Questions That Arise From the Reading of Genesis

An extract from

The Beginning of Wisdom

Reading Genesis

Leon R. Kass

BEGINNING(S)

The all-time identify to start is at the beginning, with the first book of the Bible. This book, known to usa as Genesis, is famously a book about beginnings: the beginning of the heavens and the earth; the offset of man life on world; the kickoff of the Children of Israel, start with Male parent Abraham; and before, backside, and above all these temporal beginnings, the tireless and enduring beginning that is God—Creator of the world, maker of homo in His own image, covenant maker with Abraham and with State of israel. In improver, as a book among kindred books, Genesis is itself the start of the Torah, of the biblical teaching almost how human beings are to live. Though information technology contains very little prescription and propounds very few commandments, Genesis serves as a prelude to the laws (given mainly in Exodus and Leviticus, and repeated in Deuteronomy). This information technology does primarily past making clear through its stories why the laws might exist needed and for what sorts of human weaknesses and difficulties. For this reason especially the book of Genesis lends itself to philosophical reading, at to the lowest degree at the starting time.

True, once Abraham appears on the scene in Genesis 12, the Bible'south account of "human history" acquires a unique and singular particularity, with a portion of the human being race living in a special relationship with the biblical God. Such a teaching could neither be discovered nor fifty-fifty exist countenanced by unaided philosophic reason. Just the so-called universal human history of the get-go eleven chapters—from the cosmos to the tower of Babel—is different.

To be sure, these stories too describe singular figures and unique events, for example, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood. Only read philosophically, they convey a universal teaching about "human nature," an anthropology in the original meaning of the term: a logos (account) of anthropos (the human being). Without using argument or philosophical language—there is no biblical Hebrew discussion for "nature"—the stories of these first eleven chapters nevertheless offer (among other things) a coherent anthropology that rivals anything produced past the great philosophers. To meet this, nosotros must larn to read the beginning of Genesis as offering a more than historical sense of "start."

On the face of it, the early capacity of Genesis announced to give an account of humankind's temporal ancestry, a history that tells the sequence of what happened at the start: first the creation of the earth and humankind; then the expulsion of man and adult female from Eden; then Cain and Abel; then events leading up to the flood, and then on. Simply these seemingly historical stories are in fact (also and especially) vehicles for conveying the timeless psychic and social elements or principles—the anthropological beginnings or roots—of man life, and in all their moral ambiguity. The stories cast powerful light, for example, on the problematic character of human reason, speech communication, freedom, sexual desire, the love of the beautiful, shame, guilt, acrimony, and man's response to mortality. The stories bandage as powerful light on the naturally vexed relations betwixt human and woman, brother and blood brother, father and son, neighbor and neighbor, stranger and stranger, man and God. Adam and Eve are not but the commencement simply also the paradigmatic man and woman. Cain and Abel are paradigmatic brothers. Babel is the quintessential metropolis. By ways of such paradigmatic stories, the beginning of Genesis shows us not then much what happened every bit what always happens. And by belongings upwards a mirror in which we readers can discover in ourselves the reasons why human life is so bittersweet and why uninstructed human beings generally go it wrong, Genesis reflectively read also provides a powerful pedagogical kickoff for the moral and spiritual education of the reader. Every bit a issue of what we learn from this early education, when God calls Abraham in Genesis 12 we will also exist inclined to pay attending.

The educational lessons of the kickoff are supplemented past the rest of the book. After the beginning 11 capacity expose some of the enduring psychic and social obstacles to decent and righteous living, the rest of Genesis presents beginning efforts to overcome these obstacles in the lives of the Israelite founders Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their families. These national ancestry are fraught with difficulties and success is hard to come by. Even so remarkably, a new human style of acting and standing in the globe is established and transmitted for several generations through the education of the patriarchs, an education in which we readers may vicariously and reflectively participate.

