On Adam, Eve, and Human Misbehavior
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used
by permission. All rights reserved.
It’s called the doctrine of original
sin. It goes like this. Adam, or Eve, or both committed the first sin when in
the Garden of Eden they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
which the Lord God, as God is
usually called in the story, had told them not to do. That first sin stained
human nature such that sin got transmitted through biological reproduction to
every human being who descended from Adam and Eve, in other words, every human
being who ever lived. We’re all sinners from the moment of our conception in
our mother’s womb. Sin is inherent in and through through the act of sexual
intercourse that created us. Our sin is original in the sense that it comes
from the original sin in the Garden of Eden and because in us it goes all the
way back to our biological conception.
Many of us these days don’t much like
the doctrine of original sin, and we particularly don’t like the way
misogynists have misused and abused the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden to
blame sin on women, in fact to turn women into misbegotten monsters. There is a
strong tradition in Christianity that sin is all Eve’s fault because she ate
the forbidden fruit first and then somehow seduced Adam into eating it too.
Ergo it’s all woman’s fault. As we will see the story actually supports no such
conclusion, but an awful lot of men in the Christian tradition have said that
it does.
Christians who have propounded the
doctrine of original sin have always based the doctrine on that story of Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Here’s the thing though. That story doesn’t
support the doctrine. The Jewish faith gets that truth. The story of Adam and
Eve was a Jewish story long before it became a Christian one, and Judaism has
no doctrine of original sin. So let’s take a close look at the story. You’ll
find it at Genesis 2:4b-3:24. You may already know the story. Most people in
our culture know it at least in general outline, but I want to go over it here
in some (perhaps excruciating) detail so we can see if it supports the doctrine
of original sin or not. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t. It is however a really good
and famous story that is worth spending some time with,
The story starts at Genesis 2:4b with
the earth made in one day not in the six it takes in Genesis 1. The Lord God, that is Yahweh God, “formed
man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life, and the man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7. Now, as is so often the
case with the Bible, we need to stop here to explain something that most people
don’t know. The Hebrew text doesn’t exactly say that God created man. It says
that God created “adam.” Not Adam. The Hebrew word “adam” is not a name, nor is
it the Hebrew word for man. It means something more like “earth creature” or
“dirt creature.” In the form “adamah” it means “creature born of earth.”[1]
Now allow me one more important
interjection here. I learned it from the great Catholic feminist theologian
Elizabeth A. Johnson. At this point in the story it makes no sense to call the
creature God has created “man.” “Man” refers to one side of the distinction
between man and woman. Man has meaning only when juxtaposed to woman. There is
as yet in this story no woman nor any creature that could be called women in
juxtaposition to man. No woman, therefore as yet no man.
The Lord
God puts adam in the Garden of Eden. This creature wasn’t created there, but
God puts the creature there. God has created
the garden with something called the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil in it. God commands adam: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the
day that you eat of it you shall die.” Genesis 2:16-17. Thus the first sin is
set up. God has given God’s creature adam a command. It is in a sense the first
law, the first commandment God gives anyone. “Thou shalt not eat of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil.”
Then God decides it is not good for
adam to be alone, so God sets about finding a “helper” to be adam’s “partner.”
God tries it first with “every animal of the field and every bird of the air.”
Genesis 2:18-19. God brings the animals to adam, and adam names them. In having
adam name the animals God is making adam God’s co-creator. In the ancient world
a thing wasn’t thought really to exist until it had a name. That may sound odd,
but when today we see something new we want to know what it’s called. We don’t
really know what it is until we know its name. Perhaps that need of ours to
know a thing’s name is a bit like the notion that a thing doesn’t exist until
it has a name. In any event adam names all the animals. In doing so he is
acting a bit like God at God’s direction.
But for adam “there was not found a
helper as his partner.” Genesis 2:20b. So we come to the famous story of Adam’s
rib, and I don’t mean the Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie. God puts the
earth creature into what we would probably call a coma. God takes one of adam’s
ribs, makes it into a woman, and brings the woman to adam. Adam says:
This is at last bone of my bones,
and flesh of my flesh,
This one shall be called Woman,h
for out of
Mani this one was
taken.
