Among the patriarchs.

The Beginning of Wisdom

Reading Genesis

Leon R. Kass

The Free Press, $35, 720 pp.

Leon Kass is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is also the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. Biology and ethics are his professional game. This book is a labor of love, an amateur's close and careful reading of Genesis from beginning to end. I do not mean it is amateurish, but rather that it was written out of a long-term affection for this biblical writing developed over years of teaching.

Providing large portions of English translation as well as frequent recourse to the original Hebrew, Kass works through the long narrative without the slightest attention to the debates over Pentateuchal source theories that so often clutter the work of professionals in the field, although he does linger over the parallels offered by the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Because Genesis is a substantial and subtle narrative, and because Kass's method is to follow that narrative sequentially in whatever direction it goes, his book turns out to be equally substantial and subtle. It is also ambitious. Kass reads Genesis in a search for wisdom, which means that he reads this ancient text philosophically. Those familiar with the history of biblical interpretation will recognize that his effort resembles that of the ancient Hellenistic Jew, Philo, who read his Bible through the lens of Greek, and especially Platonic, philosophy.

Also like Philo, Kass reads the Genesis account as an evolutionary educational process, with each of the patriarchs representing another stage or aspect of maturation toward wisdom. Finally, he also resembles Philo in considering the Bible to be philosophical above all in its politics--although Kass reads Joseph, the supreme political figure in Genesis, in a manner that Philo would not recognize. (More on that, later.)

Although Kass knows and savors the ancient philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle, his chief conversation partners are the moderns. He frequently draws in the reflections on human beginnings found in Descartes, Kant, and especially Rousseau. For specific readings of the text, Kass employs the contemporary scholarly analyses of Nahum Sarna, Umberto Cassuto, Robert Alter, and above all, Robert Sacks, but he is acquainted as well with traditional Jewish exegesis (especially that of Rashi), and he generously credits what he has learned from his former students.

My first response to the book was entirely positive. After a charming preface that explains why and how a guy like him, a medical doctor with an additional PhD in microbiology, should end up teaching and writing and lecturing on Genesis, Kass invites the reader into a disciplined yet open reading in which "the concerns of the text and its characters become the concerns also of the reader. The education of the patriarchs and matriarchs can become the way to our own education." His engagement with the text is impressive. He reads Genesis's first creation account from three distinct perspectives: visual-historical, intellectual-metaphysical, and moral-theological. As did earlier philosophical readers of Genesis (notably Philo and Augustine), Kass finds the book's majestic and mysterious opening a place for genuine metaphysical play.

Reading the rest of Genesis "in a philosophical spirit" proves to be harder, precisely because the vividness and particularity of the stories resists either metaphysical universalizing or easy moral appropriation. Kass is not unusual in reading the sequence of stories from Genesis 2-11 (from the garden to the tower of Babylon) in terms of a universal decline in humanity, to which God responds by calling Abraham and beginning over with a single family. But Kass gets unusual philosophical traction from the stories, as indicated by his chapter topics: freedom and reason, man and woman, fratricide and founding, death and beautiful women, elementary justice, paternity and piety, and, most portentously, the failures of civilization.

Kass is always intelligent and he makes many fine observations. However, I began to get a bit uneasy in this section because he tends not only to read Genesis as a source for wisdom--that is both possible and laudable--but to read Genesis as though it were the only source of wisdom. Here we find the tension between the close literary reading of ancient texts, which demands attention to the particular, and the desire of philosophy to make universal statements about the human condition. I suspect I am not alone in thinking that although Genesis's treatment of the genders is profound as well as provocative, and deserving of serious attention, it cannot stand alone as an adequate statement concerning sexuality or gender roles. Yet Kass's method tends in just this direction, from literary representation to ontological conclusion.

Similarly, the Genesis account of Babel undoubtedly connects humanity's Promethean ambitions with the building of a city, and it is entertaining to see Kass contrast the implicit antiurbanism of the account to Aristotle's positive view of the city. Still, does Kass seriously regard not just Babel but the project of modernity as "the failure of civilization," and would he seriously propose tribalism as a better alternative to civilization? His method enables him to make large statements but frees him from having to argue or defend those statements.

These tendencies become even more troublesome when Kass turns from "universal beginnings" to the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis 12-50. He recognizes that these stories don't lend themselves easily to broad thematic treatment. Like Philo, as I mentioned, he uses the general category of education as an interpretive lens. Whereas Philo focused on each patriarch as exemplifying some dimension of being "a living law" (nomos enpsychos) in terms of virtue, Kass focuses on politics in the broader and narrower sense of that word. Even so, the organizational scheme is awkward. It works best with Abraham, who is "educated" by God in the "meaning of marriage" and "the meaning of patriarchy" and "inheriting the way," but it unravels with Isaac--whom Kass, disappointingly, finds boring, as do so many commentators--and especially Jacob, whose education is at best uneven and only partially successful. As for the lessons the patriarchs were supposed to learn (according to Kass), they are all about family, and specifically all about the patriarchal family, and above all how the patriarchal family provides the basis for the nation. Kass celebrates and defends patriarchy in every respect. No problems.

