Genesis Review

After dozens of reviews for sacred texts from a wide range of cultures, it still feels a little odd to write a review for the biblical book of Genesis (and even odder to give it a star rating).  I even reconsidered if I should do a review for it at all, not least because, however I do it and whatever I say, I will certainly offend someone.  Yet, here I am, writing a review for the book of Genesis, and not just in the interest of fairness and completeness.  It assuredly won’t ruffle any feathers, along with the reviews that will eventually come for the other books in the Bible.

While I don’t consider myself an especially religious person, I do consider that I have a decent amount of exposure to, and familiarity with, the biblical texts, at least enough that I figured reading through the more familiar ones, like Genesis, would more be an exercise in stringing familiar stories together, rather than in being exposed to new content.  In a way, that’s what happened…but there are details that tend to be left out or missed when you don’t read straight through, and stories that don’t quite interact with each other in the way you might expect.  And that’s without getting into the difference between what’s actually included in the text, and what’s evolved into the popular understanding.

For instance, how many people realize that humanity is actually created thrice in Genesis?  There’s the seven-day creation story, in which man and woman are created along with the other terrestrial animals.  In the next chapter, man and woman are created from the substance of the earth, with life breathed into them, and then man is created again, separately, and given the opportunity to name and have dominion over the animals, and then woman is created from the man’s rib.  If the creation of the human species appears subject to a certain degree of confusion, what is much less ambiguous is the implication when Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden of Eden: God was afraid of creating more Gods.  Apparently, God believed that if humans ate from both the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life, it would make them Gods, and He exiled them from Eden in order to prevent this from happening.  One wonders, of course, why either tree was planted in the Garden if they posed such a potential risk.

It probably sounds terribly sacrilegious, but the God in Genesis feels like a God who is sort of figuring things out as He goes.  Frankly, though, I found Genesis more interesting from an anthropological and historical perspective.  Aside from the ubiquitous flood story which we see in Genesis as well as so many other creation narratives from around the world, Genesis and other early books of the Bible serve both as religious texts and as primary sources on a relatively sparsely documented period of human history.  Even before Noah and the flood, the text is firmly grounded in the historical world.  Its characters, too, are quite grounded in temporal existence, despite some of them living for many centuries.

Indeed, it is extremely evident that the stories Genesis recounts are from a very different time and place.  They chronicle practices and beliefs which today we would consider quite unsuited to the Christian or Jewish faiths, making them more jarring than they are when they appear in something like Epic of Gilgamesh.  It is especially interesting that, even at this early stage and before many of the trials and tribulations which fill the later books, the Israelites already held themselves apart as the chosen people of God, and God repeatedly emphasizes this is so – His favorite promise being that His favored people will have many descendants.

Even if you think you are familiar with the stories of Genesis, or even if you are not religious, I encourage you to actually sit down and read it.  It is a different experience to read it through as, well, a book, than it is to treat it as a religious text and read excerpts of it here and there, and, outside of its religious significance, it is an enormously influential and culturally relevant piece, with significant historical relevance.  I intend to (slowly) make my way through all the books of the Bible, so I will have a lot more of these challenging reviews to write.  I’m sure I won’t offend anyone.