Read Genesis 2.4-3
It’s so hard to read this story without other voices telling us what it means. Centuries of readers before us, from Augustine to our Sunday School teacher to skit writers for tv, have put ideas in us of what the story says and what we should take away.
I mean, there is no apple in the story. The apple (a popular fruit in Europe, not Mesopotamia) becomes the forbidden fruit years later when the scriptures are translated into Latin. It makes a nice pun because in Latin apple and bad are the same word. Genesis 3 doesn’t say anywhere that the serpent is Satan; that’s John Milton’s version of Paradise Lost in which Satan chooses to inhabit the serpent. (Well, okay, we can’t blame it all on Milton; Paul make some allusions, and 2 Enoch causes trouble, but all that is long after Genesis was written.) We call the story the Fall, but it doesn’t say that anywhere, nor does it mention original sin. We read this text through lenses other people have made for us. Do they clarify or obscure the text?
This story has been far more of a foundation story for Christians than it has for the Jewish people. Jewish tradition reads these stories as a sort of primeval prologue to the patriarchs. We Christians want to build our theology upon it. I find myself wondering sometimes if that’s an unfortunate move.
Try opening the book and just reading. Clear your mind, say a prayer, and just read. What do you notice? What leaps out at you? How do you feel about what is happening?
I am struck that humankind is made of the common dust of a rainless earth and the very breath of God. In some ways that explains what happens in the rest of Genesis and in the other sixty five books. In this creation account, it doesn’t say that we are made in God’s image. This account was probably written about three or four hundred years before that in Genesis one. It doesn’t say that we are created in the image of God, but God’s Spirit is what enlivens us. So, in both accounts, we are made and we are very much not God. But in both accounts, there is something of God in us. How lovely. How true.
I read this rabbinic story in Bill Moyers book on Genesis: the rabbi says that if we want to keep balance in our lives, we should each have two pieces of paper. One says “I am but dust and ashes.” When you need that bit of wisdom, read that. The other says, “Bishvili Nivra haslam” which means “For my sake, the universe was created.” You might have one that says “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world?” and another that says “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” If you are really brave, you could give copies of the verses to your spouse or a best friend and allow them to flash a card at the appropriate time. That would require a great deal of trust.
That also brings me to the creation of Eve in this account. Some people have read this as a story of subordination, but I think it says more about interdependence and essential sameness. “Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.” What could mean more to us? While we are so often aware of the “otherness” of people, of how hard it is to know what they are thinking or feeling, of what a challenge it is to see the world through another’s eyes, this story calls forth the possibility that two could act as one. I find it rather astonishing. And hopeful. God calls to unity and relationship again and again and again and again. It seems to be what we are made for.
And unity and relationship seem to be what is broken when Eve and Adam eat the fruit that was forbidden to them. A voice of a creature God created, for God made the serpent( and in chapter one at least, declared it to be good), this voice suggests disobedience, makes a case for acting against what God has said. Why did God put the tree there in the first place? And isn’t knowledge good? Don’t we seem to be made for it? If we are created in the image of God, wouldn’t we want to know, to make choices, to be free to act, to learn, to try again. Yes, the terrible and fearful reality is that we so often act badly, even tragically, but not to be able to act. . . .?
And yet, we are not God. We are largely dust. God sets boundaries; that’s how creation comes into being in the first place in chapter one. God separates one thing from another. If God is God and we are not, God can tell us what to do. And we know that when one person in a relationship does something to break the trust, does something the other has forbidden, then there is pain and loss and sometimes exile. One of the writers in that Bill Moyers book on Genesis uses the metaphor of marriage and fidelity and infidelity (a common biblical image) to speak about what happens in the Garden. Walter Brueggemann (my very favorite Old Testament scholar!) writes, “You count on fidelity, but if it’s a real marriage, it’s not a closed book. With God, everything is always open for freedom and risk and healing and forgiveness and homecoming. The relationship always has to be renewed and rearticulated because a gamut of potential infidelities is always available.” I can break God’s heart in ten thousand different ways. And God has at least that many ways of forgiving and of making life between us possible again.