Product details
- ISBN 9780827616011
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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God and the First Families offers a novel exploration of God's role as a parent in the book of Genesis. Compellingly, author Stephen Spector introduces Americans' four main perceptions of God and their four most common styles of parenting as lenses through which we can reckon with God's own methods of parenting in the first biblical book.
God begins as an authoritarian parent who demands obedience and submission to authority, but shifts in striking ways. Next, God's parenting seems entirely benevolent. Stunningly, God reverts to authoritarianism during the near sacrifice of Isaac—but then invents a new parenting style focused on guiding the characters' moral and emotional growth. Many psychologists consider this the most successful childrearing method. Genesis reached that conclusion two and a half millennia ago!
Throughout, Spector engages with familiar stories—sibling rivalries, family ruptures, traumas—from unexpected angles. He dramatizes how parental love in Genesis builds resilience against trauma, another idea validated by modern psychology. Surviving trauma, healing from parental favoritism, repairing broken relationships, earning forgiveness, possibly even reconciling after injury—Genesis offers wisdom on all.
Stephen Spector is a professor of English emeritus at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews and Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, among other volumes. Spector has taught the Bible to undergraduate and graduate students for fifty years. He has been a visiting scholar at Hebrew University and a senior research fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Wesleyan Center for Humanities.
