The Book of Genesis: An Introduction to the Biblical World (review)

REVIEWS THE BOOK OF GENESIS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLICAL WORLD. By Zvi Adar. Philip Cohen, trans. Pp 165. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990. Cloth. Zvi Adar, emeritus professor of education at Hebrew University, has written several books on Jewish education and on the Bible, and he here tries his hand at an infonnal commentary on Genesis. He conceives his discussion of Genesis to be an introduction to the "Biblical world," as his subtitle states, yet the organization of the book follows a typical commentary fonn, discussing each section of Genesis chapter by chapter, or story by story. The book has chapters titled: "The Creation of the Universe and the Emergence of Mankind," "Abraham," "Isaac," "Jacob," "Joseph," and introductory and concluding chapters. It is not entirely clear why Adar believes that his book is an introduction to the biblical world; indeed, it is unclear what he thinks the biblical world is. There are many flaws in this book, and few virtues. Adar knows little of modem biblical scholarship, yet never hesitates to pronounce finn judgments on scholarly matters, some of which he reverses a few pages later. For example, on p. 9 he states that "the analytical approach of many Genesis scholars, who fractionalize the Book into its constituent parts, is diametrically opposed to that of the author of the Book of Genesis." Yet after this clear statement-implying a remarkable sympathy with the mind of the "author" of Genesis-the reader is surprised to read that "almost from the outset we observe that two separate strands are involved" (p. 11). Later Adar mentions obscurely "sources and records" that were used by the "author" of Genesis (p. 42), yet he never tells us what these sources and records may have been. Adar seems to have read the Genesis commentaries of Gerhard von Rad and Ephraim Speiser but is apparently unaware of any discussions of Genesis since 1964. On p. 68 he cites confidently Speiser's discussion of legal parallels to patriarchal customs in the Nuzi documents, obviously unaware that several well-known books and articles in the 1970s undermined most of Speiser's arguments. He shows no acquaintance with Claus Westennann's massive three-volume Genesis commentary, nor with other Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 68 Reviews more recent works, including those by his Hebrew University colleagues. Nor does he know of modem literary studies of Genesis, such as the works of Robert Alter or Meir Sternberg. Another anachronism in the book is his use of the 1917 IPS translation of the Bible (p. 9). Adar (and his translator) appear not to know that a new IPS translation of the Torah has been out since 1962. It would be tedious to list all of the errors of fact and logic in this book. The first error is a misunderstanding of the first verse of Genesis in which Adar obviously does not understand a syntactic problem that has troubled scholars since Rashi (Adar thinks that the problem has to do with the verb M,:a, when in fact it concerns the syntax of the initial word, n'IDM,:a). He believes that the "essence of the philosophy of the Bible" is that "the first and supreme Being is that of the one God," apparently unaware that these are words and concepts from Platonic or Aristotelian thought (or, more precisely, Philonic or Maimonidean) that are foreign to the idiom of Genesis. Adar is uncomfortable with the anthropomorphic picture of God in much of Genesis, thus we get bowdlerized summaries such as "Man... was imbued with a spirit of life emanating from God," referring to Gen 2:7 where God blows the breath of life into the man's nostrils. Adar thinks somehow that the Cain and Abel story "simply reveals a basic mechanism of the human soul which is stressed in modem psychology" (p. 27). After extracting a moral lesson from the brief mention of Enoch in Gen 5, Adar concludes that "Enoch is a legendary character and he has nothing to teach us" (p. 34). The confusions and non sequiturs continue throughout the book. A sense of Adar's style of thought is indicated by his concluding remarks on the patriarchal stories (p. 164...