There are many translations of the bible, so we should make clear which translation is being used. The venerable King James Version (which I do not read) seems to use “meat” for “food,” which provides more fodder for the debate, even though nuts have meat too.
Yes, and plainly, they were naked and still didn’t have to wear sunscreen. And lions laid down with the lamb.
Which period? Not the Edenic period–did they even have sex then?
No, it seems they also wore the skins. So, I suppose they could have stuck to wool shirts and lederhosen and just thrown away the bloody carcasses–or burnt them all in sacrifice. Perhaps that’s how they learned how to cook. Must have been an irresistible aroma–at least, after the fall. Maybe that’s what God was pissed about.
<< The venerable King James Version (which I do not read) seems to use “meat” for “food,” which provides more fodder for the debate, even though nuts have meat too. >>
Interesting. I don’t happen to have a KJV in the house, but if that’s what KJ says, they’re just wrong. The Hebrew text does not use the word B-Sh-R (meat or flesh) but '-kh-L (food or eat).
Yeah, I suppose I could have done more about the use of animal skins for clothes. Skipped my mind. I was so excited about doing a short-and-sweet Staff Report instead of my usual twenty-pager, that I didn’t want to develop side themes. But God makes clothes for Adam and Eve, so presumably it was OK to make clothes.
The bible unfortunately does not focus on lots of details that archaologists and anthropologists wish were there, about how clothes were made, how house were built, what a typical meal looked like, etc etc. That’s not the concern of the Author(s).
I actually find it interesting that the point about vegetarianism is not made explict. I suspect that it would have been an unpopular thing to say. It was tough enough for religious leaders to list all the thou-shalt-nots, adding thou-shalt-not-eat-meat would’ve been over-the-top in terms of acceptability. Neither Moses nor Paul would’ve been very popular, one suspects, if they had insisted on vegetarianism.
But we wouldn’t expect Moses or Paul to say such a thing, especially after the offer made to Noah, right?
Eden was idyllic and nonviolent. They didn’t have to cover up, or kill for food. They didn’t even have to till for food. Not only didn’t they eat meat, but they didn’t even have to eat all their vegetables–they were told not to.
So animal like wolves, lions, sharks, even hawks were vegetarians? Be interesting to see how that worked, since I don’t think any of them could be healthy or even live on a vegetarian diet.
Or perhaps the wolves, lions, sharks, & eagles of then were different from the current ones? So the Bible is saying that these animals evolved from earlier, vegetarian species that existed in the “Edenic times”?
Seems to me that no matter how you follow this tangled web, you end up with nonsense.
The Bible is not trying to describe evolution or the biological digestive systems of carnivores. It’s using poetry to describe an ideal world, where there is no murder, no bloodshed, no killing. Whether that ideal world ever existed is pretty much irrelevant – the goal is the prophetic vision that this is what we should be striving for.
I don’t find that so far-fetched, although I certainly don’t think that genetic engineering to breed vegetarian wolves is necessarily a good thing.
Dex’s conclusion here, that Adam and Eve were vegetarians, seems to be based almost entirely on the omission of meat (i.e., animal flesh) in Genesis 1:29 and the reference thereto in Genesis 9:3. But Genesis 1:29 does not actually prohibit the eating of meat, so I consider it a weak reed.
The Garden of Eden is generally believed to be an idealized version of the hunter-gatherer life that preceded farming. One would naturally suppose that a hunter-gatherer life would include hunting, and perhaps even eating of the hunted animals.
We know that Abel sacrificed animals, well before the “gift” of Genesis 9:3. The ancient Israelites ate animals that were sacrificed.
I don’t think that the passages in Isaiah have any relevance at all. They discuss a future state of affairs, not what happened in Eden.
Yes and no. Most of the Jewish dietary laws were found to not be binding upon Gentile Christians, but the life-blood thing was retained. For example, in Acts 15:29, we have
While admittedly most modern Christians pay no heed to this injunction, it’s still right there in black and white. I venture no speculation as to why this prohibition is ignored.
