Would you choose a book for the younger generation in which the protagonist cheats, lies, steals, kills, and gets no retribution?You may have had them read this kind of book.Yes, it is the Genesis of the Bible.There is nothing wrong with encouraging your children to read Genesis, but guide them from the sidelines.It is the best interactive moral education textbook ever written, inspiring readers of all ages to ponder the eternal issues of right and wrong. (Especially the first book - Genesis is fundamentally different from the New Testament and the Koran. Most of the New Testament and the Koran teach the world by showing the perfection of God, Jesus and Muhammad It is justice and axiom. Christian or Muslim parents can safely give the New Testament or the Koran to their children for self-education, and they will learn how to live a just and noble life through the stories in it. The fables and teachings in it may need some explanation , however, the lessons learned from the lives of Jesus and Muhammad are generally obvious and easy to understand. The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' answer to the mob that stoned the immoral woman on the Mount of Olives, or the good Samaritan Is there anything controversial? Muhammad is the same. The Koran describes his life as a model for the world. He is a person of "high moral character". If your words and deeds are completely based on Jesus or Muhammad, You will be a gentleman.

The Jewish Bible contrasts them sharply in terms of character descriptions, where the characters, even the protagonists, are flawed human beings.They are good people, but sometimes they do bad things that both people and gods hate.As the book of Ecclesiastes says: "There is no righteous man in the world who always does good and never sins." This tradition of human imperfection began from the beginning of the creation of the world.Even the God of Genesis can be seen as an imperfect God, neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and sometimes even murderous.He regretted the creation of human beings, promised not to flood the world again, and even allowed Abraham to teach him what is irrational.Most of the Jewish scriptures use examples of injustice, justice and imperfection to impart true advice on justice and axioms. Genesis actively provokes the reader to react, to think for himself, and even to object.As such, it is an interactive text that provokes far-reaching questions and provokes a dialogue between man and God in different ages.

What sense of justice and justice can we learn from Abraham’s attempt to kill his two sons, or from God’s annihilation of Noah’s contemporaries and the city where Lot lived?Bible commentators of all ages have asked these questions, and they have rightly asked them.They have something to say.These stories cannot be read alone.Reading the Old Testament (I mean the Jewish Bible here, and the two are used interchangeably without any special purpose), especially the book of Genesis, must be actively explored.It is true that the critical reader is bound to question the scriptures, just as James argued with the angels of God.There is a passage explaining the scriptures of Eli’s preaching, describing how human beings “crack their brains to study” and believe that this research work consumes too much energy. If the researcher has a wife, “the number of intercourse can be reduced to once a week. Because research work makes them physically weak" In contrast, the wealthy have to perform humanely every night because they don't have to work, and the average working class twice a week.

Whether we agree or disagree that academic work on the Bible should affect our sex lives, we are obviously bound to be angry with doubt and angry with denial after reading ambiguous passages.Perhaps it is because of this that the Jews are so argumentative, forceful, and "hard-spoken" when citing the "Scriptures". The reason why I like to read the Torah is precisely because it always needs interpretation and questioning. The first time I thought about the axiom of justice was when I was a child reading Genesis.To this day, I remember more clearly the questions it raised than the answers the pastor gave.For a ten-year-old to read Genesis is to explore God's thoughts on justice and axioms.No child would think that Adam and Eve should be punished for disobeying God's command and eating the fruit of the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil", because before they ate the fruit of the tree, they did not have the ability to distinguish good from evil what!No curious child would be willing to accept that God would send a flood on innocent babies, or destroy Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone.How can Abraham be praised for being willing to kill his son as a sacrifice?Why was Jacob robbed of his twin brother's birthright and father's blessing, and was rewarded?

I first encountered these problems in the 1940s and 1950s, when I was in the elementary section of an Orthodox Jewish school.My teachers, mostly from European Jewish seminaries who survived the Holocaust, encouraged students to ask the same mind-bending questions that rabbis have asked for centuries, and were not afraid to change their minds More Zhang.Those are old questions, asked by believers of all generations.Every question has an accepted answer that reinforces the belief in the heavenly origin of the scriptures and the goodwill of God and his prophets.Sometimes there are multiple answers, and occasionally the answers conflict with each other, but they are all part of the canon.Some of them require devotion to make up for doubt, or even faith rather than evidence.Yet no question, at least no acceptable one, encourages us to question the existence of God or his good intentions.If a skeptical student asks a deviant question, the teacher has a ready-made answer. The rabbis from ancient times to the present are people who are much smarter than you. If your question is a good question, then someone among them should have asked it.If none of them put their brains to it, then it must not be a good question.

