Primeval History
Genesis opens with creation, the first disobedience, the flood and the scattering of the nations. The text gives these events no datable setting.
The first eleven chapters of Genesis set the stage for everything that follows: a good creation, humanity made in God’s image, a rupture, and a world that needs mending. Later Scripture returns to these chapters constantly. Christian traditions read them in different ways, from literal history to theological narrative, and this wiki places them at the head of the timeline without assigning years.
Events of this era
- undatedThe Creation
Genesis opens with God making the heavens and the earth in six days and resting on the seventh. It then tells how the first man and woman were made and placed in the garden of Eden.
- undatedThe Fall
In Genesis the first man and woman eat from the tree God had forbidden and are sent out of the garden of Eden. Paul later reads the story as the entry of sin and death into the world, which Christ’s obedience reverses.
- undatedThe Flood and the Covenant with Noah
Genesis tells how God sends a flood on a violent world and saves Noah, his family and the animals in an ark. Afterwards God makes a covenant with every living creature, with the rainbow as its sign.
- undatedThe Tower of Babel
Genesis tells how people with one language set out to build a city and a tower reaching the sky in the land of Shinar. God confuses their speech and scatters them over the earth, and the city is named Babel.