Many contemporary writers continue to respond to the stories of the Bible, especially those of Genesis. It is this book that has provided a thematic and mythical basis for much of Western literature. We only have to think of Milton’s Paradise Lost or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. Naturally, the kind of contemporary literary responses inspired by Genesis are much different than the commentaries of earlier eras. But the fact that modern and contemporary writers have continued to find considerable inspiration in these ancient biblical myths demonstrates their enduring power, as well as the ingenuity of modern authors in finding ways to make these ancient tales relevant to their own lives. Natural Bridge #9 is a special issue on the literature of Genesis. The works submitted for this issue were somehow inspired by one of the stories or themes found in the Book of Genesis.

In its compact 80 pages, Genesis covers a lot of territory: the Creation, the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, the stories of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, and the story of Joseph and his brothers. In organizing this issue, we have arranged the Genesis material according to the biblical chronology that inspired it. Thus the Genesis poetry section begins with several poems about Creation, including Donald Finkel’s “The Invention of Meaning,” Harvey Shapiro’s “A Commentary,” “Genesis” by Ira Cohen, “On Clear Nights” by Shirley Kaufman, “God in His Youth” by Jeffrey Hantover, “Creation” by Veneta Masson, “Days of Awe” by Maxine Silverman, and Linda Bosson’s hilarious “To Do.” On the first page of each piece, the biblical passage that inspired it will be identified for readers who wish to go to the original source.

It was fascinating for us as editors to observe which biblical stories, in particular, were the focus of the most submissions. Surely these choices reveal something about the modern literary sensibility and about which biblical figures continue to fascinate and inspire. Among the most popular themes were those about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, and the Flood. But the most popular biblical story that inspired contemporary authors was that of Lot’s wife. We received more than a dozen submissions about Lot’s wife and selected the best of these.

We have been equally fortunate in the quality of the short fiction drawing on the themes of Genesis. Among some of the outstanding works are the stories “Isaac, My Laughter” by Shelly Fredman, which beautifully expands on the biblical narrative, and Mark Mirsky’s “The First Tower,” which reinterprets the biblical account of the Tower of Babel in ways as unique as Franz Kafka did in “The City Coat of Arms.” We are especially proud to be the first to publish Steve Stern’s magnificent story “Kafka’s Brain,” from his forthcoming novel The Angel of Forgetting, which brings together many of the themes of Genesis, including the creation of man, and is certain to leave the reader’s brain astonished and delighted.

What are the methods used by these writers to re-imagine these well-known biblical texts and make them new and relevant? Surprisingly, they make use of a literary technique at least 1500 years old, created by the ancient rabbis, known as the midrashic method. In order to resolve the unresolved problems the rabbis perceived in the biblical text, they devised methods for reading between the lines, imagining the endings of unfinished narratives, and finding ways to resolve apparent contradictions in the text. The stories of Genesis, in particular, leave out a lot of details. What, for example, was the light of the first day, when God said, “Let there be light”? After all, God didn’t create the sun, the moon, and the stars until the fourth day. Or what was the forbidden fruit? You may think it was an apple, but the text doesn’t say what it was. Or how did Cain die? He was the first murderer, and the rabbis believed that the nature of his fate would serve as a precedent for how murderers should be punished. But the last we hear of Cain, he has founded the city of Enoch and nothing is said about his death. Or what was the name of Noah’s wife? The text doesn’t say. And why did Lot’s wife look back when the angel told her not to, causing her to turn into a pillar of salt? Genesis doesn’t tell us. Nevertheless, despite the lack of information in the biblical text, the rabbis found the solution to each and every one of these problems. To the reader unfamiliar with this midrashic method, it appears that the rabbis were taking extreme liberties with the holy text of the Bible. Yet at the same time they firmly believed that every word of the biblical text was true. How can this paradox be resolved? The rabbis justified these kinds of reimaginings on the grounds that they derived from an ancient oral tradition that God gave to Moses at Mount Sinai at the same time that He dictated the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. One rabbinic legend (a midrash) puts it this way: God dictated the Torah to Moses during the day, and at night He explained it to him (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer).