The teacher even has an authoritative document as their backing., there is a story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (a distinguished but somewhat arrogant master around the second century AD) who taught the following principles: If a fledgling bird lands within fifty of someone's house, it belongs to the owner of that house.If it falls fifty cubits away, whoever catches it is his. Rabbi Jeremiah asked the question: "If a bird has half its body within this limit and the other half outside, to whom does it belong?" He was expelled from the academy because of this problem. I also sometimes ask abrupt questions and get kicked out of the classroom.I remember once I asked a question that made the teacher angry, that is: Since Adam and Eve had no daughters, where did Cain's wife come from?A classmate was slapped for wondering how day and night existed before God made the sun and the moon.My teacher called these questions for ignorant people to ask.However, I still ask these questions to this day, as do many of my classmates.I also raise these questions in this book.

After working as an altar boy, I began practicing divrei Torah—that is, reporting on my weekly Bible readings—at the Youth Israel Polo Park Synagogue that our family attended.My mother found some of my speeches at that time in the old materials. I didn't expect that I had already thought of the topics to be discussed in this book: I have already argued that laws without rational basis violate freedom, and I have advocated that legislators understand that they need to make laws for themselves. When order seeks a rational basis, that is when the seeds of democracy are planted.The lecture my mother found was about a part of the Bible called the Chukkas, which dealt with laws that the rabbis found no rational basis for.Just because these are the decrees of God, that is, the will of God, people must follow them blindly.These chukims are distinguished from mishpatim, which are laws based on reason and experience. The word mishpatim is cognate with justice and judge, so mishpatim (plural mishpat) is based on the principles of justice and chukim requires no explanation.

This book sets out to illustrate the distinctive feature of the Bible (as opposed to other earlier legal codes) that the Bible is a law derived directly from empirical narration. God in Genesis enters into a formal covenant with mankind, requiring him to Give reasons (at least in most cases) The Bible reflects the development of law from chok without reason to mishpat with reason. When Abraham and God disputed the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah - in Religion For the first time in history, human beings demanded justice from God—an important watershed in the development of democracy.

These stories, and others in which justice was done or thwarted, had a profound effect on my young mind.They lead me to look at the world in a questioning and questioning way.If Abraham could question God, I can naturally question my teacher.At that time, my high school principal refused to approve me to participate in the statewide college scholarship examination on the grounds that my grades were not high and I had no chance of being selected.After my hard work, I was not only able to participate in the audition, but also to apply for a scholarship.The Bible gave me the ability to pursue justice and justice.I suspect that these biblical stories must have a similar impact on other curious students, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish!

I read Genesis precisely to induce myself to question everything, even beliefs.It taught me that faith is a process, not a static set of thought patterns. "Genesis" tells us that faith has to pay a price to get something, even God is no exception.Jacob understood clearly that he set a condition that he would believe in God only if God fulfilled the agreement between them.When I was a child, I narrowed down this unique God-man relationship into my own version, and made my condition: God wants to move a World Series championship game to Brooklyn, so I believe in Him.I spent many years without faith until the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees and moved to Los Angeles.God is really unfathomable.