Genesis is thus in many different ways about "what is showtime." Information technology tells of the temporally first men ("history"). Just more of import, it shows us what is first in man, what is primordial, elemental, principal, and essential ("anthropology"). It also invites reflection on what is cosmically offset and how homo beings stand in relation to the whole ("ontology'), as well equally on who acts well and who acts badly, who is worthy of praise and who of blame, and why ("ethics"). Information technology introduces u.s.a. to the seeds of a new nation, following a new and God-fearing way, a fashion that will somewhen exist codification in constabulary and transmitted through political institutions and religious-cultural traditions ("politics"). And by confronting us with all these firsts, in the course of stories told with very picayune commentary, information technology begins the pedagogy of the reader who is seeking wisdom not only about what is start just also and especially most how first or all-time to live ("philosophy"). What I am suggesting is that Genesis is a coherent narrative that conveys a moral whole, in which the opening part prepares the philosophic reader to take seriously, when it comes, the inflow of God's new way for humankind, while the rest enables him to larn along with the patriarchs what it might offering and require of him.

A full defense of this unusual merits cannot be provided in accelerate; evidence regarding Genesis's narrative, moral, and pedagogical integrity can exist obtained only through careful scrutiny of the unabridged text. But I promise that it will not spoil the reader'southward pleasure of discovery if I provide here a few suggestions most the overall structure and direction of the narrative, indicating too what I have to be its central concerns.

Genesis begins with a comprehensive and universal panorama of the entire cosmic whole (chapter one), moves to naturalistic and universal portraits of human being life (chapters ii-eleven), and concludes with the emergence of a tiny and distinctive people, begetting a new and distinctive human way on world (chapters 12-50). Throughout, the text is concerned with this question: Is it possible to discover, institute, and preserve a way of life, responsive to both the promise and the peril of the human brute, that accords with homo'south truthful standing in the earth and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?

In the opening chapter of Genesis, we learn how cosmic guild is produced out of primordial chaos by means of a progressive process of separation and distinction. At the peak of creation stands homo, the one god-like brute, alone capable, thanks to his reason, of recognizing the distinctive articulated order of things. But equally we learn, beginning in Genesis 2, man is also the fauna—once again, thank you to his reason and freedom—who is most capable of disturbing and destroying order, especially equally pride in his own powers distorts his perception of the world. In a series of tales—from the primordial couple in the Garden of Eden, through the fratricide of Cain and the warring Age of Heroes leading to the Flood, to the ambitious building of the universal city of Boom-boom—readers are shown the dangerous natural tendencies of humankind: on the one hand, toward order-destroying wildness and violence, on the other hand, toward order-transforming efforts at self-sufficiency and mastery of the given earth. Against the aspiration toward human being-made unity and re-creation, with its proud illusion of human autonomy, the text begins (in affiliate 12) to recount a new human culling, carried by a separated pocket-size portion of humankind nonetheless ordered in pursuit of wholeness and holiness. The new style accepts as given the heterogeneous world of distinctive peoples but seeks to cultivate attitudes that will care for strangers justly, generously, and, ultimately, as 1 would care for oneself. And it recognizes human dependence on powers not of our ain making and the need to marshal human being life with the highest principle of Existence. In a word, the new man fashion—the way of the Children of Israel, launched every bit a light unto the nations—is to exist built on two related principles: the exercise of righteousness in relations toward others, informed by the pursuit of holiness in relation to the divine. Both are grounded not in human reason or freedom but in the peculiarly human feel of awe and reverence, elicited by the mysteries of the earth's order and power and especially by the voice of commanding moral say-so.

Starting time with the call of Abraham (Genesis 12), the text enables usa to experience the struggles to embody the ideals of righteousness and holiness in the way of life of a nascent people—showtime with i man, the founder (Abraham), moving to 1 household of perpetuation (Isaac and Rebekah), and flowering into ane clan or tribe, on the threshold of nationhood (Jacob and his sons). Each generation faces and solves the perennial threats to survival and decency, including the intrafamilial dangers of patricide, fratricide, and incest, the international dangers of conquest, injustice, and assimilation, and the spiritual danger of idolatry. Through their trials—domestic, political, and spiritual—Abraham (the founder) and Isaac, Jacob, and Judah (the perpetuators) are educated to the piece of work of proper patriarchy, all in the service of advancing the crusade of righteousness and holiness in the globe. ("The Education of the Fathers" would exist a most appropriate subtitle for the book of Genesis; it was, in fact, the working championship under which I first began this book.)