Here we get to the Hebrew words for
man and woman. The superscript h in this quote indicates a translator’s note in
the New Revised Standard Version that says “Heb ishhah.” The superscript
I directs us to a translator’s note that says “Heb ish.” The text doesn’t
call adam ish, man, until there is ishhah, woman, which supports
Elizabeth Johnson’s exegesis of this text. The text then somewhat oddly calls
the two people “the man and his wife.” How she got to be a wife before there
was any marriage law or any other woman to be other than wife is not explained.
We’re told that the man and the wife were naked but were not ashamed. Genesis
2:25. Chapter 2 of Genesis ends.
Chapter 3 begins with a reference to
the villain of the piece, the “serpent.” Note: Not snake. Serpent. We’re told
that the serpent “was more crafty than any other wild animal the Lord God had made.” Genesis 3:1a. The
serpent asked the woman, who is not yet called Eve, if God had told her not to
eat from any tree in the garden. We don’t know why the serpent asked that question
specifically, but it does. The woman tells the serpent that God told them not
to eat “of the fruit of the three that is in the middle of the garden.” We are
surely to assume that that is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She
says that they can’t even touch that fruit, for if they do they will die.”
Genesis 3:2-3. The serpent replies: “You will not die, for God knows that when
you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good
and evil.” Genesis 3:4-5. The serpent actually turns out to be right here. God
said they’d die if they ate the fruit of the forbidden tree. They eat it. They
don’t die.
Then comes the crucial moment:
So when the
woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the
eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its
fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he
ate. Genesis 3:6.
Thus the first people committed the first sin, if sin it was.
God had told them not to do it, but they did it anyway. They violated a divine
directive, something we have always understood as sin.
The woman, still not called Eve,
seems to have made two mistakes. She believed the serpent when it told her she
could eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and not die though God
had said that they would die if they ate it. It may seem odd that anyone would
believe a serpent, who somehow or other could speak in human language, rather
than God. Yet it’s not too hard to understand. The serpent was giving her what
she took to be good news. It was telling her something she wanted to hear. We
all are more inclined to believe something we like hearing than something we
don’t like hearing, aren’t we? The woman in the Garden of Eden sure was.
Her second mistake, if a mistake it
was, was to make a decision on the basis of what seemed good to her rather than
on the basis of a divine directive. She listens to the serpent, but she acts on
the basis of what she saw and what she knew. She let those things overcome what
she knew God had said. Of course as far as the story tells us God didn’t tell
the woman not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
God told the man not to do it. We have to assume I think that what the woman
actually knew was that the man had told her that God had told him not to eat
from that one tree. Her knowledge of God’s directive was less immediate than
the man’s. It was only hearsay.
She’s a lot like us in that regard.
Most of us know what we think we know about God’s will and ways not because
we’ve heard it directly from God but because we’ve been taught it. It’s easier
to disregard a directive we know only by hearsay than one we’ve learned firsthand.
So maybe we can cut the woman a little slack here, although of course she still
had some reason not to eat the fruit but ate it anyway.
Christians have for centuries made
the women the more evil transgressor here. They say she seduced the man into eating
the fruit God had told him not to eat. But is that really fair to the woman? I
don’t think so. First of all the story says nothing about seduction. All it
says is that the woman gave some of the fruit to the man, and he ate it. It
seems to me he’s actually more guilty than the woman is. The story says he was
with her. It’s a little vague on just when he was with her, but it seems
reasonable to assume that he’s heard what the serpent said as well as she did.
He too chooses to believe the serpent over God. Or maybe he just believed the
woman over God. Yet he’s the one who heard God’s directive directly from God,
which she probably had not. He was in a better position to say “no God said
don’t do it” than she was. Yet he too made the decision to eat, to do what God had
told him not to do.
So is the woman more guilty than the
man? I don’t think so. For ages Christian misogynists have said that she was.
