The third chapter of Genesis begins by saying that the serpent was the most clever of all animals. Maybe at the time the serpent was actually closer to human status, and it only got demoted to animal after the Fall.
Let’s pull back to a big picture viewpoint. Most Bible scholars–the sane ones, that is, not the literalists–agree that the Creation story was written around the time of the Babylonian captivity. So at this time the Jews were exiles in a foreign land, and probably they were hearing a lot of competing theologies from other peoples that they interacted with. Many of the religions that flourished in the Middle East at that time had a very chaotic cosmology–the universe arising at random out of the blood and semen of the gods, or things like that. The Genesis creation story was clearly written with the intention of binding the Jews together as a people by telling them: our God created the world with a purpose, our God created us with a purpose, and the punishment we’re enduring exists for a reason.
Also remember that literacy was fairly low at the time. Most people would only hear the story orally, so they’d never have a chance to pick it apart word by word, only to get the gist of it.
You were doing so well in explaining the rudeness and irrationality of the poster to whom you responded, and then you posted this.
While off-topic interruptions and a lack of considered thought are frequently the province of this Forum, direct rudeness, even in what one hopes is a good cause, is not.
Do not hurl direct insults at other posters or call them rude names outside the BBQ Pit.
I agree. However, telling someone who believes the Bible is the inerrant Word of God that it’s all a bunch of bullshit isn’t likely to change their mind. Having a civil, thoughtful discussion on the topic might have some effect on some people though.
As other people have said, I think the whole thing was a setup to get Adam and Eve out of the Garden. Either God knew what would happen beforehand, or God was stupid. On the question of why God would do such a thing, I tend to think it’s because, as portrayed in the Bible, he’s an abusive patriarch, but that’s best left to another thread.
Sorry about that, lesson learned. I didn’t think it would be an issue, as it wasn’t intended seriously, and I felt the old-timey insult used would make that clear, but I won’t do it again. :o
My reference works are not available at the moment, but the term “good and evil” is used elsewhere in the Hebrew bible in the sense that we would say, “A to Z” or my parents’ generation would say “from soup to nuts.” Thus, under this reading, “knowledge of good and evil” means “knowledge of everything” – thus the story is about people gaining the ability to learn, to gain knowledge.
So, they answer to the OP would be, they already had the ability to discern obedience (good) from disobedience (evil), but they gained the ability to learn, to question, to develop.
And, by the way, I think that Cecil has written a column (probably appearing later this week) on this story.
There are two creation stories (P document and J document versions), written at very differen times, and the oldest of the two (J document, i.e., the Adam and Eve creation story) was, I thought, held to have been written after the Kingdom of David, in the era of the Two Kingdoms.
If by “written” you mean “originated”… I think it is generally assumed that the story, while written down as part of J, had been told orally for a long long time.
It’s not supposed to be a chronological sequence, except in the loosest of senses. Chapter 1 tells the Creation story, 2 and 3 the Adam-and-Eve story, 4 the Cain-and-Abel story, then 5 picks up the frame story and uses the gimmick of a genealogy to tie A&E to Noah (as it will do again in the second half of 11 to link Noah to Abraham). They are stories, legends, fables, what you will, with the “Toledoth” (generations=genealogies) concept used to unite them into a framework.
Presumably by the time the first two boys grew to adulthood and Cain offed Abel, Adam and Eve had followed the first commandment to humanity to the letter: They had been fruitful and populated the Earth. We have no clue how many children they were supposed to have had, but a minimum of five sons and two daughters (Cain, Abel, Seth, and unnamed sons and daughters noted after the note on Seth’s birth). C&A are mentioned because of the story of their conflict, Seth because he was the paternal ancestor of Noah, the central figure of the next legend.
This is, by the way, not a liberal-Christian gloss, but the accurate concept of how an Israelite would have understood the stories – not as lineal narrative history (it hadn’t been invented) but as ____ story, (“idiolectic”?? I forget the proper study-of-folklore term), the kind that is told as explanation of an aspect of human nature – joined together into a coherent unit through the use of the Toledoth passages as frame story.
Doesn’t it illustrate the idea of sin pretty clearly though? The point of the story is that they were disobedient to God and therefore sinful, without regard to whether eating a particular piece of fruit is evil per se.
The Mormon take on this quite different from other Christian churches. God knowly plants the tree and allows Satan to temp A&E, as part of his eternal plan. Giving a Savior if A&E partook of the fruit was also part of the plan, so God was not as much of an asshat as he would be in other explanations. Of course, Mormon doctrine is vastly different on original sin, as well.
