The Torah describes God creating through speech, midrash mores specifically understands creation through the letters of the aleph-bet, and the kabbalists envision it as a series of divine emanations, contractions, and primal pairings. What meaning can we find in these ancient creation myths in light of evolution?

God rejects Cain’s sacrifice while accepting Abel’s, then in the next scene, Cain kills his brother. Does this mean that Cain killed Abel out of jealousy, or could other factors have been present? Ancient interpreters explore many possible motivations, from the simple to the bizarre.

After the flood, God permits humans to eat animals, whereas in Genesis 1, humans are told to eat plants. Interpreters have understood this to mean that vegetarianism was God’s original plan for humanity. Gersonides found the claim that God changed His mind scandalous, but this is more about countering Christian claims than the simple meaning of the text.

The theme of a divine creator’s right to assign territory to his people is pervasive in the Bible and ancient Near Eastern literature. Perhaps the rabbinic midrash which suggests that the Torah begins with creation to defend Israel against the accusation they stole the land of Canaan were onto something.

A mother’s joy, loss, and recovery serves as an etiology of human grief.

The Sons of Elohim sleeping with women and producing demigods (Gen 6:1-4) is sandwiched between the birth of Noah and the flood. This juxtaposition of passages prompted 1 Enoch and Genesis Apocryphon to question whether Lamech was Noah's father or whether Noah was a demigod.

The simple meaning of Genesis 1–2:4 is that God created the world out of primordial elements. And yet, one important new initiative was the construction of time, embracing the day, the month, the year, and the week. The week, however, does not depend on a cosmic phenomenon but served to introduce the concept of a people holy to a creator God.

Feminist biblical interpretation is more than simply paying attention to texts about women. It is also a means of achieving a more accurate understanding of life in ancient Israel and of the composition of the Bible.

Rashi interprets the opening verses of the creation story as describing God’s use of primordial substances to form the world. This idea appears in various forms in rabbinic literature but some of Rashi’s particular notions are only found in Plato’s Timaeus. Could this be one of Rashi’s sources?

What is the gender of the God of creation? Of YHWH in general?

According to the non-biblical book of Enoch, Genesis 6 tells of angels who bring sin to humanity, causing the Flood as well as sin and disease in the present.

Four Aramaic targumim (ancient translations) have God, and not just cherubim, taking up residence east of the garden. This is based on a slightly different vocalization of the Hebrew text, which is likely a more original reading than our current biblical text (MT).[1]

The Jewish Version of the “Fall”

Commentators have struggled with this question for centuries, but ancient cosmology offers a compelling solution.

A pediatric neurologist searches for the soul through the lens of current neuroscience.

Reading Cain’s murder of Abel and the account of Cain’s descendants as a metaphor for the trajectory of human development and the change in patterns of human behavior.

At stake is Ibn Ezra’s curse: “May your tongue stick to your palate… may your arm dry up and your right eye go blind.” 

The “Other” Benefits of Partners

Understanding the Midrash in Light of Plato and the Pseudepigrapha

Eight possible meanings of Cain’s response and what this tells us about his character as presented in the Torah

Literature and art are replete with images of angels descending to earth and joining humanity. One source for this image is a terse account in Genesis describing fallen angels, which is expanded upon in Second Temple literature. This interpretive tradition is suppressed in the classic rabbinic literature only to resurface again in the late narrative midrash, Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer.

The Garden of Eden story includes a lengthy introductory exposition (vv. 2:4b-3:1a), whose seemingly tangential details contrast the utopia of Eden with the dystopia of the real world.

A methodologically rigorous reading of the account of the Woman's creation reveals a fundamentally egalitarian view of the sexes that is both nuanced and psychologically sensitive.

“And the Lord Blessed the Seventh Day and Consecrated It” (Genesis 2:3). Can time be blessed?

Genesis 6 presents a narrative about divine beings who come to earth and have offspring with humans. What is a story which sounds like a pagan myth doing in the Torah?

The bridge that enables the annual traversal from the ending of the Torah back to its beginning is the anticipation of new questions.

The Torah describes God’s fashioning the firmament (רקיע) on the second day of creation. This piece of the universe, however, doesn’t actually exist—a problem obfuscated in my yeshiva education.