When they do they make the story say something it doesn’t say. They’re doing
what Christian bigots of all stripes always do. They’re misusing something from
the Bible to support a hatred the Bible absolutely does not support. They’re
using the Bible to portray as divine something that is only a despicable human
prejudice. So let’s be done with the “she made him do it” exegesis of this
story. In the story she just doesn’t do that. The man makes his own decision
just as the woman does though he has more reason to make a different decision
than she does. The story clearly says the woman did wrong, but it doesn’t say
she somehow tricked or seduced the man into doing the same wrong. It just
doesn’t.
The transgression of the man and the
woman in eating the forbidden fruit has immediate consequences, though the
first consequence it has is, for me at least, unexpected. Here’s what happens
immediately upon the two people eating the forbidden fruit: “Then the eyes of
both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves
together and made loin cloths for themselves.” Genesis 3:7. We were told
earlier that the man and the woman were naked but were not ashamed. They eat
the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and all of sudden they
are ashamed. They cover their loins, something they previously had no reason to
do.
One of the things that puzzles me about
the story of Adam and Even is the way it presents human nakedness as inherently
shameful or evil. Whether it is good or bad for a person to be naked is after
all both entirely cultural and entirely contextual. Many human cultures are
much more relaxed about nudity than we uptight, Victorian white Americans
mostly are. Moreover, even in our culture there are situations in which nudity
is good not evil. It is good to be naked when bathing. It may be good to be
naked when undergoing a medical examination. It is good to be naked when you’re
making love with someone you truly love and who truly loves you. So nudity
simply is not necessarily shameful or evil. Yet the story of Adam and Eve treats it as though it were. Go figure.
As the story continues God finds out
what the two people have done, and it’s their knowledge of their nakedness that
tips God off. The God in this story is actually quite limited. We read that God
knows neither what the two people have done nor even where they are. See
Genesis 3:8-11. Some scholars try to explain away the lines that make God seem
so primitive. In a note to Genesis 3:9-11 in the HarperCollins Study Bible,
page 9, Joel Rosenberg says: “God knows of the couple’s whereabouts and deeds
but asks in order to elicit confession.” I think Rosenberg’s just wrong here.
The story simply does not say that God knows where the two people are or what
they have done. It says nothing about confession. The story of Adam and Eve is
a very ancient one. It isn’t surprising that it includes a quite primitive
image of God.
In any event, the Lord God takes an evening stroll in the
garden. The man and the woman hide themselves from God in the trees of the
garden. God doesn’t know where they are. God calls out to the man, “Where are
you?” The man replies, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was
afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” Genesis 3:10. Again God asks
the man a question you’d think God already knows the answer to but apparently
doesn’t: “Who told you that you were naked?” Genesis 3:11a.
There’s another odd thing going on
here that may be worth mentioning. The concept “naked” is another of those
concepts that has meaning only when juxtaposed to its opposite, in this case
clothed. Yet the man and the woman in the garden somehow know that they are
naked before anything has been said about clothes. They invent the first
clothes when they sew fig leaves together, but the way they know about
nakedness before they know about clothes is another way in which this story is
quite primitive.
Somehow the fact that the man knows
he is naked tips God off to his transgression of eating the forbidden fruit.
Apparently God knew that the first knowledge the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil would provide would be knowledge of nakedness. The man admits what he
did, and the tries to blame the woman. He says, “The woman whom you gave to be
with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Genesis 3:12. So God
confronts the woman, who blames the serpent: “The serpent tricked me, and I
ate.” Genesis 3:13b. These two had never heard of Harry Truman and his desk
sign “The Buck Stops Here.” They did the very human thing of passing the buck.
One of the tragedies of this story’s history is how men have gone along with
the man’s passing the buck and blaming not only the woman in the garden for the
first sin but all women for all sin.
God blames all three characters in
the story starting with the serpent. God creates woman’s dislike of snakes,
something I know well from my own family. More interesting perhaps is that God
turns the serpent into a snake. God says to the serpent, “upon your belly you
shall go….” Genesis 3:13b. The necessary implication is that until then the
serpent didn’t go upon its belly, that is, it wasn’t a snake. You’ve probably
seen depictions of a snake handing Eve an apple. Those depictions get the story
all wrong. The serpent isn’t a snake when it gives the woman the fruit of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The story never calls the fruit an
apple either, but never mind.
