In the period between the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon in the fourth and fifth centuries, the faithful in the churches of the ecclesiastical district of Antioch were the beneficiaries of the ministry of the Word from distinguished pastors. Included in this ministry were homilies on the Old Testament by John Chrysostom and written commentaries by his mentor Diodore and his fellow student Theodore, and later by Theodoret. Though the biblical text was admittedly Jewish in origin, "the text and the meaning are ours," claimed Chrysostom; and the great bulk of extant remains reveals the pastoral...

John Chrysostom, called the ""golden-mouthed"" for his eloquent preaching, continues in this second volume of the sixty-seven Genesis homilies to provide instruction for the moral reformation of the Christians of Antioch. He continues in Homily 18 with Genesis 3 and finishes in Homily 45 with Genesis 20. They seem to have been delivered perhaps as early as 385, half just before and during Lent and the remainder, from Homily 33 onward, after Pentecost. That Chrysostom favored Antiochene exegesis is clear from his exhortation at the beginning of Homily 20 to ""take up the thread of the reading...

This translation makes available for the first time in English one of the most significant Old Testament commentaries of the patristic period. St. John Chrysostom's extant works outnumber those of any other Father of the East; in the West, only Augustine produced a larger corpus. Of Chrysostom's more than 600 exegetical homilies, however, only those on the New Testament have previously been translated into English. The Genesis homilies, his richest Old Testament series, reveal a theologian, pastor, and moralist struggling to explain some of the most challenging biblical material to his...