In Genesis, names are everything. Sometimes they are just plain interesting linguistically, sometimes they describe the characters, and sometimes they tell parts of the story.

An example of the first type is that of the name of God in the very first verse (“ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”). God’s name in Hebrew here is elohim. Elohim is unusual here in that while Genesis speaks of only one God as creator, elohim is plural in form, and in other contexts it might be translated as “gods.” We know elohim is singular in usage, because it is used in nearly all of Genesis with a singular verb.

Some Christians have seen the use of elohim as suggestive of the Trinity — there is a plurality of three persons in one God. But there’s no evidence that the original readers thought of God that way. Instead, the word might have been understood originally as suggestive of God’s majesty. Historically, use of plural form may have come about as the polytheistic culture of Canaan transformed into one believing in one true God that ruled over all.

There is a singular form of elohim, eloah, but it isn’t found in Genesis. It can be found dozens of times in the Old Testament, however, often to refer gods of people other than the Israelites. Eloah is also used frequently to refer to God in the book of Job, which has a setting outside of Israel.

And here’s where elohim becomes particularly interesting: Elohim is used with a plural verb rather than in Genesis 1:26 rather than the singular verb found elsewhere, leading to translations such as “God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness.”

Why elohim is used as a plural here has been subject of discussion and debate among theologians for centuries. Again, some have seen echoes of the Trinity in this passage, while others have seen something like the “royal we” of English. One of the more intriguing explanations is that the verse refers to God speaking to his heavenly court or assembly. (The assembly is referred to in passages such as 1 Kings 22:19-22, Job 1:6-12 and Isaiah 6:1-8.)

The Hebrew word for “humankind” in Genesis 1:26 is adam, which leads us to the use of names as defining the characters. Adam can mean not only “humankind,” but also to “men” as a group and to a singular adult male. The context tells us what meaning is applied; verse 27 makes clear that the creation here was of both men and women, not just males or a single man.

But once adam clearly refers to a single male in the creation account, the lack of capital letters in Hebrew makes it unclear whether the word refers to a generic male or to one named Adam. Thus in Genesis 2:19, some Bible translations have God telling an unnamed man to name the animals, and others have God talking to Adam. Practically, there’s not much difference between the two, as the theological point of both translations is that God was delegating responsibility for caring for the animals to this particular man. Adam’s name tells us that he was the man.

Eve’s name also tells us her significance. In Genesis 3:20 Adam gives her the Hebrew name of Chavvah, meaning “giver of life.”

Dozens of other names in Genesis similarly tell us something about personal characteristics. Among the examples are names of Ishmael (“God hears,” because his mother pleaded to have a baby), Isaac (“laughed,” because his father laughed at the prospect of having a child when his wife, Sarah, was 90 and he was 100) and Esau (whose name sounded similar to the word for “hairy”).

‘Israel’ as a name

Finally, a few of the names in Genesis tell a story, especially when they are changed.

Abraham was originally known as Abram, meaning something like “exalted father.” But the new name God gave him was one that sounded similar to a phrase meaning “father of a multitude” or “father of nations.”

Even more important was the name change for Jacob, whose name originally referred to the heel he was holding onto upon being born along with his twin bother, Esau. The story of Jacob’s name change begins in Genesis 32:24, where Jacob wrestles with a man, often depicted in art as an angel, whom he later realizes is God. They wrestle all night, continuing until dawn even after God dislocates Jacob’s hip socket. God wants to leave, but Jacob insists on receiving a blessing first, so God gives him this blessing: “Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Translations that have been given for “Israel” include “God prevails,” “God fights,” “one who prevails with God” and “one who strives with God.”

This name arguably became the most important of Genesis, for it became the name of a nation that both struggled and prevailed for hundreds of years.

This commentary on Genesis is part of our Bible for Modern-day Saints series. Biblical quotations are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.

When we think about how the first five books of the Bible came to be, we might imagine Moses sitting in a tent with pen and papyrus in hand and writing a Hebrew version of what we have today.

But that may not be how it happened.

In fact, the origins of these books — often known as either the Pentateuch or Torah, often as simply the Books of Moses — have been the subject of sometimes heated debate for well over a century.

Explanations of the books’ origins range all the way from the traditional one, in which Moses wrote almost essentially what we find in Bibles today1 to the views of many historians that Moses was a person of legend rather than of history and that the books were developed by a series of authors and editors.

