The Lost World of Adam and Eve (18 page)

What is the result of such an approach?

• An Israelite reader would not identify the serpent as Satan. The consequences are far more significant in the account than the agent. The serpent is the catalyst more than the cause.
  
• An Israelite reader would recognize the deleterious effects of the temptation but would not necessarily consider the serpent to be morally evil or bent on the destruction of humankind. An Israelite would not give any unique status to this serpent—he is just one of any number of chaos creatures rather than a spiritual, cosmic power of some sort.
  
• The Israelite reader would have thought of the serpent as a sort of disruptive free agent with less of a thought-out agenda. The Old Testament does not give the serpent an ongoing role. Like the serpent in the
  Gilgamesh Epic
  who did what its nature led it to do and then disappeared from the scene, no continuing role or place is recognized for the serpent in the Old Testament, though the consequences of the human act remain in place (again as in
  Gilgamesh
  ).
  
• The serpent’s insertion of doubt and his nuanced denial of the woman’s understanding of the consequences stated by God would not be interpreted any differently than in our traditional understanding. Deception, misdirection and troublemaking are all within the purview of chaos creatures. It is important to note the syntactical subtlety that is evident in the serpent’s words. He does not say “you will not die.” Instead the placement of the negation results in something more like “don’t think that death is such an immediate threat.”
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  God told the truth: when they ate from the tree, they were doomed to die. The words God used did not suggest immediate death (the syntactical expression that he uses, “on the day that,” is simply the Hebrew idiom for “when”), but the penalty was carried out by removing their access to the tree of life. They were therefore immediately doomed to die (the force of the verbal construction). The woman was not as careful in her wording, and the serpent therefore told the truth when he picked up on the discrepancy and contradicted
  her
  (not God) by saying that death was not an immediate threat. In this way the serpent’s deception came in exploiting a misrepresentation by the woman and telling her of a benefit to eating the fruit without likewise including the deleterious effects. Notice that the serpent does not suggest outright that Eve eat the fruit or that she should disobey.
  22
  
• At the same time there is no room for the suggestion that it was the serpent who told the truth (you will not die, you shall be like gods) and God who was wrong (in the day that you eat from it you will surely die).
  23
  God’s statement did not indicate immediate death (“in the day” is the Hebrew way of saying “when”). The construction often translated “surely die” expresses only that they will at that time be doomed to die,
  24
  which is exactly what happened when the way to the tree of life was barred.
  
• The Israelite reader would understand that the result of the serpent’s role was that evil took root among humanity. This is clear from Genesis 3:15, where an ongoing battle is portrayed between humans (generation to generation) on one side, and the “seed” or “offspring” of the serpent, which does not refer to future generations of serpents but to the evil that had resulted, on the other side. The fact that the two verbs in the verse that describe the antagonistic actions are from the same root (despite the fact that many translations render them differently) shows that the verse does not indicate who the victor will be. Instead it indicates that there will be the ongoing exchange of potentially mortal blows.
  
• We might well ask what a chaos creature was doing in the garden (the center of order in the cosmos). Surprisingly, when we examine the text closely, we discover that the text never suggests that the serpent
  was
  in the garden (let alone in the tree). If we inquire how then Adam and Eve would have encountered the creature, we must note that Adam and Eve’s tasks in the garden do not necessitate their constant presence. Priests serving in sacred space do not live in sacred space. While the placing of Adam in the garden may suggest a more permanent residence, we would have to ask whether that meant he would never leave. Much is unspecified in the text.
  
• As a chaos creature, the serpent would be more closely associated with non-order than with disorder. Non-order has a certain neutrality to it, whereas disorder is evil in nature and intent. We might describe an earthquake or a cancer as forces of non-order with evil consequences. But they are not inherently evil. We do not control them, and therefore they can have disastrous effects. If the serpent truly is in the category of chaos creature, neither his contradiction of God’s statement nor his deception about the consequences are part of an evil agenda. They are simply the disruptive, ad hoc behavior that chaos creatures engage in. More complete understanding is offered in intertestamental literature and New Testament theology, but if we limit our analysis to the ancient context of the Old Testament, things look very different.
  

Excursus: Myth/Mythology

I remain uncomfortable applying the genre label “myth/mythology” to these biblical narratives. The designation has too many definitions, and therefore the words lose their ability to communicate clearly. Furthermore, we have so thoroughly adapted these terms to Western culture that their application to ancient culture becomes inevitably anachronistic.
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But the issue goes beyond the labeling of a genre of literature; it concerns the process by which literature of any genre is conceived and composed. The ancients think differently; they perceive the world in different ways, with different categories and priorities than we do.

