Re "But the punishments describe nothing more than adult human life."
Tell it to the serpent. The serpent who only told the truth and he gets his legs stripped away as well as all other serpents of his kind, for doing nothing wrong, for being the "adult in the room" so to speak.
I also note that fantasy Christians claim the serpent is Satan in disguise, but the serpent does no wrong and if Satan were impersonating a serpent, why did Yahweh punish all serpents for something they did not do?
I guess people can't stop making a fantasy more fantastic.
Losing your legs and eating dust isn't a term of adult life the way childbirth and farming are. It's an etiology, an origin tale for why snakes crawl on the ground, which is a different machine from the human curses. So you're right that the sentence as written stretches over the serpent, and the piece would be cleaner splitting the two.
On Satan, you've named the contradiction the disguise reading can't solve. The serpent-as-Satan idea isn't in Genesis. It arrives centuries later and gets cemented by the New Testament and church tradition. The Genesis serpent is just one of the animals Yahweh made, and the curse falls on the animal and all its offspring forever. If the real culprit were a disguised spirit, cursing the costume and every snake born after makes no sense. The text punishes a literal serpent because the authors meant a literal one, and as a snake it symbolized wisdom. It informs, it doesn't deceive.
Re "Without the serpent there’s not much to tell, just two people standing naked in a garden forever, never aging, never choosing, never becoming anything."
There is no evidence that they were immortal at this stage. In fact they were kicked out of the garden for not being trustworthy, the quote indicating that they could also eat from the Tree of Life and "become like us" which I suppose means immortal.
I agree. However, the reason they were kicked out had more to do with knowing too much than with trustworthiness. Once you gain wisdom from the tree of knowledge, you can't go back to a life with no responsibilities, no shame about your nakedness, none of it. The door only swings one way.
Think of it like this. A 5-year-old boy and his 4-year-old sister can share a bath, and nobody blinks, because there's nothing there to think about. The kids have no concept of their bodies as anything that needs covering. Put a 15-year-old and his 14-year-old sister in that same situation, and neither of them would want it, because both have crossed into the awareness that makes it impossible.
Re "That second phrase, “knowledge of good and evil,” gets flattened in most retellings into “knowing right from wrong,” as if Adam and Eve were moral infants who couldn’t tell virtue from vice until they ate."
I think "being born yesterday" is an apt description of them both and the implication associated with the phrase is they didn't know shit from Shinola.
Right, and that idiom fits better than the moral reading does. "Born yesterday" carries the sense the story is going for, not innocent of wrongdoing, but innocent of knowing anything, easy to take advantage of. Adam and Eve follow the one rule because they were told to, not because they grasp what breaking it costs.
Exactly! Eden and Gilgamesh are running the same machinery, and the Enkidu sequence is the clearest case of it, innocence among the animals, a woman bringing knowledge and sex, then no road back to the wild. The Israelite authors lived in a world that knew the Mesopotamian material well, so Genesis is working a tradition its neighbors already had.
It occurs to me that maybe it’s also a reflection of something else. A mythic story of the transition from hunter gatherer to settlement and the cultivation of crops. A cultural memory of a time before their lives were given over to toiling in the soil for food, building social hierarchies.
Haven't read the Zevit itself, but I know the argument and wrote a piece on it on Medium a couple of years ago. Might be time to revisit it.
As you must already know the claim is that tsela doesn't mean rib. It's an architectural word everywhere else it shows up in the Hebrew Bible, the side of a building, the side of the ark, and Zevit makes the case that what God takes from the adam is the baculum, the penis bone virtually every other mammal has and humans conspicuously don't.
It explains the raphe, the seam running up the scrotum and perineum, as the scar where the flesh was closed up, and it accounts for why the man lost the one bone every other mammal keeps. Makes more sense than a rib. I should pull that old piece back out.
Of course there's a lot more to Zevit's book than that. He is an expert in Hebrew, and he interprets the text from the Jewish perspective. For example, 4 people were expelled from the garden. The contest between Cain and Abel was over who married the pretty sister. And the story has Iron Age details; when Adam and Eve realized they were naked, they wore aprons, which was appropriate for a family space. But they hid behind bushes when God appeared because the aprons were not enough for outside the family (thus expressing the alienation from God).
