of the reasons why she was unhappy.

Step into the shoes of Hagar who was Sarah's maid and ask yourself what life was like from her point of view. 

Stepping into the shoes of each character is one of the most powerful ways to dig into the mysteries of the book of Genesis.

CHANGE YOUR GLASSES

Perhaps the biggest hindrance in discovering what Genesis wants to say is that we all have preconceived notions and opinions about the book and about the people in the book.

Our notions and opinions about Genesis are created and designed by movies we see, preachers we hear and Sunday School teachers who taught us a surface view of each episode in Genesis that is filled with 21st Century assumptions about people and about heroes of the faith.

While these modern interpretations give us a glimpse into the events as they unfolded, they do not dig very deeply into the stories.  Much of the humanity of each character in Genesis is lost and buried.  Their humanity is covered up by our assumptions about people chosen by God, by our own values that we read into the characters and into their times, and by our opinions that we believe are God's own.  In other words, we view Genesis through our own glasses.

In order to understand Genesis at its core, you must be willing to let your glasses change from time to time.  You must be willing to see that some of your heroes were not always so heroic.  You must be willing to see that the fathers of our faith were not above being human.

As I was talking about one of the characters in the book of Genesis, one of my students voiced her opinion that God would never use someone who was so less than perfect.  She had the belief that heroes of the Bible lived a level of life that humans have never nor could ever live.  She believed that the Fathers of our faith were holy, chosen by God and above reproach in every way.  Now I would agree that the Fathers were holy and chosen by God; but they were not above reproach - and quite honestly, they were very human in every way.  My student did not see things that way.  The glasses she wore told her that saints lived in a special world, untouched by real temptations and unscathed by failure.

Many 21st Century interpreters of the Bible know that we need to take off their proverbial glasses in order to understand the Bible better; but the truth is, we are never without glasses.  At best, we can change our proverbial glasses from time to time to better understand the Bible.

If you want to better understand the book of Genesis (or any other book in the Bible), don't be afraid to change your proverbial glasses to see what the book is really saying. 

To put it all quite simply, let the stories of Genesis say what they were meant to say.