Come join VISTA as we dive into the stories of the Ancient Israelites and learn how their history can still impact our lives today!

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The good news? We have very successfully turned early Genesis (chapter 1–11) into a series of

picture books, Sunday School lessons, videos, and flannelgraphs. As a result, most children

growing up in the church are quite familiar with those Bible stories. The bad news? There can be

trouble when we never move beyond that child-sized understanding. Ironically, early Genesis can

be a challenge precisely because of our strong start in childhood. We are very familiar with these

passages, but we are also significantly uninformed about their ancient setting.

A good, healthy way to ‘grow up’ in our understanding is to hear these passages in their original

ancient Near Eastern context, to listen alongside the ancient Israelites. What would they have

heard? What kind of literature would they have known this to be? What would have been the

obvious main points? What are we modern folks missing? These questions will be the focus of

this course.

When we approach early Genesis this way, we find that it is not about the various culture-war

issues we often bring to the text, but rather about things far deeper. Early Genesis proclaims

Good News about God, about the world, and about what it means to be human.