The story is obviously an attempt to evade the problem of evil by shifting responsibility for suffering onto humans whilst still maintaining that God is all powerful and all loving.
first time i've ever heard any kind of informed interpretation of the story. Of course most westerners miss all of the metaphorical meaning. From the eastern world view, it can be seen as a symbol of the incarnation of the spirit as it enters and becomes bound to the material body. The tree is a symbol of the capacity to judge, the human mind acquiring the good/evil dichotomy which is the basis of your emotional reactions to everyone in your environment. That's the first stage of the soul's confinement in the body. The second stage, needless to say, is sex. They know they're naked (IOW, they know lust), now they're well and truly stuck, and the only way out is in death.
Thanks, that's a generous reading and a coherent one. What you're describing, spirit descending into matter and getting bound there in stages, has a long pedigree. It's the Platonic and Gnostic line, where embodiment is a fall and the body is where the soul gets trapped, with the two trees and then the nakedness marking the rungs on the way down. Read that way the story does hold together as you've laid it out, judgment first, sexual awareness second, death as the only exit.
In the follow-up piece I'll get into how we decode the story, and why the coming-of-age reading is the one most scholars land on.
Yes. Posted this Article today on Genesis 3, and the Sumerian, cuneiform Creation stories comparing the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Atra-Hasis Epic, and the Ethiopic Book of Adam and Eve to Genesis Chapts. 3-11 … and much more. Scroll down the Tables of Contents I provide at this link. May be of interest to you. 🙏🔥
Re "But the punishments describe nothing more than adult human life."
Tell it to the serpent. The serpent who only told the truth and he gets his legs stripped away as well as all other serpents of his kind, for doing nothing wrong, for being the "adult in the room" so to speak.
I also note that fantasy Christians claim the serpent is Satan in disguise, but the serpent does no wrong and if Satan were impersonating a serpent, why did Yahweh punish all serpents for something they did not do?
I guess people can't stop making a fantasy more fantastic.
Losing your legs and eating dust isn't a term of adult life the way childbirth and farming are. It's an etiology, an origin tale for why snakes crawl on the ground, which is a different machine from the human curses. So you're right that the sentence as written stretches over the serpent, and the piece would be cleaner splitting the two.
On Satan, you've named the contradiction the disguise reading can't solve. The serpent-as-Satan idea isn't in Genesis. It arrives centuries later and gets cemented by the New Testament and church tradition. The Genesis serpent is just one of the animals Yahweh made, and the curse falls on the animal and all its offspring forever. If the real culprit were a disguised spirit, cursing the costume and every snake born after makes no sense. The text punishes a literal serpent because the authors meant a literal one, and as a snake it symbolized wisdom. It informs, it doesn't deceive.
Re "Without the serpent there’s not much to tell, just two people standing naked in a garden forever, never aging, never choosing, never becoming anything."
There is no evidence that they were immortal at this stage. In fact they were kicked out of the garden for not being trustworthy, the quote indicating that they could also eat from the Tree of Life and "become like us" which I suppose means immortal.
I agree. However, the reason they were kicked out had more to do with knowing too much than with trustworthiness. Once you gain wisdom from the tree of knowledge, you can't go back to a life with no responsibilities, no shame about your nakedness, none of it. The door only swings one way.
Think of it like this. A 5-year-old boy and his 4-year-old sister can share a bath, and nobody blinks, because there's nothing there to think about. The kids have no concept of their bodies as anything that needs covering. Put a 15-year-old and his 14-year-old sister in that same situation, and neither of them would want it, because both have crossed into the awareness that makes it impossible.
Re "That second phrase, “knowledge of good and evil,” gets flattened in most retellings into “knowing right from wrong,” as if Adam and Eve were moral infants who couldn’t tell virtue from vice until they ate."
I think "being born yesterday" is an apt description of them both and the implication associated with the phrase is they didn't know shit from Shinola.
