In the Beginning. . .
May. 24th, 2012 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbandrewsI probably shouldn't review the book yet because I haven't actually finished it, but I plan to finish it tonight and I don't think the last 20 pages are going to change my opinion of it.
In the Beginning... by Isaac Asimov is one of the most fascinating books I've read, and I want to write this about it because nothing I've seen about it has described it accurately.
The description is that it's a comparison between the book of Genesis and the current scientific theory about the origin of the cosmos. It starts out like that, but it pretty rapidly switches away from that model (which is good because that would get tiresome after a few dozen pages) and into an in-depth, unapologetically-secular, line-by-line analysis of Genesis.
What we call the book of Genesis is actually two documents, referred to as the P-document and the J-document. Together these are probably the oldest written records of (our) civilization, chronicling the tribes settled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Parts of the two documents are garbled and nonsensical, and Asimov tries to speculate on what they might mean, but doesn't pull any punches assuming that the documents themselves are wrong (as opposed to them holding divine meaning we can't comprehend). Parts of them contradict each other or have glaring translation errors, but the book isn't mean-spirited about it. Far from being focused on disproving the creation story, he just tries to explain what it might mean.
I really wish that he had done a book like this for other parts of the bible, like the gospels, or revelations. It would have been really fascinating.
Edit: Oh, apparently he did.
In the Beginning... by Isaac Asimov is one of the most fascinating books I've read, and I want to write this about it because nothing I've seen about it has described it accurately.
The description is that it's a comparison between the book of Genesis and the current scientific theory about the origin of the cosmos. It starts out like that, but it pretty rapidly switches away from that model (which is good because that would get tiresome after a few dozen pages) and into an in-depth, unapologetically-secular, line-by-line analysis of Genesis.
What we call the book of Genesis is actually two documents, referred to as the P-document and the J-document. Together these are probably the oldest written records of (our) civilization, chronicling the tribes settled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Parts of the two documents are garbled and nonsensical, and Asimov tries to speculate on what they might mean, but doesn't pull any punches assuming that the documents themselves are wrong (as opposed to them holding divine meaning we can't comprehend). Parts of them contradict each other or have glaring translation errors, but the book isn't mean-spirited about it. Far from being focused on disproving the creation story, he just tries to explain what it might mean.
I really wish that he had done a book like this for other parts of the bible, like the gospels, or revelations. It would have been really fascinating.
Edit: Oh, apparently he did.
