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M.D. Cassuto's celebrated commentary on Genesis, read verse by verse with an ear for the language of the text itself.
Cassuto approached the opening chapters of the Torah as a unified, deliberately crafted work — and set himself against the reigning academic view that Genesis was stitched together from separate documentary sources. Where others saw seams and contradictions, he showed patterns: repeated words and numbers, deliberate echoes, a style with its own rules. His readings drew on his mastery of Ugaritic and ancient Near Eastern literature, using the world in which the Torah was given to illuminate what its words meant to those who first heard them — and how sharply they broke with the mythologies around them.
The result is a commentary that is at once rigorously scholarly and deeply respectful of the text: creation, Eden, Cain and Hevel, the generations, the flood, the tower — each treated with patient attention to what the verses actually say.
A landmark of modern Hebrew biblical scholarship, and one of the most influential arguments ever made for the literary unity of the Torah.