The Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen)

This was one of the first seven scrolls out of Cave 1, and the most badly decayed. It could not be unrolled for a decade; when it finally was, in 1956, twenty-two columns proved legible. It tells parts of Genesis over again in Aramaic, and mostly in the first person — the patriarchs speak for themselves. **What survives.** Lamech returns home to find his wife Bitenosh has borne a child so radiant he suspects one of the Watchers is the father; she protests her innocence in a striking domestic scene, and Methuselah is sent to consult Enoch, who confirms the child is Lamech''s own. That child is Noah. Later columns cover Noah''s vineyard and the division of the earth among his sons. The best-preserved section is Abraham''s. He narrates a dream of a cedar and a palm tree that warns him of danger in Egypt, and his descent there with Sarai. When Pharaoh''s courtiers see her, they praise her in a long poem — her hair, her eyes, her hands, "how fair all her whiteness" — the earliest surviving Jewish poem of that type. Pharaoh takes her; Abraham prays; a plague afflicts the household until Sarai is returned untouched. **What kind of book it is.** Not a commentary and not a translation but "rewritten Bible" — Scripture retold with gaps filled in, motives supplied and problems smoothed away. It overlaps at points with Jubilees and 1 Enoch, though the relationship between them is debated. **Where it stands.** In no canon.

The Genesis Apocryphon shows, better than any other scroll, how ancient readers handled the silences of Scripture. Genesis does not say how Abraham felt going down to Egypt, or why Sarai was taken and returned unharmed, or what Lamech thought when Noah was born. This book supplies answers — and every answer is an interpretation, not a revelation. That has direct value for reading the Bible today. The instinct to fill the gaps is not modern; it is as old as Qumran. The difference is that the Apocryphon is honest fiction in service of edification, while Scripture itself is remarkably restrained about motive and feeling. Watching the contrast teaches you to notice what Genesis does and does not actually say. It also confirms that Genesis existed in a fixed and familiar form long before Christ — you cannot creatively retell a book that has not yet settled. And its Aramaic is a valuable specimen of the language Jesus spoke. Modern translations remain under copyright; Berean summarises and points to the published editions.

• Genesis 12:10-20— Abraham and Sarai in Egypt, retold in the first person
• Genesis 5:28-32— The birth of Noah, expanded into a domestic scene

• ·Joseph A. Fitzmyer, 'The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1: A Commentary' (3rd ed., Biblical Institute Press, 2004)
• ·Daniel A. Machiela, 'The Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon' (Brill, 2009)
• ·Geza Vermes, 'The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English' (Penguin, 2011)
• ·The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library

• Manuscripts

  The Book of Jubilees

  Another rewriting of Genesis

• History

  The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran

  One of the original Cave 1 scrolls