Just thought I'd serve up a few excerpts from a New York Times book review. Since we're broadening our interests and all...

Leon R. Kass is well known as a philosopher with particular expertise in bioethics...But the public, aware of those credentials, may well be surprised now to find him the author of a hefty volume on the book of Genesis, entitled ''The Beginning of Wisdom.''

By his own account, during the past 20 years Kass, who grew up in a secular environment without knowledge of the Bible, underwent a profound shift. No longer is he confident that unaided human reason or a scientific understanding of human life are sufficient.

In short, he has had a conversion experience. Now he carries within his soul (a term he uses frequently) the zeal of the convert...

To set the stage for his detailed analysis of Genesis (often verse by verse), Kass notes the leanness of the Bible as a literary document...He recognizes that readers bring to it their own experiences; yet he sees in this inevitability ''the great danger'' of finding in the text not what the author intended but what the reader puts there...

Kass's desire for an ''unmediated reading'' of Genesis leads him to give short shrift to biblical scholars.

But in focusing on the present text rather than on the literary sources behind it, he joins the mainstream of current scholarship, only to turn it around...For Kass this focus means establishing coherence -- discerning how Genesis, with all its ambiguities and conflicts, yields a single, harmonious meaning.

The particular coherence Kass discovers (actually, puts) in Genesis lies in his answer to a question he poses:

''Is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life that accords with man's true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?''

Kass asserts that in the beginning Genesis lifts up a double-sided difficulty to this way of life...

In arguing correctly that Genesis 1 rejects the worship of the heavens as an option for the good life, Kass goes on to say that the entire Bible, like modern scientific dogma, teaches the moral neutrality of nature.

To secure the point he is fond of noting that the heavens may, as Psalm 19 claims, declare the glory of God, ''but they say not a peep about righteousness.''

That is so him.

If, however, he had read farther, he would have discovered in several psalms that ''the heavens proclaim God's righteousness'' (Psalms 50:6; 85:13; 97:6).

Besides posing a philosophical problem for Kass, these texts alert the reader early on that not everything Kass declares about the Bible is necessarily true.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt. Who could be saying such mean things?

Phyllis Trible is the university professor of biblical studies at Wake Forest University

Oh. Well, then. Mean true things.

Maybe we can discount everything she says by noting that she's a feminist bible scholar. Damned uppity women...

He knows that the noun ''patriarchy'' carries negative meanings, so he hastens to defend it by attaching to it the adjective ''proper.'' He even asserts that ''patriarchy properly understood turns out to be the cure for patriarchy properly condemned.''

For a definition of patriarchy he turns to its Greek etymology...

Where all aspiring savants should seek enlightenment.

Bringing a bias for patriarchy to what is itself a patriarchal book, Kass finds there what he already believes. We can briefly examine how this maneuver works in his analysis of the Dinah story in Genesis 34.

Dinah, Jacob's only daughter, went out to visit the women of the land. Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite, seized her and raped her. After the deed was discovered, he said he wished to marry her, but her brothers would not hear of it. Instead, they sought to avenge the rape.

Kass holds that in doing this the brothers are concerned ''with the dignity of woman as such'' and not as the possession of husband or father. But he fails to note that the reason given for the brothers' revenge -- by the narrator and then by the brothers themselves -- is not about Dinah's dignity but rather about the defilement of ''their sister.''

Dinah, unheard, is the possession of the brothers.

This all sounds kind of familiar...

Further, they not only murdered all the Hivite men but also took their children and wives captive.

Better them than her.

Kass admits, but ''only in hushed tones,'' that seizing the women provided wives for Jacob's sons ''without a huge risk of assimilation to foreign ways.'' In other words, Dinah's brothers raped the Hivite women.

At least they didn't cut off their heads.

Although Kass says their attack ''reeks of barbaric cruelty,'' apparently it does not persuade him to retract his contention that the brothers respected ''the dignity of woman as such.''

To compound a confused interpretation, he moralizes about the help the story of Dinah can give readers (presumably males) in how to protect daughters.

He believes it teaches the restraint of male promiscuity and calls males to familial responsibility. Moreover, he believes that the story ''hints at a correlative female counterpart: modesty, caution, refusal, self-reverence and chastity, all exercised in the service of eventual marriage -- fruitful, love-filled, sanctified.''

Where the hint resides in the story remains unclear...To see this story educating the fathers in righteousness and holiness stretches credulity.

Outlandish moralisms pepper this book, making the patriarchy of Genesis look far more pernicious than it is. A sampling of six, chosen from dozens, illustrates the tendentious readings of Kass:

The ''institution of stable domestic arrangements for rearing the young depends on some form of man's rule over woman.''

Instituting ''a prolonged period of barrenness before allowing childbirth'' is God's ''strategy'' for ''taming the dangerous female pride in her generative powers.''

Circumcision is ''a taming of maleness, putting men into the service of the (more traditionally womanly) work of child rearing.''

''Not eros as such . . . but procreation is the biblical way by which the love of man and woman can lead to the love of God.''

''Friendship and marriage-and-family are mutually exclusive alternatives. . . . Friendship (especially male-male bonding) belongs to the ways of others.''

''Living in peace among one's neighbors may not be an option for people of the covenant.''

The final verdict?

The Book of Genesis According to Kass is not for this reviewer the beginning of wisdom. To the contrary, it is the beginning of folly -- inspired by the zeal of a patriarchal convert to biblical study...

Well I'm sure going to read the whole thing. Count on it.