I. GENESIS.

2.  The Hebrews name this book Bereshith, in the beginning, from the first word.  Its Greek name Genesis signifies generation, genealogy.  As the genealogical records with which the book abounds contain historical notices, and are, in truth, the earliest form of history, the word is applied to the history of the creation, and of the ancient patriarchs, as well as to the genealogical lists of their families.  Gen. 2:4; 25:19; 37:2 etc.  In the same wide sense is it applied to the book itself.

3.  Genesis is the introductory book to the Pentateuch, without which our understanding of the following books would be incomplete.  Let us suppose for a moment that we had not this book.  We open the book of Exodus and read of “the children of Israel which came into Egypt;” that “Joseph was in Egypt already,” and that “there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.”  Who were these children of Israel? we at once ask; and how did they come to be in Egypt?  Who was Joseph? and what is the meaning of the notice that the new king knew not Joseph?  All these particulars are explained in the book of Genesis, and without them we must remain in darkness.  But the connection of this book with the following is not simply explanatory; it is organic also, entering into the very substance of the Pentateuch.  We are told (Ex. 2:24, 25) that God heard the groaning of his people in Egypt, and “God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob; and God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them.”  The remembrance of his covenant with their fathers is specified as the ground of his interposition.  Now the covenant made with Abraham, and afterwards renewed to Isaac and Jacob, was not a mere incidental event in the history of the patriarchs and their posterity.  It constituted the very essence of God’s peculiar relation to Israel; and, as such, it was the platform on which the whole theocracy was afterwards erected.  The nation received the law at Sinai in pursuance of the original covenant made with their fathers; and unless we understand the nature of this covenant, we fail to understand the meaning and end of the law itself.  The very information which we need is contained in Genesis; for from the twelfth chapter onward this book is occupied with an account of this covenant, and of God’s dealings with the patriarchs in connection with it.  The story of Joseph, which unites such perfect simplicity with such deep pathos, is not thrown in as a pleasing episode.  Its end is to show how God accomplished his purpose, long before announced to Abraham (ch. 15:13), that the Israelites should be “a stranger in a land not theirs.”