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.