The Torah Part II: Cain & Abel to Joseph

After eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. They then had two sons, Cain and Abel. In a fit of jealousy, the older brother, Cain, killed his younger brother. The world began on a bad note. And it only got worse. It was filled with violence.

Observing all this evil, God declared that the “will of man’s heart is toward evil from his youth.” The Torah thereby announced one of its most important insights: Human nature is not basically good. It is not basically evil, but it is surely not basically good.

I have made a PragerU video on how foolish and dangerous it is to believe that human nature is basically good and why it is impossible to make a good world if you believe that. In one sentence, you can’t be a good person unless you battle your nature. 

That is one example of the innumerable insights of the Torah that have shaped the way people understand life. As people stopped studying the Torah and the rest of the Bible, they have become less and less wise. Just think of how foolish many well-educated people are.

Because mankind descended into evil, God decided to destroy the world. God did not create human beings to be cruel, and therefore decided to bring a flood, wipe everyone out, and start over.

Virtually every ancient society had a flood story — but the Torah’s was unique. 

First, the only reason the God of the Torah brought a flood was that people were evil. In the other flood stories, that was not the reason. In the famous Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, the gods destroyed humanity because human beings annoyed them — they made too much noise and kept the gods up at night. I am not kidding.

Second, while in other flood stories, the gods saved someone, only in the Torah’s story does God save an individual — a man named Noah — because the man is good.

The God of the Torah is preoccupied with goodness.

The next important figure in the Torah is a man named Abraham. For reasons not stated, God appears to Abraham and tells him that through him and his descendants — the people known as Jews — all the world would be blessed. From Abraham on, the Torah tells the story of the Jewish people.

The lessons within those stories, however, apply to all mankind. 

One of the most significant stories in the Torah relates an argument that Abraham had with God over God’s decision to destroy the particularly evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham contended that if there were just 10 good people in those cities, it would not be right for God to destroy the cities. “Will the judge of all the Earth not judge justly?” Abraham argued.

In this story of Abraham, the first Jew, the Torah established the amazing principle that human beings can argue with God — another Torah first. The very name of the Jewish people, “Israel,” means “Struggle with God.” 

Abraham had two sons, Isaac, the second Jewish patriarch, and Ishmael, the second patriarch of what eventually became known as the Arab peoples.

Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. 

Jacob, whom God also called “Israel,” had twelve sons. They became the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The Torah depicts Jacob as favoring his youngest son at the time, Joseph. One of the reasons people have read the Torah for thousands of years is that its stories are so real. This portrayal of Jacob’s flaws as a father is one such example. No character in the Torah is portrayed as perfect — because no human being, no matter how good, can be perfect, or even close to it.

That’s why all of us can relate to the individuals in the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible.

As a result of Jacob favoring Joseph, Joseph’s brothers came to hate him — so much so that they left him in a pit to die. But passersby found Joseph and sold him into slavery in Egypt.

There he became a servant to a powerful Egyptian man, Potiphar, whose wife wanted to have an affair with the handsome young Hebrew. Joseph, however, refused her seductions, infuriating Mrs. Potiphar, who then lied to her husband that Joseph had tried to seduce her.

Potiphar had Joseph imprisoned. 

While in prison, Joseph earned a reputation as an interpreter of dreams, and eventually his name was brought to the attention of the ruler of Egypt: the Pharaoh. Pharaoh had a pair of disturbing dreams which none of his wise men could interpret. So Joseph was summoned.

What Joseph told the Pharaoh not only saved the kingdom, but saved the Jewish people as well.

And the story is just getting started.

I’m Dennis Prager, author of a five-volume commentary on the Torah, The Rational Bible.