Genesis—or Bereshit in the Hebrew Bible, meaning “In the beginning”—is many things: a creation narrative, a flood myth, a story of the origins of monotheism, a genealogical record of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Judaism, and the cornerstone of both Jewish and Christian scriptural traditions. But it is also much more than these things. As one of the oldest pieces of ancient Near Eastern literature, Genesis is exceedingly generative—multiplied with meaning, as the waters teemed and swarmed with creatures. Across millennia, the Book of Genesis has begot theological questions and interpretations, ethical debates, religious literature and scores of secondary scholarship, faith, literary retellings, philosophic analyses, artistic renderings, and even politico-psychological explanations in answer to the question: how have we come to where we are, as humanity, as a society, and as a world?In this course, we will survey some of this manifold meaning by engaging deeply with the biblical text, applying techniques like close reading, word study, and structural analysis. With several key episodes as our focus—the two accounts of creation; the exile of Adam and Eve from Eden; the interlocking subjectivities of Sara and Hagar; the development of the trickster Jacob; and the Joseph cycle—we will ask: what picture of human being emerges from this text? What picture of the character of God, from both its poetry and its prose? And with an eye to the present: what resources might this ancient text offer for thinking through today’s manifest crises and contradictions? Supplementary readings will draw on a range of sources, including the Talmud, Mesopotamian literature, Immanuel Kant’s “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, and Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis.
Overview
Taught by
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
