In the Beginning . . .

...the explanation of God's love for Israel lies on the other side of eternity...

...To make matters even worse, it is the descendants of Cain, the world's first murderer, who found the first city and put in motion the march toward progress...

...Here The Beginning of Wisdom is truly in its element...

...there could be no Socrates who knew that he did not know...

...The power of the story resides in how Joseph and his brothers grow to see the deeper providential design of what initially appeared to be merely an irrational preference...

...The rabbinical epigram at the front of Michael Wyscho-grod's recent book on the doctrine of election puts it well: "Even though the Jews are unclean, the Divine Presence is among them...

...Only a book as good as The Beginning of Wisdom deserves arguing with in this way...

...The second half of Genesis picks up at chapter twelve and tells the story of God's mysterious designs for Abraham and his offspring and how they, in turn, respond to His call...

...The sole guarantor of a flourishing city is the acknowledgment of her true Founder...

...The story of Joseph," as Jon Levenson puts it, "is the most sustained and the most profound exploration in the Hebrew Bible of the problematics of chosenness...

...This "Great Books" approach seeks a universal form of wisdom in contrast to the more parochial concerns of religiously committed readers...

...The Book of Genesis divides neatly into two halves...

...Unrivaled claims to truth can be terribly dangerous, especially when wedded to unrivaled power...

...They are tainted upon arrival, for they originate as human inventions...

...As Kass states in his introduction, the title he originally proposed for the book was "The Education of the Fathers," for the bulk of his narrative concerns how the colorful stories about the patriarchs and matriarchs of ancient Israel can serve us today as teachings about the good life...

...Only one: to illustrate the radical and unpredictable nature of God's preference for this special people...

...The atmosphere of these first eleven chapters is breathtakingly universal...

...For sometime thereafter Joseph plays a charade that causes the greatest of pain to his doting father—because, Kass suggests, Joseph has left the moral constraints of his covenantal heritage and assimilated into the ways of Egypt...

...The way to make one's name great will not be by prideful acts of self-betterment...

...Kass is best known these days as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, and America's recent battles over cloning and stem-cell research offer obvious and appropriate occasions for the application of his penetrating philosophical mind and finely tuned moral compass to the pressing issues of the day...

...And the reasons boil down to the intellectual character of Kass and the sort of character he thinks he discovers in Abraham and his lineage...

...the rivalries that spring up are, in part, both the result and the cause of the affronts to national self-esteem that such otherness necessarily implies...

...What explanation can there be for why the stories of Genesis consistently move in a direction contrary to the Bible's own legal dictates...

...they are unique to the theological fabric of Genesis...

...The tower-builders must be dispersed and their languages multiplied...

...Kass is awestruck by the Bible's unique approach to this subject and draws the proper conclusion: In the biblical worldview, the emergence of civilized life is set under a pall of suspicion...

...whether we confront the spread of the postmodern claim that all truth is of human creation—we see everywhere evidence of the revived Babylonian vision...

...Self-examination, no less than self-criticism, would be impossible...

...In contrast to every other ancient account of mankind's origins, the Bible chooses not to locate its own national perspective in the story...

...God promises Abraham a great name solely on the condition of obedience, and obedience that will cost Abraham potentially everything, even his long-awaited son...

...The dilemmas that the patriarchs experience as families are not generic and universal...

...The one chosen is sorely tempted to interpret his special status as a mandate for domination...

...There's some parallel to this in the purposes he intends with The Beginning of Wisdom...

...And yet, Kass's effort frees us to ask whether the Book of Genesis is fundamentally about such universal moral and philosophical themes...

...Perhaps we should pay attention to the plan He adopted as the alternative to Babel...

...In the very first pages of the book, Kass declares that he will read Genesis just as he reads Plato's Republic or Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics...

...That it contains these themes, and that Kass has found them, seems beyond doubt...

...Indeed, the problems with emerging civilization become even more pointed in the story of the Tower of Babel...

...The stories of the patriarchs are really accounts, in veiled form, of the people Israel, who are favored by God for no apparent philosophical reason...

...Kass's long and detailed text considers nearly every scene in the Book of Genesis, and some of its brilliant readings will stay with the reader forever, particularly the discussion of Abraham's quarrel with God, the binding of Isaac, and the reconciliation between Jacob and Esau...

...Equally shocking, Kass observes, is the way in which the discovery of human culture is recounted...

...Human nature, the story makes clear, is not constituted so as to facilitate the acceptance of chosenness...

...Will this new Babel succeed...

