In Genesis 2:4b-8, 15-18, 21-25, 3:1-13, 20-23, 4:1-10 we find the J account of the origins of humanity. It implies a breaking of the first and second commandment, breaks the tenth commandment by a profound reflection on coveting, and breaks the sixth commandment. The Shechemite Twelve Commandments in Deuteronomy 27:25-26 also call for rejection of murder. Humanity, although set in paradise, quickly turns away from God, the source of life, and therefore begins to die.
In Genesis 2:15-17, 15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till ('avad, to serve or to work) it and keep it. Adam is a farmer and his work, albeit an easy form given the fertility of Eden, is part of the divine plan. The Lord brings the human being to rest in the garden not for the human's sake but for the need the garden will have for someone "to till it and keep it." The original human condition, as Genesis depicts it, was not one of idle leisure; agricultural labor -- tending and preserving the garden that belongs to the deity -- was the reason the Lord created humans. In this, Genesis shares a fundamental notion with other stories of creation, notably the Old Babylonian story of Atrahasis (17th century B.C.): "Let the midwife create a human being, let man assume the drudgery of god."[1] As the story unfolds, work, per se, is not the divine punishment; hard, frustrated, unproductive work is. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat. The Hebrew construction translated “eat freely” is the infinitive absolute, often translated as “indeed + verb.” One might capture the sense of the command somewhat colloquially as “Help yourself!” or “Eat up!” of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (good and bad, weal and woe, or moral good and moral evil), which may be a merism that signifies the totality of knowledge, you shall not eat. What is so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil? What is bad is that this knowledge belongs by rights only to the Lord, who has gracious spelled out the difference in the covenant. Human beings have placed themselves in the place of the Lord who, rightfully sits in the chair of the judge to weigh testimony. Humanity has placed itself in the role of judge, a role belonging to the Lord alone. For in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Here is the first mention of death, related to an act of disobedience. Human choices made in freedom have consequences. The forbidden tree offers an experience that is both pleasant and painful. It awakens those who partake of it to the higher knowledge and to the pain that both come with moral choice. The presence of two specified trees in the garden with a prohibition against eating from only one suggests that the other, the tree of life, was freely available to the human beings who availed themselves of it. By virtue of the tree’s nourishment, the humans enjoyed immortality; they were not created immortal (cf. 3:22 and the NRSV annotation there). The inner logic of the link between sin and death presupposes that all life comes from God. Since sin is turning from God, sinners separate themselves from the will of God and the source of their own lives. Death is the nature of sin and its consequences.
Genesis 3 is the J account of the Fall of humanity. It has a parallel in the Gilgamesh Epic and the Tale of Adapa. Joseph Campbell said concerning myth, "A myth is something that never was, but always is." The text goes on quickly from answering the question of from where we come, offering the theological perspective that humanity derives from an act of the Lord God to the question, "why do we behave differently from all other creatures?" Although much of Christian tradition views the story as explaining the origin of sin, we might well think of the story explaining the origin of death, as well as the difficulty involved in work and reproduction. The story contains an insight into the power of human desire that can tempt us toward self-destructive behavior. We can see this emphasis throughout Chapters 3 and 4. Sin explains these things. It contains the five elements that will reappear in virtually all the remaining biblical accounts of sin: (i) the occasion for sin; (ii) the prohibition; (iii) the temptation; (iv) the sinful act; and (v) its consequences.
The story puts everything into human terms. The serpent receives human qualities and Yahweh continues to have anthropomorphic characteristics. Yahweh speaks as father to child, evoking the childhood of humanity itself. The author expresses here the great spiritual experience of the whole nation. The focal point of the narrative is the tree of knowledge, the full possession of mental and physical powers which the serpent incorporates in 3:5.
In Genesis 3:1-7, Now the serpent, one of the creatures of God, was more crafty (arum, shrewd, contrasting sharply with the first couple). It is a pun on the fact that the humans were naked, something like: “And the man and his wife were both bare. … Now the serpent was more barefaced than. …” The Old Testament regards serpents, in general, with a mixture of fear and loathing (and for good reason, cf. Numbers 21:6); only rarely (as in the case of Moses’ bronze serpent, Numbers 21:9) does the Old Testament esteem them. The image of serpents persists throughout the OT as a symbol of danger and undesirability. Only in later religious tradition does the serpent in this passage become identified with Satan/the devil. Thus, the serpent was shrewder and craftier than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. The implication is that sin is bound up in the nature of the creation of finite things. He said to the woman, J wants to keep responsibility with human choices, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The question is tricky and does not admit of a yes-or-no answer. Reading this as a graphic example of the process of temptation, note that Eve is alone, isolating herself from Adam. While alone, the thought arises to do something the Lord forbade. It may even bother us that the command of the Lord God concerns such an unimportant thing as fruit. Yet often we reveal our character in small events. An angry word, a selfish act, lustful meditations, inappropriate consumption of food and expenditure of wealth, and so on, can reveal who we are and what we value. The serpent says it knows the purposes of the Lord God better than the believing obedience of the woman The prohibition of eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil suggests, since Adam gives no argument, suggests that it must have been a necessary rule. The first question in the Bible is not about trees, but about authority and obedience.