Yet although the focus of Genesis often centers on the household, its near of import implications are cultural and political. For the new way is set off against, and tin can all-time be seen as an alternative to, important competing cultural alternatives: the heaven-gazing and heaven-worshiping Babylonians, the globe-worshiping and licentious Canaanites, and the technologically sophisticated and masterful Egyptians. Equally Abraham must sally out of and against the ways of Babylonia, so the nation of State of israel must emerge out of and confronting the ways of Egypt. Accordingly, Genesis culminates in an encounter between nascent Israel and civilized Egypt, exemplified especially in the contrast between Judah, the prudent and reverent statesman, and Joseph, the brilliant and cosmopolitan administrator. Although the full picture will non emerge until the book of Exodus, which follows next, Genesis leaves united states with these clear alternatives, which represent in fact a permanent human choice: a world in which the rational mastery of nature and the pursuit of immortality leads ultimately to the enslavement of mankind under the despotic rule of ane man worshiped as a god, versus a way of life in which all human beings, mindful of their limitations and continuing in awe-and-fear of the Lord, can exist treated every bit equal creatures, every bit servants of the i God toward whose perfection we may strive to align our lives.

READING IN A PHILOSOPHICAL SPIRIT

This book on Genesis, addressed to serious and thoughtful readers of whatever kind or degree of religious cognition and exercise, has iii major purposes: First, to demonstrate by example a wisdom-seeking approach to the Bible that attempts to sympathize the text in its own terms yet tries to testify how such an agreement may accost u.s.a. in our current situation of moral and spiritual neediness. Second, to recover in their full power the stories of Genesis as tales to live with, equally stories illuminating some of the virtually important and enduring questions of man existence. Third, to brand at least plausible the power of the Biblical approach and response to these questions, with its emphasis on righteousness, holiness, and reverence for the divine.

Great difficulties confront anyone who proposes such a philosophic arroyo to the Bible. For information technology is far from clear that the Bible is a book like whatsoever other, or enough similar any other, to be read and interpreted in the usual ways. Because of its place in our religious traditions, few people are prepared to arroyo it impartially. Even before they read it some people know—or recall they know—that the Bible speaks truly, being the word of God; others know—or remember they know—that, claiming to be the give-and-take of God, information technology in fact speaks falsely. In addition, as already noted, the academic written report of the Bible has raised major methodological questions, not to the lowest degree about whether the Bible—and fifty-fifty the single volume of Genesis—is in fact a coherent and integral whole. The then-chosen documentary hypothesis argues that what nosotros telephone call the Bible is in fact a latter-day compilation of disparate materials, written past different authors at dissimilar times, having different outlooks and intentions, even employing different concepts of and names for God. Only fifty-fifty granting that the textile compiled in Genesis came, to begin with, from different sources, one must all the same consider what intention or thought of wholeness governed the act of compilation that produced the present text. Must one assume that the redactor was some pious fool who slavishly stitched together all the available disparate stories without rhyme or reason, heedless of the contradictions between them? Or should we not rather give the redactor the benefit of the doubt and presume that he knew precisely what he was about? Could he perhaps have deliberately juxtaposed contradictory stories to enable the states to notice sure contradictory aspects of the world thereby made plain? True, finding a coherent interpretation of the whole does not guarantee that one has plant the biblical author'south (or redactor's) own intention. Just it should give pause to those who claim that the text could accept no such unity. Besides, knowing the historical origins or sources of the text is no substitute for learning its meaning; to discover the meaning, a text must be studied in its ain terms.

An equally severe difficulty comes from the other side, from those who regard the Bible equally the revealed word of God. For them information technology is definitely a volume, but not a volume that can exist read and interrogated like whatsoever other. It seems rather to demand a certain prior commitment to the truth of the account, fifty-fifty in order to sympathise it. Religion, information technology is sometimes said, is the prerequisite to understanding. Simply the Hebrew Bible in fact suggests the contrary. In Deuteronomy, Moses asserts that observing the statutes and ordinances that God has commanded is Israel's "wisdom and agreement in the eyes of the people, that when they hear all these statutes shall say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and agreement people'" (4:half dozen). The wisdom of the Torah is said by the Torah to be accessible to anybody, at to the lowest degree in part.

