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Over the last several years, the Book of Genesis has been the subject of a near-freakish concentration of attention in books, magazines, and television programs aimed at a general audience. For all their surface diversity, is there an underlying pattern to these works? And what do they have to tell us that is of lasting import?

In the view of medieval rabbis, the Bible is a book by God about man. What it offers its readers is the divine perspective on human affairs, a perspective made complex by the powerful reflexes of God's indefatigable hesed love—affection, jealous protectiveness, an insistence on accountability coupled with demands for justice and righteousness. This turbulence of love's expression—and an uncompromising moral realism—inevitably lends to the divine viewpoint an ironic slant.

For the same rabbinic tradition, works of synthetic reflection and commentary on Scripture (such as Christians are inclined to call "theology") are books by men about God. However earnest or intelligent, they are of a lesser order. A sense of irony, we might add, is not their natural mode.

Later, especially in post-Enlightenment times and among those most affected by a rationalistic world-view, Scripture itself

came to be viewed as books by men about God. At last, in our own century most explicitly, came the natural consequence of this generic displacement—the evidently comforting assertion that Scripture was really just a collection of books by men (especially patriarchal men) about men. In this new canon there is scarcely any room for irony at all.

I draw attention to this evolution in part to caution against an overly eager appreciation for the mere fact that there has been a recent outpouring of books of commentary and translation of Genesis. At the same time, I think Christians have a lot to learn from several of these volumes.

The first thing to learn, perhaps, is that with the possible exception of the published version of Bill Moyers's pbs series (Genesis: A Living Conversation, an interfaith dialogue), all of the books in question represent a vigor of interest in Genesis among Jews rather than Christians. Eight of the books are by Jewish scholars: one rabbi, two professional academics, an independent scholar, and three lay Bible teachers; one of these contains chapters by an additional 20 Jewish fiction writers and poets. The remaining book has for its author an ex-nun and ex-Catholic, Karen Armstrong (author of The Gospel According to Women and A History of God), who just happens to teach at a rabbinical training college in London, England. Even Moyers's project, as he admits, would not exist without the guiding inspiration of Rabbi Burton L. Visotsky (whose The Genesis of Ethics is reviewed here), and it would have been impossibly poorer without the contributions of Naomi H. Rosenblatt (Wrestling with Angels), Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg (The Beginnings of Desire: Reflections on Genesis), Robert Alter (Genesis: A Translation and Commentary), and, to a lesser degree, Karen Armstrong and Stephen Mitchell (Genesis: A New Translation of the Classical Biblical Stories). Only Peter Pitzele (Our Fathers' Wells), the dissident contributions collected by David Rosenberg (Genesis As It Is Written), and Jonathan Kirsch (The Harlot by the Side of the Road), among those reviewed here, were not part of the celebrated Moyers "conversations."

The "explosion" of interest in Genesis is thus evidently a Jewish phenomenon. What may be less apparent on the surface is just how "antirabbinic" much of it is. Though each of these books in its own way is rich in the lived experience of Jewishness, and most have centrally to do with the question of Jewish identity, most are also at pains to express a sturdy resistance to the methods and the pieties of the commentaries that have shaped the tradition of Jewish interpretation of Torah. The resistance, moreover, has several dimensions as well as degrees of intensity.

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April 26 1999, Vol. 43, No. 5