While wandering through the halls at work today I discovered a used book sale going on. Hardback books for a dollar and paperback books for 50 cents. I am currently in two books right now with two more on the way from Amazon. Not to mention the next Harry Potter is out this weekend. The last thing I need is another book. But I have an unwritten rule that you cannot go past a used book sale and I decided it couldn’t hurt to look. So I browse through the cheesy romance novels and the various outdated business books certain that there will be nothing good here. But then I spied an interesting title: The Serpent Was Wiser: A New Look At Genesis 1-11, by Richard S Hanson. I have been looking for books on the creation narrative for about two months anyway. I picked it up and read the back cover… “Neither a commentary nor an introduction to genesis 1-11. Rather it attempts to reclaim this significant part of the Bible for the ‘person who likes to read for insight and entertainment and for the preacher who would like to preach on the ancient motifs and stories.’ Richard S. Hanson is an Old testament scholar who displays a joyful sense of humor and a deep human understanding of his material and his readers. His fresh, imaginative engagement with the text lets the mind roam through the creation stories and the accounts of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Tower of Babel, leading the reader to see things he never knew were there. Ancient tales from Mesopotamian culture and creative, poetic translations of the Bible set the stories into perspective. Finally, Hanson recaptures the mood and importance of the Genesis accounts to spur readers to new observations of their own.”
For 50 cents I had to at least give it a try. I read the first two chapters at lunch and they are wonderfully written. The “poetic translations of the Bible” are great. It was refreshing to read these stories in a genre that they were intended for. So far this book has been worth every penny (all fifty of them). I guess it is true that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure