The Book of generations is an hypothesized text that the modern documentary hypothesis claims was used by the redactor of the torah to connect up parts of the priestly source and the JE source. The text is no longer extant, but in the hypothesis, portions of the text survive as part of the torah. In particular, the text is believed to be fragmented across several portions of the text, since it was used as a filler for several joins. It was Frank Moore Cross who first demonstrated that the text was separate to the other sources, which are substantially larger in comparison.
The standard reconstructed version of the text, formed by collecting together the various fragments, indicates that its presence is usually announced in the torah by the words "and these are the generations of ". The text itself appears to be a basic genealogy of the main ancestors of the Israelites, putting emphasis on the main line that leads from Adam, to Noah, then to Abraham, Jacob, and to Moses. However, there also appear to be a few asides to detail significant lines apart from this, such as that concerning Edom.
Read more about Book Of Generations: Variations On A Theme, The Book of Generations As A Template
Famous quotes containing the words book of, book and/or generations:
“And she straiked me three times o’er her knee;
She changed me again to my ain proper shape,
And I nae mair maun toddle about the tree.”
—Unknown. Alison Gross. . .
Oxford Book of Ballads, The. James Kinsley, ed. (1969)
“There ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and I ain’t agoing to no more.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)