Genesis 2:15–17, 3:24 (NRSVUE)
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘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.’ … He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.”
Introduction
Genesis 2:4b–3:24 has generally been understood by both Christians and Jews as an account of how God created the first man and woman, and how these first disobeyed God and were subsequently expelled from God’s special garden, the Garden of Eden. As influential as this story has been on the development of both religions, the text itself is ambiguous. As a result, it has produced a myriad of interpretations and disagreements that continue to this day.
Walter Brueggemann, one of the world’s foremost Old Testament scholars, states that “No text in Genesis (or likely in the entire Bible) has been more used, interpreted, and misunderstood” than Genesis 2:4b–3:24. He suggests that the most important task, given the current situation, is “to distinguish between the statement of the text and the superstructure laid upon it…by careless, popular theology and dogmatic church tradition” (Brueggemann 41).
For example, interpreting the text within the purview of Christianity leads to the serpent becoming “Satan,” Adam and Eve’s disobedience becoming “Original Sin,” and their subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden becoming “The Fall”—all concepts that one could interpret from the text, but that are not explicitly stated as such.
Scientific advances in the 19th century also brought with them, in no short measure, new interpretational challenges that prompted a wave of reactionary, wooden, literal understandings which treat the text as if it is some type of scientific treatise on the origins of life. Peter Enns, Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University’s Theology Dept., sees modern literal/fundamentalist interpretations as “rooted in a precommitment to read the Bible literally at virtually every point despite evidence to the contrary” and “avoid engaging science by reinterpreting it to conform to that conviction” (Enns 17).
According to Enns, such an approach does more harm than good, robs the text of its true meaning, and is nothing but a misunderstanding, plain and simple (Enns 72). Rejecting literal interpretations of this creation myth for metaphorical ones is not an exclusively modern attitude towards scripture: Origen, one of Christianity’s most brilliant theologians, already questioned the intelligence of those who used such a strict approach as early as the 3rd century C.E. (Borg 70).
Modern Scholarship
In The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins, Professor Enns points out two important developments in the 19th century that inform modern scholarship’s views of Genesis and the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole: Biblical Archaeology, and a better understanding of when exactly the Pentateuch was written, and by whom, by way of Biblical Criticism.
The growing field of Biblical Archaeology would set Israel and its texts within a historical context that would inform our understanding of its scriptures, providing us with external evidence to paint a picture of the social, political, and cultural settings in which these traditions took form.
The field of Biblical Criticism, in turn, would point us to internal evidence, allowing us to create an even deeper understanding of the world that gave birth to the Bible. As a result, by combining these two disciplines, Biblical scholars now see the Hebrew Scriptures in their current form as a response to Israel’s Babylonian captivity (586–539 B.C.E.), an attempt at defining their identity as a people who, under foreign control, were now returning to their homeland.
Professor James Kugel, an Orthodox Jewish Bible scholar who teaches at both Bar-Ilan University in Israel and at Harvard, points out how the Babylonian Exile was a “cataclysmic event for the Jews: not only were they now a conquered people, but many of them, including the country’s leadership, were forcibly relocated to Babylon” (Kugel 8).
Among those relocated were most of Israel’s political and intellectual leadership, leaving the nation with a political and social landscape that would need to be rebuilt from the ground up upon their return to the homeland. Those returning were not an intellectually homogenous group in any way, shape, or form.
Kugel explains: “Those returning exiles were not of one mind as to what should happen next: Who was to rule Judah—some member of the royal family, or the priests who had controlled the (now-destroyed) temple, or yet some other group? And should the returnees—as the Persians expected—settle meekly into being a minor province in the Persian Empire, under the control of a distant regime? Or should they wait for the opportunity to gain a measure of political autonomy, even independence?” (Kugel 9).
Despite this collectively incongruent outlook on how to reorder things, one thing was for certain: the only thing that now connected them to their past was their library of sacred texts. As such, despite all the disparate opinions, everyone used these ancient writings to make their case.
Some, argues Kugel, did this by retelling the glorious past while simultaneously introducing deliberate changes, via way of editing or even by retelling the stories using fictional narratives to help give shape to the future. So, it is within this quandary that things start to make sense.
Proto-Israel
With Adam and Eve, Enns sees some elements that seem to suggest that this has nothing to do with human origins, but with Israel’s origin—a way for Israel to make sense of its then-current situation. Admitting that seeing Adam as Israel is not the only way to read it, Enns continues:
“The Adam story mirrors Israel’s story from exodus to exile. God creates a special person, Adam; places him in a special land, the garden; and gives him a law as a stipulation of continued communion with God (not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). Adam and Eve disobey the command and as a result are cursed…but primarily their punishment is death and exile from paradise. So too Israel was ‘created’ at the exodus…and brought to the good and spacious land of Canaan, a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ (e.g., Exod. 3:8, 17; 13:5)—a description of super-abundance with rich ancient Near Eastern overtones that evoke images of paradise. Israel also has a law to keep, in this case the law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. But Israel continually disobeys the law, which eventually results in an exile from the land God gave them” (Enns 119).
As such, like all ancient origin myths, Israel’s should also be seen as a struggle to tell its own story, and not everyone else’s (that includes the universe, humanity, Christians, etc.). Adam can be seen as a “proto-Israel” (Enns 118): a template to make sense of their struggles over the land.
Thus, the story of ancient Israel is set in motion in the Garden of Eden: obey God’s commandments and live in the land he gave to you; disobey God’s commandments and be exiled from the land. Genesis, then, is not a story about how the world began, or about how “sin” originated, but of how Israel began—Genesis is a story where Israel wrote its present back into its primordial past.
Works Cited
- Brueggemann, Walter A. Genesis. J. Knox, 1982.
- Enns, Peter. The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins. Baker Pub. Group, 2012.
- Borg, Marcus J. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally. Harper San Francisco, 2002.
- Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. Free Press, 2008.