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, a theme of the tree of life deriving from Mesopotamia, nor shall you touch it, the woman going further than the command of God, or you shall die.’ ” The woman had not heard the commandment directly. She paraphrases it closely. Why she adds the prohibition on touching the fruit is unclear. 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God (or “gods,”) which, in fact, is exactly what the deity says has happened later in the story (v. 22). In this story, human beings want to become little gods so that they do not need to revere their creator. The desire to assume for oneself the role of a god is the worst form of idolatry. The serpent impugns the motives of the Lord God, attributing the command or prohibition to jealousy. It suggests the arrogance of freedom without limits. We need to clearly see the link between sin, finitude, and death in that sinners deny the finitude of their own existence in trying to be as God. For this reason, they experience life as riveted to finitude, and this takes place through death. The distinction between finitude and death is one we can see here in the fact that the non-acceptance by sinners of finitude delivers them up to death.[2] We are to seek the root of evil in revolt against the limit of finitude, in the refusal to accept one’s own finitude, and in the related illusion of being like God.[3] Ironically, human destiny is fellowship with God, and yet, for this reason, it is a temptation for us. When humans snatch it as if it were prey, whether by way of religious activities or by emancipation from all religious ties, we miss it. We cannot achieve it by direct human action. We find the author’s exquisite story-crafting not in reporting the out-and-out lie but in preserving the ruinous half-truth.[4] Adam wants to be like God, while, in Christian teaching, the Son distinguishes himself from the Father and submits to the will of the Father.[5] The serpent says the human beings will be like God, knowing good and evil.” In verses 3-5, the inner logic of the link between sin and death presupposes that all life comes from God. Since sin is turning from God, sinners separate themselves from the will of God and the source of their own lives. Death is the nature of sin and its consequence.[6] The desire that orients itself to what the Lord has forbidden thinks it has a better knowledge of what will promote life. It forces us to think that the command has a tendency that is inimical to life, as though observing it would involve renouncing that which is part of riches of life.[7] The story links knowledge to eating the forbidden fruit, meaning that they did not have perfect knowledge in paradise. Further, we read nothing concerning original righteousness. The story of the first sin traces it to a lack of affective agreement with the will of God. The serpent brings to light an inclination to turn aside from the will of God.[8] 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband who was with her (immah), raising the very real possibility that the man was present during the conversation and said nothing. The discussion between the serpent and the woman has had profound ramifications for relations between the sexes for millennia. The serpent may indeed have seduced the woman, but the man was not blameless. She does not subject herself to the Word of God. God had already provided what was good. The serpent offers the possibility of humanity going beyond the limits established by God. Once the serpent leads the woman astray, she becomes an agent of temptation for the man. In the small act of disobedience, Eve discovered who she was. She wanted to lead her life independent of God. She also wanted to bring Adam into her orbit. Then, they broke the familiar relationship they had with God in Eden by hiding from God. The secretive nature of sinful behavior becomes clear. Yet even though Adam and Eve sinned together, the sin disrupts their relationship with each other. The experience of authenticity they had in Eden with God, with each other, and with nature, remains a hope, but is not human life as we know it in history and in our experience. And he ate. The serpent is simply there, a creature that God has made, but is also crafty. The serpent tempts the woman and denies what God said in terms of dying. The serpent offers the woman the possibility of divinity. We see a wonderful description of the process of sin, having its origin in the breaking of the Ten Commandments, especially the tenth commandment that one shall not covet. She “saw” physically and had “delight” aesthetically, and she then intellectually “desired” wisdom that would come in disobedience to God, so she took the fruit and gave it to her husband.[9] To put it differently, she rationalized her behavior. The tree is “good for food” — it has practical usefulness. When something tempts us, we are more likely to give into that temptation if we can convince ourselves there is something useful about it. It is “a delight to the eyes” — the tree truly is beautiful. Our aesthetic sense is a wonderful gift, but it is a poor guide for ethical decision-making. The tree is “to be desired to make one wise” — it offers the tantalizing promise of wisdom. It is true that we can gain wisdom from making all sorts of decisions — both those that are beneficial and those that bring us pain. Sometimes it is the lessons our bad decisions teach us that are the most compelling. The desire oriented to what God forbids means that humanity thinks it has a better knowledge that will promote life. We see the root of evil in the revolt against the limited of finitude, in the refusal to accept one’s own finitude, and in the related illusion of being like God. They now become aware of their nakedness, which brings shame, alienation, and separation. Now, they must cover themselves.