Wow! A fair amount to respond to. Sorry for letting this thread go for a couple of days.
I’ll take things in order:
Thanks! Thanks also to Stranger, Polycarp, and the PC apeman (who’s still “the P Capeman” in my head, despite his spiffy new username. Sorry. ;)) I spent (wasted?) more than two years studying this stuff in graduate school (on top of [mumble-mumble] years getting a BA in it) so I’m glad I get to pretend I’m a theologian occasionally.
True, but none have shown up in this thread, so I thought it best not to bring that up. Speak of the devil, you know.
No, of course not. But people who will accept all sorts of fanwank for a Star Trek plot hole, suddenly insist that minor contradictions in Scripture, even ones that the author/redactor must have noticed him- or herself and allowed intentionally, invalidate the whole thing.
People who treat every minor unexplained detail in movies and TV as gaping plot holes bug me too. (“Sure, maybe Chief Tyrol rigged the airlock not to set off an alarm, but why didn’t they show it???” Um, how about because it would have been boring and added nothing to the story?)
You know, this explains more about the world, than just about any other theory I’ve read. And I have to admit, it does fit with the Bible.
Hmmm, I think most of the (United Methodist) churches I’ve attended (admittedly a very biased sample) were quite willing to acknowledge that much of the Bible, especially Genesis, was myth not history.
That’s a good question. How do you decide which parts of the Bible are true and which are made up? I mean, some statements in the Bible are true, right? How do you know? Who decides?
Ok, so it morally wrong, but it had consequences which they knew about. It is commonly argued that death did follow (eventually) as a result of eating the fruit, that had they not disobeyed they would have lived forever. It is not at all clear that this is a gloss and not the original intent of the storyteller. It certainly seems like a reasonable reading to me.
And I’m not sure that not morally wrong equates to not sin. I don’t know what the understanding of sin and morality was of the Israelites at the time the story originated, but a longstanding understanding of sin in Christian theology (and possibly Jewish–I’m not sure) is that sin is that which separates us from God or causes us to “miss the mark” that God set for us (i.e., perfect communion with him).
To further this point a little, and respond to your last sentence, it depends on which theology you mean. In some theology (e.g., most Jewish theology, Mormon theology) it isn’t anywhere near the core of the theology at all. In other theology, the snake is clearly symbolic of/identical with Satan, which you reject out of hand. (It certainly wasn’t the intent of the author, but IMO that necessarily doesn’t make it an invalid interpretation. Folklore often gets reinterpreted.) Some liberal Christian theology just ignores any inconsistency, but some gets along just fine with a purely metaphorical Creation/Fall story.
Since people reacted positively to my earlier exegesis, I’ll give another personal interpretation of the story. (See what happens when you encourage me, folks!) Keep in mind that this is a different take than the one I gave earlier, but I find no problem with multiple interpretations of a literary work.
When I was in struggling with my beliefs in seminary (becoming, in the end, an atheist) I had a lot of problems with this story. Even the most metaphorical understanding seemed to be at odds with evolutionary theory. After all, in any version of evolution, there was no perfect creation, and so no Fall. All the things that make up sin–violence, greed, deception, etc., were present in the animal kingdom long before we arrived on the scene. In fact, we couldn’t have evolved without these traits being present in our pre-human ancestors. Not only is sin not a corruption of a perfect state, it was a necessary and integral part of our creation!
This seemed to contradict everything the story told us about the origin of sin–that it wasn’t part of creation, that it came later, that it was our fault.
Eventually, though, I started to look at the story freshly, without the baggage of earlier theology. I discovered, to my surprise, that it worked remarkably well as a parable not of the Fall, but of evolution!
As others have pointed out, there are problems with the story as traditionally told. If sin is our fault, how does the snake fit in? The story as it is written presents the snake as one of God’s creatures. Why isn’t he perfect? What is the source of his shrewdness (contrasted punningly in the text with our nudeness)? If he is Satan, as later assumed, what is the story of his fall? Milton tells us, but not Scripture.
But it fits with what we know through science! In the story, sin does precede us, in some sense. It is part of creation, of nature, before we become as we are now. And choosing sin, becoming aware of it, is a necessary part of our creation–before such a choice we were not morally culpable, were not really human in the way we are now. We were more like animals, who commit violence and deception without guilt, without knowledge or self-awareness, but also without anxiety, without confusion, and without the pain of having to find our own way in the world without instinct.
The author of the story knew nothing of biology or evolution (and I don’t believe in knowledge through revelation), but he or she was acutely aware of how humans differ morally from other animals, of how closely bound violence and nature are, and how morality, awareness, and human pain are three sides of the same thing. So perfect were his or her understanding of these things that the story seems to fit even better with what we know know that with what was believed then.