Then God turns to the woman. God says
one thing to her that just recognizes a human reality:
I will greatly increase your pangs
in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth
children….Genesis 3:16a,b.
In this part of what is presented as
a curse we see one primary purpose of this story. It is a myth told to explain
why certain things in human life are what they are. We’ll see the story
functioning in that way again when we get to what God says to the man. The
stories of ancient cultures often function in this way. We know how things are,
and we want to know why. Pre-scientific cultures had even less ability than we
do to come up with natural explanations of things. So they told stories to
explain how things are. Often those stories tie some human reality to an act or
the will of God or some god or goddess the way Genesis does here. Women suffer
pain during childbirth. We all know that. What this story has God say to the
woman, still not called Eve, gives at least some sort of explanation to that
human reality.
God says two more things to the
woman. One of them may simply be a reference to human sexuality or at least to
human heterosexuality. God says to her “yet your desire shall be for your
husband.” Genesis 3:16c. If that is simply a reference to female sexual desire
fair enough. I don’t know what else it could be.
The last thing God says to the woman
is far more problematic. God tells her that your husband “shall rule over you.”
Genesis 3:16c. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a product of
a radically anthropocentric culture. Men dominating women was how things were
in ancient Hebrew society. The tragedy of this line has been that people have
taken it to mean that men dominating women is God’s will. It isn’t. It can’t
be. The first, less ancient creation story in Genesis has both women and men
created in the image and likeness of God. Genesis 1:27. With God women and men
are equals. Neither has the right to dominate the other. Yet sexist human
societies have used this line to support their belief that men are superior to
woman and have not only the right but the duty to dominate them. We aren’t over
that diabolical corruption of God’s will yet.
Then God turns to the man. God sort
of buys into the man’s passing the buck to the woman. The first thing God says
to the man is, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife….” Genesis
3:17b. It is most unfortunate that this story has God say those words. Sexists
can use and have used them to say that a man should never listen to his wife.
Those of us who have been lucky enough to have been married to a woman who is
wiser than we are know how false that contention is. Anyone who understands the
true God-given equality between women and men knows how false that contention
is. The Bible attributing words like these to God is one of the most
unfortunate, destructive things about it. They are words of ancient (and
tragically contemporary) cultural prejudice not words of divine wisdom.
God then turns to what the man’s
actual fault, sin if you like, was. God issues the curse that will come upon
the man because he ate the forbidden fruit. God says:
[C]ursed is the ground because
of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the
days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring
forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of
the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground;
for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return. Genesis 3:17c-19.
It’s clear what this story is doing. Its author[2]
knows how hard and unreliable food production is, especially in an arid place
like Israel. People would naturally ask why life was so hard. We want it to be
easier. Why isn’t it? They had no meteorological science to explain their
climate. Things just were what they were. This story at least has the virtue of
giving an answer to why things were the way they were.
Of course most of us today are not
farmers. We have the luxury of not having to produce our own food. Yet we still
have to work hard. Perhaps we work hard to earn an income either through
employment or through running a business. Perhaps we work hard to make a home
and raise children. Whatever our work history has been, most of us know that
life requires hard work. To use this story’s metaphor, it requires the sweat of
our faces. Why? Why isn’t life easier? This story at least gives an answer to
that question, unconvincing as it may be to most of us today. It’s because of adam’s
sin.
Next the woman finally gets a name:
“The man named his wife Eve,l because she was the mother of all
living.” Genesis 3:20. The superscript l in the New Revised Standard Version
directs us to a translator’s note that says, “In Heb Eve resembles the
word for living.” Elizabeth Johnson, whom I’ve mentioned before in this
piece, teaches that like “adam” “eve” isn’t really a name. It’s a word that
means mother of all living. Be that as it may, it is only near the end of this
story that the woman gets a name. Sadly, many women in the Old Testament and
some in the New never get a name. At least here Eve finally got one, or at
least got a word that functions like one. God then makes garments of skins for
God’s two people and clothes them. Genesis 3:21.
