Because the other tribes at the time had different creation myths. This story was not the true story of how the world came to be, except to the simplest minds. The story with the painful circumcision were told symbolically as ritual of passage to manhood within a tribal body (Nation). Many young men probably believed the story literally to affirm their world view, but eventually every child stops believing in Santa Claus, and ironically, with children becomes Santa Claus.
Modern schooling does not train us in the art of contemplation, so in a modern setting we are often baffled by contemplative texts. The point of it is to get you to sit and think about it. It was written in a time where scientific verification did not exist at all and contemplation was the only method of knowing available. It’s meant to get you to think about the origin of man and the universe.
Well there is also the fact that at the time most societies were ruled by an elite priest class that didn’t even try to get farmers to understand the mysteries of the universe kind of in the same way that physicists in Berkeley don’t proselytize at the Denny’s in Barstow.
Except, why couldn’t the other tribes at the time have believed their creation myths too?
There are two different questions here.
- Did the peasants believe the myths?
- Did the educated class believe the myths?
The answer to 1 is: Most likely.
The answer to 2 is: Probably not.
Whoa, I don’t get where you get this from? Most Animals that I have seen give birth suffer to some degree or another. Their vocaliztion is just different, and their body different… plus, we have evolved into walking mammals and the pelvic restriction that that entails. I have seen dogs suffer during pregnancy, a cow, a horse…sometimes it results in their death.
Maybe that disconnect from animals in the Adam and Eve story, man’s naming, dominion, and taking of animals at Will, by God’s Will, refers to a more pastoral time when man wasn’t pastoral, ironically. It may refer to the “Happy Hunting Grounds” of the Jews, so to speak, before they were cast out and had to take possession and care of animals domestically in desert conditions (toil). That may simply be the divider between a Hunter Gather society versus the Good Shepard and cultivation.
See I think the story isn’t about that at all. Not that I think you are wrong. But the point is to get you to think about the cyclical nature of beginnings in general. It’s not about a particular event, but it’s about the nature of creation in a religious/philosophical sense. So it’s not wrong that you interpret it that way. I think that the story is pregnant with the information of what it doesn’t say, it begs a whole lot of questions and that’s the entire point. It is meant to get you to question the nature of creation, the nature of being, the nature of life, of death, of knowledge, of suffering, of remorse, of Creation (capital C) in general. In saying that it is about a movement from a hunter/gatherer style to a more agrarian style is an interesting take on it, but I think trying to pin it down that specifically is again trying to see it literally to fit it as a story that sits within a particular time and place rather than a story that deals in universal constants.