The debate over the historicity of Moses is beyond the scope of his article. Suffice it to say that the story we have of Moses comes exclusively from the Bible; there are no ancient Egyptian records of him, no writings of contemporaries that mention him, no archaeological proof. But even for secularists, there are some intriguing hints about his existence that go beyond the Pentateuch and the collective memory of the Biblical Israelites: Most notably, the name Moses appears to be of Egyptian origin; note how it ends in “-ses” as do Egyptian names such as Ramses. And some historians have suggested that there could be a connection between Moses and the definitely historical Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, an early proponent of monotheism or monolatry.2

In any case, the view that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch goes back to before the time of Christ, even though the books were anonymously written, as were the other books of history and most books of poetry in the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, portions of the Pentateuch were ascribed to Moses. For example, in Mark 12:26 Jesus says:

But about the dead, that they are raised, haven’t you read in the book of Moses about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?

And in Acts 15:21, James says:

For Moses from generations of old has in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath.

The passages don’t clearly point to a belief that all the text of the five books was written by Moses, but then again in that culture authorship wasn’t a big concern. It wasn’t until the development of the Talmud, a collection of Jewish writings developed in the third through fifth centuries CE, that Jewish theologians explicitly attributed the books to Moses.

Origins of the documentary hypothesis

And that was the consensus view of both Christians and Jews for over a millennium. It wasn’t until the 1800s that scholars, seeing less unity in the Pentateuch than might be expected from a single author, started seriously questioning whether the Pentateuch was written by one person. The best known of such scholars was German professor and theologian Julius Wellhausen, who popularized what has become known as the documentary hypothesis.

According to the hypothesis, the Pentateuch is a compilation of documents written by four independent sources: the Yahwist (J), the Elohist (E), the Priestly (P) and the Deuteronomist (D). Based on these names, the hypothesis is sometimes called the JEPD or JEDP hypothesis.

The theory is that each of the documents emphasized the interests of its sources; for example, the Yahwist source used Yahweh (sometimes referred to as Jehovah in English) as the name of God, while the Elohist source used the name of Elohim.

Here are three examples of how proponents of this hypothesis see the different sources used in Genesis:

🟪 Genesis 1:1-2:3 by the Elohist explains how Elohim created the world and its living things in six days, while the Yahwist in Genesis 2:24 and following verses gives an account of Yahweh creating the world with a focus the creation of a man followed by the creation of animals and then a woman.

🟪 The story of Noah and the ark seems like a mixture of Yahwist and Priestly accounts, with seven pairs of animals entering the ark in the Yahwistic portion and two of each kind in the Priestly part. The Yahwistic account indicates that Noah sent a dove out in order to find out whether the ground was dry, while in the Priestly account Noah simply removed the boat’s covering and looked around.

🟪 The Ishmaelites take Joseph to Egypt in Genesis 27:28, but in verse 36 it appears that the Midianites did. The first version is typically ascribed to the Yahwist source, the second to the Elohist.3

The documentary hypothesis was the dominant view of Biblical scholars for around a century despite constant disagreement over details, including major ones such as whether there were really four sources, when the sources originated and which passages came from which sources.

A new theory emerges

Beginning in the late 1900s, problems with the hypothesis led many scholars to abandon it to what has become known as the supplementary hypothesis. In this view, the Pentateuch may have begun as a single group of writings, but editors added to it over the centuries. (Sometimes these editors are referred to as an R source, for “redactors.”)

There’s a huge overlap between the documentary and supplementary hypotheses, as both see a final document with sections that indicate the development of Israel’s theological belief. And both theories see the Pentateuch not taking its final form until well into the post-Exilic period, centuries after the Exodus.

Meanwhile, fundamentalist and many evangelical scholars point to the weaknesses in these hypotheses and continue to defend their view that the Pentateuch is essentially the work of Moses while accepting that what we have today may include minor additions or changes made after his death.

In the end, what we’re left with is a mystery as to the Pentateuch’s origins; there certainly is plenty more to be discovered. What isn’t a mystery is the importance of the Pentateuch to both Jewish and Christian thought.4 Moses is mentioned more often in the New Testament than any character other than Jesus, and the significance of the laws based on divine revelation through Moses form the backdrop for the life of Jesus and letters of Paul. It is the Pentateuch that tells us how the world was created, how sin and misery entered the world, how Abraham would become the father of nations, and how the Jews established monotheism in a territory that had been divided by competing gods. The rest of the Bible would make little sense without those five initial books.

This commentary on Genesis and the remainder of the Pentateuch is part of our Bible for Modern-day Saints series. Biblical quotations are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.

It has been well over a century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, yet Darwin’s recognition that advanced life as we know it today took millions of years to evolve is doubted by a substantial portion of Americans, many if not most of them evangelical or fundamentalist Christians.

Skeptics of large-scale evolution can even be found at the highest levels of government, especially in recent years. While he has apparently not publicly stated his personal views on creation and evolution, evangelical Christian and House Speaker Mike Johnson as an attorney once advocated for the Ark Encounter, a Kentucky theme park dedicated in part to promoting creationism, the theory that Genesis 1 is literally true and thus that the Earth and everything in it was created in six 24-hour days a few thousand years ago.