Then we come to the conclusion of
this story, Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden. God does not
actually expel them from the garden because of the sin they have already
committed as we might expect. God expresses the divine concern that leads to
the expulsion this way: “Then the Lord
God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and
now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and live
forever.” Genesis 3:22. God is more concerned here about something Adam might
do in the future than God is about what adam has done in the past.
In these words of God we see what has
been God’s major concern about the two people God has created all along, though
God here refers only to the man not to the woman. God has created human
creatures not gods. God doesn’t want God’s people becoming gods or even like
gods. Originally only God possessed the knowledge of good and evil. God’s
people didn’t, and God didn’t want them to get it. That’s why God forbade them
to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But they ate
the forbidden fruit anyway and acquired knowledge of good and evil like God. In
this story, and in reality, only God is immortal. There is however in the
Garden of Eden a way in which God’s two people could become immortal. They
could eat of the tree of life. That would do the trick, and God really doesn’t
want the trick done. Just telling the people not to eat of the tree of life
wouldn’t be enough. God already tried that with the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil. It didn’t work.
So God resorts to a more drastic
measure. We read:
[T]herefore
the Lord God sent him forth from
the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out
the man; and at the east of the garden he placed the cherubim, with a sword
flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. Genesis 3:23-24.
The cherubim, by the way, are not cute, angelic children.
They are fierce winged creatures that are quite frightful. With the expulsion
of the man from the garden the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
ends.
It is odd that the story says that
God sends only the man out of the garden. It doesn’t say that God sent the
woman out of the garden or that she went with the man of her own accord. I can
think of two possible reasons for this oddity in the text. Perhaps we’re just
supposed to assume that the woman went with the man. I mean, she must have,
right? How else was the human race going to be propagated? There is, however, a
more intriguing possible explanation of why God does not send the woman out of
the garden.
God’s concern in sending the man out
of the garden is to prevent him from becoming like God and living forever by
eating of the tree of life. It would never have occurred to the culture that
produced this story that there was a risk of the woman becoming like God.
Ancient Israel’s God was the very male God Yahweh. The Hebrews’ earliest
conception of Yahweh was as the people’s war god. See Exodus 15:20-21. The song
Miriam sings there is probably the oldest verse in the Bible. In it Yahweh is
clearly only a war god. Over the centuries the Hebrews’ conception of Yahweh changed.
It became much more sophisticated. By the middle of the sixth century BCE they
had come to understand Yahweh as the one true universal God of all creation.
See for example Isaiah 44:6, written during the Babylonian exile. Yet in Hebrew
theology Yahweh never ceased being male. Yahweh’s pronoun is always he. The author of the story
of Adam and Eve could perhaps have imagined the male character Adam becoming
like the male God Yahweh. He would never have imagined the female character Eve
ever being able to do any such thing. We see a tragic echo of that distorted
thinking today when people say that women can’t be Christian priests because
Jesus was a man. Genesis 1, which dates from centuries after the oral origins
of Genesis 2 and 3, says that God created both female and male human beings in
the image and likeness of God. The creator(s) of the story of Adam and Eve
believed no such thing. Yahweh was male, therefore only a human male could ever
become like God. Perhaps that’s why the story has God sending only the male out
of the garden.
Now let’s return to where I started
this piece so many words ago. Have you noticed what’s missing from this story?
Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, does it say that all future human generations
would be stained with original sin because of the sin of Adam and Eve. The
story just doesn’t say that. Some of the curses on Adam and Eve describe common
conditions of human life, but that’s a long way from saying that the sin of
Adam and Eve was passed on to every future human through the act of sexual
intercourse the way the doctrine of original sin contends. Judaism, perhaps
unsurprisingly, understands this Jewish story better than Christianity has.
Judaism has this story, but it has no doctrine of original sin. It knows that
the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden just doesn’t support much less
require any such doctrine.
So let’s take this story for what it
is, not for what it isn’t. It is an ancient creation story. It gives an account
primarily of where human beings come from and why their life is the way it is. It
isn’t history. It never happened as a matter of fact. The only character in the
story who is real is God. Yet the God of this story isn’t the God we know. The
God of this story is Creator, but that God is also very limited, as we have
seen. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a very ancient story
that comes from a very ancient culture very different from ours. Let’s leave it
at that, shall we?