This staff report made me think of something I hadn’t considered before. I always thought the Pauline revocation of Kosher dietary restrictions was a device to make Christianity more appealing to non-Jewish converts (the less cynical/more devout may, of course, simply take Paul’s account of his vision at face value and move on to another post).
But this–the emphasis specifically on the lifeblood, rather than on the clean/unclean animal aspect, made me wonder if it wasn’t done partly for doctrinal reasons. After all, it’s hard to say “Don’t consume lifeblood” while also saying “Here’s Christ’s lifeblood–dig in.”
Not an impossibility, mind you, just difficult. But then, I’m not even sure how soon the whole transubstantiation issue became codified into its modern form.
“Later, of course, Paul and the early Christians (at the Council of Jerusalem, reported in the book of Acts) decided that belief in their Messiah obviated the need for any such dietary laws, and so “eating flesh with its life-blood in it” was no longer prohibited.”
The only thing I wanted to quickly comment on was related to Dex’s conclusion above. While I agree that the early Christians believed that their Messianic belief released them from the Mosaic Law, it didn’t absolve them of the responsibilities given to them via the new Christian congregation(specifically a very similar restriction given in Acts 15:29).
Isaac Newton had an interesting insight on this point: “This law [of abstaining from blood] was ancienter than the days of Moses, being given to Noah and his sons, long before the days of Abraham: and therefore when the Apostles and Elders in the Council at Jerusalem declared that the Gentiles were not obliged to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, they excepted this law of abstaining from blood, and things strangled, as being an earlier law of God, imposed not on the sons of Abraham only, but on all nations.”
Actually, it doesn’t.
It says something in an ancient, dead language that was translated (400 years ago) as “Every creature…”.
It’s quite possible that the actual word used in that language does not normally include humans in it’s definition. (No doubt some biblical scholar who knows more about this will be along shortly.)
Even in English, creature is defined primarily as “a lower animal; especially a farm animal” according to Merriam-Webster, and only in the secondary definition are human beings included.
Maybe it was like they showed on The Simpsons (which is, of course, every bit as factual as the traditional story). A pig approached Homer (as Adam) and offered up part of itself for his meal, much like the animal who wanted to be eaten at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Like the Bible, you have to do a bit of analysis on Merriam-Webster to really understand it. What you especially have to know is that M-W doesn’t put its definitions in primary sense-secondary sense order. Instead, it puts them in historical order.
So the first definition of creature above is quite likely to be the one in use at the time the KJV was written.
And as noted earlier in the thread, the word meat once meant just “food”. You can see this in M-W’s entry for meat where the first definiton is in fact “food”.
But there’s another entry further on listed as archaic. I’m glad you brought this up, the entry for meat at www.m-w.com (Merriam-Webster) is a bit different from the one at www.dictionary.com (mostly American Heritage), the MW one doesn’t include as much sex.
Like the eternal quest for “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”, this can be argued fervently until the Tuesday after the end of the world. Are the dancing angels meat? Well, that’s another story. As is, “why not Wednesday?”
Thanks for the correction on the life-blood thing with the early Christians. I’ll amend the Staff Report to reflect that. I confess, I didn’t notice the distinction.
On jbaker’s comment: Yes, I thought the Staff Report made it clear that the vegetarianism was interpetation, not stated directly. However, it’s not a stretch at all. At one stage, people are told that all the plants have been made for them to eat, and they may do so. At another stage, people are told that it’s OK to eat meat etc. It is not unreasonable to assume that the implication is that they were not permitted to eat meat before that: otherwise, why would explict permission be needed later?
And, for those who are making comments about the reality of the text, please note that I have also done textual analysis of THE WIZARD OF OZ and TARZAN OF THE APES, so I’m making no claims as to historical veracity. I’m just doing textual analysis.