Product Review

This paperback edition of Creation and the Persistence of Evil brings to a wide audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Jon Levenson defines God's authorship of the world as a consequence of his victory in his struggle with evil. Classic doctrines of God's creation of the universe from the void do not do justice to the complexity of that hard-fought battle, which is uncertain in its outcome. Levenson traces this more flexible conception of God to the earliest Hebrew sources. He argues that Genesis 1 does not describe the banishment of evil but the attempt to contain the menace of evil in the world, a struggle that continues today.