As I grew older, I continued to ponder the wonderful stories in Genesis.Whenever I think of some contemporary issues about justice and injustice, these stories come to mind, as if they have been tightly bound to my consciousness.In the college law classes I teach, I always quote from the Bible as objects of simulation and citation because most students are familiar with Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Moses , David, Job, Jesus, and Muhammad. In the fall of 1997, I decided to give a seminar at Harvard Law School on the source of justice contained in the Bible.I was surprised by how popular it was, with 150 students applying for 20 spots.The course of this seminar is exciting. Christians, Muslims, atheists, and agnostics (the school that believes that the existence of God cannot be known) discuss the sacred scriptures and seek answers to justice, axioms and laws. insight.In the spring of 1998, I spent several months in Israel reading commentaries on the Bible and discussing it with scholars from all over the world from various points of view.In the fall of 1998, I gave seminars again, focusing on the narratives of Genesis and the Bible.In the summers of 1998 and 1999, I led two Bible study groups in the Diocese of Marathon to discuss the ethical and moral implications of several Bible stories. My students included religious fundamentalists who took every word of scripture literally.I was in the Harvard Law School parking lot and someone posted the phrase "God said it, I believe it. Don't need to discuss it" on the bumper. I also taught the other extreme, such as atheists, agnostics, There are also some students who haven't read the Bible until then. A girl told me: "Up to now, the Bible is just a book for me when I live in a hotel and look for a pen and paper in the bedside cabinet. . " Some of my students see the Bible as a great work of literature, with Shakespeare, Homer, and Dostoevsky in its lineage.My point of view is different, I think it is a sacred book, many people believe in it, some people are willing to die for it, or kill and set fire.Whether you believe that the Bible was written by God, or inspired by him, and then written by human beings, you can't just think of it as a collection of folklore, short stories, and historical events.It is sacred scripture, and it cannot be fully appreciated without looking at it differently from reading secular literature.We read Shakespeare, marvel at his mastery of words, and share his insightful insights into human nature.However, we will not take it as a model of virtue.We can identify with the struggles of the characters in Shakespeare's plays, and at the same time know that they are all amazing crystallizations of the human soul.On the other hand, the Bible represents the words of God and is the rule of conduct for all mortals.It is for us to do it, not just think about it.No one is burned at the stake for misinterpreting Shakespeare's Macbeth. I re-read the Bible when I prepared the materials for those Bible classes and when I wrote this book.In the classroom at Harvard University, I am neither Jewish nor Christian or Muslim, and regarding the identity of the author of the Bible, I neither support the cooperation between God and man, nor the original creation or joint creation of multiple people.I welcome each student to read the scriptures in the tradition of their own background.I do not take any presupposed positions on the "truths" put forward by various commentaries, even though they have their own authoritative status in different religions.We study many commentators and criticize them for their contributions and insights, regardless of their doctrinal presuppositions. I have experienced a unique revelation in a passage of a great medieval commentator.A Spanish Jew in the twelfth century, he was familiar with Greek, Christian, and Islamic philosophy, and his biblical commentaries were insightful and timeless.He once said: "Anyone with a little intelligence (let alone someone who has read the law) can write a paragraph of his own "Midash". The so-called Midash refers to biblical interpretations that use enlightening stories, explanations, comments, or other forms of interpretation.There is a traditional Judaism proverb that the Torah has seventy faces, which means that there is no single correct answer to the narration in the Bible.A contemporary commentator has stated that many of these aspects "are dormant, and as different generations discover ways of expressing certain aspects of them, they again present a new aspect of the Torah that Moses received on Mount Sinai." It is in this spirit that I engage in the dialogue of the ages.Every generation has the right and the responsibility to reinterpret the Bible in accordance with the knowledge and information available at the time.Eight centuries ago, Maimonides, the most esteemed Jewish interpreter, insisted that research must cover both ancient and contemporary writers, within and beyond his own beliefs, because he believed: "We should accept convey the truth." Maimonides read widely Greek and Arabic writers, and was particularly influenced by Aristotle, although he largely disagreed with Aristotle's concept of God.Norman Lamm, President of Yeshiva University—reiterating this inclusive point: “No religious position is pious if it refuses to consider those troubling theories that may be true tomorrow. . . . Judaism must Facing them is like facing what has been held to be true by men throughout the ages... If those things are roughly true, we should not ignore them. We should use newfound truths to understand our Torah more clearly— 'The Book of the Law of Truth'." There is this "open