Reading Sefer Bereishit

(5784) (Wednesday) Reading Sefer Bereishit: A Literary Approach to Biblical Narrative. The “Modern Literary Approach” represented a biblical studies revolution in the academic classroom, reading the Torah as a unified whole and finding in Tanakh literary beauty, moral insight, and psychological wisdom. Orthodox Jewry naturally found this approach congenial and started to employ these methods. In this series, we will see how both midrash and medieval commentaries such as Radak and Abravanel anticipated some of these techniques. We then will highlight how much these ideas challenge the edifice of biblical criticism, since they often provide better explanations for certain textual anomalies. Finally, this series will collate the work of a host of scholars and explore novel literary techniques and categories.