The key passage here is the horrific story of the rape of Dinah and the revenge carried out by Jacob's sons on the city of Shechem (Gen 34). The story is particularly fraught because--as Kass sees--it inevitably foreshadows the issue of "Israel and her neighbors" that continues into today's blood-drenched headlines. Not only does Kass refuse to acknowledge the text's own subtle and in many ways sympathetic treatment of the Shechemites, and refuse to recognize that perhaps here is a story that should be taken as a warning about the dangers of patriarchy. He also lacks any critical distance from the politics embedded in the account. Yes, it is regrettable that a woman got raped, and too bad so many Shechemites had to be killed, but in the end, Kass celebrates the important thing: the sons of Jacob united against a common foe and truly became a nation. Not only that, Kass seems unworried about the moral implications of massive retaliation: for the rape of one woman, all the male population of the city is slaughtered (having first been rendered helpless through a fraudulent circumcision), and all the women of the city are taken as booty by the Israelites (another and more systemic form of rape).

The lack of critical distance--of a properly philosophical engagement--stems, I think, from a peculiar sort of text piety that Kass shares with other readers (including the influential Meir Sternberg), which in some ways resembles Christian fundamentalism. Philo and Origen read Genesis as carefully as Kass, but they were morally revulsed by some of the things that text said about people and about God--not, to be sure, the same things that would repulse contemporary readers--and their philosophical response was to read such passages allegorically. Allegory was the philosopher's way of preserving the text and God's honor while maintaining intellectual integrity.

Kass has no such refuge, but then neither does he ever seem particularly repulsed by what he reads. For him, the text provides the absolute limits for thought, and the text is authoritative. This position is unsupported by any explicit statement that God reveals through the text, or that the text is divinely inspired. Indeed, it is striking how little about the character of the God who interacts with the patriarchs is made thematic in this thick book. Yet Kass follows the text as though it were divinely inspired and an authoritative revelation. Like the rabbis, he searches out the significance of every syllable. Unlike the rabbis, he does not turn every syllable to a teaching about the "fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom." Instead, he turns every syllable to the development of a political philosophy that sounds increasingly like a support for the policies of the state of Israel. Unlike the rabbis, he is not ranging across all of Scripture and the oral Torah, but chooses to be constrained by this single narrative. The stories are inadequate to the weight they are asked to carry. Almost inevitably, then, authority tilts from text to reader, and the author's desire to get large lessons from an ancient story--especially the large lessons he desires--leads to actual readings that are deeply problematic, based on "filling the gaps" in the accounts, not with real knowledge, but often with psychological speculation.

In fact, the further Kass gets into Genesis, the clearer his own ideological commitments allow him simply to ignore or actively suppress aspects of the narrative that might easily be read in other ways. The nadir is reached in Kass's treatment of the patriarch Joseph. For Philo and other ancient readers (see The Testament of Joseph, for example), Joseph was an exemplar of virtue and a savior of the people, who despite having been sold into slavery by his murderously minded brothers, was led by God to a position of power from which he could restore the fortunes of his family. Not for Kass, who dislikes Joseph viscerally. The reason? Joseph represents assimilation in the diaspora (Egypt), which for Kass is contrary to the "New Way" represented by the patriarchs--which must be found in the land of the promise. Kass is certainly entitled to his bias, but his reading of the actual narrative is forced into that mold. Even as a child, Joseph is "Egyptian," because only Egyptians have revelatory dreams! Joseph is not a chaste man sexually harassed by the wife of Potiphar, but a male beauty who sexually teases her. Joseph is not an innocent man in prison who is rescued because of his divinely guided powers of interpretation, but a jailhouse snitch who reaches power by connivance. Furthermore, whenever Joseph speaks of God, he may not really mean the God of Israel! Joseph viciously manipulates his brothers, and his tears at being reconciled with them are sham. I had inklings throughout earlier discussions that Kass's troubling attitude toward homosexuality was as thorough as it was unreflective, but I was dumbfounded when he suggested, with absolutely no support in the text, that Joseph's desire to have his younger brother at his side was due to erotic impulses. Those Egyptians! This is pretty ugly stuff, apparently driven by cultural and ethnic chauvinism of the most primitive sort.

In fact, Genesis as a whole can be read as "the beginning of wisdom" not because of its positive lessons, and still less because the patriarchs learned those lessons--Kass fails to note that a great deal of God's instruction of the heroes is given to them by outsiders--but because Genesis as a whole reveals just how much humans needed the gift of Torah. Because Kass allows enough of the text to emerge in his readings to allow a careful reader to challenge his own dubious readings, and because he writes with sufficient passion and intelligence to evoke in readers a response more properly critical, that is, more properly philosophical, than his own, his book can serve as a useful vehicle for thinking through Genesis and what it has to do with wisdom. Still, I would recommend the book only for those with strength of mind and stomach for struggle.

Luke Timothy Johnson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. His most recent book is The Creed (Doubleday).