door, never end debate" quality in the hermeneutic nature of Midash.It never forbids anyone to participate in never-ending biblical discussions.In this spirit of free questioning, the "drash" is untamed and unabated.An elder of mine who worked as a professor in Israel once traced our surname, and he believed it came from the Hebrew word doresh or drash, which means "to search for interpretation" especially the interpretation of the Bible.Our family obviously has a long history as interpreters of sacred scriptures.Of course, it is impossible to test whether it really evolved from here, but it would be an honor for me to join this tradition.Among the generations of people I know, they can indeed support this view. However, my relatives and elders may not all agree with the tone and content of my doubts in this book. Unlike other authors who have written on the Bible as their subject, I do not make it my calling to study the Bible for life.In contrast, I have devoted my life to legal studies and legal affairs, always keeping in mind the principles of the Bible.During my forty years as a lawyer, I have thought about the Bible and how it affects the law.My teaching and practice draw knowledge from both secular sources and the Bible.Now the time has come for me to write a book about this fascinating relationship that has played an important role in my personal and professional life. I draw on my legal, political, and personal experience to ask new questions of these ancient classics and to offer new insights into old ones.In no way do I think I'm giving the "correct" answer.I also in no way claim to be a religion or any authority.My goal is simply to stimulate discussion, whether you are a believer in God, a non-believers, a skeptic, or someone as fascinated as I am by the impact of the Bible. Most writers on a biblical subject have a list of goals, sometimes explicit, mostly implicit.They want to prove or disprove that the Bible came from God, or the merits of a certain religious opinion about the scriptures, or about the history of the scriptures.When I read traditional reviews, I found that these authors can be grouped into several categories. The first category can be classified as defense lawyers.They are like good lawyers advocating for their clients, rarely asking questions they don't know the answers to.In this case, the answer must be to demonstrate the goodness of God, the consistency of the scriptures, and the divine origin of the scriptures.These defense lawyers look in the scriptures for "evidence scriptures" that support what they already know, as a Midas confidently assures the reader: "Whenever you see an Heresy, and you're bound to find refuting arguments left and right." The Most Famous Advocate The Genesis of Law: The Origins of Law in Search of Biblical Stories is Rashi, a brilliant and energetic French Jew of the eleventh century whose full name was Solomon Ban Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac.Rahi lived during the time of the Crusades and wrote detailed commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, usually confining himself to narrow textual interpretation and commentary rather than broad philosophical or theological expositions. The next category is the Socratic type of interpreter, who seems to be determined to ask difficult questions and admits that he may not have perfect answers.These commentators accept that some things are left unanswered, and express doubts from time to time because the correct interpretation may not be available to their generation, or may be hidden in the scriptures with hidden mysteries.No matter how open this kind of scripture interpreters are, even the most enlightened ones will ask others to accept the belief first, and then talk about doubts, but they are unwilling to look at the problem from the perspective of doubt or non-belief first.The most famous Socratic interpreter was Maimonides, who was well versed in Greek philosophy and believed that scientific knowledge coincided with the truth in the Bible.His works are not only biblical commentaries that are handed down from generation to generation, but also can be studied purely as philosophical works. There is also a class of duplicity skeptics.Despite their professed faith, any attentive reader could smell their doubts: doubts about the justice of God, the fulfillment of covenants, and even the occasional existence of God.Using powdered allusions, hypothetical stories, and ironic criticism, these commentators challenge God and wonder why his people have suffered so much in the past.For these skeptics, feeling skeptical is never a sin.After all, human beings are born with the ability to doubt, even if there is no need to doubt.Acting on these doubts constitutes a crime. For Judaism, the theological perfection of believers is not as important as the observance of religious rules.When God gave the Jewish Torah, the people said they would "practice and listen" and their answer—putting "practice" before "listening"—could be used to support the view of innocence, as long as the behavior Pious words.An important figure of this type is Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, an eighteenth-century master of Hasidism who came to The Inquisition, with drums beating, accuses God of breaking his covenant with the Jewish people. It has been almost universally accepted throughout the ages that the Jewish Bible was written or inspired by God himself, and that it was a complete document delivered to the Jews on Mount Sinai.In the Middle Ages, some traditional interpreters found some intriguing inconsistencies in the scriptures, indicating that there may be multiple authors or descendants