The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel puts the Hebrew Bible into its ancient Near East context. Using scholarship that has been accumulated in the academic world over the last 200 years, the series includes articles and illustrations surrounding the Hebrew text and new Koren English translation that give background in the areas of ancient Near East parallels, archaeological discoveries, geographical place identifications, plants and animals, and Egyptology references. Although the traditional Jewish commentators explained and analyzed the text based on tradition and their knowledge at the time, recent scholarship helps unlock the true uniqueness and revolutionary character of the Tanakh because of how it related to the world around it. The Talmud says, “The Torah speaks in the language of man” – to truly understand why the Tanakh had such an impact on western civilization, you have to understand the way it took the milieu of the ancient world and built an entire system of morality, ethics, monotheism, politics, and economics. The book of Genesis volume of this series sets the stories of creation to the Tower of Babel and the partriarchal narratives against the backdrop of the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Hittites that surrounded it at the time. The insights, although consistent with traditional Orthodox belief, open up an entirely new dimension to our understanding the genius of the book.
