The Genesis Apocryphon

What it is

Genesis retold in the first person by Lamech, Noah, and Abraham. Lamech suspects his wife of conceiving by a watcher and she swears she did not; Abraham dreams of a cedar and a palm; and the courtiers of Pharaoh describe Sarah's beauty from the hair of her head to her hands.

Why it lasted

The most vivid of the rewritten scriptures, filling in exactly what Genesis leaves out — motive, dialogue, and what the characters were feeling. Its Aramaic is a key witness to the language spoken in Palestine in the period.

Scripture it works from

Read it here

The full text is held here and can be read in the reader.

28 sections · complete, from Qumran-Digital transcription: 1Q20.

Elsewhere

The complete text is held here and can be read in the reader.

• Christian Classics Ethereal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Internet Archive

These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.