adding.For example, Moses narrates his own death; the places and people mentioned in the text do not appear until many years after the teaching at Sinai. There is a scripture describing Abraham's journey. It is written in the Bible: "At that time, the Canaanites lived in that land." Ibn Ezra suspected that this text might be inconsistent with historical facts, so he proposed a possible interpretation, Then take a big bet that if my interpretation is incorrect, there must be secrets hidden in this passage. He warned "those who know the secret to keep silent." A scholar who commented on Ibn Ezra proposed an explanation for this cryptic warning: Ibn Ezra understood that the Canaanite sentence was a historical misplacement, but he was unwilling to create doubts in the minds of readers The solution is not to mention it! Many biblical scholars now accept that Deuteronomy appears to have been written later than the other four books and that the original books were written in different styles, indicating multiple authors and subsequent edits and revisions. The authorship of the Bible has been hotly debated in the academy for more than a century.Although I am quite familiar with this fact and use it in my classroom, this book is not intended to be part of the debate. "Genesis of Law" is not mainly about discussing historical facts, but about the Genesis of Law: Finding the origin and connotation of law from biblical stories: these stories are supposed to teach us about lawlessness on the surface The true meaning of justice and axioms, and how we should interpret these stories.In order to participate in the controversy that has been fought for thousands of years, I agree that in the sacred nature of scriptures, there is also the participation of successive authors.For the purposes of this book, it does not matter whether the book of Genesis was given to Moses by God himself, or whether it was compiled by an unknown author who synthesized multiple sources.What matters is that Genesis is considered sacred scripture for more than two millennia.Of course, this does not necessitate a literal death-definition of fundamentalist views.Ibn Ezra said well that if the contents of the Torah cannot be explained by our knowledge, or contrary to our rational judgment, then we must look for hidden meanings.This is all because wisdom is the foundation of the Torah.The book of the law is not given to the ignorant. Pope John Paul II made a similar point: Fundamentalists place too much emphasis on certain details of inaccuracies in biblical texts, especially in relation to historical or scientifically accepted truths.This school often regards some contents that were not originally written by historians as historical facts.This school regards everything stated or described with past tense verbs as historical fact, completely ignoring the symbolic or metaphorical meaning that must exist... Fundamentalists also tend to take a very narrow view.As for the written description of astronomy in ancient outdated astronomy, this school accepts it in its entirety just because it is mentioned in the Bible.In this way, any dialogue that would open one's eyes to the relationship between culture and faith is completely stifled.They rely so heavily on a blanket reading of certain passages of the Bible in order to reinforce their prejudicial political ideas and social attitudes, such as racism, which run counter to Christian teaching. I was told a story from the writings of Maimonides: Two rabbis died and went to heaven, where they continued to argue about the discrepancy between one passage of Maimonides and another.Both offer insightful arguments and counterarguments that seek to resolve apparent contradictions.God listened to their wonderful conversation and called Maimonides himself to explain.Lao Lao looked through the conflicting fragments and metaphors, and declared that this was just a clerical error passed on by one of them.There was no contradiction at all!The two rabbis dismissed Mai Lao, complaining that his own solution was far less interesting than theirs. I am using the polemical tradition of Jewish rabbis to discuss some of the contradictions in Genesis. Children intercede, as long as we point out that this paragraph is written by author A and that paragraph is from author B, we can solve it easily.However, this is far less interesting than the answers proposed by some traditional commentators.Since I am dealing with interpreters and scriptures in the same way that readers have accepted them for thousands of years, instead of writing a book about who wrote the Bible, I write about how to interpret the often contradictory statements about justice in the Bible the content of the axiom. The open style and often ambiguous nature of the Rabbinic Bible has favored a rich oral tradition and commentaries on thousands of texts.In Jewish tradition, there are several different kinds of hermeneutics: pshat, word-for-word translation; drash, rabbinical commentary; remez, symbolic interpretation; and sod, hidden or obscure meaning.The Jews like to combine the first letters of several words to form a collective name, and the prefixes of these different types of Bible commentaries are put together to be pardes (pshat, drash, remez and sod), which means "orchard". It should contain many aspects of the book of the law.Perhaps the most popular form of biblical commentary is the Aggadah of the Midrash (these are often stories, sometimes far-fetched, developed from a biblical narrative that go beyond the closer master exegesis of the text) I will provide examples of such stories in various chapters of the book 16 Genesis of the Law: Finding the Origin of the