Genesis as dialogue

About this book

Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in interest in the book of Genesis-the first book of the Bible, and a foundational text of Western culture. This commentary aims to offer a complete and accessible overview of Genesis from literary, theological, and historical standpoints. The author's work is organized around three main ideas: the first is that the primary subject of Genesis is human existence-while full of historical echoes, it is primarily a sophisticated portrayal of the progress and pitfalls of human life. His second thesis is that Genesis' basic organizational unity is binary, or diptych: building on older insights that Genesis is somehow dialogical, he argues that the entire book is composed of diptychs-accounts which, like some paintings, consist of two parts or panels. Finally, Brodie contends that many of Genesis' sources still exist, and can be identified and verified.