Be this as information technology may, the biblical text, whether revealed or non, whether read past believers or atheists, is not self-interpreting. To understand its meaning, the hard work of exegesis and interpretation is required. The chore of interpretation is complicated by the fact that the Bible, like about great books, does non explicitly provide rules for how to read it. As with the content, so with the approach, the philosophical reader is forced to notice his ain manner. Every bit a result of many readings and rereadings, I now brand the following "methodological" assumptions in my efforts at interpretation: Kickoff, at that place is a coherent order and plan to the whole, and the order of the stories is of more than chronological significance. 2nd, every discussion counts. Third, juxtapositions are of import; what precedes or what follows a given sentence or story may exist crucial for discovering its meaning. (It matters, for example, that the Noahide lawmaking and covenant appear every bit the firsthand sequel to Noah's animal sacrifice tendered at the end of the Flood. Information technology matters, too, that there are two juxtaposed and very dissimilar stories of the creation of man or of the multiplication of nations and languages.) 4th and finally, the teachings of the text are not utterly opaque to human reason, even if God and other matters remain veiled in mystery. Though, as we shall see, the text takes a dim view of the sufficiency of human being reason, it presents this critical view to human reason in a most intelligible and powerful mode. Ane can approach the text in a spirit of inquiry, fifty-fifty if 1 comes as a event to learn the limitations of such philosophic activity.

I am well enlightened that this suggestion, though allowed for by the Bible, still appears to be at odds with the manner recommended past the Bible. As I noted near the start, the outset of biblical wisdom is said to be fright (awe-reverence) for the Lord, not open inquiry spurred by wonder. In addition, there is the great danger that hangs over all efforts at interpretation: I will find in the text not what the author intended but only what I have put there myself (unremarkably unwittingly). For these reasons, a philosophic reading of Genesis must go on with great modesty and caution, not to say fearfulness and trembling. If I sometimes forget myself and seem too bold, it is only out of zeal for understanding. Moreover, I make no claim to a final or definitive reading. On the contrary, the stories are too rich, too complex, and too deep to be captured fully, one time and for all. It is therefore possible, as I hope to demonstrate, that i tin can arroyo the book in a spirit and mode that is simultaneously naïve, philosophic, and reverent. The pursuit of wisdom, through the direct and unmediated encountering of the text, can go on even as one is humbly mindful of the inexhaustible depths and mysteries of the text and the world it describes. As the example of Socrates reminds us, humility earlier mystery and cognition of i'due south own ignorance are inappreciably at odds with a philosophic spirit.

Allow me try to brand these remarks about reading philosophically nonetheless humbly a bit more than physical. When we set out to read the book of Genesis, nosotros begin, quite properly, at the beginning. But getting started is not as piece of cake equally it seems. For though we know where to get-go, we practise not yet know how to go along. To brainstorm properly, it seems, we need prior knowledge. What kind of book are we reading? In what spirit and manner should we read? For the beginning reader, answers to these questions cannot exist had in advance. They tin be caused, if at all, only as a issue of reading. We are in difficulty from the start.

The opening of the volume only adds to our difficulty, fifty-fifty earlier nosotros go to the first affiliate. Unlike virtually books, it declares no title and identifies no author. The name nosotros call it in English, Genesis, meaning "origin" or "coming into being," is only the Greek mistranslation of the book's commencement, Hebrew word, ber'eshith, "in commencement," by which Hebrew proper noun the book is known in Jewish tradition. That tradition ascribes authorship to Moses—the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible are also known as the Five Books of Moses—yet nowhere in Genesis is such a claim made or even supported. We do not know whose words we are reading, and we as well practice not know whether it matters that we do not know whose words we are reading.