Not to get to far off subject but in other recent threads we were discussing something close and several people suggested that it’s not so much a process of studying the Bible and deciding what parts are true but really useing the bible to help discern what is true for you. In other words, what may or may not be literally true doesn’t matter. Does it move you? Stimulate your mind? Your Heart? Does it help you understand something about your own nature and the nature of mankind?
One of the things that interests me about the A&E story is the idea that they weren’t embaressed by their nudity until they gained a knowledge of good and evil. IMHO the story is about entering the world of duality from a place where duality didn’t exist. Once you make the choice to enter the world of duality you can’t be in a place of non duality. There’s some interesting theology in the Book of Mormon about this and I’ll see if I can find it.
It was seriously offered, not inserted as a snarky aside. I didn’t invent it, you know.. Comment on the theological ramifications of positing the serpent as the true divine character in the story and the Lord God as an evil character among whose evil deeds is making the illicit claim to divinity?
This is a salient point in reading the story as it was probably originally written.
Basil Bernstein and Mary Douglas looked at various societies from an anthropological perspective and drew some intersting conclusions. They noted that in terms of establishing values within communities, societies could be graphed using speech, (restricted moving to elaborated), and family control, (positional moving to personal), and determine a number of characteristics. A society with very restricted speech and positional family control sees sin as an act against a rule, regardless of motivation or mitigating factors. Such an approach is seen in some of the older Greek myths involving the Furies who take revenge upon a character for violating a natural law, even if the transgression was done in ignorance of the law or with the best of motivations. There is a fair amount of evidence that the Jewish authors of the tradition from which Genesis 2 - 5 was produced wrote from that perspective. (Compare the later tale of Uzzah (1 Samuel 6 or 1 Chronicles 13), where the oxen who are pulling the cart with the ark stumble and Uzzah, a non-Levite, puts out his hand to steady it and is killed.) A society with that approach to the law is going to interpret the breaking of the law according to actions, alone. Motivation is simply not a factor in the discussion. God established a Rule. Adam and Eve broke the Rule. Consequences arose from that act of disobedience.
Discussions of later interpretations or current understandings of the myth are still open, of course, but when we look at the tale as written, I think it is important to have some understanding of the society from which the authors emerged.
Nope. The Bible doesn’t say that. At this point, only Adam, Even, Cain and Abel have been mentioned, but the Genesis account does not say “… and there were no other people in existence.”
I’m vaguely aware of the gnostic recasting of the story with snake as good, thanks to Elaine Pagels, but you haven’t given us much to respond to.
I’m sorry I haven’t read the page you llinked to, but it seemed very poorly written and completely undocumented. The first sentence is a nearly meaningless, unsupported generalization. Albert Einstein is quoted at least twice, out of context and outside his area of expertise, as an “‘egghead’ mathematical scientist” without citation. When I got to the sentence that began “One must consider, for example, not only the serpent’s seeming immortality but also its ability to periodically desquamate the integument covering its entire body…” I just gave up.
The pro-snake interpretation clearly wasn’t intended by the writer of the myth as we have it, and you aren’t claiming that it is historically true, so I’m not sure what the meaning or point of your interpretation is. It’s true that the text can be read that way, but you have to tell us what you think can be gained by it. Do we learn that Judaism and Christianity (represented by God) are evil? I’d rather judge a tradition by its practitioners, not by how its myths can be misread. Do we learn that all attempts at control and coercion are wrong and should be disobeyed? Meh. I’ve seen you argue that point better without the myth.
I was actually tossing it out there ahistorically — not so much how actual Ophitics have viewed the matter from their context in culture and time — but insofar as the Bible is indeed a hodgepodge of scriptures assembled and redacted from multiple sources, and this story is generally considered to have been decently ancient by the time it was committed to text in the Book of J, I find it interesting to think of the story in this fashion… that either the folks who originally told it were trying to stamp out spiritual experiences in favor of obedience to authority, or else the folks who originally told it did so with a different tone and emphasis, one that reflected admiration for the sneaky snake and rolleyes for the pompous Lord God.
I suspect neither of those things are true, and there’s certainly no evidence that they are, but a disproportionate amount of cultural emphasis (especially under Christianity, actually) has been placed on this one tale over the centuries, and it’s interesting to discover that there was an historical group who stood the tale on its head, as it were.
At any rate, it makes for an intriguing alternative to “it’s all bullshit” for those who find themselves in theological recoil from the conventional interp of the message enshrined in the story.