The Book of Genesis: A Biography. By Ronald Hendel. Princeton University Press; 293 pages; $24.95 and £16.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“IN THE beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,” reads the first sentence of the Book of Genesis. Or does it? An equally plausible translation runs: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth,” with no hint of the idea (popular since the late second century AD) that this momentous event was the beginning of time, when the universe was conjured out of nothing.

Biblical scholars cannot decide whether the authors of “Genesis”, whoever they may have been, thought that the earth and heavens were crafted from material that had always existed, as the ancient Greeks maintained. Maybe some of the authors believed in an eternal, Greek-style universe, and others believed in a big beginning. For one thing that scholars can agree on is that “Genesis” is a compilation of writings from three main sources, as Ronald Hendel, a professor of Hebrew Bible studies at the University of California, Berkeley, explains in “The Book of Genesis: A Biography”.

If any book deserves to have a biography written about it, it is the opening to the Bible, which was assembled between the tenth and sixth centuries BC. Not only is it the source of some of the Western world’s best-known stories—from Noah’s brush with climate change to the entrepreneurial success in Egypt of his distant descendant, Joseph—it has also led a rather eventful life. Its account of the creation of the world and of the early days of mankind, with its parade of deceptions, retributions and covenants, has been subjected to many kinds of interpretation. “Genesis” has been not one book but many.

Only recently, for example, has it been championed by some as the literal and inerrant word of God, to be believed in every plain detail. Biblical fundamentalism has its strongest roots in the late 19th century. Before then, the faithful, if they read it at all, were on the whole freer in their interpretations—not because they were any less devout, or less convinced of the book’s divine inspiration, but because puzzles in the text seemed to point to deeper, hidden meanings. Long before anyone worried that “Genesis” seemed inconsistent with the facts of history or science, people had noticed that it was inconsistent with itself. It contains, for instance, two conflicting accounts of the order of creation. (According to Professor Hendel, some fundamentalists account for such apparent slips by holding that the original version of scripture was all literally true, but that the Bible we now have is corrupted in a few places.)

Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew who was born at the end of the first century BC, was one of the most inventive discoverers of cryptic messages in the Bible. He read the two creation stories as referring to two different types of creation, the first concerned with ideal Platonic forms and the second with everyday matter. This tactic served both to harmonise Greek philosophy with biblical cosmology, and also to explain why the Bible seems not to be able to keep its story straight. Three centuries later, St Augustine was happy to use philosophical and allegorical readings when required. He argued that whenever solid science seems to contradict a piece of scripture, this means that the offending biblical passage should be interpreted figuratively, not literally. Unlike his ecclesiastical successors in the 17th century, Augustine would, in theory, have had no problem with Copernicus or Galileo.

Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer who began his church career as an Augustinian monk, had no patience with allegorical readings: scripture was written for plain folk, not philosophers or mystics. He admitted that parts of “Genesis” could be obscure. But the Holy Spirit—working through the conscience of believers themselves, not via the official pronouncements of a church hierarchy—would somehow inspire people to accept it, and draw out its morals. The snag is that the Holy Spirit seems to have offered conflicting guidance to different believers. Defenders of African slavery, for example, found a biblical justification for it in Noah’s curse on Canaan, the son of Ham, on the grounds that Ham is said to be the ancestor of several African peoples (even though Canaan himself is not). Abolitionists, on the other hand, found biblical rationales for their views, as well. The story of Eve, and its implications for the role of women, have been a bone of contention too.

Professor Hendel rightly gives plenty of space to the views of Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Dutch-Jewish heretical philosopher. Spinoza’s “Tractatus Theologico- Politicus” is, in effect, the founding text of modern biblical scholarship, though it took two centuries before most scholars caught up with him. Spinoza made the shocking claim that the best way to find out what the Bible means is to drop the idea that everything it says must somehow be true. Investigate the Bible as if it were any other historical document, written by fallible people affected by the outlook of their time and place, and you are more likely to get to the bottom of it. Once you are prepared to accept, for example, that the two creation narratives were written by different people, it is easier to explain why they say different things. Some readers may, however, wish that Professor Hendel had spent more time describing the fruits of such historical research, and less on theorising about it.

One legacy of Spinoza’s rationalism was a broader appreciation of what the Bible has to offer, at least by some. Emily Dickinson, a 19th-century American poet, came to see it as an “infinitely wise” and “merry” work of art. Professor Hendel discusses how she, Franz Kafka and other modern writers have mined “Genesis” as a source of literary inspiration. Once the Bible came to be regarded as a human artefact, religious stories could be seen as literature—especially by those for whom literature is a religion.