Structure of Genesis: Colophon Examples

In a previous post, I wrote about the Book of Genesis being structured through the use of colophon postscripts to each narrative or genealogical section.  The postscripts appear to resemble the pattern of colophons as used in Mesopotamian writings suggesting that source material for the Book of Genesis was written contemporaneously to other ancient works that exhibit similar structure.

The Book of Genesis includes multiple uses of the following phraseology:

"These are the toledot (generations/account/historical writings) of..."

In the Tablet Theory, these phrases are taken as postscript colophons for the preceding narrative or genealogical text in Genesis.

Here are some examples of colophons from other ancient writings for comparison:

Mathematical colophons: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00048-012-0071-z

“26 sections on canal”
“31 sections on trenches”

Musical colophon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrian_songs

"This [is] a song [in the] nitkibli, a zaluzi … written down by Ammurabi"

Medicinal colophon: https://recipes.hypotheses.org/8805

Palace of Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of the land Assyria, to whom (the gods) Nabû and Tašmētu granted understanding, (who) acquired insight (and) a high level of scribal proficiency, that skill which among the kings, my predecessor(s) no one has acquired. I (i.e. Ashurbanipal) wrote, checked, and collated tablets with medical prescriptions from head to the (toe-) nail, non-canonical material, elaborate teaching(s) (and) the advanced healing art(s) of (the gods) Ninurta and Gula, as much as exists, (and) I placed (them) within my palace for my reading/reciting. (BAK, no. 329)

As we can see, the content of a colophon may vary greatly between one document and another, and we see some diversity between colophons used in Genesis.  As text was transcribed from clay tablets to scrolls, colophons that were originally on the side, back, or end of a tablet would be placed at the end of the content as a postscript.  The practice of summarizing or terminating a narrative with a postscript is not limited to Genesis.

Perhaps the most compelling examples come from the books of Numbers and Leviticus.

Leviticus 27:34 These are the commandments that the Lord commanded Moses for the people of Israel on Mount Sinai.

The last sentence in Leviticus is an especially potent example.  Read out of context, one would expect a list of commands to follow.  But in fact, it is the final line of the book, stating what the content was that was just read.  This is precisely the style that the Tablet Theory proposes for the Book of Genesis.

Numbers 36:13 These are the commandments and the rules that the Lord commanded through Moses to the people of Israel in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho.

As seen above, the book of Numbers finishes in the same manner.

We should not wonder that the books containing the Law would end with colophons since they were originally created by God as tablets.

Exodus 24:12 The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and wait there, that I may give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.”

The original tablets may have had a colophon statement such as, "These are the law and commandment of the Lord".  Copied onto scrolls, these colophon statements may have been written at the end of the scroll including a postscript identifying the communicator (in this case Moses), the audience (Israel), and the location (Mount Sinai, the plains of Moab).

As we analyze the colophon statements of the book of Genesis, it is prudent to consider how the original statements from multiple tablets may have been augemented when being collated into a longer document.  For example, Genesis 2:4 reads

a:   "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created,
b:   in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens."

Sometimes the colophon for the creation account is considered to be Genesis 2:4a.  Genesis 2:4b, on the other hand, has two possibilities:

1. the phrase was part of the original colophon identifying the time (in the day) and the author (the LORD God) and the content (the making of the earth and the heavens).
2. it was added, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, as a parallel statement to Genesis 1:1 identifying Elohim of Genesis 1:1 with Yahweh.

In either case, Genesis 2:4 comprises the complete colophon for the creation account of the heavens and the earth.

Other Biblical Colophon Examples

Within the Bible itself, see Numbers 5:11-31 for a possible example.

Author Michael Fishbane describes Numbers 5:29-30 as a "colophon-like resumptive subscript purporting to summarize the content of the preceding text."  This he compares to the title-lines and colophons found in cuneiform and other ancient Near Eastern literature.

Numbers 5:11-28 starts with

11 Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 12 “Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘If any man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him... 

This is followed by a narrative description of the somewhat strange legal procedures.

Finally, Numbers 5:29-31 contains a postscript summarizing the previous 18 verses. 

29 ‘This is the law of jealousy: when a wife, being under the authority of her husband, goes astray and defiles herself, 30 or when a spirit of jealousy comes over a man and he is jealous of his wife, he shall then make the woman stand before the Lord, and the priest shall apply all this law to her. 31 Moreover, the man will be free from guilt, but that woman shall bear her guilt.’”

The colophon title phrase is "This is the torah [law] of ..." is similar to the Genesis colophon title phrase "This is the toledot [account] of ...".

While Numbers 5 may provide an example of usage of an extended colophon, much of the Law is presented without such a pattern, indicating that the use of a colophon is up to the needs of the scribe.

Other Suggested Biblical Colophon Examples

Job 31:40 "The words of Job are ended."

Psalm 72:20 "The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended."

Postscripts Used At The End of Biblical Narratives

The Book of Genesis ends with a beautifully structured postscript pertaining to Joseph.

Genesis 50:22-26

• So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father's house. 
• Joseph lived 110 years.
• And Joseph saw 
• Ephraim's children of the third generation. 
• The children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were counted as Joseph's own.
• And Joseph said to his brothers, 
• “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”
• Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, 
• “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.”
• So Joseph died, being 110 years old. 
• They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

When written out in prose, it is easy to miss the parallelism that is evident upon closer inspection.  This structured text was obviously not written by Joseph since it records his death, but was added as a finale.  Joseph's narrative in Genesis was not necessarily written on clay tablets using cuneiform, since he would have had access to the writing technology and conventions of Egypt.  So it is reasonable that Joseph's narrative would not have a tablet-style colophon, but rather contributed a more modern (at the time) postscript.

We see this style used in other Biblical texts.

Ecclesiastes is considered to end with a colophon comprised of 12:9-14.

The book of Ruth ends with a colophon comprised of the genealogy of David.

And the book of Job ends with a colophon comprised of a summary of blessings experienced after Job's time of testing.

In Conclusion

The practice of introducing a "postscript" at the end of a section of text in the Bible is an occasional, but not rare, occurrence.  The examples on this page are provided to help readers of Ages of Joy evaluate the colophon-based Tablet Theory of the structure of Genesis.  The postscript-colophon as used by Cuneiform clay tablets may be largely peculiar to the Book of Genesis, with Genesis being perhaps the oldest content in the Bible, but we also see shades of it in Leviticus and Numbers, whose content expressly comes in part from tablets.  Furthermore, we understand that in transcribing a colophon from a tablet to a scroll, especially when compiled as part of a larger work, the author, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, may have augmented the original colophon-title.  Therefore, we must strive to correctly identify where each section of text is joined to the next.