Genesis 3

So much packed into so few words, and so difficult to interpret! We seem to love nothing more than to project our vision of the ideal man on primitive peoples. As we saw already with Harrison Ford's old movie The Mosquito Coast, so also with Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, we can't depict primitive Man without imbuing him with our vision of how we ought to be, how we were before society encrusted us with its crippling notions of right and wrong. In Auel's case, those encrustations prevent us from having lots of freewheeling, well, if you've read the books you know what I mean. But the first to do so was the Bible, and no one has ever done it better. Here's the text:

Now, the snake was the most subtle of all the wild animals that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, 'Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?'

There's a real chicken-and-egg problem here. God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit. If they've never sinned, how can they feel tempted to disobey? The serpent breaks the cycle.

The woman answered the snake, 'We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden.
But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, "You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death." '
Then the snake said to the woman, 'No! You will not die!
God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.'

Here we have the basic temptation of mankind, to make gods of ourselves, to put ourselves in a position that only God can occupy. Whether it's the sin of pride, where we claim credit for the gifts God has given us as if we had invented them ourselves; or the sin of passing judgment on others, where we place ourselves on the throne of God as if we were qualified to judge the hearts of others; this is the sin that underlies all the others. It's been discussed so much elsewhere that it hardly needs expansion.

The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was enticing for the wisdom that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.

Again, the paradox of a complete innocent succumbing to temptation is mind-bending, but we mustn't tarry.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realised that they were naked. So they sewed fig-leaves together to make themselves loin-cloths

Shame, self-consciousness, etc.... This is another of the most commonly commented-on verses.

The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden.

Now this is wonderful. What was the state of mankind before the Fall? What was his true, uncorrupted nature? He walked with God in the garden of Eden, "in the cool of the day." It is sin that prevents us from meeting God face to face. People wonder why God doesn't show himself more clearly. Rather, they should ask why they place the barrier of sin between themselves and God. The experience of the saints bears this out.

But Yahweh God called to the man. 'Where are you?' he asked.
'I heard the sound of you in the garden,' he replied. 'I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.'
'Who told you that you were naked?' he asked. 'Have you been eating from the tree I forbade you to eat?'
The man replied, 'It was the woman you put with me; she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.'

Love this; they've only just started sinning and they've already learned how to pass the buck.

Then Yahweh God said to the woman, 'Why did you do that?' The woman replied, 'The snake tempted me and I ate.'
Then Yahweh God said to the snake, 'Because you have done this, Accursed be you of all animals wild and tame! On your belly you will go and on dust you will feed as long as you live.

There's a bit of How the Rabbit Lost His Tail fairy tale charm here, but since the serpent represents Satan it also contains a real curse for the fallen angels.

I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; it will bruise your head and you will strike its heel.

This is the verse that is always said to be a foreshadowing of Christ, the woman a type of Mary and her offspring Jesus. I guess because of Paul's use of Adam as an anti-type of Christ (if that's the correct word). Thus Jesus crushes the head the Satan the serpent.

To the woman he said: I shall give you intense pain in childbearing, you will give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you.

To the man he said, 'Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat, Accursed be the soil because of you! Painfully will you get your food from it as long as you live.
It will yield you brambles and thistles, as you eat the produce of the land.
By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it.'

To our modern ears whenever Scripture speaks of men dominating women the verses fairly shout at us off the page. But this author isn't saying that the true nature of women is to be dominated by men. Rather, he's saying that the state of powerlessness of women in this ancient pastoral community is one of the curses resulting from the Fall. It's part of the suffering introduced into the world by the sins of mankind.

I hesitate to raise the subject, in the event that someone someday actually reads this post, but it seems to me that those who claim the Genesis story is sexist because it blames the woman Eve for the Fall more than the man Adam have it backward. It seems to me that the author of Genesis looked at the state of women in his society and concluded that their suffering was somewhat greater than the suffering of men, and so gave them a 'first among equals' status in the story of the origin of sin.

Overall, we see here that pain and suffering are the results of sin. As we saw in the post on Buddhism and Original Sin, this is similar to the conclusion that Buddhists have come to with their concept of dukkha, that suffering in the world is the result of a human nature that is out-of-joint, that is not aligned with its true self.

For dust you are and to dust you shall return.'

This is a verse of breathtaking poetic beauty.

The man named his wife 'Eve' because she was the mother of all those who live.
Yahweh God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them.

This is touching. God doesn't just toss Adam and Eve out on their ears, yell 'Good riddance,' and slam the door. He clothes them - prepares them for live in the outer world - before expelling them.

Then Yahweh God said, 'Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live for ever!'
So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he had been taken.
He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the great winged creatures and the fiery flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Obviously Christians see in the tree of life a type of Christ, who mankind cannot now access until properly prepared.

This leads to the question of how we go about fixing the state of brokenness in which we find ourselves. As Huston Smith says in World's Religions, "For the rift to be healed we need to know its cause, and the Second Noble Truth identifies it. The cause of life's dislocation is tanha....Tanha is a specific kind of desire, the desire for private fulfillment." Therefore a project of finding disciplines that will enable the annihilation of desire is the answer.

This is not the conclusion one would draw from the Genesis story however. Genesis tells us that the fallen nature of Man is a result of sin, and sin came about because of the loss of innocence - the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. That is a jinn that cannot be put back in its bottle; there's no point trying to unlearn the difference between good and evil. The only direction we can go from here is forward, which is why Christ had to come into the world. Only God himself could pull off the impossible task at hand: to lead us out of our current state of brokenness and into an even greater destiny than we would have had in our previous state of innocence, that of true adopted children of God.