This book grew out of a religious crisis I experienced as a young adult.

 

At that time, I realized that the creation account in Genesis contradicted modern science. More than that, there seemed to be two creation stories in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. Not only were they different from each other, but neither bore any relationship to what we now know about the beginning of the universe and the development of the human species.

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But how could the Torah, which I regarded as nothing less than the word of God, be so off the mark in its opening chapters? 

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As a teenager, I had been fascinated by the correspondence between the biblical creation account and science. I attended talks on the biblical creation story, some given by knowledgeable physicists. When I was older, I invited Gerald Schroeder, the author of a book about the correspondence between Genesis and science, to speak at our synagogue.1 I devoured books about the Big Bang and astronomy.

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As I grew older, however, I began appreciating the tremendous gulf between the biblical account and what science has to say about the creation of the universe and the formation of the earth.

Science tells us that the story of our planet is one of initial simplicity, with the development of increasing complexity over billions of years.

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The universe began approximately 13.7 billion years ago with a Big Bang involving a super-hot, infinitely dense spot, only a few millimeters wide. From this Big Bang all matter, energy, time, and space originated. This included stars, galaxies, the solar system, and our planet earth. Simple plant life such as photosynthetic bacteria and algae appeared around 3.5 billion years ago and from these elementary beginnings complex plants evolved. Animal life began in the oceans some 600 million years ago as simple organisms and these also evolved into more complex forms.

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The first biblical creation account relates a somewhat different story. By its second sentence, earth had been formed, but all is chaos.2 Beginning on the very first day of creation, God proceeds to organize this chaos in a systematic way to make earth habitable for human life. Animal life was created only when plant life was fully developed and available for consumption. 

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Genesis was not written as a modern scientific textbook. Notions such as the Big Bang and biological evolution would have been incomprehensible to its original audience. It would also have contradicted the science of their day. Yet I still wondered whether God could not have written Genesis I in such a way as to avoid such obvious conflicts?

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This is where I stood for many years — professing belief in the Divine nature of the Torah but harboring grave doubts that this was truly the case. The first Genesis account seemed to have been written by humans and framed in the prevalent science of that time. Reluctantly, I found myself increasingly drawn toward the documentary hypothesis and the notion that the Torah was composed by different authors writing from the perspective of their times.

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Some years later I was directed to the works of Nahum Sarna3 and Umberto Cassuto4 on the Book of Genesis and they provided me with a completely different perspective on its early chapters. Both authors argued that some of these stories had an underlying foundation of mythology. Mythology was important to people living in the ancient world since it provided a framework for understanding the world in which they lived, just as the Bible does for us today.

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In his book “Understanding Genesis,” Sarna proposed that the early chapters of Genesis were composed as polemics against the pagan ideas of Mesopotamian society.3 The biblical stories were written in the same form and with the same science as the original mythological stories, but in such a way as to refute their underlying ideas. I refer to these narratives as anti-myths — stories that adopt familiar mythological forms while overturning their theological assumptions.

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Cassuto also recognized mythology as important in the format of the creation stories. He considered mythic motifs as cultural reference points and as tools through which the Torah asserted its monotheistic message.

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Because Umberto Cassuto (1883-1951) was so important to me in my understanding of the Torah, plus his writings have influenced countless others, some information about him is in order. After earning his rabbinic ordination in 1908, he served as secretary and assistant rabbi of the Jewish community in Florence. When the Chief Rabbi of Florence passed away in 1922, Cassuto was appointed his successor. He also served as director of its Rabbinical Seminary until 1925.

 

Cassuto was a brilliant academic scholar and he subsequently left the rabbinate to become Professor of Hebrew and Literature at the University of Florence, followed by a chair of Hebrew Language at the University of Rome. His expertise was in Ugaritic and Semitic languages and the cultures of the ancient world. However, just before the Second World War he was forced from his position in Rome because of antisemitic racial laws and he accepted a chair of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine. This department was strongly vested in biblical criticism. Cassuto contested this and found himself a leading critic of the documentary hypothesis. 

 

Cassuto held that the Torah was a single, unified composition rather than a patchwork of independent documents. He proposed that the Torah was put together by an Israelite writer living during the time of the early monarchy, around the time of King David or King Solomon. This was a time that literary style was highly developed and national unity was strong.5 Cassuto never claimed that Moses wrote the Torah word-for-word by the dictation of God, but he did see the Torah drawing on authentic ancient traditions handed down from the patriarchal period and the Exodus. In the final analysis, his opinion on this matter makes little difference for appreciating the brilliance of his scholarly works since he ascribed a unity to the Torah.

