A Historical-Materialist Reading of Genesis 1-4: Undoing Satan between Colonial Brazil and Biblical Israel

This book offers a historical-materialist reading of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in an attempt to revive their potential to engage people in truthful discussions about power and pleasure. For the past two millennia, biblical stories have been told and discussed in countless settings; whether one lives in Europe or in a country that was colonized by Europeans, the biblical symbolic universe remains present.This book offers a method to explore the social and political meanings of its most theological content by visiting two historical settings in which biblical modes of expression intersected with the demands of an economic-political process: Jerusalem and its province during the Persian period (5th-4th centuries bce) and Brazil of the early colonial period (16th century ce).Though distant in time and space, both were moments of comparable transformation: individuals with financial resources and military power arrived from the East to seize control over lands and means of