Download or read book Conceiving Israel written by Gwynn Kessler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kessler shows how the rabbis of the third through sixth centuries turned to non-Jewish writings on embryology and procreation to explicate the biblical insistence on the primacy of God's role in procreation at the expense of the biological parents.