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Bible Dictionaries
Genesis
People's Dictionary of the Bible
or Genesis (jĕn'e-sĭs). The first book of the Bible. The term signifies "beginning" or "origin." Genesis gives us a history of the origin of the world, of the human family, of sin, of the promise of redemption, and of the Jewish people. The first eleven chapters describe the creation of things, the history of Adam, the deluge, and the confusion of tongues at Babel. With the twelfth chapter begins the history of the patriarchs and Israel. There are no good grounds for doubting that Moses was the author. With the use of older documents and traditions, he compiled, under divine direction, the history as we have it. The order of created things in Genesis is substantially the order of geology and biology. Both begin with the formation of the earth and proceed from the vegetable to animal life; both stop with man. The word translated "day" probably means an indefinite period. The "seventh day," which has no evening, Chron. 2:2, cannot refer to a day of 24 hours, but to the long redemptive period in which we are living. Few if any existing documents have a more venerable age than has Genesis. Covering nearly 2500 years, it gives us the account of the preparation of this planet as an abode for man and the first annals of the race. Its value cannot be overestimated as a fragment of literature or as a work of history, and it has been well observed that in the first page of Genesis a child may learn more in an hour than all the philosophers in the world learned without it in a thousand years.—Schaff.
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Rice, Edwin Wilbur, DD. Entry for 'Genesis'. People's Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/rpd/g/genesis.html. 1893.