“Kentucky officials are smart to enthusiastically embrace the Ark Encounter,” Johnson once wrote in a newspaper op-ed,1 saying that the sponsoring organization “aims to encourage critical thought and respectful public debate.”

According to 2024 poll, about 37 percent of American adults believe in the creationist position that human beings were created by God in their present form, a position that doesn’t necessarily require a young Earth. The remainder generally accept accept that humans evolved, presumably from apelike creatures, to their present form, with about 34 percent of the total believing that evolution was directed by God and 24 percent attributing evolution to chance.

Christian advocates of creationism have been so outspoken that it is easy to assume that a literal reading of Genesis 1 is the only Christian view. But it isn’t — and hasn’t been since long before Darwin. Some of the earliest Christian thinkers, who had no way to know about the geological and cosmological evidence that points to an ancient universe and Earth, had views far different than modern creationism. For example, Origen, writing in the third century, saw Genesis 1 as allegorical. And Augustine, writing in the fifth century, thought that the creation account was written in a vastly simplified way so that the creation process could be understood by its readers.

Christian views today are based primarily on two factors: beliefs about what the Bible is, such as, to give two extremes, whether is was dictated by God to its ancient authors or whether it is primarily a human product; and the hermeneutic approach to the Bible that is used, which is a fancy way of referring to methods for the Bible’s interpretation. In general, those who call for a literal interpretation tend to believe that the Bible in some way reflects the actual words of God, while those who look at the Bible more as inspirational literature tend be much less rigid in their interpretation. A variety of perspectives on evolution can be found in the broad middle ground that sees the Bible as a mixture of the divine and the human.

There are several ways of categorizing the Christian beliefs about evolution; here I’ll describe four, which can overlap and which have numerous variations. In the order of most literal to the least, they are:

1. Creation in six 24-hour days

The view that the Earth was created in six actual days is the most straightforward reading of the text and is the view advocated by many fundamentalist Protestants as well as the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This view presupposes that the Bible conveys accurate science and history as well as spiritual truth.

Believers in this view have developed their own network of what they consider to be scientific research and have promoted said research through museums, lectures, podcasts, textbooks and websites. The most prominent such organization is the Institute for Creation Research, based in Dallas, Texas. ICR acknowledges that its research is based on the premise that the creation account of Genesis “is factual, historical, and clearly understandable and, therefore, that all things were created and made in six literal days.” In other words, it looks for scientific evidence to support its conclusions rather than taking the traditional scientific method of testing hypotheses.

The problem with the literalist view is obvious: The scientific evidence for a universe that is billions of years old, and that life has also evolved on Earth for billions of years, is so overwhelming as to be indisputable. The “research” of groups such as ICR simply is not taken seriously within modern science. One result is that science and faith end up opposed to each other.

2. The gap theory of a six-day creation

Although it is no longer commonly advocated, the gap theory was once a popular variation of the six-day theory. According to this theory, Genesis 1:1 — “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” — describes a creation that could have taken millions or even billions of years. After some period of time, God destroyed what was on the Earth, leaving it “formless and empty,” as it is described in Genesis 1:2. Then God re-created life over six literal days; the ancient fossils we find today really are ancient, as they came from the Earth that existed before its destruction. But modern life, according to this theory, descended from a re-creation that occurred some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The gap theory was most notably advocated in the Scofield Reference Bible, a widely influential work, published in 1909. Theologians developed the theory as a way of synthesizing a belief in literal Genesis 1 with the existence of dinosaur fossils and other artifacts that obviously were more than a few thousand years old.

The scientific problem with this theory is that there are no signs of a global destruction, and life as it is today is clearly descended from ancient creatures. And although some well-known Christian leaders — among them Oral Roberts, founder of Oral Roberts University — were supporting this theory into the late 20th century, literalist Christian thinkers today tend to find it inconsistent with a plain reading of Genesis.

3. The day-age view

Christians who see Genesis 1 as being historical but who also recognize that the Earth and life have existed for billions of years often see the Hebrew word yom, translated as “day,” to refer refer in Genesis 1 to an age or other indefinite long period of time rather than a 24-hour day. This isn’t much different than English speakers using “day” flexibly, such as in the phrase “the day of the dinosaurs,” where it is obvious that a period of far more than 24 hours is meant.

