'Genesis' II: redactor missing in action.

I have told you the good news about "Genesis: A Living Conversation" (Commonweal, October 11, 1996). The bad news is a little more complicated, but just as much a part of this rather extraordinary series.

The first problem with "Genesis" is its selection of participants. There are many distinguished and fascinating players on the team: What a pleasure to see, for instance, the reclusive John Barth, one of our grandest novelists (The Sotweed Factor, Chimera), on the show discussing the Cain and Abel story. But, for all the brilliance of his fiction, does Barth really belong here? Does the painter Hugh O'Donnell? Or the novelists Mary Gordon and Oscar Hijuelos? Or Elizabeth Swados, whose distinction is that she composed the rather sappy theme music for the series?

I'm not getting personal here (although Swados, on the show about Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, does establish a bottom line of irrelevance for the series). The point is that reading Genesis should be a part of everyone's experience; but that a conversation about Genesis should include as many truly skilled readers as possible. Too often, discussions of the day's episode - especially with the nonexperts - lead to bland ramblings that begin, "Well what the story says to me..." or "See, what I think Sarah is feeling here...." That may be very well for suburban Bible study groups, but not here. This essential text should not be masqueraded as user-friendly: that is McMidrash.

The great number of participants, of course, from four central religions, are as learned and as eloquent as one could wish. But it's bothersome to consider the names that are not on the team roster: Harold Bloom, John S. Dunne, Richard Friedman, Jack Miles, Fazlur Rahman, James Robinson - the list goes on.

And that objection is subsumed by a larger one. For a century now, responsible exegesis has been based on the fact - that's fact - that Genesis is a compilation, a sort of gumbo, of three very different and sometimes contradictory texts, called J (Yawhistic), E (Elohistic), and P (Priestly), which were stirred into the same pot around 450 B.C. by a mysterious figure - who was that masked man? - called the "Redactor." This truth in no way diminishes the authority of the text as "sacred"; to the contrary, trying to read the Bible seriously without knowing this is like trying to do physics without knowing calculus.

Nevertheless, the "documentary hypothesis," as it's called, scares the hell out of fundamentalists - Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alike. And "Genesis," the series, never once brings it up - although everybody involved, surely, knows better. It's TV, folks, and we don't want to alarm anybody out there who may be a fundamentalist and a PBS subscriber. Still, it's embarrassing: seven folks sit around reconciling the first creation story (God made everything in seven days) with the second (God formed man from clay in the garden), and nobody just points out that they needn't be reconciled, because they were written by two different people (the first is P, the second J) with vastly different agendas, who didn't even use the same word for - or have strictly the same concept of - "God."

This is part and parcel of the same evasiveness that informs the sequence of episodes. Why do we begin with the story of Cain and Abel ("The First Murder") and then begin at the beginning, in episode two, with the priestly creation? Because murder is a lot sexier than "Let there be light," of course: but do we need that? Is anybody tuning in "Genesis: A Living Conversation" likely to expect the wham-bam quick fix of, say, "NYPD Blue"?

Ditto with the initial performers. But their narrations, remarkably for a series called "Genesis," are not from Genesis: they're paraphrases - lose paraphrases, but paraphrases for all that. You have to assume that this is out of a desire not to offend anyone by picking a text not that of their own tradition, and this is partly admirable, but partly wrong. It's precisely the quality of a sacred text - Torah, the Gospels, the Qur'an - that it does give offense, as no mere novel, however great, can, and that it forces us to wrestle with its words, just as Jacob wrestled with the Dark One from the Elohim, for a blessing. These are stories - the series gets that splendidly right - and it is in stories, rather than in philosophy, that our ethical and religious life is born. But they are stories rooted in specific words, specific sentences - as are all stories - and it would have been better to use one consistent version (I'd vote for the Jerusalem Bible), if only to have a place to begin quarreling with the translation. What we have instead is Genesis Lite.

And Genesis only. My largest complaint about the series is its howling lack of closure. Of the five books of Torah, the first two are obviously a single narrative, an artistic whole despite the contradictory sources out of which it is woven. Reading Genesis without reading Exodus is like listening to the first two movements of Beethoven's Ninth, and skipping the last two. Perhaps PBS plans to follow this series with one of Exodus. Or perhaps Exodus - which completes and consolidates the epic of the formation of Israel - is a little too risky for a company that, after all, is at the funding mercy of our increasingly Gingrichian/Christian government. Either way, it's a pity. So much breath is wasted in this series about who God is, what God's like. When you read the first two books of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures) as a unit, you know what he's like. From Eden on, he's a creator who gave his creation autonomy, who is sometimes angered at that autonomy, and who's trying just to work out a way of getting along with his creation without anybody getting hurt or upset: trying to find the right covenant. Anybody who's ever had a sixteen-year-old in the house will feel deeply for Yahweh. And every failed agreement in Genesis finds its perfection in the Sinai covenant, with Moses, in Exodus. You do this for me, and I'll do this for you. And you will not stay out past one-thirty on Saturday night. Agreed?

The discussions in PBS's "Genesis," brilliant as they often are, are crippled just because they don't get to look to the end of the story - which is also, of course, the real beginning of Israel.

So it is a series noble in conception and intention, and flawed, though not fatally so, in execution. A little too smarmy, a little too politically correct, a little too nice-nelly about what may be the most uncompromising text in the world except for Homer's Iliad.

For all that, "Genesis" is a real triumph for TV and for the idea of TV. I've written a thousand words about what's good about "Genesis," and another thousand about what isn't. I'd be sorry if the second half outweighed the first. This production is a hint about what really splendid TV could be. It would be an impoverishment to miss it.