Front cover image for Genesis as dialogue : a literary, historical, & theological commentary

Genesis as dialogue : a literary, historical, & theological commentary

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
eBook, English, 2001
Oxford University Press, Oxford [England], 2001