Is the Torah One Big Story?

So often, we read the Book of Genesis as a kind of “anthology” of isolated episodes: God creates the world, Adam and Eve sin, Cain kills his brother, God destroys the world with a flood, people try to build a tower to Heaven… sure, they’re great stories, but they seem to have nothing to do with each other. But what if all of these tales actually fit together to tell a larger story? What if these episodes are like chapters in a book that build on each other, spinning a single narrative? If that’s the case, what is that story? Are we reading the Torah all wrong?

In this video David Block and Immanuel Shalev uncover a common thread that weaves its way through the different stories in Parshat Bereshit. In doing so, they offer a compelling explanation of what Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden was really about and how it connects to Cain’s murder of Abel. Not only that, but their approach to reading the Torah may just change the way that you read this most famous book of all time.

Dig Deeper: For more on Bereishit, click here and here. For more on the Garden of Eden, click here.