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Kass is a remarkably "strong reader," which means that he has the capacity to compel the text to yield meanings congruent with his own particular frame of reference. Among the most remarkable of his contributions is his discussion of the flood narrative and its aftermath. He finds the flood to be a credible punishment on the part of a God whose rule is not under threat, and who punishes and rewards according to the moral condition of Noah and his wicked contemporaries. The narrative reflects "the Bible's dim view of the goodness and adequacy of human artfulness." The narrative vouches for "an acquired human commitment to righteousness and the perpetuation of life on earth," a commitment that is contrasted, in the narrative, to "the natural human aspiration to apotheosis through heroic deed." This judgment is followed, in a consideration of Genesis 9:1-17, with the establishment of "the first law for all mankind" in the Noachide law, "the founding document of the new world order" that yields, in sequence, law and covenant. It is clear that Kass's own intellectual background permits a reading quite outside the conventional in Genesis studies.
A second strong reading that I find compelling is Kass's presentation of Joseph as suffering "irreversible Egyptianization," so that Joseph signs on to the usurpatious policies of Pharaoh at the expense of his own people. Kass offers a powerful contrast between son Joseph and father Jacob, who in great dignity and strength refuses, unlike his overly eager son, to concede anything to Pharaoh.
Of course a strong reader may also offer "strong misreadings." In my judgment, one such "misread" occurs when Kass situates the Abraham narrative under the rubric of the "education" of Abraham, a theme that recurs as well for the later ancestors. This accent seems an imposition of Kass's program in a way that invites the reader to miss a great deal of the life-or-death disjunction in the narrative, a kind of disjunctiveness that is typically Jewish but that hardly fits with what Kass seems to mean by "education." In a similar way, the extended discussion of "eros" on the basis of Jacob's initial attraction to Rachel seems to me greatly overstated in the service of an Aristotelian agenda. None of that, however, distracts, for the delight of reading Kass is to see this powerful interpretive mind at work.
As the title of the book indicates, Kass is here in pursuit of "wisdom," by which I think he means access into truth that can be received and trusted by reasonable people, without reference to a specific theological conviction. In this he succeeds impressively, showing the ways in which the Genesis narratives can be a powerful resource for reflective minds. Along the way this agenda causes a shortchanging of important theological accents in the narrative, as for example, Kass's skepticism about the theme of providence in the Joseph narrative. But then, Kass certainly knows that his book cannot do everything. What it is able to do is rich, splendid, and generative, itself a "genesis" for ongoing interpretation.
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