An Excerpt from The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

I have a copy (I work for a book distributor, we got some advance copies). I haven’t read it completely through yet… but it is astonishing.

And I think atheists will love it. Yes, it emphasizes biblical accuracy — Crumb is a non-believer, but he says he wanted to respect the book’s historical and cultural importance, so he treated it as a straight, word-for-word illustration job. But that doesn’t make it a Christian tract book. Quite the opposite. It brings the Bible’s violence and the nightmarish horror — and its deep weirdness — front and center, in vivid, unignorable detail.

Many formerly- Christian atheists say that one of the most important steps on their journey to atheism was actually reading the Bible, and seeing that (a) it’s a horror show, and (b) it makes no sense. And we’re always asking believers to actually read the sacred texts of their beliefs, to find out if they actually believe all that stuff. A word- for- word graphic depiction of the Bible story should be right up our alley.

Review to come soon on my blog.

Just imagine if all history books were so specific. They weren’t guided by bias, they just reported what actually happened. The good, the bad, and the horrifying ugliness of some person’s actions and the devastation it causes.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this makes the Bible fascinatingly unique. Maybe the Bible isn’t merely a self-help book that intends to make you feel good just because you are you. Perhaps there is a deeper message, one that can only be understood when you have all the facts. Can’t we learn from the ‘bad’ in history as well as the ‘good?’

In reaction to another commenter:

I’m not sure what makes this story unbelievable (the Lot response) incomprehensible perhaps, but fiction? Why?

Really, what I’m supposed to believe is that things like this don’t happen? If the Bible was a fabrication of myths, why would accounts such as these be included?

If the bible was a fabrication of myths, why would accounts such as these be included?

The original audience probably would not interpret Lot’s action (offering up his daughters to be raped) as being horrific in the way a modern audience would. Lot’s story demonstrates how closely the bible reflects the culture of the time it was written, rather than being somehow transcendent of such things.

Why was Lot’s story included in the bible? Presumably to make a religious point, like “Homosexuality is even worse than rape”. I don’t see how having both pleasant and unpleasant stories in a holy book is evidence that the book is an authentic retelling of actual events.

I saw it in a bookstore just today (Labyrinth books in Princeton). I was tempted to get it…

Some of us appreciate Crumb as a trend setter and yes, he did break through the wall of censorship that went up after the Congressional comic book hearings in the ’50s. I had a sneak peak of the book of genesis illustrated here and wanted to compare more independent opinions.

For some of us it’s nostalgia—I was a horny, teen-age hippie when I first discovered undergrounds back in the ’60s. That being said, if you study his body of work you start to understand the point of view he brings to even the simplest illustration. Crumb is a self-aware, sexually immature, cynic who has few heroes (blues musicians, etc.). Sure, there are better illustrators but none that would deliver the Bible from his POV. I think of Crumb as the cartoonist’s Ivan Albright. He could draw/paint the loveliest subject and still make you wonder if there wasn’t something rotten just out of view.