Dennis Prager - The Rational Bible: Genesis

To Sue

It is not good for a man to be alone.

I will make him a helper who is his equal.

Genesis 2:18 (literal translation)

To the reader: This introduction will greatly enhance your understanding and enjoyment of this commentary.

GENESIS IS THE FIRST BOOK of the Bible. This commentary on Genesis, however, is the second volume of my five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible (the Torah).

The beginning of Genesis is probably the best-known story in world history, containing, as it does, Gods creation of the world, Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood and Noahs ark. What is not well-known is how this story changed the world. The first verse, In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth, alone changed the world. As I explain, this verse asserted for the first time in history that that there is one God; that this God is universal (as opposed to tribal); and that God is not within nature but is its sole creatorunlike every other god in history.

Genesis also contains the story of the beginning of the Hebrews, the Israelitesthe Jews, as they later became knownthe people who, through the Hebrew Bible, most influenced the world. From the first Hebrew, Abraham, we are taught that arguing with God is not only acceptable, it is expected. The very name of this people, Israel, means struggle with God.

Genesis is filled with human drama that touches and helps every one of us on a personal level. For example, every family in Genesis is what we today would call dysfunctional. I regard this as a divine gift. If your family is dysfunctional, the fact that all the families in Genesis are dysfunctional should provide you with some solace. I think the Bible is telling us that family dysfunction is a normalthough not necessarily inevitablepart of the human condition. Indeed, all of Genesis is a statement of how troubled the human condition is. The rest of the Bible, especially the next four books, provides solutions to the troubled human condition. To put it in medical terms, Genesis describes the patients (the human beings) pathology, and the books that follow offer the wisdom and moral instruction necessary to cure the patient.

Some of the following appeared in the Introduction to Exodus:

I have been teaching the Torah all of my adult life and have devoted decades to writing this explanation of, and commentary on, the Torah. I have done so because I believe if people properly understand the Torah and attempt to live by its values and precepts, the world will be an infinitely kinder and more just place.

Since childhood, I have been preoccupiedalmost obsessedwith the problem of evil: people deliberately hurting other people. At the age of sixteen, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to devote my life to influencing people to the good. That mission has animated my life. In a nutshell, I love goodness and hate evil. My favorite verse in the Bible is Those of you who love Godhate evil (Psalms 97:10).

Because of my (and the Torahs) preoccupation with evil, in this commentary I frequently cite the two most recent examples of mass evilNazism and Communism. I assume all readers of this commentary have some acquaintance with Nazi evil. Too few people have much knowledge of Communist evil. So I should note here that Communist regimes murdered about a hundred million people and enslaved and destroyed the lives of more than a billion. If you hate evil, you must confront what Nazis and Communists wrought in the twentieth century (and what others wrought before them and are doing at this time).

I have had one other mission in life: to understand human beings as best as possible. These two missionspromoting goodness and attaining wisdomare linked, because it is impossible to do good without wisdom. All the good intentions in the world are likely to be worthless without wisdom. Many of the horrors of the twentieth century were supported by people with good intentions who lacked wisdom.

Here, too, because it has so much wisdom, the Torahand the rest of the Bibleis indispensable. However, we live in an age that not only has little wisdom, it doesnt even have many people who value it. People greatly value knowledge and intelligence, but not wisdom. And the lack of wisdomcertainly in America and the rest of the Westis directly related to the decline in biblical literacy. In the American past, virtually every home, no matter how poor, owned a Bible. It was the primary vehicle by which parents passed wisdom on to their children.

In the modern period, however, people have increasingly replaced Bible-based homes and Bible-based schools with godless homes and with schools in which no reference to the Bible is ever made. As a result, we are less wise and more morally confused. As I showed in Exodus, in my discussion of secular education as a potential false god, the best educated people in the West have often both lacked wisdom and been among the greatest supporters of evil ideologies and regimes.

Given the supreme importance of goodness and the indispensability of wisdom to goodness, the Torah, the greatest repository of goodness and wisdom in human history, is the most important book ever written. It gave birth to the rest of the Bible, to Christianity, and to Western civilization. It gave us Love your neighbor as yourself, the Ten Commandments, a just and loving God, and other bedrocks of humane civilization.

I have written this book for people of every faith, and for people of no faith. Throughout my years teaching the Torah, I would tell my students, The Torah either has something to say to everyone or it has nothing to say to Jews. The idea that the Torah is only for Jews is as absurd as the idea that Shakespeare is only for the English or Beethoven is only for Germans.

That is why, over time, half the people taking my Torah classesat a Jewish university, no lesswere not Jews.

Nevertheless, I would like to address some groups specifically.

To Jewish Readers:

Because the Torah has formed the basis of Jewish life for three thousand years, there are very many Jewish commentaries, a good number of which have passed the hardest test: the test of time. However, the modern world poses intellectual and moral challenges that did not exist when the classic Jewish commentariesmost dating to the Middle Ageswere written. Therefore, most modern Jews read neither those commentaries nor the Torah. I hope this commentary will address nearly all the intellectual and moral objections of these Jews.

In general, it has not gone well for Jews (or for the world) when Jews ceased believing in the Torah. Belief in the Torah as a divine document has probably been the single most important reason Jews have stayed alive for three thousand years and it has formed the core of Jews moral values. When Jews abandoned belief in the Torah, they or their offspring almost always ceased being Jews; and, too often, they created or joined social movements with non-Torah, or even anti-Torah, values.

To Jews who already believe in the Torah as a divine document: I hope this commentary gives you chizuk (strengthened faith). And I hope it encourages you to go into the world to teach Torah-based values. To all other Jews, I hope this commentary leads you to an intellectual appreciation of the Torahs unique greatness and consequently causes you to at least entertain the possibility that God is its ultimate author.

To Christian Readers:

One cannot be a serious Christian without being familiar with the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament, as the Christian world named it). Nor can one understand Jesus, a Jew who was not only observant of Torah law, but asserted he came to change not one jot or one tittle of it.