Most devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that Moses wrote the entire Torah, including the book of Genesis. Genesis takes place approximately 200 years before the birth of Moses. So, how did he do it? Was he even literate? Did God reveal everything to him, or did he gather his information from human records? 

Either Moses got the info he didn’t witness directly from God, from writings from before his time, or a combination of both. I lean towards both simply because the writing style is akin to a history report, and Moses is selective about the information he conveys, leaving out anything irrelevant. Yet it also includes detailed information with the genealogies, like ages at birth, the birth of the firstborn, and the death of each patriarch, which is not something most people would need to pass down orally. It is possible he had the help of written records left behind by Joseph. Joseph was appointed vizier of Egypt at 30 and lived for 80 more years, so he likely learned to write in Egypt or had access to scribes, given his position as a political figure. Then Moses, who was raised in Pharaoh’s house for 40 years, would have learned to read and write in Egyptian and had access to Joseph’s writings.

Joseph must be the primary source for what Moses wrote in Genesis because there are 12 chapters dedicated to Joseph, but only about nine chapters to Jacob, and only about 6-7 chapters dedicated to Isaac. Abraham has 13 chapters focused on him, but as the beginning of the covenant of Israel, he naturally receives the most attention. However, Genesis ends with Joseph and not with someone else between him and Moses. There are 144 years between Joseph’s death at 110 and the Exodus story when Moses is 80 years old. Which means Genesis could have continued up until Moses’s birth, but it stops specifically at Joseph’s death, and Exodus picks up at Moses’ birth 64 years later.

When one reads the Genealogical chapters in Genesis, such as 5, 11, and 36, they are written in a manner that implies Moses had his own “Wikipedia” via a scroll of the lineages. These passages are lists of toledot (תּוֹלְדֹת‎), which is Hebrew for “generations” or “descendants.” There may also have been some tablets preserved from before Joseph’s time, maybe in cuneiform, that Joseph used to get the genealogies and such going back to the time Abram met Melchizedek (the high priest of God at that time). As the high priest of God, Melchizedek would have had direct access to God’s history of the world and all creation up until that time. He knew God and was able to operate as a priest to God among nations with different religions, so it seems reasonable that he would have had records of the history from Noah to Abram and everything that came before.

In Genesis chapter 41, Joseph is reunited with the brothers who sold him into slavery and pretends he doesn’t recognize them. They don’t remember him because he is the Vizier of Egypt and his official name is Zaphenath-paneah. In the process of scaring them by accusing them of being spies (a trick to get them to bring the whole family to Egypt), they are freaking out when he threatens to imprison them. They complain to each other that they deserve this, and this is punishment for selling Joseph 22 years ago. However, they didn’t realize that Joseph understood them because, as the vizier of Egypt, he was using an interpreter to communicate with them. After all, they were foreigners. Joseph was using an interpreter unnecessarily, since he was bilingual (speaking Hebrew and Egyptian) at this point, which lends credence to the idea that he wrote the patriarchal narratives before Moses in the Egyptian language. Then Moses, who was raised in Pharaoh’s house, would have grown up learning both Egyptian and the Hebrew language, as his mother was his nanny.

Additionally, during his 40 years in Midian, he may have learned the Proto-Sinaitic script from the Midianites, which is the earliest version of the alphabet used by Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. This script originated from a simplification of the Egyptian writing system, so it’s also possible that Joseph, Moses, or someone else from the region invented it. This means that Moses was literate in two languages, knowing both Egyptian and Proto-Sinaitic, and this would have allowed him to translate the creation story and patriarchal histories from Joseph’s Egyptian scripts to the Torah’s version of Genesis in a Semitic language during the post-Exodus wilderness journey. I have an article on authorship in the Bible that delves deeper into the general ideas surrounding the construction here.