The study of the rhetorical features and characteristics in Genesis was started by Hermann Gunkel at the beginning of the twentieth century.1 He demonstrated how the narratives originated in the folklore of Israelite and pre-Israelite cultures, and how they were transformed into larger collections and finally into the literary documents which formed the book of Genesis. Although today few believe we can illuminate the history of pre-literary traditions and identify any orally based subunits of minor literature (Kleinliteratur) according to their initial setting of genre (Sitz im Leben), we can focus on the setting of the primary readership of the final written form.2 In addition, Gunkel’s observations on formal criteria and comparisons with other ancient Near Eastern literature are still a valuable foundation for contemporary exegesis.

Biblical ethics reflects upon maxims of moral behavior from the perspective of normative good and examines its legitimations and justifications, as well as the consequences of what can be called a morally positive or negative behavior. If maxims of good behavior are to be derived from historical narrative traditions, such an undertaking is confronted with the problem that implicit maxims of moral behavior are entangled with a number of other motifs and can never be isolated purely. The narratives of the Bible are subject to this challenge for any reconstruction of a historical ethos and its ethics. Their moral maxims were also anchored in the cultural contexts and ideals of their time. Although biblical narratives, including some in the book of Genesis, were ethically self-reflecting, they participated in the historicity of the cultural ideal motifs of their time.1 The solution for the resulting hermeneutical problem for any historical ethics due to the “nasty gap of history” (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing) – the tensions between modern ethical maxims and those of the Bible – is the main problem for any biblical ethics of the Torah or more specifically, the book of Genesis.

The image of God (Latin imago Dei) is a familiar, even fraught, biblical notion because it has served as something of an empty cipher that countless interpreters have sought to fill.1 Despite a great deal of spilled ink, what, exactly, the imago Dei is remains no small mystery because the notion goes largely undeveloped and underdeveloped in the Bible.2 References to the imago Dei appear almost exclusively in Genesis – “almost” because interpreters often find traces of the concept elsewhere, including in the New Testament.

Already in antiquity Jewish interpreters commented upon the oddity that the Torah, a book centered upon and preoccupied with the laws given at Sinai, contains such an extended prologue. Thus, the following reflection from the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, an anthology of legal midrashim from second/third-century CE Palestine, comments on why the Ten Commandments are not given in Genesis:

In the book of Genesis, we find stories about beginnings. We read of God’s creation of the universe, the origin of man, the fall into sin, the first murder, the father of faith, the birth of Israel, and more. It is a world strangely unfamiliar to modern readers, yet familiarly strange. When it comes to the origin, nature, and explanation of evil, discussions among analytic philosophers usually focus on the relationship between propositions, found within arguments, that aim to show God’s existence is either compatible or incompatible with the reality of evil, or probable or improbable given the reality of evil. God, in the analytic mode, is understood as a personal being worthy of worship. This conception of God is common to the great monotheistic traditions found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Much progress can be – and has been – made on the problem of evil at the level of “mere theism.”1 Yet, as we shall see, there is much more that can – and should – be incorporated into a full-blown account of God and evil.

There are very few books in the Hebrew Bible – Judges, Ruth, and Esther may be the only others – that contain such an abundance of women characters as does Genesis. This fact, coupled with the role of the creation narrative in women’s status over the centuries, has resulted in a nearly endless body of feminist analysis of the book. This scholarship is diverse in its approaches and in its conclusions, reflecting multiple types of feminism. Indeed, the question of what constitutes feminist analysis is a sticky one: Is it any analysis that focuses on women? Is it analysis that seeks to make an argument about women’s political empowerment? Must it proceed from a particular philosophical standpoint, incorporating works of feminist theory? Is a work feminist simply because it says it is – or can it be feminist even if it claims it is not?

