The Hebrew word for the clothing is “kathoneth” usually translated as “tunics”. The word for skin is “lamash” and can mean human skin or animal skin, but usually means goatskin or sheepskin. In the next chapter we find Abel raising sheep (and probably goats).
There are those, however, who think God just created the tunics as he created the rest of the world, and nothing died.
You are correct, of course - my apologies. I should have learned by now to look things up instead of relying on memory, which is becoming ever more a broken reed as I approach patriarchal age.
And yet the Rastafari use the Genesis story (among others) to justify their use of marijuana/ganja. It is tough to keep people from their mood-alterers.
Regards,
Shodan
Professor Pepperwinkle:
Kathoneth does mean specifically a tunic or some sort of torso-covering garment. The Hebrew worth for clothing in general is “Begged” (or plural Beggadim).
The word for “skin,” both as the bodily organ and as applied to leather or other skin-fabrics, is “Or”. I’ve never heard of “lamash” - do you have a source for that word?
Well, that is embarrassing. I’m doing this from work and transposed a name from data entry with “Or”. I promise I won’t do this any more when I’m that distracted.
I suddenly had an image of the Aesir when the giants lead Freia away with them. As beautifully depicted in Das Rheingold, the gods Donner and Froh immediately begin to droop.
So here’s what I perceive as a contradiction - G-d(s) says ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.’ Does this mean that Adam was always going to die, or is death the punishment for eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? ‘Death as punishment’ is certainly the widespread interpretation (‘Since by man came Death, by man came also’ is how Paul framed it, for instance.), but was Adam going to live forever before The Fall, or not?
I can give you a definite maybe. Both sides of this topic have been debated for centuries, and there’s no one clear-cut explanation that satisfies all questions.
The traditional Jewish answer to this is that before the Fall, humans could move on to the next world when they chose to (after all, in Jewish theology, the ultimate home for the soul is the Afterlife - it would not be considered a good thing for the human soul to be bound to the earthly plane forever); after the Fall, death would be forced upon a person at a time not of their choosing.
Just something I’d like to point out for anyone who didn’t already know: snakes used to have legs.
You can probably guess how many creationist webpages there are devoted to that fact. If you’re not inclined to read Genesis literally, it’s at least an interesting coincidence. But I am also reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel right now, and he spends some time talking about how much knowledge of the natural world ancient peoples had that we have lost. I’ve also read about the amazingly detailed observations early scientists like Aristotle were able to make. So maybe it wasn’t such a coincidence, just that someone looked at snake leg spurs and said, “Hey, looks like these guys lost their legs somehow.”
All speculation, of course. But it’s interesting to consider the possibility (at least, I thought so).
I don’t believe God has any problem with them eating from the Tree of Life before they ate from the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil). The punishment of death is handed out by forbidding Man from eating from the Tree of Life. Before the separation, Man would not die.
I am having a hard time with your interpretation. Are you assuming that they were also forbidden to eat of the Tree of Life? Or is it just that, since they had to eat from the Tree of Life, they weren’t “naturally” immortal? If the latter, what are you proposing that means?
Both trees are mentioned as ‘special’ trees - Gen. 2: 9
Only the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is mentioned as ‘forbidden’ - Gen. 2: 16-17
The tree of life is mentioned again Gen. 3: 22. While it wasn’t forbidden, it is stated that humans eating from the tree of life is to be prevented - hence, the expulsion from Eden.
So while it’s never expressly stated, it’s rather implied that they weren’t to eat from the tree of life, either. My number one question, though - if they had not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, would they have died? Or, is immortality only bestowed on God, plus those who have eaten of the tree of life? If the tree of life grants immortality to those who are mortal, and God didn’t want that, why wasn’t it expressly forbidden? Is there, as I suspect, a line missing from the story where the tree of life was also forbidden?
I have no idea what it might mean if they were mortal before the fall. Is the toil and suffering of human labour the punishment, or is death the punishment? Certainly for many later thinkers, death was the punishment, but it isn’t explicitly stated that humans wouldn’t have died anyway.
As far as I can tell, none of these questions have a definitive answer in the chapters we have read so far, and may not have a biblical answer at all. In commentary and opinion, yes, surely.
Link to Genesis 4
I realize this is not the most recent thread in the series, but just today I was looking at Genesis 2 & 3 (for the umpty-umpth time) and I was struck by something I had never thought to wonder about before: What about all the other trees in the Garden? We have the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—are any of the other trees a Tree of Something? Does eating their fruit confer some benefit, or change the eater in some way? Or are they all just ordinary fruit trees?
Unless they were specifically brought up, I would guess that the other trees were just trees.