Scholars and theologians have long debated the possible meanings of yom. On the one hand, mention of the days being marked by a morning and evening suggest that literal days were meant, and fundamentalist critics of the day-age view point out that there are other Hebrew words that might have been used here if referring to longer periods of time. On the other hand, yom is used in a few places in the Hebrew Bible where it clearly doesn’t refer to 24 hours. Among them is Genesis 2:4, which speaks of “the day [singular] that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

Advocates of the day-age view point to similarities been the Genesis account and modern, scientific views, particularly the progression of simple life forms more complex, with humankind as the pinnacle of God’s creation. In this way, they argue that Genesis 1 is the way that God chose to describe a process that would not have been comprehensible to people with limited scientific knowledge.

The day-age view is widely although not universally accepted in evangelicalism, and evolution is taught in science classes at mainstream evangelical colleges and universities. There is often debate, however, among evangelical theologians about how to reconcile evolution with the doctrine of original sin, which, in its traditional form, traces the presence of sin to the Fall of Adam and Eve.

4. The literary view

Finally, many Christians believe that Genesis 1 wasn’t intended to be historical nor a scientific explanation of how the Earth and life came to be. Instead, they see it as a way that the ancient writer (or writers) of Genesis used the cosmological understanding of the times to convey theological ideas such as the sovereignty of God, the nature of human beings as being created in the image of God, and the goodness of creation.

In terms of science, there is much agreement between this view and the day-age view. The differences have mostly to do with the understanding of how the Bible functions.

A final thought

Regardless of what they think of the mechanics of creation, nearly all Christians today believe the theological ideas listed above in the explanation of the literary view.

So the most important question for many believers becomes not how God created, but why. Therefore most of the country’s largest denominations — among them the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — take no formal position on God’s method of creation.

As the United Methodist Church put it in a formal statement in 2016, “Science and theology are complementary rather than mutually incompatible.” With that belief, the church said, scientists and theological communities should work together to “enable humanity to sustain life on earth and, by God’s grace, increase the quality of our common lives together.”

This commentary on Genesis 1 is part of our Bible for Modern-day Saints series. Biblical quotations are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.

What does is mean to be human? That’s a question philosophers and other thinkers have been asking for as long as they’ve been around.

The first chapter of Genesis has an answer to that question, and it’s both simple and profound: Humans are the ones that God put in charge of creation, and their charge included not only taking care of themselves but of everything that has the breath of life.

And to fulfill that task, they were made in the very image of God.

Of course, theologians and believers in the Genesis story have debated exactly what that means for as long as they’ve been around. Maybe the creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3 raises more questions that it provides answers. But the answers it does provide are, to use the words of 1:31, very good.

So here are three very good takeaways we can learn from this creation story, the first of two in Genesis (the second account begins in 2:4):

1. God created everything

Genesis begins with a well-known verse: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”1 Scholars generally understand the reference to heaven and earth as a merism, a type of literary construct in which two contrasting things, in this case heaven and earth, are used to represent the whole. So the meaning of this verse is that God created everything there is, the entire universe.2

This marks a contrast with some polytheistic creation accounts of the region, or to any system which gives blind chance credit for the creation.

2. Humankind was made in the image of God to take care of creation

It was the sixth day in Genesis 1:25, and God had just created the animals of the earth include livestock and the creatures that crawl on the ground.

And while “image of God” isn’t explicitly defined, verse 26 tells why humankind was made:

God said, “Let’s make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

In other words, God wasn’t going to be a micromanager. The first command God gives humankind after telling them to multiply and take control over the earth was to “have dominion” over all the living creatures known to the ancient world, and a few verses later that’s followed up with a humankind being given “every herb yielding seed.”

It was in this way that humankind would become God’s representatives on the newly formed planet. In a sense, humans were made from the very beginning to be godlike. When it comes to managing the world, they were in essence delegated divine authority, and with that the ability to make decisions about things that matter.

3. All that God made was excellent

Six times after creating things — after making light, after separating land from the water, after creating plants, after placing lights in the sky, after creating animals of the air and see, and after creating land animals, God saw that what was created was good (Hebrew tov). And after creating humankind: God saw that the creation was very good, tov meod, which might be more literally translated as abundantly good.

So humankind became the pinnacle of creation, and not merely by being last. Once humans were made, God saw the work of creation as being complete or finished.

A final thought

The Hebrew word for humankind in Genesis 1 is adam, the same as the word used later for Adam. But this chapter is about the creation of all people; it is meant as a universal story. God is portrayed here not as giving ruling authority to Adam specifically (that story comes in the second chapter), but to all human beings. For Christians, this creation story serves as a foreshadowing of a gospel that offers love and salvation for all.

This commentary on Genesis 1 is the first article (some of them previously published) in our Bible for Modern-day Saints series. Although the series is written for a broad audience, it is scheduled to roughly coincide with the Come, Follow Me curriculum of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Genesis are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.

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