This powerful work is the full text of Genesis, illustrated with the incomparable style of Robert Crumb. The earthy style suits this part of the Hebrew Bible perfectly, with its unwashed bearded patriarchs subsiding essentially as goatherds in a country looking very much like the modern Israel.
There are no elisions of repetitions or the recounting of obscure kings and chieftains, each lovingly depicted in a mini-portrait.
I haven’t read Genesis since in high school (and maybe then I just looked for the juicy parts, like Sodom and poor doomed Onan). This was a nice reunion with a text that for all its brutality and ancient weirdness still resonates in our culture.
Please note that the biblical circumlocution “to know” is graphically depicted, so if you’re uncomfortable seeing, for example, Lot’s daughters getting their dad drunk and making sure their lineage survives, you may have picked up the wrong book. The same goes for the multiple depictions of violent death and rape.
But it’s not in any way a sacrilegious text. Crumb takes the story literally, and renders it as it should be — a myth of one people’s beginnings, made special only because it survives from the mists of the dawn of time.