[pram]

Genesis is the prologue for the rest of the Torah, which is about the Hebrews. It's not supposed to be read in isolation to everything else.

"impossible to understand how the Book of Genesis could possibly form the foundation of the three major Abrahamic religions"

Maybe because it is the thing introduces Abraham? lol

[everdrive]

I was trying to paint a picture of what it looked like from the eyes of someone with no background and no context. I'm not saying that my conclusions were correct, but instead attempting to argue that a lot of the story is propped up by cultural context, different interpretations, etc. For instance, Milton's Paradise lost interprets Satan's fall from heaven in a way that the original authors of Isaiah almost certainly never intended. To someone who was both unaware of the cultural context with which both Isaiahs were writing, and also was unfamiliar with Milton's interpretations, I would also suggest that much of Isaiah would also make no sense.

Compare this to something like a Stephen King novel. A reader can pick it up, read it without any prep or study, and understand it readily.

I'm not saying that the Bible has no cohesion or anything like that -- but that a totally unprepared modern reader probably cannot make sense of the text. And also that until recently, most Americans would have been prepared with quite a bit of cultural context for the Bible via church and other things which laid out the colloquial interpretations of the text for people from an early age.