Genesis

Miguel A. De La Torre’s Genesis is a passionate liberationist reading whose greatest strength is its refusal to let the book’s victims disappear: he rightly presses readers to face Hagar’s enslavement and reproductive exploitation, Dinah’s violation, patriarchal favoritism and deceit, the concentration of power under Pharaoh, environmental abuse, and the misuse of Sodom against modern consensual same-sex relationships. He is also right that male domination in Genesis 3 is part of the fallen order, not creation’s ideal. Yet his moral urgency repeatedly outruns the text. He treats uncertain source reconstructions as established ideological programmes, turns male and female image-bearers into a sexually composite God, recasts the serpent’s partial truths and destructive deception as liberation, and too readily turns divine grief, judgment, and testing into “buyer’s remorse,” caprice, or sadism. The flood remains morally terrible, the command that Hagar return remains distressing, and Genesis 22 should never be made emotionally easy; nevertheless, the narratives themselves foreground human violence, divine restraint, preservation, covenant, provision, and renewed life. Likewise, Genesis exposes rather than simply endorses Jacob’s manipulation, Simeon and Levi’s revenge, and Joseph’s economically troubling policy, even while showing God’s purposes at work through morally compromised people. Powerful as ethical provocation and especially valuable for foregrounding the oppressed, this volume is too speculative, rhetorically overdrawn, and unreliable as sustained exegesis of Genesis’s final form.