Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Who is the author of Genesis

I was thinking that the best way to determine the historical validity of Adam and Eve is to look at the surrounding cultures, their belief systems and then work on what Genesis is trying to tell us in light of this.  This is a good thing to do, but, who and when it was written down could tell us a lot too.

I thought it was Moses.  The guy who brought us Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  Well...


It was probably written in the post-exilic period.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

I am Searching for Prophetic Meaning in a Myth

Just like the title says, I want to focus this blog on what Genesis is saying to us, to get here, I need to dispel common notions, interpretations and understandings of Genesis, without throwing the baby out with the bath-water.  I think I have written why Genesis ch. 2-3 cannot be literal (I will leave the Paul argument out of it for now, but I do have an excellent link about that for later).  Getting caught up in wether or not Genesis is an historical account we are supposed to be reading literally allows 98% of evangelicals to miss the whole point, meaning and message of Genesis.  I am trying to find out what God wanted his people to understand about himself and their relationship to him from the story.

For those in the literal camp, just think, for a moment, why Genesis isn't scientific.  Would it do any good for God to explain genetics?  Even Darwin didn't know or understand genetics (he used a theory of heredity, which preceded genetics).  Darwin could see evidence for evolution through the fossil record, biogeography, comparative anatomy and artificial selection, since then more and more evidence has piled up to support evolution (carbon dating, more fossils, genetics, mapping genomes - esp. the human's, monkey's, and soon Neanderthal's).  But God's purpose in Genesis is not to explain to us the workings of the universe, for that he gave us brians and natural curiosity.  God's purpose is to restore humans to himself, in a nutshell.  Getting into a scientific explanation would seriously detract from his purpose.

To illustrate, I am going to pick on my poor grade 8 gym teacher. 

Our grade eight gym teacher taught the whole class gym, and once a year health.  Not the homeroom teachers we all knew and loved, not community health nurse, but the school gym teacher.  He was not impressed.  We had to learn about sex ed.  So, he taught us mitosis and meiosis.  Now, I  was not a teacher back when I was in Jr. High, but I think it is a safe bet to say that sex ed. was supposed to be about choices, maybe birth control, perhaps.  I am pretty sure it wasn't meant to substitute a biology class.  Teaching grade eights about cell division, although technically correct, misses the point.

Why would God give ancient Hebrews a science lesson?  What words would He use?  How does one explain genetics, selection, and mutations, when they don't even know that women contributed to a child's makeup? That's right, Adam's seed was their understanding of how babies were made, plant a seed (plant or human) and grow it in a field (or womb).  Hence we all get Adam's sin, not Eve's.  God doesn't bother to correct this, it's not what he wants to say, so why do we keep letting our need for literalism get in the way of the message?

So God is letting his people know that he once walked among us, making our lives easy.  Our sin drove him away and we are now separated from him, life is not easy and we are now sinners.  I don't know how literally we can take any of the Adam and Eve story.  I would like to think that parts are real.  That is tough though.

If Adam and Eve are based on a Mesopotamian myth then it would make sense to go digging into the two stories and compare and contrast them.

If the Adam and Eve story is about the Hebrews' fall from grace and current situation in Babylon, it would make sense to compare it to Israel's history.  From life in the promised land (garden of Paradise) to loss of Israel/captivity (exile from Eden).

If the Adam and Eve story is completely unique - a difficult concept given its similarities to other ancient myths - then what do we make of it?

All three ways of reading it will lead us down different paths by causing us to reach different conclusions as each view will place the emphasis on different parts of the story. The other problem we encounter is reading Genesis 2 and 3 with our contemporary focus on origins in mind.

We love to look at the Adam and Eve story, thanks to the apostle Paul, as the way women and men should be viewed in the church.  We focus on how one act of sin could taint us all, thanks to Augustine, we wonder what the earth was like pre-fall, we wonder whether there were mutations, diseases and death in the wildlife's genomes in Paradise.  On and on we go, wondering, trying to make sense of something that really wasn't meant to make us lose the true meaning.

But I want to know what God wanted the readers to learn.  Was it the man's and woman's role in the body of Christ?  How we became sinful? How easy life would be without sin and a call to that pre-sinful, pre-consequential state?  I don't think that was the point of this.  A fall explains why the world is bad, unbalanced and chaotic.  God is reveling how he is going to make it right, first to the Israelites, then to the nations.

One point to remember is that the ancients saw the world as a battle between enveloping chaos, randomness and darkness vs. order, light and predictability.  Doing good, avoiding evil, maintaining order were done, not just to have peace and prosperity, but to avoid chaos from gaining a foothold.  In their creation stories, heros or gods fought off the Chaos (usually a sea serpent called Leviathan who lived in the deep under the flat world).  The god/hero won and good was victorious.

In the story of Adam and Eve, neither Adam nor Eve overthrow the serpent, the serpent "wins", if you will, and Adam and Eve lose their ordered Paradise.  They are thrown into a chaotic world that will work against them.  They will have to labour hard to maintain order, reap a harvest and grow a family.  They lost, they need a hero/saviour.

We don't see this obvious need, because we aren't familiar with the creation myths of the day.

If Genesis 1 -11 is written in the post-exilic period, it certainly does parallel the Jewish plight.  First, God makes a promise land/garden where he can commune with his people/couple.  The people/couple mess up by disobedience (other gods/eating forbidden things).  The result of disobedience is expulsion from the promised land/garden.  In the land beyond the Promised land/garden life is difficult and the people/couple are separated from that close intimacy they had with their maker.  If God kicked Adam and Eve out of Paradise, he eventually gave their predecessors a Promised Land, and maybe he will give the Jews' predecessors another chance, if they turn back to God.

What if the Adam and Eve story wasn't written in the post-exilic period, it wasn't based on Sumerian myths, but rather on a stylized form of a real couple who God granted great favour and prosperity.  We would have to ignore the serpent, Eden's geographic location, and how they came into existence for this to work.  Okay, so Adam and Eve are given everything they could want, and a close relationship with God.  They get tempted, somehow, and disobey God, eating the one they weren't supposed to, and they lose their favoured status, prosperity and closeness with God.  They go off, unblessed into the hostile world and raise two sons, one a horrible son who kills the other then is lost to them, then they have another son and become the ancestors of everyone.  It works nicely with the idea that Adam and Eve are real, but it leaves out the part where they can hope for a saviour (the hero who slays the Leviathan/Chaos) or salvation (turning to God will restore the promised land).  In the other two stories, the need for a saviour to restore them is implied, in this one, the story ends hopelessly.