When we begin to read—"In starting time God created the heavens and the earth"—we discover that the internal phonation or speaker of the text—what literary critics would call "the narrator" simply what I volition simply call "the text"—is also nameless. Someone is addressing us in a commanding voice, speaking about grand themes, speaking with seeming authorisation. But who is talking? We are not told. The vox of the text is apparently not the direct voice of God: God'southward speeches the text identifies and reports using the third person ("And the Lord said"). Just if it is not God who is speaking, our perplexity but increases; for the text begins by talking confidently about things that no human existence could maybe have known from straight experience: the prehuman world and its coming into being, or cosmos. How, we wonder, does the speaker know what he is talking virtually? Why should we believe him? Is this a divinely inspired business relationship? Is this the revealed give-and-take of God, passed to u.s. through the prophetic voice of the text? How tin can we know? On the basis of what other than prejudice—prejudgment—can we decide whether the text is speaking truly?

In the face of our ignorance before these questions, many skeptical readers will be tempted to quit correct here, absent some outside evidence for the veracity of the biblical account. On the other side, some pious readers, responding to the skeptic'south challenges, volition debate that the text is accessible only to the true-blue, those who trust that the text is indeed the revealed discussion of God. Let me propose a third alternative, an mental attitude between doubtfulness, demanding proof in advance, and faith, comfortable that proof is unnecessary: the attitude of thoughtful appointment, of suspended disbelief, eager to learn. I offering a biblical example of what I mean.

At the beginning of the 12th chapter of the volume of Genesis, we readers are called to witness a crucial turning point in human history. Out of the bluish, with no accelerate warning, a mysterious and crawly voice calls to Abraham, commanding him to take a journeying—"to the land I will show you"—and promising him great rewards should he do then. Abraham, without so much as a question or a comment, immediately hearkens to the call: he promptly sets off every bit commanded. If we wish to imagine ourselves in Abraham's place as he hears the commanding vocalization, we must forget that we know, because the biblical text explicitly tells the states, that the voice calling Abraham was the voice of the Lord: "And the Lord said to Abram..." (12:i). Abraham himself is not told who is calling him; the phonation that calls does non place itself. Although he is, for reasons we shall explore in a later chapter, open to such a call, Abraham at this moment cannot know with certainty who is speaking to him or whether the voice tin deliver on its keen promises. Even so, trustingly and courageously, Abraham decides to accept a walk with this voice. Putting bated whatever possible doubts and suspicions, he embarks on a path that enables him eventually to detect merely who had spoken to him and why.

Readers who take upwards the book of Genesis without presuppositions or intermediaries notice themselves in a position not dissimilar Abraham's: a commanding only unidentified voice is addressing us from out of the text, without alarm or training, speaking to us correct away about things (for openers, the creation of the world) that we homo beings could not by ourselves know anything about. To be sure, the opening words of Genesis practice not control united states of america to act. Neither tin we compare ourselves to Abraham in setting, stature, or virtue. Even so, nosotros readers are beingness invited, equally was Abraham, to proceed trustingly and courageously, without knowing yet who is speaking to united states of america, what he might desire from us, and whether or non he speaks truly.

How and then shall we answer? What does the call of the author of Genesis require of united states of america readers? Not, as some might insist, a bound of faith or a commitment in advance to the truth of the biblical story, but rather, only a suspension of disbelief. Being awake and thoughtful, we cannot assistance but note the difficult questions regarding both our get-go and the starting time, but we will, at least for at present, put them aside and plunge right in. We will suspend our doubts and suspicions and take the book'southward invitation to accept a walk with the biblical writer keeping our eyes and ears open up and our judgment peachy, to be certain. Nosotros will proceed in the hope that we might have our doubts addressed and our uncertainties resolved. If nosotros let ourselves to travel its narrative journey, the book may reward our openness and gain our trust. Who knows, nosotros may even learn who (or Who) is speaking to us, and why.

In adopting such an mental attitude, nosotros are self-consciously deciding now to decide only later, after reading and pondering, whether we think the book and its author speak truly. In making such a decision, we are according the Bible the aforementioned courtesy that we give to other books that place big obstacles earlier our credulity, for example, the Iliad, in which nosotros are told, in the very first judgement, that nosotros will hear how "the will of Zeus was accomplished." Every bit with other books, to estimate the veracity of the text we shall accept to find out what kind of a text, teaching or pointing to what kind of truth, we have before us. As with other books, we shall have to read and reread many times if we are to learn from the Bible how it wants to be read.

