Genesis 1–25 by Kathleen M. O’Connor (review)

In a sign of these troubled times, several academic disciplines have begun pooling their resources to study the effects of disaster and trauma on cultures forced to absorb the horrifying aftershocks of tribal, civil, and international war. Biblical scholars are beginning to sit up and take notice of this development, some going beyond their classical training to reexamine the Bible through lenses ground by these “trauma and disaster studies.” Ruth Poser, for example, vigorously reads the Book of Ezekiel from this perspective (Das Ezechielbuch als Trauma-Literatur [VTSup 154; Leiden: Brill, 2012]), as does O’Connor herself with the Book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah: Pain and Promise [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011]). The present volume continues O’C.’s work in this regard by challenging postmodern readers to question whether evidence exists in the well-known stories of Genesis showing how they reiterate Hebrew history in ways designed to address more relevantly the needs of traumatized readers.

O’Connor sees myth as one of the primary vehicles used to accomplish this goal.

Disaster shows up in a variety of ways across the book, but receives special attention in a group of stories that present collapse and violent destruction within a largely mythic world. The stories do not depict the nation’s collapse in any literal way such as describing warfare and invasions. Rather, they tell about other cataclysms that happened to other people in the distant past. Such stories work like memory trails conveying similar experiences of destruction for the ancient audience. Terrors unfold at a distance, in a literary world, as if on a screen or a stage where events happen to others. By transposing cataclysm to other domains—like floods that destroy the world or fire and brimstone that fall upon a city—the disaster stories dip into memories of violence and loss without re-traumatizing the people. Narratives like these interpret and reframe former traumas and re-anchor people in a world that is otherwise paralyzingly chaotic.

(p. 9)

Elsewhere I similarly engage the Igigi and Flood myths in Atrahasis (WealthWatch: A Study of Socioeconomic Conflict in the Bible [Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011] 73–89), so it is gratifying to see someone of O’C.’s gifts similarly read a related mythopoeic text.

One of the book’s strengths is its deep sense of balance. For example, when O’C. engages Regina Schwartz’s well-known hypothesis that the reason for Cain’s violence has fundamentally to do with the proclivities endemic to monotheism (The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997]), O’C. gracefully yet firmly responds: “Schwartz has proposed that monotheism is the problem because the brothers offer sacrifices to the one God of wrath. In this view it is no wonder that Cain is devastated by not being accepted, making the real problem of the text to be the character of God. What she does not consider fully is the mythic nature of the story and its purposes. It does not portray a full picture of the divine so much as it provides an account of why relationships are the way they are—broken, alienated, and prone to violence” (p. 75). Another strength is the wisdom with which O’C. applies “trauma and disaster studies” to overtly theological texts. Noting God’s “grief” ( , Gen 6:6) over the problem of human wickedness, for example, she contends that “this portrait of the inner world of God serves as a defense of God, who suffers on account of humans, does not want to destroy them, and does so only with the deepest sorrow” (p. 110)—an insight not unlike views found in the Gospels or letters of Paul.

Yet sometimes this balance is not evident. In the story of Lot’s attempt to protect the two (“angels,” Gen 19:1–11), for example, O’C. focuses, like so many others today, on the inhospitality of the Sodomites to the exclusion of all other factors. Reading the...