Seeing Genesis as felicitous whole

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THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM: READING GENESIS

By Leon R. Kass

Free Press., $35, 576 pages

REVIEWED BY LARRY WITHAM

Reading a thick and scholarly commentary on Genesis, the Bible's first book, can be daunting. These types of works, which expand on Genesis' 50 chapters, scores of characters, and mountains of genealogies and customs, are anything but easy reading. Leon R. Kass, in his very modern and readable commentary "The Beginning of Wisdom," shows how Genesis can be somewhat more effortless when taken as a "coherent narrative that conveys a moral whole."

To persuade us, Mr. Kass, who is chairman of the Bush administration's Council on Bioethics, presents Genesis as a book of philosophy to be read in same spirit as studying Homer or Plato. Theology and history aside, he says, Genesis present us with nothing less than a basic cosmology (Chapters 1-2), followed by an "anthropology" of human nature (Chapters 2-11). Then, we get to see how people try to "learn" and live out this God-given way.

Mr. Kass is natural scientist turned philosopher. He was reared in a secular home, but became curious about the Hebrew Bible in 1978, while teaching at the University of Chicago. After discovering his own "rabbinic gene," he spent two decades with students and scholars, including lectures in Jerusalem and Rome, plumbing the depths of Genesis. Clearly, Mr. Kass is a believer in God. But his commentary is a summons in particular to secular Jews and unchurched Americans to tip-toe back into Genesis in search of modern wisdom.