Chaim Potok's previous novel, "My Name Is Asher Lev," was about a young painter torn between religion and art. His new novel ["In the Beginning"], about a gifted Bronx boy who becomes a Biblical scholar, suggests that the author has decided in favor of religion. The book has an ascetic, stoical, almost self-punishing tone, established with its first line, "All beginnings are hard," and sustained through the painful and sometimes repetitious actions of the story. From shortly after birth, in the nineteen-twenties, David Lurie is plagued by chronic sinus illnesses that prove to be emblematic of his growing up…. David's inner life, tortured with fears and bad dreams, is followed through the Depression, which nearly ruins his family; through the late thirties and forties, as the news from Europe grows more and more dreadful; and into his budding years as a scholar, when he learns that curiosity can...