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I have been much influenced, in particular, by Cassuto’s focus on the literary style of the biblical text and the Torah’s use of keywords. These are words that are repeated seven times or multiples of seven within a section or paragraph to provide emphasis to that section. He was the forerunner of biblical scholars who have made extensive use of literary analysis in their writings and teaching.

 

Cassuto is fairly well-known in Israel, but not so much outside of Israel, which is why I had not previously come across his name. Mosaic authorship of the Torah is a basic tenet of Orthodox Judaism and because Cassuto did not hold strictly to this, his writings were rarely studied in orthodox Jewish circles. In addition, because of his opposition to the documentary hypothesis, his work was not considered favorably by many academic biblical scholars.

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Ironically, I found that Cassuto’s books and the literary studies of those who followed him made it that much easier for me to accept Divine authorship of the Torah. The Torah is an extraordinarily sophisticated literary work. Its allegories contain depths of meaning. Themes are developed throughout the span of the Pentateuch by parallel word patterns. Critical passages are lucidly clear while at other times obscure, as if to say — you, the reader, need to figure this one out for yourself. Its ethical messages were revolutionary for its time. The Torah is also completely honest in its documentation of the failures of its characters, which is unusual and improbable for a national book.

 

The postulate of Sarna that some of the early stories in Genesis are polemics against Mesopotamian ideas, plus Cassuto’s analyses of the Torah’s literary structure based on Near Eastern writing had a profound effect on me. No longer was I dogged by the discordance between the Torah and my religious beliefs. Gradually, the pieces were beginning to fit together

 

 

The main ideas in this book:

 

This book elaborates on several central themes:

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• The significance of the divine names YHWH and Elohim.

 

The documentary hypothesis considers mention of the names Elohim and YHWH in the Torah to be source-related. Therefore, to substantiate his unitary hypothesis, Cassuto needed to explain the Torah’s use of the names of God in a different way. His conclusions were summarized in a monograph entitled “The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch.”5 In this book, Cassuto suggests that the name YHWH is used in contexts that highlight the covenantal relationship with Israel, while “Elohim” is a more general name for the more universal aspects of God. I elaborate on this more extensively in my chapter “The importance of the names of God in the Torah.”

 

Furthermore, based on Cassuto’s analysis of the meaning of the names of God, I formulated the proposition that the focus of the Torah is not God, nor man, but the relationship between God and man. This focus is a crucial aspect of the entire Torah and not only the Book of Genesis.

If one were to ask what is the Torah all about. This would be my answer.

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• The importance of reading the Torah in its ancient literary context, and the literary unity of the Torah.

 

Cassuto gave new meaning to the Hebrew word p’shat, which is the literal understanding of the Torah, by stressing that the Torah was written in the language of the ancient world.

 

By contrast, much classical Jewish biblical exegesis is based on what is called midrash. Midrash provides imaginative interpretations that make the biblical world more vivid and relatable. Frequently, aggadic, or non-halachic midrashim (plural of midrash), teach moral and ethical lessons by means of parables that are only loosely tied to the text. Theological insights are revealed by stories, metaphors and imagery. Midrash also fills in gaps in the biblical text, such as Abraham’s early life, which is otherwise a blank in the Torah. In sum, midrash enabled generations of Jews to interpret Scripture within the framework of their lives and kept the Torah alive and meaningful.

 

The biblical commentator Rashi often uses midrashim in his commentary and thereby popularized many midrashim. Rashi’s commentary provides a useful gateway into midrashic interpretations, and I often quote him, as well as other Medieval commentators, to contrast and highlight p’shat-based explanations.

 

I do not claim that one method of interpretation is more authentic than another. Midrash and p’shat have different aims. There are numerous religious books based primarily on midrash, and this book makes no attempt to duplicate them. Rather, most of my chapters are explained on the basis of p’shat. A major advantage of this form of interpretation is its ability to unify the entire Torah text, which is not necessarily the case for midrash.