Equally a result of many readings and rereadings of Genesis, I am increasingly impressed by the leanness of the text and the lacunae in the stories. Little of what nosotros readers might like to know about an event or a graphic symbol is told to us. Much of what we are told admits of a wide multifariousness of interpretations. Rarely does the text tell us the inner thoughts and feelings of a character. Rarely does the text tell us the pregnant of an result. And almost never does the text pronounce judgment on the words or deeds of any protagonist. Why this reticence? What purpose could it perhaps serve?

Let me advise that these formal features of the text are responsible for its indelible vitality and the success of its timeless pedagogical ability. The book has been read by several hundred generations of readers, with each reader located in a particular time and place. Notwithstanding the compiled text remains the aforementioned, letter for letter, now as then, hither as at that place. How tin can a static historic period-old text continue to speak to changing and always more mod readers? How can seemingly fourth dimension-jump characters and stories that may perhaps carry timeless insights retain their power in differing times and places and for differing types of readers? How tin the text allow for every reader's historical and cultural particularity, while bringing him into contact with what might be a transhistorical and universal wisdom? Information technology is precisely the text'southward sparseness, lacunae, ambivalence, reticence, and lack of editorial judgment that both let and require the date of the reader. The difficulties of exegesis and interpretation force united states to grapple with the text and to try and weigh culling readings and judgments, always testing our opinions against the textual evidence likewise as the differing interpretations and judgments of swain readers of our ain and earlier times. As a result of these efforts, the venerable stories and characters of Genesis go once again and over again ever young and e'er fresh, taking up residence in the hearts and minds of all serious readers. By this means, each reader's imagination is furnished and enlivened and his thinking is enlarged and deepened. In the stop, the concerns of the text and its characters become the concerns as well of the reader. The pedagogy of the patriarchs and matriarchs can get the way to our ain education.

All of us necessarily come at the text start from where we are, in our ain time and place, equipped—simply also express—by our particular experiences of the world around u.s.a.. Yet the mysteries and perplexities of the text disturb our complacent zipper to our own parochial situation and invite our active participation in a globe larger than our own. We are drawn into the stories only to discover there a profundity not hitherto available to us. When we analyze, ponder, and talk over the text and when nosotros live with its stories, the enduring text comes live, here and now. We who alive hither and now are offered a adventure to grab a glimpse of possibly timeless and transcendent truth about, say, homo and adult female, kin and strangers, man and God, or whatever matter the text has under consideration. At the same fourth dimension, our need to keep grappling with the abiding ambiguities of the text teaches the states, by performative experience, another timeless truth almost ourselves: the truth of our own ignorance and the impossibility of ever resting comfortably with what we think we have understood. The open form of the text and its recalcitrance to concluding and indubitable interpretation are admittedly perfect instruments for cultivating the openness, thoughtfulness, and modesty almost i'southward own understanding that is the hallmark of the pursuit of wisdom.

THE SEEDS OF WISDOM

Non only in course and spirit but likewise in substance will seekers for wisdom be easily drawn into the world of Genesis. Despite the not bad distance betwixt the nomadic civilisation of the ancient Promised Country and the promise-filled technological civilization of third-millennium America, we will notice that Genesis takes up and considers themes and questions of paramount concern also to u.s.—one might even say, to human beings always and everywhere. Human beings now as e'er need wisdom regarding family and individual life, regarding public and civic affairs, and regarding their place in and relation to the whole and their relation to the powers that be.

As were the protagonists in the world of Genesis, so are we today troubled by vexing questions of family life. Not only do we face oft irreconcilable struggles betwixt human being and adult female, parent and child, or sibling and sibling. We are besides increasingly uncertain nigh the proper organization of family unit life, especially with regard to providing well for the rearing of children. Our inherited cultural forms in these matters are in a country of flux—evolving, if y'all approve, or breaking down, if you don't, into God only knows what new patterns. Reading Genesis reveals that this is hardly a new dilemma. Not simply does it offer for reflection its famous tales of family unit struggle; read philosophically, the stories of Genesis reveal the deepest roots of these conflicts and prove us why information technology is so hard to organize and sustain a flourishing homo household.

