The Second Scroll in "books" (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), with each book loosely based on its equivalent from the Torah, and in the Jewish Talmudic tradition, several glosses further the ideas of each book at the end of the novel. The novel incorporates modes from poetry, drama and prayer, and contains elements of metafiction. The Second Scroll The Second Scroll is a 1951 novel by the Jewish-Canadian writer A. M. Klein. Klein's only novel was written after his pilgrimage to the newly founded nation of Israel in 1949. It concerns the quest for meaning in the post-Holocaust world, as an unnamed
The Book of Genesis (comics) on the work, as would have been expected. Reviewers have called the style "humanizing", with a "human-looking deity" with "enormous, hairy, veiny hands"; unlike much later Christian art, which Europeanized the characters from the Old and New Testaments, the characters in Crumb's book are "plac[ed...] squarely in the Middle East — and populat[ed...] with distinctly Semitic-looking people". The clothing and sets in the book were based on stills from classic Hollywood movies, as "there's not a lot of documentation about how people dressed and lived in ancient Mesopotamia." Crumb originally intended to do a sendup of the Book of Genesis,