Read Genesis the way it was meant to be read

If you've picked up this course, I suspect you already love Genesis — or at least sense that there is far more to it than you've been given access to. Maybe you've read it many times and still feel like something essential is just out of reach. Maybe you've sat through readings that felt either too devotional to ask hard questions or too skeptical to take the text seriously as Scripture. Maybe you just know, somewhere, that this is one of the most important and carefully crafted books ever written, and you want to be the kind of reader it deserves.

That is exactly why I built this course. Genesis rewards serious attention. Its literary architecture is intricate — patterns of repetition, symmetry, and key terms that signal meaning at every level. Its ancient Near Eastern context is illuminating rather than threatening; when you understand what the surrounding cultures believed about creation, flood, and humanity, Genesis's distinctive theological claims come into sharp relief. And its ancestral narratives — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph — are among the most psychologically honest and theologically rich stories in any literature, full of failure, grace, and the slow, surprising movement of divine purpose through deeply human lives.

My approach throughout is to take both the text and you seriously. I introduce scholarly tools — genre, intertextuality, narrative criticism, ancient parallels — because they genuinely help, not to signal expertise or complicate things unnecessarily. I don't avoid the hard questions: the relationship between Genesis and science, the moral difficulty of the ancestral narratives, the nature of the fall, what it really means to be made in the image of God. But I approach them with intellectual fairness rather than either defensive dismissal or fashionable skepticism. The goal is equipping you to think well, not telling you what to conclude.

By the time we reach Joseph's reconciliation with his brothers in Genesis 50 — one of the most theologically laden scenes in the entire Old Testament — you will have built a reading practice that can hold the literary, the historical, the theological, and the devotional dimensions of the text together. You won't just know more about Genesis. You will read it differently: more slowly, more precisely, and with a deeper sense of why it stands at the beginning of everything the Bible goes on to say.

If you are ready to engage Genesis with the full attention it asks for, I am glad you are here. Let's begin.