This is the first in a series of comprehensive commentaries on the Book of Genesis that the late Professor Umberto Cassuto had planned as part of a magnum opus embracing the whole Pentateuch and also the Book of Psalms.The aim of this commentary is to explain, with the help of an historico-philological method of interpretation, the simple meaning of the Biblical text, and to arrive, as nearly as possible, at the sense that the words of the Torah were intended to have for the reader at the time they were written.