Riassunto
Riassunto di Genesis Apocryphon
A chi è rivolto
For readers curious about the Dead Sea Scrolls, Genesis, and the Jewish storytelling that grew up around it. It also suits students of the Bible and ancient history who enjoy retellings enriched with dreams, prayers and drama.
Che cos’è questo libro
The Genesis Apocryphon is a scroll in Aramaic that was found in the first cave at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, after 1947. Nobody knows who wrote it. It retells and expands the stories of Genesis, and it tells parts of them in the first person, so that Noah and Abram seem to speak for themselves. Only part of the scroll survives. The beginning is badly damaged, and the text breaks off in the middle of the story of Abram.
Scholars generally date the surviving copy to the late first century BCE or the early first century CE. The work itself is probably older, perhaps from the third to first century BCE, though experts disagree on the exact date. In this summary you will meet a worried father and a mysterious birth, a great flood and a vineyard, a beautiful wife taken into a king's house, and a war of kings. You will also see why scholars value the scroll as evidence of how Jewish readers once retold their own scripture. Let us begin with the scroll itself and how it came to light.
In questo riassunto
- 1A damaged scroll from the first caveFree
- 2Lamech fears for his newborn son
- 3Noah tells of the flood and vineyard
- 4Abram, Sarai, and the king of Egypt
- 5Abram walks the land and meets Melchizedek
- 6How to read this retelling today
Punto chiave 1 di 6
A damaged scroll from the first cave
The Genesis Apocryphon was among the first seven scrolls found in Cave 1 at Qumran, in the late 1940s. It was one of the scrolls that reached Israeli scholars in the 1950s, and for a time it was called the Lamech scroll, after one of its characters. The leather was so brittle and darkened that it could not be opened at first. Specialists worked on it carefully over several years, and a first edition appeared in 1956.
The text is written in Aramaic, the everyday language of much of the Middle East in the later centuries before Jesus. Most of the Hebrew Bible is in Hebrew, so an Aramaic retelling of Genesis stands out. About twenty columns of writing survive, but the first ones are badly decayed. The last columns are the clearest, and they are where most readers begin.
Scholars still debate its age. The style of the handwriting points to the late first century BCE or the early first century CE for this copy. The composition itself is probably older, with many experts suggesting somewhere between the third and the first century BCE. The scroll does not seem to use the special vocabulary of the Qumran community, so many scholars think it was written elsewhere and later valued there.
No title survives on the scroll. The name Genesis Apocryphon is a modern label, meant to say that the work follows Genesis but is not part of it. That label is the reason many people expect a hidden version of the Bible. In fact the scroll is better seen as a creative retelling.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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