Go Deeper: Read “The Genre of Genesis 1:1–2:3: What Means This Text?”

By Steve Boyd, PhD – Chapter 6 of Coming to Grips with Genesis

The starting point for understanding any text is to read it according to its genre. The original readers (or listeners) an author had in mind when he wrote would have recognized intuitively what type of text they were reading (or hearing), because they would have been familiar with the literary conventions
of their day. In fact, the author — aware that his readers had this knowledge — worked it into his text. On the other hand, we modern readers must deduce what would have been obvious to the original readers: perforce we must marshal the data to determine the genre of a text. (Continue with PDF)