Genesis 1-11, A Continental Commentary

Claus Westermann's Genesis 1-11, A Continental Commentary, translated by John J. Scullion and published by Fortress Press in 1990, is a standard critical commentary on the opening chapters of Genesis, working verse by verse through the text's composition history, its Ancient Near Eastern parallels and an extensive survey of how the passage has been interpreted from the patristic era through modern critical scholarship. Westermann was among the twentieth century's leading Genesis scholars. Its strength is the sheer depth of that interpretive survey, letting a reader see not just Westermann's own reading but how the text's meaning has been argued across nearly two millennia of interpretation. Its limit is that a critical commentary of this kind works from historical-critical method and comparative Near Eastern material, an approach not every religious tradition that also reads Genesis shares, so a claim about a specific tradition's own theological reading of the text needs a source from within that tradition alongside this critical commentary.