Difficult to Read
Primordial narratives are pretty hard to understand − then add the Church Fathers
By Debbie Blue
Old Testament Reading: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
For Sunday, March 13, 2011: Year A − First Sunday in Lent
This is a beautiful and sad (maybe, slightly funny?) story. I don’t know. I can’t tell. The weight of interpretation it so heavy here, I find it hard to read. I do know you can’t leave out Genesis 2:18-25.
But, okay, trying
God is super creative—makes the world, like God doesn’t want to be alone. God seems very generous, makes a human and gives the human fish and food and a lush garden to live in and says, “eat freely of all this beauty, except that one tree.” (Maybe its poison, whatever, it will make him die if he eats.) God, not liking to be alone Godself, thinks the human shouldn’t be alone either. The animals are nice but they aren’t really companions the human can be intimate with. So god uses a rib from the first human to make another one. Using the bone God (intimately) sculpts the intimate other.
Misinterpretation
The first human upon seeing the new one, likes “her,” but apparently sees her as derivative: says, “this one shall be called woman for out of man she was taken.” God used one of Adam’s bones, so it could be a bit of a leap on Adam’s part to say she came out of him, but, okay—at any rate they’re naked together and not ashamed. Seems kind of sexy and ecstatic. It would be nice if that lasted awhile. But, narratively anyway, things are moving along pretty quickly.
Misrepresentation
Suddenly a crafty snake appears and talks to the intimate other. The snake brings up the poison tree and makes it seem like it’s the best tree ever. While he’s at it he makes the creative-lover-intimacy-maker, who drew so close as to blow into the nose of the human, seem like a sort of greedy, rivalrous liar who wants to keep the humans away from what is REALLY good. The snake makes it seem like the creator is at heart not very generous and deeply concerned about keeping humanity at a distance. The god the snake draws is afraid the humans will be like him. Is the god the snake makes up, the one we often end up worshipping? Both the humans end up eating fruit from that tree and afterwards they aren’t together naked and unashamed, they are sort of slinking around lying and hiding. They sew fig leaves together to cover their genitals.
What Happened?
The trajectories of interpretation are staggering and winding. It is the original sin, it is total depravity, it is uncontrolled Eros winning, it is the difficult but necessary step we all must take in order to be fully realized humans. I like the Girardian take on it: It is the first story of humans forging their identities “over against.” It is a story that reveals that rivalry exists at the heart of humanity. Maybe God isn’t at all like the picture the snake draws. Maybe God is truly generous and creative, loving, desiring intimacy, but something about humans just couldn’t see it that way. We make up a god that is greedy, rivalrous, more into transcendence than intimacy—a god that is very concerned with maintaining God’ status above humanity. Christianity is always urging us to trust God—but the god the snake and the human discuss, is not really one that I could trust—and yet that’s the god we so often end up worshipping.
A Lot of Damage
How Christians have interpreted this passage has shaped the world (the subjugation of women, the demonization/distortion of the erotic, the exclusion of women from the clergy etc). The writer of 1Timothy blames the sin of the world on women. The Church Fathers followed his lead. Who wants to spend a sermon trying to undo all that − and yet it’s kind of glaring.
The Hardest Question
Primordial narratives, ancient epics of origin, different versions woven together to reach their final form after the Hebrew temple was decimated by the Babylonian empire? There’s SO much to consider here. Is it something about the pathology of power? This may seem like a cop out for the hardest question, but it really about sums it up for me: What does it all mean?
Debbie Blue is one of the founding pastors of House of Mercy in St. Paul, MN, the author of Sensual Orthodoxy and From Stone to Living Word. She lives on a farm with her family, friends, and animals
I think it’s really helpful to focus as closely as possible on the canonical texts, which seldom are as obnoxious as the tradition does with them, and which often do not actually say what people claim they do.
One great example is Phyllis Trible’s focus on Genesis 2-3 (in her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality). She has convincingly argued against translating the Hebrew adam (which can mean either gendered “man” or inclusively-gendered “human”) as a gendered term until very late in the text. The text is more subtle than its readers, and does not make it clear whether the woman came out of the man, or whether the woman is brought out of an omni-gendered or un-gender-differentiated human (an idea which existed in the ancient world). That second reading may not be the likeliest reading, but it is a possible one, and tussling out which way you go makes clear that the very act of reading/speaking the words involves interpretive choices.
Her take on Genesis 3 is perhaps still more illuminating, and she and others worked for many years to see that translations make clear that the woman’s husband was present in the whole serpent/fruit enterprise, albeit a voiceless, passive, accepting partner. “She also gave some [of the fruit] to her husband, *who was with her,* and he ate it” (Gen 3:6b, NIV). This allows one to consider anew several points. If the man is truly prior to the woman and somehow in charge, why is he so much in the background? If the man was truly prior, why didn’t he correct the woman’s and serpent’s misquoting of the Lord’s command? If the man was *with her*, then was he not also a full participant in being deceived or being disobedient?
Likewise, the 1 Timothy text does NOT “blame the sin of the world on women.” It makes an argument for male priority, which it then inadvertently problematizes with its claim that “Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner” (1 Tim 2:14, NIV). In order to blame the sin of the world on women, you have to a) make the interpretive leap that Eve’s sin was world-altering, infecting Adam by touch and all her offspring by blood/DNA, b) ignore the Genesis text where Adam lands in hot water, c) make the authoritative Adam/man completely powerless and irrelevant to this story. A close focus on this text reveals that its claims do not stand on a very firm foundation of prior scripture.
A close reading of the texts almost always makes it difficult to make oppressive, universal claims about them. If the hardest question is “What does it all mean?,” then I propose that the texts of scripture themselves are a better starting point than the grand theological baggage that has been hung upon them.
March 8th, 2011 at 10:32 amNot sure I can answer the question about how I read the whole thing, but I like knowing the Hebrew: the adam is taken out of the adamah, the earth-creature separated from the earth, and the ishah is taken out of the ish. Someone recently told me what is usually translated “rib” is actually “side”– that it’s perfectly consistent (and fits that story better) to thing of God splitting the adam down the middle, so that they are equal halves, male and female. Then it makes more sense that they BOTH know what God said about the tree.
March 9th, 2011 at 1:07 pmI also think that the tree of knowledge and the tree of life have to be in this garden, in order for there to be any life, that’s why they’re there. There are places in southern California, with its Mediterranean-like climate, that great big trees provide shade, shelter, stabilize soil, even stabilize water absorption so that things can grow around the edges of their roots. I think of these trees in that way.
It’s interesting that when the Quran tells the story, the man and the woman, instead of hiding and blaming each other and the serpent, prostrate themselves and ask forgiveness, and God grants it immediately. The curse doesn’t on take the same importance as in Christian interpretations. It does seem to me that when we have done what we realize was wrong, foolish, or dangerous, we do tend to turn against each other. There’s a level of realism in the story that runs counter to the surrealism of it too. Since I don’t read it as historical, I find it easier to accept the notion that it says something profound about what human beings do in relationship to God, earth, animals, and each other. But I read it a little differently depending on what truth I’m attentive to when I approach it.
Just a couple of thoughts, the serpent in many ancient and pagan traditions was a symbol of wisdom, the whole idea of the serpent being “condemned” to eat the dust can be taken a different way if we keep in mind that “from dust we came and to dust we shall return” dust seems that it might be “holy.” Also, Eve has the first theological debate AND she is a woman! Adam was a paasive and submissive bystander to a great theological conversation with wisdom.
March 9th, 2011 at 2:43 pmImagine if this text had been interpreted this way over the years, would we be where we are now?