...In short, Joseph remains silent because he learns that his own election does not constitute "a mandate for domination...

...This bit of wisdom—that reading and character are intimately related— seems to have mostly slipped away from us in American culture...

...Biblical law itself (in Deuteronomy 21:17) outlaws the favoritism for the later-born that Genesis shows, and what defines the family in the Book of Genesis is quite different from what defines the family in the Book of Kings...

...But where in universal philosophy can we look to find one of the most important features of Genesis: the theological character of Israel's identity as the chosen people of God...

...A strict adherence to the philosophical mindset forces a biblical interpreter to run roughshod over the particularistic, Israel-centric concerns of Genesis...

...Uriel Simon has a much better grasp on the matter when he accounts for Joseph's failure to identify himself: "Had knowledge reached Jacob, even of the briefest most anonymous form—that Joseph was not mauled by animals but sold into slavery— it would have been extremely difficult to maintain the awful secret of the brothers' role in the affair...

...Abraham, he remarks, "may have figured out that there must be a single, invisible, and intelligent source behind the many silent and dumb heavenly bodies, that the truth is not one city with many gods, but many cities in search of the one God...

...To his credit, Kass knows the dilemma he is in...

...This is a painful lesson that Joseph and his brothers must learn over the course of the last third of the Book of Genesis...

...The theological concept of election is manifestly present in Genesis, and election is a stumbling block to any philosophical reading of the text...

...The will to power is not eliminated thereby—but the absolute monopoly over power is...

...Can it escape the failings of its biblical predecessor...

...Augustine once said the best rule for understanding the Bible was to read it over and over again...

...The weakest part of The Beginning of Wisdom is the treatment of the Joseph story...

...But Kass's insight that the beginnings of civilization are cast in an aberrant mold is certainly on target...

...Like so much of modern technology," Kass observes, "the means precede and generate their own ends: 'Now we have bricks...

...With these preliminaries in place, the second part of God's solution can emerge upon the stage of human history...

...And its loss can be measured by the shock we experience when we encounter a book like Leon Kass's exploration of the Book of Genesis, The Beginning of Wisdom, which assumes and depends upon both the high moral importance of the Bible's text and the high moral demand placed upon the Bible's readers...

...Kass's keen philosophical eye gets straight to the heart of the matter: "The much-prized fact of unity, embodied especially in a unique but created 'truth' believed by all, precludes the possibility of discovering that one might be in error...

...or the biomedical project to re-create human nature without its imperfection...

...Had the matter become known to Jacob, his joy over the survival of the 'son of his old age' would have been voided by the unending sorrow over what the ten brothers had done to this very son...

...So, what is the solution that Kass perceives Genesis to offer...

...Human accomplishments are not wrong per se...

...Kass has spent some twenty years reading the terse and enigmatic text of Genesis...

...Such a confession must give pause to readers of The Beginning of Wisdom...

...On this matter, Kass honestly confesses, the text is shockingly silent...

...This is an unfortunate contrast...

...Election does not turn on moral worth...

...An appeal to election "does not sit well with the philosophical reader," Kass confesses, "for it looks rather like arbitrariness...

...In the Beginning . Leon Kass's Genesis By Gary A. Anderson Brevard Childs, a professor of biblical studies at Yale, used to tell his students that what they needed to read the Bible more intelligently was to become deeper people...

...Here the text's simple sense bows to the midrashic designs of the philosopher...

...First, the possibility of committing similar errors in the future must be eliminated...

...Out of the many post-Babel nations God will choose one through whom He will set the world straight...

...The city is back, and so, too, is Sodom, babbling and dissipating away...

...The claim to land and law, which are central to the remainder of the Torah, are passed over in silence...

...Kass's character proves worthy to the text he interprets: "Anyone who reads the newspapers has grave reasons for doubt...

...But to seek only contemporary advice in The Beginning of Wisdom—as though Kass were writing the upper-brow equivalent of "Management Secrets of the Bible for Today's CEOs"—is to mischaracterize the book radically...

...Rather, Joseph's election, like the election of Israel itself, is designed to serve the larger common good: Those who are chosen are chosen to serve...

...Here we see all of humanity gathered together as a single entity endeavoring to build an enormous city whose towers will scrape the heavens...

...Once we see the pattern of election in the second half of Genesis, we can look back to see it foreshadowed in the first half...

...Thus, at the beginning of chapter twelve, without any proper introduction, are the words that are as surprising to us as they were to Abraham: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great...