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There is a discussion in the Talmud between R’ Ishmael and R’ Akiva as to whether the Torah is written in the language of man or whether meaning can be derived from each extra word or letter in the Torah.9 Cassuto has added an extra dimension to this debate by proposing that the Torah is not only written in the language of man, but this language is often from a specific historical period.

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• The allegorical nature of many early Genesis narratives.

 

This topic is discussed in greater detail in the chapter “Allegory in the early stories of Genesis.” I maintain that an allegorical format continues until the stories about Abraham, and from this point on the Torah is mainly factual. This includes the stories about the forefathers, the exodus from Egypt and the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert.

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• Genesis as an anti-myth responding to ancient Near Eastern beliefs.

 

This is discussed in detail in the chapters “Mythology and the First Creation account” and “The Noah story: An epic poem of mythological proportions.”      

An excellent example of this is seen in the first creation story, which tells us:

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And Elohim created the great sea monsters (et hataninim hagdolim) and every living creature that creeps, with which the waters swarmed, according to their kind, and every winged fowl according to its kind, and Elohim saw that it was good (Genesis 1:21).

 

But what are sea monsters doing here? They are the only species other than man mentioned in the first creation account. The answer provided by Cassuto is that the ancients believed that the gods battled sea monsters.10 As an anti-myth, the Torah is telling us that the great sea monsters were not independent creations but were also created by Elohim. Without the insight of Cassuto, their mention here would remain a mystery.

  

The implications of this approach are quite radical. It means that to fully understand some of the early stories in Genesis one needs to be aware of Mesopotamian mythology. This includes creation myths and the Gilgamesh myth, a myth that bears a strong relationship to the Noah story.

 

Clearly, this approach is not for everyone, and many will regard it as no substitute for the ethical messages built around the text by midrashim. Mythology also has nothing to teach us about ethical behavior. To the contrary, the gods were power-driven and violent. Nevertheless, for those wishing to fully understand the Book of Genesis and the messages it is trying to impart, I propose that there is a definite place for this type of analysis.

 

And last but not least

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• The literary unity to the Torah.

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There is a unity to the entire Torah. It is essential, therefore, to understand how each story, particularly in the Book of Genesis, builds on the Torah’s underlying messages. It is almost never the case that a story is meant to be analyzed in isolation.

 

References:

1. “Genesis and the Big Bang. The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Bible” by Gerald L. Schroeder, Bantam Books. 1992.

2. The notion of chaos is reflected by the words “tohu” and “vohu” in Genesis 1:2. The precise translation of these words is unclear since they are not found elsewhere in the Bible other than as an allusion to Genesis. Rashi, following a midrash, translates them as “astonishment and amazement” or “astonishingly empty,” this being the reaction a person would have on seeing this chaos. Targum Yonasan translates the words as “emptiness and desolation” and the Kuzari as “absence of form and order.”

3. Creation, Genesis 1-4 in Understanding Genesis. The Heritage of Biblical Israel by Nahum M. Sarna, Schoken Books, New York. 1970.

4. A Commentary on the Book of Genesis. Part One. From Adam to Noah and Part Two. From Noah to Abraham by U. Cassuto, the Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1998.

5. Cassuto, Umberto. The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1961 (English translation of his 1941 Hebrew lectures). In Lecture VI, p113 he wrote: “We must assign the composition of the Pentateuch to the period of the early monarchy in Israel, the age that immediately followed the settlement in the land and the establishment of the kingdom,” and in lecture VII, p119: “The Pentateuch, in the form in which it has come down to us, was composed in the period of the early kings of Judah, before the division of the monarchy.”

6. Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 2:2.

7. Examples of love of YHWH in the Torah are Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (the Shema), Deuteronomy 10:12, Deuteronomy 11:1, Deuteronomy 13:3-4 and Deuteronomy 30:6.

8. Examples of the fear of YHWH in the Torah are Deuteronomy 6:13, Deuteronomy 10:12, Deuteronomy 13:4, Exodus 20:20, and Leviticus 19:14. Examples of the fear of Elohim in the Torah are Genesis 22:12, Genesis 42:18, Exodus 1:17, Exodus 18:21 and Leviticus 25:17.

9. TB Nedarim 3a and Sifrei to Deuteronomy, Parashat Re’ah, 112.

10. Umberto Cassuto, “A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I: From Adam to Noah (Genesis I–VI), trans. Israel Abrahams, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1961, pp. 53–55.