What is the genre of the Book of Genesis

This question of the genre of Genesis was raised at the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars in their zoom meeting May 23/24 from New Zealand. In this video, Don Moffat suggested it was to be decided around the concept of generations. To analyse this, we can't use the 'authorized' version, KJV and its derivatives, since the word for generations is confused - used for both successions, תוֹלְד֧וֹת from ילד, to give birth, and דור, generation. This sort of practice -- glossing different roots with the same English gloss, is very common in KJV. 

Genesis is then a record of giving birth. I suggested that the genre might also be a song -- of course you would expect that from me -- a song of successions (ild) and perhaps for the generations (dor). Word counting for the root ild, to give birth (650 total occurrences) gives us the following counts where I used succession in my glosses: GENESIS(16), EXODUS(2), NUMBERS(15), 1 SAMUEL(2), 2 SAMUEL(2), ISAIAH(3), HOSEA(1), RUTH(1), 1 CHRONICLES(11).

Each of these is a word form of ild used as a noun, singular or plural in various forms: mostly like toldot. This itself is variously spelled in the Leningrad codex, e.g. Genesis 2:4, 5:1, 6:9, sometimes missing one or other vav, sometimes with other affixes, like ltoldotm, Genesis 10:32, 25:13 etc. Clearly, from the numbers, Genesis, Numbers and 1 Chronicles lead the pack with only scattered usage in other books. But further if I restrict it to the formulaic, "these are the toldot of.".. I see 10 in Genesis and 1 each in Numbers (for Moses and Aaron), Ruth, and Chronicles.

In contrast, counts for generation (dor -- 197 total occurrences) are distributed as follows: Gn(7), Ex(19), Lv(14), Nb(10), Dt(11), Josh(2), Jdg(3), Is(19), Je(4), Joel(5), Psalms(53), Pr(6), Job(2), Lam(2), Qoh(2), Est(2), Dan(6), 1 Chr(1). It's a different pattern with broad emphasis in Torah as a whole and David's Torah, the Psalms, and little usage in Chronicles.

If indeed the music will make these into a song, I wondered what it would show us. You might say that my job in this deaf age is to make the ancient music visible in the hope that it might also be heard. Most readers jump over the begats in the text.

So for each verse I will make a page like this. You have seen this before.

• The left top quadrant is the square text-- also called the 'deficient' text because of the variations in spelling such as those I pointed out above. This text includes vowel pointing and cantillation -- hand signals.
• The top right quadrant is my translation, a translation produced with computerized help to prevent the type of error I noted above where a single English gloss obscures the distinctiveness of the Hebrew word usage.
• The lower left quadrant is the SimHebrew, a form of the text that allows a non-Hebrew reader to read the Hebrew text accurately. The SimHebrew content was done by hand by Jonathan Orr-Stav, and verified with a computer program I wrote that converts the Biblical WLC text to the fully-spelled (plene) text used in modern Hebrew. 

[plene scriptum (יתר, yater, 'excess'), sometimes simply described in Hebrew as מלא (malé, 'full'), is often used in contrast with defective scriptum (חסר, ḥaser, 'deficient'), the latter implying a word in which a letter that is normally present has been omitted.]

Finally, the lower right quadrant is an automated parsing of the text -- not in SimHebrew -- but showing prefixes and suffixes that form the word. E.g. tv/ld\vt - the root is ild, the i is dropped or converted to a vav (i being a weak letter), and the taf prefix is added converting the verb to a noun, the vt is a standard feminine plural. 

The left quadrants are computationally verified and verify each other. The right quadrants are assists to the non Hebrew reader to be taken with care. The numbers between the two lower quadrants are syllable counts.

The music is produced automatically by the transformation of the Unicode into MusicXML according to the specs I published in 2022 beginning here. I don't see how to reproduce the te'amim successfully without resorting to the image of a traditional music staff. I did an experiment here using only ascii characters -- but I don't find it helpful.

The music program uses an anglicized transliteration for the lyrics that corresponds to what a singer untrained in Hebrew might be able to read in the Latin character set with the music. It is possible that I could make a switch or two mapping ts to x, k to c, het to k, sh to w, y to i to free y for ayin and by doing so make the lyrics correspond more to SimHebrew, but it would not be complete or easier for the singer because SimHebrew is too sparse with its vowels to allow the singer to form a musical line. (Besides, I know what a hornet's nest the 12 year old program is.) There seems to be no shortcut to these multiple transcriptions. So we switch from one to the other uneasily.

This is where I'm at -- more to come...

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אֵ֣לֶּה תוֹלְד֧וֹת הַשָּׁמַ֛יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם בְּי֗וֹם עֲשׂ֛וֹת יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶ֥רֶץ וְשָׁמָֽיִם		4 ♪B These are the successions of the heavens and the earth when they were created, on the day Yahweh God constructed earth and heaven,
d alh toldot hwmiim vharx bhibram biom ywot ihvh alohim arx vwmiim	15 15	alh tv/ld\vt h/wmim vh/arx bh/bra\m b/ivm yw\vt ihvh alh\im arx v/wmim

Genesis 2:4 alh toldot hwmiim vharx bhibram

The music, beginning as it does on the fifth note of the scale, clearly points us back to the prior verses. I have observed a principle of the music embedded in the Bible that when the opening note is not the tonic, that the music is continuing what has gone before. Will this expression turn out to be a refrain? 

 [You might notice a silluq in Gen 2:4 if you look very closely. This is a spurious one according to my programming. It's one of those confusions of metheg and silluq -- so the program ignores it.]

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