"An evil soul producing holy writ is like an apple rotten at the core: outwardly beautiful, but inwardly full of deadly worms," so wrote William Shakespeare long ago. Does that apply to those who have found a new interest in the Old Testament book of Genesis? It all depends on what they say the book is all about.
Recently Time magazine made the book of Genesis its cover story, showing planet Earth, and from above the circle of the Earth a light shone from the heavens as a voice said, "And God said..." The caption read, "Betrayal. Jealousy. Careerism. They’re all in the Bible’s first book."
Bill Moyer produced a ten-part documentary series for television on the book. He explained the interest, saying, "At this moment of post-cold-war confusion about where we’re going as a civilization, with all kinds of murky religious ferment, it makes sense to do some stock-taking. Let’s go back to the book that started the whole shebang."
None would deny that we need to go back to the blueprint. We’ve made a mess of families. From a human interest standpoint alone, no other book in the world so records the dreams and hopes, the sins and failures, and the foibles of human nature as does the Bible, the book of Genesis in particular. It’s a book of beginnings–of life, marriage, the nations, the flood, the rise of the Jewish and Arab worlds, and the rise of governments including laws and society.
Some have set out to use the book to justify our modern moral failures today, portraying Moses’ treatment of God in the book of Genesis as a kind of parable, not to be taken literally. They interpret the events in the book as a kind of existential "there is no real meaning to life" story which then justifies our misdeeds today.
In the book of Genesis you find all the sordidness of man’s base nature: adultery, rape, murder, war and plunder. There is not much that sends people to prison that you won’t find here. But the real issue is, was there a moral sense of right and wrong that was violated? Taking single events from the book would tend to make a person think that this was an "anything goes" sort of moral anarchy. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that is where an understanding of the context and the whole Bible makes a remarkable difference.
Resource Reading: Genesis 16-18