The relationships in Genesis (Genesis 2:4)

This verse shows us how to recognize the family stories in Genesis, framing our identity in relation to God and to each other.

It’s all about our relationships with God and each other. Genesis 2:4 introduces us to the structure of the book, how the stories of the key people fit together, and our relationship to the Lord God.

Discerning where each new section begins is crucial to understanding any text. You won’t believe how easy this is in Genesis. Each new story begins with the word tô·lē·ḏôṯ in Hebrew. It means a family story, the account of a family’s origin and the descendants who carry on the family line.

Here are all the family stories (tôlēḏôṯ) identified in Genesis:

Gen 2:4: The account of the heavens and the earth
Gen 5:1: The account of Adam’s family line
Gen 6:9: The account of Noah and his family
Gen 10:1, 32 The account of Shem, Ham, and Japheth (the nations)
Gen 11:10 The account of Shem’s family line (the Semitic peoples)
Gen 11:27 The account of Terah’s family line (Abraham’s father)
Gen 25:12-13 The account of Abraham’s son Ishmael
Gen 25:19 The account of Abraham’s son Isaac
Gen 36:1, 9 The account of the family line of Esau
Gen 37:2 The account of Jacob’s family line.

The structure of Genesis tells us that no one is an individual. We’ve sometimes read Genesis as a series of unrelated stories: Adam’s sin, Cain’s murder, Noah’s flood, Abraham’s call, … That’s our culture, but Genesis places us within a communal story. We’re not isolated individuals living our own lives and creating our own identities. We’re part of a family. That was essential to Israel’s identity throughout the Old Testament.

Genesis is setting up for Israel’s story: the twelves tribes came from Jacob whose tôlēḏôṯ runs from Genesis 37–50. Jacob belonged to Isaac’s tôlēḏôṯ (Genesis 25–35), and Isaac belonged to Abraham the son of Terah whose tôlēḏôṯ runs from Genesis 11–25.

Those are the extended tôlēḏôṯ, but Genesis isn’t just about Israel’s roots. There’s a whole chapter on the tôlēḏôṯ of Esau (Genesis 36). There’s a brief account of Ishmael’s tôlēḏôṯ in Genesis 25. But half the tôlēḏôṯ in Genesis are pre-Abrahamic! What’s the point of including those family stories? What is Genesis telling us?

Listen to the first one:

Genesis 2:4 (NIV)
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

Now, that’s an odd expression: The tôlēḏôṯ of the heavens and the earth means “the family story of the heavens and the earth.” In what sense do the heavens and the earth have a family story?

The second half of the verse explains. God’s name is introduced for the first time. In Genesis 1, God (Elohim) was the subject of almost every sentence. We met God as the sovereign ruler whose decrees defined how everything was to be in heaven and on earth. Now we meet God by name as the head of the family. The Lord God breathes his own life into the human he creates (verse 7).

Strictly speaking, the name of God was not revealed until Exodus. God told Moses:

Exodus 6:3 (ESV)
“I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name the Lord [YHWH] I did not make myself known to them.”

The name (YHWH) was the covenant name, given so the people of the Sinai covenant could call on their heavenly sovereign. For Israel, the Lord was your Father, your Creator, who made you and formed you (Deuteronomy 32:6). But that text also claims that God gave the nations their inheritance (verse 8), comparing the 70 nations of Genesis 10 with the 70 descendants of Jacob who went to Egypt (Exodus 1:5).

The one God governs and provides for all the families of the earth. And that’s the family story in Genesis 1–11. That’s why God called Abraham: all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you (12:3), all the nations of the earth (26:3).

If the earth was running, right, all the peoples of the earth would recognize their heritage in his family. He is the Father of all the peoples of the earth, the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name (Ephesians 3:14).

That’s the point Genesis 2:4 as it introduces humanity in relation to God. The family story of the heavens and the earth is that our Father in the heavens established us as his family on earth. Every human being belongs in this family. That’s the theme of Genesis 1–11.

Another version

Some academics tell a different story about why Genesis 2:4 uses God’s name. About 400 years ago, some German scholars noticed the text was now using a different word for God and decided this must represent a different author’s work had been incorporated into Genesis. They labelled this text as from J (for Jehovah or Yahweh), and the previous author as E (Elohim). They guy who wrote Deuteronomy they called D. And thought a priest must have pulled these writings together after the exile, so they called him P. Over time, they identified every piece of the Torah as from the pen of either J, E, D, or P.

But this whole attempt to reconstruct the Torah’s origin is theoretical. Whereas modern academics write their own documents, ancient cultures were much more communal, transmitting stories orally. Eventually it’s written down, but not as the work of an individual. Many academics now recognize the documentary hypothesis as flawed, but it’s still a popular story:

No new consensus has evolved to replace Wellhausen’s basic theory … There is now widespread recognition of the hypothetical character of the results of modern criticism.
— Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, WBC (Dallas: Word, 1987), xxxv

C. S. Lewis pointed out that the method doesn’t even work for modern writings:

What forearms me against all these Reconstructions is the fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way. …
My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 percent failure.
— Lewis, C. S. “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in Christian Reflections edited by Walter Hooper, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 159-160.

Genesis is not the work of a bunch of individual writers. It’s a communal story, ancestral recollections passed down orally, written by the community at some point, and adapted over time so it remained their story. The adaptations are obvious in some places. For example, there are additions to Genesis 14 to explain how place names that have changed over time (verses 2, 3, 7, 8, 17). Genesis 10:10-11 explains the origin of Babylon and Assyria, Israel’s arch enemies in later centuries. But that doesn’t mean the whole of Genesis was written after the exile to Babylon. It’s an ancient story, adapted so that it remained the story of Israel across many centuries.

Genesis 2:4 is not a different author using a different name for God. It self-identifies as a new family story (tôlēḏôṯ). YHWH God is the God who wants to be known, intimately involved in his creation, breathing his own life into us, inviting us to live in his garden where he provides everything we need to thrive, and teaching us that we are also relational beings (Genesis 2).