[10] 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, as the serpent predicted in verse 5. Upon eating of the tree, they do not receive knowledge of good and evil, but knowledge of being naked. That perception led them to being ashamed. Human beings are not divine, but we are not like other animals. We have tantalizing visions of what we might be, while mortality torments humanity with the truth that simple mortality provides us. They have knowledge they did not have before. Their eyes “open” to the disproportion between their actual appearance and the magnitude of their pretension. They experience shame because of sin. They cannot remain hidden from God. They wrestle with their guilt. And they knew, having enhanced knowledge, that they were naked. When they see their nakedness, their clothing becomes a symbol that shame seek to conceal what one has done. Fear and shame are the result of the Fall. And they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. The narrator does not use full-blown myth. Rather, he limits himself to the disorders of present life--shame, fear, dissonance between the sexes, ascribing them to human sin. All sorrow, the author says, comes from sin, humanity's disrupted relation to God. Thus, the passage concludes with the sad fulfillment of the snake’s fourfold prediction: (i) the eyes of the woman and the man are opened; (ii) they now know good and evil, as evidenced by their sense of shame; (iii) in their development of conscience, they have now become like God and are no longer like other living creatures; and (iv) they do not immediately die.
Genesis Chapters 3-4 are an explanation, not of the origin of sin, but of the origin of death and of the difficulty involved in work and reproduction. We rightly doubt the Christian tradition of interpretation that this passage is an account of a once for all event of a fall. Sin does not attain by one event its dominion over humanity. It does so in a sequence that reaches a first climax with the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. We ought not look upon Genesis 3 in isolation and derive from it the idea of single fall. We are to look at the entire process whereby sin increases in the race and God takes countermeasures against its aggression to preserve the race from the ruinous consequences of its own acts. This approach is more in keeping with the biblical text in these stories of the early days of human history.
Two stories, one in Genesis and the other in Matthew and Luke. Watch the parallels in both (the temptations of the antagonist), and the differences with which each protagonist meets the tempter.
The first tale:
Humanity is the protagonist in the person of Eve.
That she is alone puts her in the way of danger.
The Tempter challenges the word of God: “Did God say …?”
The Tempter will, in the end, look for an act that manifests her separation from the word, and from the God who spoke it. She will take of its fruit and eat.
She chooses to answer in her own (human) words and herself undermines the sufficiency of the word of God: “Neither shall you touch it.” Her personal addition to the divine prohibition (a kind of a childish whining: “You never let me have anything”) prepares her to hear the universal lie:
“You shall not die.” God wants no other gods around. That lie, should she believe it, turns God into humanity’s (the Protagonist’s) antagonist!
She believes it and humanity begins its long dying.
The second tale:
Jesus is the protagonist, the tempter, the antagonist
That he is alone puts him in the way of danger
The Tempter challenges the word of God: See 3:17 and the Voice whose words are, “This is my son. …” Three verses later: “If you are (what God said) the Son of God.”
The Tempter looks for an act that manifests his separation from the word, and from the God who spoke it. “Command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
He chooses to answer not in his own words but in the words of Scripture (in God’s words). Even so does he refuse to manifest a separation, but rather to manifest an intimacy. He did not take or eat. Moreover, his answer is a direct hit at the Tempter’s effort to implant doubt: “We live … by every word … from the mouth of God.”
By his choosing always to respond with God’s word and not his own, the protagonist becomes (for now) proof against the following blandishments of his antagonist.
I am among those who have a concern that our society is already reaping the results of an education that concerns itself too much with self-esteem. I am not knowledgeable enough to go into the matter extensively here. I want to focus upon a bit information that has come my way.[11]
In some school districts across the country, grades of zero are outdated. No more ZEROS! There is a movement afoot in some educational systems that has the design of keeping students from feeling the pain of a ZERO. These school districts are creating a grading scale in which failure is not an option. For example, Virginia's Fairfax County Public Schools, middle and high school students can earn a score no lower than 50. Across the Potomac River in Maryland, Prince George's County will limit failing grades to a 50 percent minimum score. All the students must do is show a "good-faith effort." The result, apparently, is that failure is not an option.
