The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis

713 Pages·2006·14.736 MB·English

by  Leon R. Kass

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13eginning
READING GENESIS
Leon R. Kass
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kass,Leon.
The beginning of wisdom : reading Genesis / Leon R. Kass.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Bible. O.T. Genesis-Commentaries. 1. Title.
BS1235.53.K37 2003
222'.1l06-dc21 2002045593
ISBN 0-7432-4299-8
For Zayda's treasures
Polly, Hannah, Naomi, and Abigail
-and, God willing, also for theirs:
Engage the text. Hold it close. Hand it down.

CONTENTS
Preface: The Professor and the Fossil XI
Introduction: The Beginning of Wisdom 1
PART ONE
DANGEROUS BEGINNINGS:
THE UNINSTRUCTED WAYS
GENESIS 1-11
1. Awesome Beginnings: Man, Heaven, and the Created Order 25
2. The Follies of Freedom and Reason: The Story of the Garden of
Eden (I) 54
3. The Vexed Question of Man and Woman: The Story of the Garden
of Eden (II) 98
4. Fratricide and Founding: The Twisted Roots of Civilization 123
5. Death, Beautiful Women, and the Heroic Temptation: The Return
of Chaos and the Flood 151
6. Elementary Justice: Man, Animals, and the Coming of Law and
Covenant 168
7. Paternity and Piety: Noah and His Sons 197
8. Babel: The Failures of Civilization 217
PART Two
EDUCATING THE FATHERS
GENESIS 12-50
Abraham (Genesis 12-25)
9. Educating the Fathers: Father Abraham 247
10. Educating Father Abraham: The Meaning of Marriage 268
11. Educating Father Abraham: The Meaning of Patriarchy 297
x
CONTENTS
Isaac (Genesis 25-28)
12. Inheriting the Way: From Father to Son 352
13. The Education of Isaac: From Son to Patriarch 376
Jacob (Genesis 28-35)
14. The Adventures of Jacob: The Taming of the Shrewd 404
15. Brotherhood and Piety: Facing Esau, Seeing God 446
16. Politics and Piety: Jacob Becomes Israel 473
The Generations ofJ acob: Joseph, Judah, and Their Brothers (Genesis 36-50)
17. The Generations of Jacob: The Question of Leadership 509
18. Joseph the Egyptian 550
19. Joseph and His Brothers: Estrangement and Recognition 573
20. Israel in Egypt: The Way Not Taken 616
21. Losing Joseph, Saving Israel: Jacob Preserves the Way 636
Epilogue: The End of the Beginning 661
Endnotes 667
Index 679
PREFACE
THE PROFESSOR AND THE FOSSIL
How does a man of medicine and science, raised in a strictly secular home with
out contact with Scripture, come to write a book on the Bible? It is a mystery,
even to the author. My scientific training leads me to suspect that it all comes
from a late-onset, dominant-and, I fear, lethal-rabbinic gene, one that, like
Huntington's chorea, gave no evidence of its existence during my first forty
years. But such a hereditary cause would require for its expression some appro
priate environmental stimulus. About this stimulus I am quite certain. For I re
member exactly when and how I came to study Genesis. It was all because of
Darwin.
In autumn 1978, I gave a lecture on Darwin's Origin of Species at St. John's
College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The following morning-it was Saturday, the
Jewish Sabbath, when my observant co religionists were in synagogues reading
from the book of Genesis-and still in a Darwinian mood, I persuaded my host
and friend, Robert Sacks, to drive me to a nearby rock quarry where I might
hunt for fossils. As I sat upon the ground in that barren excavation, splitting
open rocks to no avail, I discovered something far more precious than fossils.
For my friend Sacks, who had just completed a full commentary on the book of
Genesis, was regaling me with one after another of his discoveries in the text.
I had, the previous year, taught Genesis in a new common-core course my col
leagues and I had designed at the University of Chicago, but it had not then
seemed to me a book carefully constructed or worth studying as closely as the
works of the great philosophers or poets. It was, so I then thought, an edifying
book that spoke only to believers. But as I listened to Sacks point out and inter
pret strange juxtapositions in the text-what is the point of the long and boring
genealogical chapter of "begat's:' detailing the generations from Adam to Noah,
and how is it related to the global violence that follows immediately thereafter?
why does God say that the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth
right after Noah's sacrifice? why do the Noahide law and covenant come right
after Noah's sacrifice and God's comment?-I realized that I had badly under-
XI
XII PREFACE
estimated the subtlety of the book and that I had yet to learn how to read it. I
returned to Chicago eager to have another look.
For the next two years my wife and I, along with a faculty colleague (Ralph
Lerner) and some of our students (Adam Schulman, David Sher, Karen Kapner,
and Sidney Keith), met weekly at our house to discuss the weekly portion of the
Pentateuch that is read aloud in synagogues on the Sabbath. I read the chapters
in Genesis with the aid of Sacks's commentary, a copy of which he had been kind
enough to give me even before it was published.l The stories of Genesis took
hold of me. Though the characters seemed larger than life, the troubles they
faced were clearly not so different from our own. I brought the stories to the
family dinner table, where conversation was keen but closure was never reached
about their meaning. There was, it seemed evident, deep wisdom to be found
here, but it would not be available without great effort. I knew I had to persist.
At the University of Chicago, disciplinary boundaries have long been fluid,
and my own appointment gave me great latitude in teaching. Although I had
been brought to Chicago because of my interest in science and morals and
my work in biomedical ethics, I had begun teaching courses on classic texts
Plato's Symposium, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima, Lucretius's On
the Nature of Things, Descartes's Discourse on Method, Bacon's New Atlantis,
Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men, Darwin's Origin of
Species and The Descent of Man-with a view to the question of the nature of
man and its bearing on how we are to live. It was now becoming clear to me that
the Bible also had an "anthropology," an account of the human being, embedded
in its account of the good life. The Bible belonged in conversation with these
philosophical texts, where, I began to suspect, it could more than hold its own.
Yet it did not seem proper for me to offer courses at the university on the He
brew Bible. Public teachers of the book, I then thought and still think, should be
either biblical scholars or knowledgeable and religiously observant keepers of
the tradition-preferably both-and I was neither. But adhering to these stric
tures led to a difficulty. As I soon learned, biblical scholars, preoccupied with
determining the sources of the text or comparing it with the writings of other
traditions, now rarely read and teach the Bible in a wisdom-seeking spirit. And
the traditional readers of the text often read too narrowly, resolving textual dif
ficulties in the most pious direction. After a while, I persuaded myself that I
would do my students no harm if! convened a not-for-credit course on Genesis
in which we would read philosophically, solely for meaning and understanding,
in search of wisdom.
1. Sources for all quotations except those from the Bible, as well as other citations, can be found by
looking up the appropriate page and the last few words of each phrase in the backmatter Endnotes.