• Cain murders his brother -- and walks...
• God gets angry -- and millions die in flood...
• Abraham commits attempted murder -- and is praised...
• Jacob deceives his father, then robs his brother -- and gets away with it...

Violence, lust, deception, murder, incest, and vengeance: These are the subjects of the biggest -- and perhaps the juiciest -- bestseller of all time, the Book of Genesis. Its oft-told tales have inspired and challenged humankind for generations. But perhaps never before has anyone examined these stories so provocatively from a modern legal perspective.

Based on Alan Dershowitz's class at Harvard Law School, The Genesis of Justice shows how the Good Book is also a remarkable law book. According to Dershowitz, these seminal stories describe a people -- and a God -- struggling in a world before the invention of systematic rules, a primal place that predates our notions of fairness, honesty, and rights. Yet here in Genesis we can see these concepts -- and the need for them and for their embodiment in a formal legal system -- evolving in front of our eyes.

Using ten of the most intriguing biblical narratives and drawing on not only his own observations but those of biblical commentators throughout the ages, Dershowitz evaluates the actions of biblical heroes, even God himself. And together with concluding discussions on "The Injustice of Genesis," he shows us how the flawed behavior of its flawed protagonists led to the Ten Commandments and a deeper, richer sense of justice than any mere legal code could ever provide.

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