Maybe. Kush/Kish was also a Sumerian city near Babylon, though, so it could refer to that.
I am surprised at this answer from Chaim, because I thought that, Biblically speaking, this question has a Straight Dope answer. Jews are descendants of Judah, son of Israel, just as Levites are descendants of Levi and the Reubanites are descendants or Reuben. Jews are/were one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, and all the other patriarchs are neither Israelite nor Jews.
As for Eden, I understood that to refer to the nation now known as Iraq. The Garden, East in Eden, is more…metaphorical.
If Adam and Eve were the only people that God created, why did Cain tell God that whoever would find him would kill him if he were banished after his brother’s death? According to Genesis, Adam and Eve didn’t even have a third child until after Abel was dead. Clearly he’s worried about people other than his parents, or he wouldn’t have said “whoever” instead of saying them specifically.
Hypothetically, they’d be other children of Adam and Eve whose names aren’t mentioned in the bible and their descendants.
No, You have it all wrong. Since Adam was a Jew, He probably performed the first Briss… Likely on his Sons.
Why would that be? The Bible would have us believe that circumcision originated as as a sign of the covenant between Yahweh and Abraham. According to the history in the bible, there would have been no such tradition for Adam, so even if he did circumcise his sons, I don’t think it could be called a Briss. If there was no Covenant yet, there would only be three possible reasons for doing so that I can think of:
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He was doing it for hygienic reasons as per the explanation for Egyptian circumcision given by Herodotus.
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He was copying some other Semitic culture (like the Canaanites) and the circumcision was a faux sacrifice to appease one of their gods. I don’t think that would be a popular explanation among the religious…
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He was messed up in the head and decided to cut up his kids private parts for no reason.
I don’t think that there is anything that indicates he circumcised anybody though.
Another possibility…
- Hi, Opal… Circumsicion is also a very popular African rite of passage amongst certain tribes, both Male and Female. I’m sure it predates any semitic culture.
Adam might have belong to a fetishest or scarring tribe.
Adam wasn’t a Jew. Circumcision doesn’t show up in the bible until the story of Abraham, where Abraham is commanded to circumcise himself, his male slaves, and his children in commemoration of his covenant with God, and that in the future, all of Abraham’s male descendants should be circumcised to remember the covenant.
Yea, but who do you think he got that idea from? Out of pure ingenuity? Hmmm. let’s cut off the tip off our dicks. There was an ancient reason.
In the bible, he got the idea from God. In actuality, there in all likelihood was no Adam and no Abraham, and male circumcision was a custom common in the Middle East and North Africa.
Well, usually these “New Deific Covenants” are restorative of the “Old Ways”. They are usually implemented because of superstition and a perceived breaking of the last covenant, or a moral redrft… The last Law in place. It’s going back to the tribal Father and Mother’s mystics and rituals. I gues it’s the definition of conservatism, to be honest
In Genesis, circumcision is considered something new, established between God and Abraham:
Reno Nevada:
First of all, as I have said earlier in this thread, the word Jew, while derived from the tribal name Judah, was not coined to refer only to descendants of Judah. It comes from Judea, the Roman name for the province where the Israelites - from any of the remains of the original tribes existed - were the predominant ethnic group. Judea in turn comes from the Kingdom of Judah, so called because the rulers of said kingdom were of the tribe of Judah, but the inhabitants were not exclusively so.
Secondly, the reason I was hesitant to answer no is because a covenant is usually an exclusive arrangement, and by defining the Jews as parties to the covenant, that covenant set them aside as something special. However, since Adam and Eve were the only people in existence at the time they were created, lack of a special covenant would not have excluded anyone else, so perhaps they could have been considered in the “Jewish” category (despite pre-dating Abraham, Israel and Judah). In the end, though, I concluded that the Torah is a way of life that Adam and Eve never did have access to, and therefore, they cannot be considered Jewish in any sense.
How would you conclude that? Many details are missing from Adam and Eve’s story. The story seems to indicate that the people of God were thrown from the garden, but then God said, Ok, Let’s try this again. Reset. Perhaps God “told” Avram that that was his mystical covenant between Adam and Eve and their Sons. Maybe the mark and punishment that Cain endured was the scar of circumcision?
I’m amazed it took 7 posts for this.
Actually the whole Adam and Eve story sounds like a whole mystic rite that is told to initiates. It really does sound like a story that is told during the rite of passage from Child to Man. Sounds like the chant of a circumcision ceremony.
Yes, Genesis is a mystical text not to be taken literally, just like Revelations. I read it as the story of the loss of innocence as humanity came to know suffering. Birth really. In the womb everything is provided for you, it’s all good, everything is comfy and nice, and then suddenly bam you are shot out into the cold cruel world naked and unsure.
Why assume that it wasn’t taken literally by the authors of Genesis? Most people don’t take it literally now, because we know a lot of things about the creation of the earth and the evolution of man that people back then didn’t. But the ancient Jews were undoubtedly curious about things like how the world was created, why women suffer pain in childbirth while most animals don’t seem to, why people have to work to grow food, and so on. It explains human suffering, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t also seen as a history of how the world came to be created.
Because a day is how long it takes for the Sun to rise, set and Rise again, and the Earth was not created on the first day. That’s how I know they didn’t take it literally. The only people that have ever taken Genesis literally are total morons. It’s an allegory, it was always an allegory. By virtue of the fact that it was written down we know that it was written by priests for other priests, IE, by the intellectual elite for the intellectual elite never meant to be read by the lay people. As we know from Greek Mythology the myths were allegories meant to explain complex concepts to idiots and children, the real educated class has left us actual writings telling us what they really believed. That Genesis is as incomplete as it is should be the first clue that it wasn’t meant to be taken literally.