Thoughts about Genesis

The reason Genesis launches into a full on rant about who was related to who, who gave birth to who, is simple: a requirement for Jewish people to be considered Jewish is that they had to be able to state their lineage very far back. The Bible could have been a type of record for the jews so that they could remember who their great-great-great-great-great grandfather was easily. Of course, they still had to memorize it, but this made it way easier for them to do so. Without the standing record, the Jewish might forget and no longer be considered Jewish!

Another reason The Bible goes into such detail on ancestry is that it gave us an accurate representation of time. People who studied the Bible looked at all the people, added their years together and slapped them into 4000 years before Jesus was born (a drastic oversimplification, but fair). Without the extensive list of names, we wouldn’t have the year 2023, we’d have the year 122345566.(A completely random number, I just used it to make a point). Without the detail given in the Old Testament, we would have not known who Abraham’s father was, or Moses’ mother was, or the basic explanation of who was this guy’s parents. The long list of names and ancestry in the old testament may be painful to read, but without them a lot of questions would have gone unanswered and a lot of Jewish would have lost their heritage (which was an unbelievably big part of a Jewish person’s life).