The topics of sex activity and the relation betwixt the sexes are, not surprisingly, amply considered in Genesis. Women effigy prominently in many of the stories, often playing vital and even heroic roles. But Genesis is mainly most the adventures of men, and especially of the Israelite patriarchs and their male offspring. More precisely, much of Genesis is devoted to efforts at educating men in the work of fatherhood: the task of transmitting to their descendants not just life but a worthy mode of life, devoted to justice and holiness and looking up to the divine. Why this accent? Does it represent (as current mode believes) the sexist or patriarchal mentality of aboriginal State of israel? Or does information technology reflect something closer to the contrary: a belief that men are by nature much more than women in need of education if they are to live responsibly, righteously, and well? Are men naturally fatigued to domestic life and the care of those who will anytime supplant them? Or will they, if left to their own devices, pursue ways of life devoted to heroic quests for personal honour and celebrity, to power and domination, and to wealth and pleasure? Reflection most such questions is open in every time and identify to prospective fathers—and mothers—who can learn vicariously along with, and through the stories of, the patriarchs.

In add-on to examining private life, Genesis besides explores the life of cities and civilizations, shedding light on the bug of offense and injustice, the dangers of xenophobia and abuse of strangers, and the significant of the political aspiration to independence and cocky-sufficiency. Contemporary concerns over unbridled technology are anticipated in the story of Babel. Our worries nigh civic licentiousness are taken up in the story of Sodom. Our wish neatly to uncrease justice from revenge is challenged by the story of the rape of Dinah. Most of import, the text gets us thinking about competing cultural and political visions of the best human life. For Genesis presents the emergence of nascent State of israel, bearer of God'due south new way, in the context of iii major cultural alternatives, the Babylonians, the Canaanites, and the Egyptians, each characterized by dissimilar ruling ideas, each looking upwards to different gods. Much tin can be learned about the distinctive graphic symbol of the Judeo-Christian manner—then and now—by thinking through the meaning of these quasi-polar alternatives. For though these ancient civilizations are long gone, their animating principles survive. Indeed, they detect expression in cultural alternatives competing today for our attention and allegiance.

Biblical Egypt should be of special interest for modern Americans. For Egypt was the tiptop of ancient civilization, a civilization characterized by agricultural plenty, high levels of science and technology, advanced hierarchy and public administration, and—perhaps nigh relevant for united states of america—a passion for longevity and the pursuit of actual immortality through the conquest of decay and death. Nevertheless Arab republic of egypt was also the place where women were rounded up for the ruler's harem, foreigners were held in contempt, a homo was worshiped every bit a god, and in the cease, the people'south preoccupation with survival and material well-being led to their enslavement. Is Egypt, mayhap, a permanent human possibility and temptation? Is something like Egypt in our future?

Finally, the stories in Genesis address our current concern with man's relation to nature and the earth, to the other animals, and to the divine—ultimate questions in any pursuit of wisdom. For a variety of reasons—including our conventionalities in evolution, our interest in animal welfare, and our business concern for the surroundings—nosotros detect ourselves once again agitating the question of the difference of man and the difference information technology makes. Modernistic biological science, from molecular genetics to evolutionary psychology, has raised a large claiming to the traditional belief in man distinctiveness. Deep ecologists speak with reverent awe nigh Gaia, our Female parent Globe, nearly every bit if she were a goddess. What does all this nature worship mean for human being cocky-understanding and the belief that man was made in the image of God? And what follows for human life and the way we should live it? Can a "pan-naturalism" that glorifies nature and makes light of the human being deviation provide the ground for standards of human being justice and decency? These seemingly contemporary concerns, the careful reader will discover, are not foreign to the book of Genesis. To the contrary, who we are and how we stand in the earth is of the utmost importance to the biblical author. Indeed, these are the questions addressed at the very first of the commencement, in the story of creation, to which we are at present set to turn.

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages nine-21 of The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis by Robert East. Wright and David J. Cowen, published past the University of Chicago Press. ©2003 by Leon R. Kass, K.D.. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accord with the fair-utilize provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)

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Leon R. Kass
The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis
©2003, 716 pages, 2 halftones
Paper $20.00 ISBN: 0-226-42567-3

For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or hither online—please get to the webpage for The Kickoff of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.

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