Less constricted by religious piety, modern scholars approach the Hebrew scriptures with a lens quite different from those of antiquity and the Middle Ages. For modern biblical scholars, the Bible is yet another literary text, like the ancient texts of the Greek philosophers or the Roman rhetoricians, subject to the kinds of historical and linguistic analyses that are the hallmarks of philology. Biblical scholars attempt to date texts by comparing their idiom and references to those of other texts, and sometimes cite archeological findings to corroborate their arguments. These intertextual analyses helped to situate the biblical texts in the broader world of the Near East, beyond the geography of ancient Judea, and trace the history of Israel and its surrounding peoples. The comparative approach seeks a kind of objectivity and scholarly distance from a pious or devotional attitude toward the Bible.
Genesis is the first book of the Torah.
It opens with a cosmology, an account of the creation of the heaven and earth, then recounts the creation of Adam and Eve. There are two different accounts of the creation of the cosmos, and two different accounts of the creation of humanity. Scholars argue that these different accounts evidence two different oral or literary traditions brought together by a redactor or redactors. Traditionalist would contend that the apparently conflicting accounts simply document two different perspectives. Implied is that beyond this creation is God alone.