Right, and that idiom fits better than the moral reading does. "Born yesterday" carries the sense the story is going for, not innocent of wrongdoing, but innocent of knowing anything, easy to take advantage of. Adam and Eve follow the one rule because they were told to, not because they grasp what breaking it costs.
Obviously the story of Adam and Eve was Jewish interpretation of Gilgamesh just like Tanner
Exactly! Eden and Gilgamesh are running the same machinery, and the Enkidu sequence is the clearest case of it, innocence among the animals, a woman bringing knowledge and sex, then no road back to the wild. The Israelite authors lived in a world that knew the Mesopotamian material well, so Genesis is working a tradition its neighbors already had.
It occurs to me that maybe it’s also a reflection of something else. A mythic story of the transition from hunter gatherer to settlement and the cultivation of crops. A cultural memory of a time before their lives were given over to toiling in the soil for food, building social hierarchies.
Have you read Ziony Zevit's What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?
If not, it wasn't his rib.
Haven't read the Zevit itself, but I know the argument and wrote a piece on it on Medium a couple of years ago. Might be time to revisit it.
As you must already know the claim is that tsela doesn't mean rib. It's an architectural word everywhere else it shows up in the Hebrew Bible, the side of a building, the side of the ark, and Zevit makes the case that what God takes from the adam is the baculum, the penis bone virtually every other mammal has and humans conspicuously don't.
It explains the raphe, the seam running up the scrotum and perineum, as the scar where the flesh was closed up, and it accounts for why the man lost the one bone every other mammal keeps. Makes more sense than a rib. I should pull that old piece back out.
Of course there's a lot more to Zevit's book than that. He is an expert in Hebrew, and he interprets the text from the Jewish perspective. For example, 4 people were expelled from the garden. The contest between Cain and Abel was over who married the pretty sister. And the story has Iron Age details; when Adam and Eve realized they were naked, they wore aprons, which was appropriate for a family space. But they hid behind bushes when God appeared because the aprons were not enough for outside the family (thus expressing the alienation from God).
The story is obviously an attempt to evade the problem of evil by shifting responsibility for suffering onto humans whilst still maintaining that God is all powerful and all loving.
It's a reasonable explanation. Thanks for sharing.
first time i've ever heard any kind of informed interpretation of the story. Of course most westerners miss all of the metaphorical meaning. From the eastern world view, it can be seen as a symbol of the incarnation of the spirit as it enters and becomes bound to the material body. The tree is a symbol of the capacity to judge, the human mind acquiring the good/evil dichotomy which is the basis of your emotional reactions to everyone in your environment. That's the first stage of the soul's confinement in the body. The second stage, needless to say, is sex. They know they're naked (IOW, they know lust), now they're well and truly stuck, and the only way out is in death.
Thanks, that's a generous reading and a coherent one. What you're describing, spirit descending into matter and getting bound there in stages, has a long pedigree. It's the Platonic and Gnostic line, where embodiment is a fall and the body is where the soul gets trapped, with the two trees and then the nakedness marking the rungs on the way down. Read that way the story does hold together as you've laid it out, judgment first, sexual awareness second, death as the only exit.
In the follow-up piece I'll get into how we decode the story, and why the coming-of-age reading is the one most scholars land on.
that would be great, looking forward to it....
Hi Mike!
Was the answer satisfying?
https://www.theunholytruth.com/p/decoding-the-garden-of-eden
Brilliant reasoning. But how do you know that they meant it that way?
It’s a great question, and the answer will be revealed in the upcoming piece: Decoding the Garden of Eden.
Yes. Posted this Article today on Genesis 3, and the Sumerian, cuneiform Creation stories comparing the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Atra-Hasis Epic, and the Ethiopic Book of Adam and Eve to Genesis Chapts. 3-11 … and much more. Scroll down the Tables of Contents I provide at this link. May be of interest to you. 🙏🔥
https://substack.com/@jt913/note/p-211419005?r=19ia12
would love to know where the cherub holding the sword guarding the eastern gate fit into this analogy?
But the serpent did lie. He told Eve that she and Adam would not die after eating the fruit, but mortality was the exact punishment for doing so.