Discussions of religious faith and science have proceeded along four tracks: science, philosophy, systematic theology, and scriptural interpretation. The dominant dialogue between theology and science is mediated by philosophical categories. While less prominent, the engagement of science and Scripture has been addressed in several intersecting classifications each with a specific focus. James P. Hurd sketches three scenarios seeking to harmonize the paleontological record of humans origins with Scripture.1 Nicolaas Rupke surveys five discourses about Scripture and science in their social context from 1750 to 2000.2 Gijsbert van den Brink describes five types of interpretation of Genesis 2–3, addressing the historicity of Adam and the Fall.3 Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma as well as Denis Alexander distinguish attempts at creating consistency between science and Scripture (scenarios, models).4 Mark Harris addresses the “neglect of the Bible by the science-religion field” more broadly.5 All aim at conflict resolution.

The Book of Genesis never seems to go away. Whether we roam the corridors of human philosophies and theological speculations, or walk among the literary giants of past generations, we always seem to find Genesis. It is, in fact, inescapable, given a name like “Genesis” or “Beginnings.” Its position as the first book of the Bible, and the one that establishes so many of the themes to follow, gives Genesis a unique position in world literature and in the history of religions. Indeed, Genesis addresses the most profound questions of life. Who are we? Where are we? Why are we here? And it has answers. Whether we are believers or skeptics, Genesis answers questions about who God is, what God’s nature is like, and how God relates to humankind. Since the beginning of civilization, most societies have speculated about these or similar philosophical questions, but none has left such an impact on world history and thought as Genesis. Besides addressing the beginnings of the cosmos, of humanity, and of human civilization, the book is also about the origins of God’s chosen people, the Israelites, who produced the traditions that came to be preserved in the Hebrew Bible, traditionally known as the Old Testament. As such, the Book of Genesis is one of the first steps one must take along the path to understanding the world religions we now know as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the variety of theologies and philosophical principles related to them.

Research on the Pentateuch began in the eighteenth century with the book of Genesis. This has had noticeable consequences for the current literary-historical analysis of both the Pentateuch as a whole and Genesis in particular. It is clear that the question of the sources and redactions in Genesis cannot be answered without the whole Pentateuch in view. However, the exact impact of the earliest questions of Pentateuchal research upon the research approaches of later generations, even in areas in which the directions of inquiry have clearly shifted, is rarely considered.

Genesis reflects a robust example of inter-cultural conversation. This chapter will summarize the major categories of commonality between Genesis and the ancient Near Eastern world in three major categories: (1) creation and humanity; (2) perceptions about the gods; (3) ancestor narratives. A truism of comparative studies is that similarities as well as differences require attention, and examples of both will be discussed.

This chapter examines the problem of the region in world crime fiction – the extent to which a regional approach to crime fiction offers a way of moving between the national and global. It focusses on the Mediterranean and what is called Mediterranean or Southern European noir and examines works by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Jean-Claude Izzo, Andrea Camilleri and, more pointedly, the Mexican writers Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It seeks to tease out the complications produced, first, by attempts to locate what is distinctively Mediterranean in Mediterranean noir, and second, by attendant moves to distinguish between different taxonomies of geographical and political space. Attention is paid to the fusion of cultures central to and produced by an understanding of the Mediterranean as matrix and to the ways this cultural mixing has also been exploited by organized crime networks for profit. However, to fully interrogate the place and problem of the region in world crime fiction, and to tease out its political possibilities, this chapter looks at the complex entanglements between texts, readers, publishers and contexts, and hence new ways of doing critique.

This chapter provides a framework for the companion by defining world crime fiction and outlining the key theoretical issues involved in studying crime fiction as a global genre. The first section explores the global and transnational prehistories of crime fiction; it covers various forms of premodern crime writing and discusses the global dissemination of Western crime fiction from the late nineteenth century, highlighting the role of translation, pseudotranslation and adaptation in the emergence of local crime literatures. The second section focusses on the transnationalism of contemporary world crime fiction, arguing that the global adaptations of the genre are not just a matter of adding local colour, but involve formal hybridization that results in new, local versions of the genre. The final section discusses how crime fiction studies, as a field traditionally tied to Western crime writing, has recently moved towards a global and transnational conception of the genre. The overarching argument of the chapter is that founding world crime fiction as a research area requires a rethinking of the crime genre itself beyond the Anglocentrism of the scholarly tradition.