I do however need to say a bit more
about what follows when we say that the story of Adam and Eve does not support
the doctrine of original sin. The idea that sin is transmitted from generation
to generation through sexual intercourse just doesn’t make sense. Neither do we
much like the notion that human nature is somehow intrinsically corrupt. Most
of us don’t think of ourselves that way. We like to think that we are more
capable of being good than the doctrine of original sin says we are.
Yet I do not find it hard to
understand why Christianity developed the doctrine of original sin in the first
place. When we look at human history, or for that matter at how so many humans
behave today, it is hard not to conclude that there is something radically
disordered about human nature. At least since the rise of civilizations six
millennia ago or more, violence has been the human way. So have avarice, covetousness,
envy, jealousy, and other wrongful acts and attitudes. Human beings, especially
men, far too often (once being too often) misuse their God-given sexuality as a
weapon rather than as a gift. Betrayal and treachery are frequent players in
human life. God created us as centered selves, but we so often corrupt that
nature of ours into selfishness and concern only with what’s good for us. The
wealthy exploit the poor. Majority races and ethnicities oppress minority races
and ethnicities the world over. Men dominate, oppress, abuse, and discriminate
against women. Able-bodied people discriminate against people with
disabilities. Straight people discriminate against gay people. Humans across
the globe abuse the earth, treating it as if it were there only for them. Yes,
humans also do a lot of good, but the list of human horribles just goes on and
on.
The doctrine of original sin at least
has the virtue of offering an explanation of sorts for what can so readily seem
the disorder inherent in human nature. When we reject the doctrine of original
sin we’re unavoidably faced with he necessity of coming up with some other
explanation for why we humans so pervasively misbehave the way we do. People
have tried many times to offer such an alternative explanation. Some say it’s
biological. Others say it’s cultural. Some say we’re born that way without
quite meaning what the doctrine of original sin means by saying the same thing.
Some say we learn to be that way, blaming human civilization and human culture.
The list of explanations for human misbehavior is nearly as long as the list of
human misbehaviors.
I wish I had a definitive replacement
for the doctrine of original sin, but I don’t. I don’t think Matthew Fox’s
notion of “original blessing” is the answer because I think human corruption is
more pervasive than Fox does. The best I can do is say that I believe that
human misbehavior is a result of the combination of our evolutionary biology
and the influences of human civilization. We are animals. That’s not a slam,
it’s just a fact. We evolved over an enormous length of time. Sometimes natural
selection favored the violent over the nonviolent. I think Robert Ardry
overstates the matter in his book African Genesis, but the scene early
in the film “2001 A Space Odyssey” in which an ape discovers a weapon to the
opening bars of Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” speaks a good deal of truth.[3]
Perhaps our large brain played more of a role in human evolution than violence
did. I hope so. Yet to this day we use our large brains to invent ever more
effective and efficient ways of killing each other. We seem very much to be the
products of both nature and nurture. Far too often nature and nurture produce a
life we can only call disordered.
So let’s give the story of Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden its due. It is a very ancient story and quite a
primitive one. It presents human androcentrism as divinely ordained, which
human androcentrism certainly is not. It presents a God who takes human-like
strolls and is so far from omniscient that God has no idea what God’s people
have done or even where they are. Yet in the way of ancient mythology it does
portray God as Creator, and it offers a primitive mythic explanation of why
some key parts of human life are the way they are. Don’t be tricked into
thinking the story is history. Don’t be tricked into taking it as fact. It
isn’t. Still, it is a good story. Maybe the best we can do is take it and leave
it at that.
[1]
See the HarperCollins Study Bible note to Genesis 2:20 on page 8.
[2] I use the term author for convenience only. This story certainly originated in ancient Hebrew oral tradition. The form in which we have it was set down in the late sixth or early fifth century BCE as part of the creation of the current form of the Torah. The Torah was created by priests after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian exile. There is no one author, or at least we have no way of knowing who that author was if there was one.
[3]
The title means “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Zarathustra here refers to a
character the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche created and called the Ȕbermensch,
the superman.
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