Many of the contributors to the Genesis portion of this issue are familiar, to some extent, with this midrashic method, but they have found their own original ways to make use of it. Sometimes these solutions are quite surprising, even shocking. In the biblical text it states that Jacob wrestled with an ish, which literally means “a man.” The notion that it was an angel was a popular tradition that grew up later. But in “The Seduction of Jacob” Christopher Hennessy draws on the original meaning, and while Jacob does wrestle with an angel, “naked/lying on tucked wings,” their wrestling is actually a sexual encounter like that between two men. Likewise, in “Hospitality” DeWitt Clinton views the biblical account of Sodom and Gemorah through a similar lens. When the men of Sodom learn that Lot has brought strangers into his house, they demand that he surrender them to him. The biblical account suggests they want to kill them, but Clinton interprets their desires in a sexual sense, insisting that “Tonight they want angel,/soft angel meat on their lips.” This reading is no doubt shocking, but at the same time it is parallel to the rabbinic view that Sodom was a place of perverse sexuality. The difference is that Clinton’s view is not nearly as judgmental, and Sodom is a place where “The evening darkens with the push of sex.”

Other writers build on biblical assertions in unexpected ways. Among the punishments for eating the forbidden fruit, God says to Eve: I will make most severe/Your pangs in childbearing;/ In pain shall you bear children (Gen. 4:16). Picking up on this theme, Rachelle Hosty writes in her humorous “Letter to Eve,” “I just wanted to thank you./After all,/pregnancy wouldn’t be the same/if it weren’t for you.” Sometimes these writers seek to bring their own interpretations to missing information in the text. For example, God curses Cain to a life of wandering for the murder of Abel, then gives him a sign to protect him: And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him (Gen. 4: 15). But nowhere does it say what this sign was. Barbara Lefcowitz imaginatively speculates on what it was in “The Mark of Cain,” turning it into an elusive, transforming symbol much like the Zahir in the story by Jorge Luis Borges. And sometimes these writers start with next to nothing and use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. Consider Cain’s wife. Virtually nothing is said about her in Genesis, only that Cain knew his wife and she conceived (Gen. 4:17). But in “Cain’s Wife,” Phillip Memmer does a wonderful job of bringing her to life, drawing on every detail about Cain found in Genesis. This is definitely making good use of the midrashic method, and shows that the ancient technique has much to offer to the contemporary author.

Be sure not to overlook our section of essays. Here again the biblical themes that underlie the sections of Genesis poetry and fiction reappear in a new but equally potent form. In “My Brother’s Keeper,” the famous biblical phrase of Cain takes on all kinds of new meaning as the author, Tessa Dratt, recounts her lifelong struggle with her older brother’s mental illness. And in “Volunteer in the Garden of Eden,” Judy Labensohn recounts her first experiences in the Promised Land, and views them from the past, the present, and from the myths and legends that have turned the land of Israel into such a paradoxical mix of reality and myth. In “Her Chiefest Joy,” Freema Gottlieb, author of The Lamp of God, attends a synagogue service and suddenly finds herself called upon to serve as a witness to an impromptu wedding. And in “Saturday Morning Wrestling” Miriam Raskin struggles with her faith in light of her experience with the Holocaust.

Every issue of Natural Bridge includes a miscellany of fiction and poetry, and this special issue is no exception. We are equally proud of the sections of non-theme work, and we spent as much time selecting the material for these sections as for the Genesis ones. As guest editor of this issue, I am exceptionally proud of the members of this class and the intense and professional way they threw themselves into this project. You are holding the results of their labors in your hands, and I am confident that you will find this to have been a worthwhile project indeed. I also want to express particular thanks to Ryan Stone, the regular editor of Natural Bridge, for his outstanding efforts to keep us organized and on track as we wrestled with a massive number of submissions and a tight deadline.

Natural Bridge is the literary journal of the MFA program of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It is edited as part of a Literary Journal Editing class in which the staff, consisting of MFA students, edits the journal under the guidance of a guest editor, in this case, Howard Schwartz. Students formed teams and selected the submissions they felt most worthy of consideration from a pool of more than 1000 submissions. There was an extensive process of winnowing, intensive discussion, and votes by the staff, which eventually resulted in the final selection of poems, short stories, and essays included in this issue.

Finally, it is our pleasure to dedicate this issue to David Carkeet, the first director of the MFA program, and its pillar of strength for many years. Although he has only recently retired, we already miss him badly, and we offer this issue of Natural Bridge as a token of our respect and affection for him.

—Howard Schwartz