My concern is the reason offered for this change in grading. Some educators believe such a grading system is more conducive to learning. Thus, getting a score of 50 percent instead of 0 can encourage students to catch up when they fall behind. The zero would encourage students to give up. This result could lead a student down the path of dropping out.
Other educators, however, point out failing needs to be an option. Giving a failing grade can teach the student diligence, prepare them for college, and even prepare them for the real world. Giving nothing lower than 50 percent can mask genuine failure in the classroom. It can also advance students who have not mastered the material, which is the point of the grading system. If we assume that they need to master the material in order to succeed in life, they will never know that they have failed in certain basics.
Books in the business world refer to the importance of failure. We are to “fail forward.” The assumption is that we will fail. Do we succeed all the time? Of course not, but if failure is not an option, the implication is that we succeed all the time. We do not. If we are not failing, we are probably not being creative or taking enough risks. The issue is what we do with failure. One business saying suggests that failure is not only an option, but also a requirement. The point is failure is an option in life and work. It seems as if it needs to be an option in school.
In fact, studies have shown that people become more careful when they sense greater risk, and less careful when they feel more protected. Students of human behavior call this behavior "risk compensation." For example, motorists drive faster when wearing seatbelts. They drive closer to the vehicle in front of them when they have anti-lock brakes. In the sport of skydiving, equipment has become steadily more reliable, but the fatality rate has remained constant, since skydivers are now engaging in riskier behavior. The conclusion from such behavior is simple. People make better choices when failure is an option.
Yet, I am not just concerned about education. You see, spiritual failure is serious business because it involves your life. We discover in Genesis 2 and 3 that even if human beings are in an ideal situation, they will choose wrongly. They will fail to live the way God wanted them to live. They will not fulfill the purpose God had for them. Of course, the issue is what we do with such failures.
Obedience is such a difficult lesson to learn. Most of the rules we learn from parents are for our protection. Most of them are good lessons to incorporate into life. Life experience may teach us differently in some places. Yet, we need such guidance. We do not have good instincts. We must learn how to live. Often, such learning is a matter of openness to learning new things and simple obedience to what others have taught us.
Often, small acts in our lives reveal who we are. The over-reaction to a child, the cross word to a spouse, the shortness we have with a co-worker, boss, or employee, often reveal who we are. Of course, we are imperfect. We often dismiss such behavior, as if to say, “I am only human.” This reaction can reveal a need of grace to ourselves. This reaction can also be denial that, far from being human, we have acted in a beastly fashion.
In our youth, we often want to be quite different from our parents. Most of us go through a time in our teen years when we believe we are superior to our parents. I knew I wanted to be different from my parents. I had my Beatles and wanted my long hair. I just knew that was better than anything my parents could have had. They thought all that the Beatles ever sang was, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” even though they used that phrase in one song. The music was just too loud. For me, such music showed my generation had something over on them. Of course, back then, it was not just music. We had a war in Vietnam and racism to deal with as well. On another level, I knew I did not want to have alcohol dominate my life the way it did my father. I knew I wanted to have an education and lead what I believed was a better life. Frankly, I also knew that my mother wanted that better life for me, even if she could not see a way to have that better life for herself.
Yet, we often discover that in certain critical areas of our lives, we are no better. We have the same patterns of sin that our parents had. I can be every bit as fearful of life and failure as my parents were. I can be so content with my life that I become slothful. I can gain so much knowledge that I become arrogant. I can disguise the truth about myself. We bear a family resemblance to Adam and Eve. In their small act of disobedience, simply eating a piece of fruit, they revealed who they were. They revealed their nature as rebels against God. In our regular acts of moving against what God wants, often in what seem small and insignificant acts, we discover the same rebellion in us.
[1] (Atrahasis, ll. 190-191 in Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, 2nd ed. [Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 1996], vol. 1, 167).
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[11] Balingit, Moriah and Donna St. George. "Is it becoming too hard for students to fail in school?" The Washington Post, July 6, 2016, A1, washingtonpost.com.
Your opening paragraph fits Tillich. I like that. I also like the acknowledgement of other myths story. Sin is separation from God, others and self. I thought the work with our children took away from the power of this theme.
ReplyDeleteAs the discussion points out, I think there is good reason to move a different perspective than viewing the story as Fall. Apparently you do not. I admit the movement from childhood to adolescence and even adulthood is a new one for me but I like playing with the possibility.
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