Law from Biblical Stories.One commentator even elevates the status of Aggadah-style stories to the level of God's Word. Want to know God... Study Aggadah.Some biblical commentators take things a step further, arguing that the Bible itself is a sort of Midrash, and the most famous of these is the argument.Herschel believed that the central event of biblical theology—the apparition of God on Mount Sinai—was the Midrash, which told the story of how the law was taught to the Israelites. To speak and pass down the tablets is to confuse metaphor with fact.From his point of view, everything is Midrash interpreted and interpreted and interpreted.The stories in the Bible transform God's unknowable actions into human-familiar expressions so that the readers can understand them.Maimonides also regarded certain words of the Bible as "parables" "using human language" and "adjusted to the level that most people can understand." Maimonides focused on "the hand of God", "the fire In terms of words and sentences such as "sword", it is explained that these words are used for people who "only have a clear concept of actual objects". The New Testament and the Koran are also objects of Midasian interpretation.Jesus was good at using the Midas-style interpretation technique, and Muhammad, who has always been called "the masterpiece of Aggadah", also used the "Midash"-style interpretation to compile the legendary materials into the Koran in this book. I focus primarily on the Genesis text.When necessary, I will cite different interpreters and Midas. I am not limited by a specific perspective of interpretation, nor do I think any one is authoritative or final.Once the scriptures are published, they belong to everyone, and anyone can interpret them according to their own opinions.Tradition is certainly an opinion, but it is not privileged.I firmly oppose the anti-intellectual views of contemporary Haredi (radical orthodox) rabbis, who believe that: "The minds of modern people are not allowed to have any thoughts and ideas that their own minds have come up with, only those of their predecessors." handed down." I've wrestled with this anti-intellectual fundamentalism since I was a kid in synagogue school, and now I'm a grown man teaching at Harvard to continue to wrestle with it.Rather, it was the great sixteenth-century interpreter Rabbi Eliezer Ashkenazi who firmly believed that each of us, our children, our descendants, It is the responsibility of the last generation of mankind to accept the truth that anyone says, and use it to examine the secrets of the Torah. "he thinks: We should not care that other people's logic - even better than our own - will hinder our personal discussion.Not at all, just as our ancestors were unwilling to accept the truth of previous generations as it was, and did not decide to reject it, so it is suitable for us to emulate.Brainstorming is the best way to test the truth...Don't be alarmed when you find that big people have different beliefs from yours; you must explore and interpret, because this is what people are here for, and wisdom is given to you by God to benefit you... While many of my ideas are of course borrowed from my predecessors, I hope to share with you new insights from my unique career as a lawyer and professor.After all, using personal experience to expand knowledge is central to the book of Genesis, and its characters make mistakes and give God questions, and God gives them questions. Some students and colleagues are curious why I focus on "Genesis" (in 18 Genesis of Law: Finding the Origin of Law from Biblical Stories There are many original stories but few laws) instead of the law in the Bible. topic chapters.The theme of "Genesis" was carefully selected.I believe that narratives that deal broadly with justice and injustice will last longer than the laws of the Bible, because the latter are often narrow, limited by the times, and sometimes only derivatives of scriptures.For all their influence—particularly the Ten Commandments—not all have stood the test of time.Sometimes the law is no longer useful, as in the book of Leviticus, which is mostly about animals that have long since been abandoned.Even those codes that cover human relations include some disenfranchised statutes that are no longer binding today.Children who disobeyed their parents were no longer stoned, and witches were no longer summarily executed.These statutes, and others like them, clearly reflect the practice of anarchy, and should predate the Bible. The narratives in the Bible, especially those in Genesis, were as fresh, pertinent, thought-provoking and difficult in ancient times as they are today.These narratives provide the background elements of the statute and give life to the statute derived from it.The content of the Bible is composed of essays, short stories, and short stories. Among the important documents discussing human life in history, there are almost no equivalent works.As long as people pursue questions about justice and injustice, there will continue to be interpretations and discussions of these chapters. Among the readers of this book, there must be many who have their own interpretations of the stories in the Bible.I hope you will read this book in the way of questioning and debating, which is how I wrote this book.In addition, you are welcome to continue the dialogue with me after reading, please send your opinions to [email protected] by email.I'll share interesting comments with my class so you can join in a conversation that transcends generations.

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Notes: , Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy With the characters in "King Lear".