...This is right, of course, but not complete...

...For Kass, one of the major lessons to be learned from these stories is how to run a family...

...Perhaps we ought to see the dream of Babel today, once again, from God's point of view...

...Surely this is wrong...

...While Aristotle praised the city as "the first truly self-sufficient community," the Bible, Kass concludes, considers deeply troublesome our aspirations to self-sufficiency...

...At the end of time, as Isaiah puts it, "all nations shall flow unto" the holy city, "for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem...

...Each nation, by its very existence, testifies against the godlike status of every other...

...And all this hard labor has born fruit as Kass discovers, in biblical detail after biblical detail, themes of universal moral and philosophical importance...

...A prime piece of evidence for him is the fact that Joseph does not reveal himself to his brothers when they first come down into Egypt to buy grain...

...As a reading and application of the primeval history of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, this is compelling...

...In order to whittle these pretensions down to size, this monopoly of power must be broken up...

...What else do we have today that knows as clearly as The Beginning of Wisdom that reading and character are intimately related...

...Gary A. Anderson is professor of Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School...

...Only the "creation of divergent customs and competing interests can challenge the view of human self-sufficiency...

...Certain commentators imagined, for instance, that Abraham was singled out as a result of his daring discovery of monotheism and his willingness to suffer for it...

...Though the first city was founded on bloodshed, Jerusalem was not, and the forty-eighth psalm's command to "Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof" is hardly anti-urban...

...Though numerous insights follow from this approach, the overall effect is a subtle but marked distortion...

...What philosopher can accept the privilege Israel holds on truth...

...This moving tale centers on the election of a later son, Joseph, over his brothers and the jealousy that results...

...These are among the most pressing of questions that face us today...

...Faced with the disturbing fact that God offers no rationale for the preference of the sacrifice of Abel (the second son of Adam and Eve) over that of Cain (the first son), Kass considers— only to reject—the possibility that what is at stake is God's mysterious electing hand that consistently prefers the later born over the first born (at least in Genesis: Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over his brothers, Ephraim over Manasseh, and even Rachel over Leah...

...Over the centuries, other biblical commentators, both Christian and Jewish, have also been embarrassed by this silence and rushed in to fill the textual gap with a moral theory that could account for it...

...whether we look at the World Wide Web...

...The one uncontested way does not even admit of the distinction between truth and error...

...However laudatory religious readings may be, their approach to the Bible "places certain obstacles in the way of a disinterested and philosophic pursuit of truth...

...Whereas, say, the ancient Babylonian account of creation builds toward and concludes with the erection of the city of Babylon and its central cult site, no trace of such national chauvinism can be found in Israel's tale...

...Unlike Mesopo-tamian creation accounts, the emergence of the various arts (metallurgy, music, agriculture, and midwifery) is not the result of some divine benefaction...

...This portion of the story ends with humankind in complete disarray: Divided by language, each incipient nation is sent from Babel to establish its own culture...

...He is a brilliant explicator of texts, an intellect of high moral seriousness, and a profound philosophical examiner of human life...

...Everywhere he looks, Kass sees today the decline of Abraham's way and the rising again of the Tower of Babel...

...everything depends on how such accomplishments are grounded...

...Kass concedes that the Bible offers no support for this notion, but he himself inclines toward it nonetheless...

...The first, the primeval history, stretches across the first eleven chapters and tells the story of creation, the garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the flood, and concludes with the Tower of Babel...

...But Kass's account of the patriarchs in the second half of Genesis seems less helpful...

...Kass's choice to limit his focus to Genesis leads him to overstate his case...

...Whether we think of the heavenly city of the philosophes, or the posthistorical age toward which Marxism points, or, more concretely, the imposing building of the United Nations that stands today in America's first city...

...And they, for their part, would never have been able to look him in the eye again...

...What can we make with them?' " The danger that the story of Babel alerts us to, Kass believes, is where human achievement will lead when it lacks any mechanism for self-correction...

...Unwilling to see the way chosenness shapes the narrative, Kass offers the unusual interpretation of Joseph as a thoroughly hubristic man whose place in the narrative is to provide a moral object lesson to the reader...

...My copy is already dog-eared and annotated—primarily because, even when he seems wrong, Leon Kass assumes the high moral importance of the Bible and the high moral demand placed upon its readers...

...When commenting on how the choice of Abraham constitutes the Bible's way of rectifying the sin of Babel, Kass raises the pertinent question: Why him...

...God's tactic is to divide mankind into rival nations and disperse them across the face of the globe...