A Bioethicist's Take on Genesis by Ed Rothstein:
Genesis is punctuated with human attempts to be radically self-sufficient. This is what was so problematic about Babel's tower, Mr. Kass notes; residents aspired "to nothing less than self-re-creation through the arts and crafts, customs and mores of their city." Genesis is deeply suspicious of cities; it is even suspicious of civilization itself. Its heroes are not farmers (cultivators), but shepherds (guides).
The danger, Mr. Kass suggests, is the snake's promise that full knowledge can be had simply by exercise of human faculties. The snake is, he writes, "an embodiment of the separated and beguiling world of autonomous human reason," a voice of "rationalist mischief."
But civilization cannot be avoided; after Cain and Noah and Babel even God has to acknowledge as much. So, in Mr. Kass's telling, other constraints on hubristic humanity become necessary. In this case it is a covenant, an agreement that God makes with Abraham and his descendants. A covenant binds; it also promises. For Mr. Kass this notion of a transmittable tradition, is crucial; it becomes the central preoccupation of Genesis.
Ultimately the covenant is so precarious that it must be supplemented by binding law. Nothing mitigates Genesis's skepticism about the nature of humanity. As a religious book Genesis is dark and troubling. Its skepticism, common to many religious traditions, also gives religion a peculiar place in modern societies. It can seem illiberal and threatening: it sees limits on humanity's abilities to perfect itself through the use of reason alone.
and
a book review of Catholicism and American Freedom
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