In our culture, we think “scientifically.” We are primarily concerned with causation, composition and systematization. In the ancient world they are more likely to think of the world in terms of symbols and to express their understanding by means of imagery. We are primarily interested in events and material realia whereas they are more interested in ideas and their representation.
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Some might suggest that the Israelites who crafted the early chapters of Genesis are historicizing myth (as can potentially be seen in Is 27:1), that is, presenting real events using imagery as a rhetorical means to capture the full range of truth as it is commonly conveyed in the world in which they live. Since the concept of myth (mythic/mythical/mythological), however, is so volatile and diversely understood, we need to use it in connection with other qualifying terms. The word group
image/imagery/imagination/imaginative
would work well (though
imaginary
would be incorrect). A rhetoric using mythical imagery is easily discernible in biblical poetry (e.g., “from the heavens the stars fought” or “crushed the heads of Leviathan” [Ps 74:14]), and it becomes formalized in the genre of apocalyptic. Nevertheless, it is not absent from prose. To describe this sort of thinking, I would like to adapt the term
imagistic.
27
It offers a distinction that is easy to understand in today’s culture as we find that students are increasingly visual learners—a fact that compels us to be more imagistic in our teaching and communication.

Rather than attempting to define it, in accordance with true imagistic thinking, I will instead describe it by illustrations. Imagistic thinking and representation would stand in contrast to scientific or analytical thinking. We can see the difference if we compare two visual representations of the night sky—one taken by the Hubble telescope, the other presented by Vincent van Gogh’s
The Starry Night.
People would never consider doing astronomy from the van Gogh and could not do so even if they wanted to; the image contains nothing of the composition or position of stars. At the same time, we would not say that it is a false depiction of the night sky. Visual artists depict the world imagistically, and we recognize that this depiction is independent of science but not independent of truth. The ancients apply this same imagistic conception to all genres of literature, including those that we cannot conceive of as anything other than scientific. Imagistic history, like that preserved in Genesis, is to history as
The Starry Night
is to a Hubble photograph.

As another example, we would not try to reconstruct historically the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the war of 1812 by a detailed analysis of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Note how our national anthem is set in a historical context but uses the rhetoric of imagery and the power of symbol (the flag) in an artistic way to convey an enduring truth and value that reaches far beyond the War of 1812.

A modern-day example of terminology that offers an alternative to scientific/historical thinking would be what Lutherans today refer to as “sacramental” thinking, a highly controversial term that includes the mystical aspects of the sacraments but goes beyond it into the wider realm of religious thought. In such a context, they find it quite a natural way of thinking. In those traditions people realize that such thinking is not subject to scientific verification, and historicity is simply not a category that would have any meaning. People who are used to sacramental thinking (however defined) find it very hard to describe it (or defend it) to those who are not so inclined. The fact that this seems like a new and unfamiliar way of thinking to some readers who are not Lutheran (or connected with other traditions at home with sacramental thinking) demonstrates the point I am making.

Imagistic thinking presents similar difficulties. Israelites found no problems thinking about Ezekiel’s vision of Egypt as a cosmic tree (Ezek 31). This does not warrant labeling the literature mythology, nor does it concern questions of reality or truth. Some might consider the trees, the garden and the snake to be examples of imagistic thinking without thereby denying reality and truth to the account. The author understands
trees
in a way that does not simply indicate a botanical species of flora with remarkable chemical properties.
28
When we put these elements in their ancient Near Eastern context and recognize the Israelite capacity, and even propensity, to think in imagistic terms,
29
we may find that we gain a deeper understanding of important theological realities.

Some scholars today believe that Israel was in the habit of borrowing other people’s myths and transforming them into a mythology of their own. I do not share that perspective. What is sometimes perceived as a shared mythology is more often a shared propensity to think imagistically about the same issues using a shared symbolic vocabulary. Nicolas Wyatt distinguishes between those who use the oral discourse of story to represent reality and those who analyze the observed world and formulate hypothetical paradigms to explain that which is observed.
30
Imagistic thinking is not only to be contrasted with causation analysis. It also stands in contrast to metaphysics, which, though not a science, is a product of scientific thinking in that it is also interested in intermediate causation and systematization. These are varying ways to communicate ideas about identity and coherence.

This discussion quickly becomes very esoteric and is both out of my area of expertise and out of the range of this book. I have raised this issue not to solve the questions it entails but to elevate our consciousness of yet another way in which we think quite differently from how people in the ancient world thought. This generates the repeated warning that we have to take care not to impose our categories of thinking on the literature that was more at home in the ancient world than in ours.

Proposition 15

Adam and Eve Chose to Make Themselves the Center of Order and Source of Wisdom, Thereby Admitting Disorder into the Cosmos

This is not the place to offer a full analysis of the nature of sin, law, accountability, guilt and punishment. These are matters of theology and would require a trained theologian to provide a credible treatment. The issues are complex, and the debate about the particulars can be traced throughout the entire history of the church.

The focus of this book is neither on the systematic theology of the church nor on trying to sort out the distinctions between, for example, Augustine and Pelagius or Irenaeus. Instead, we are exploring how Genesis 3 might have been understood against the backdrop of the ancient world and what claims are being made in this context. It is certainly important to eventually factor in what Paul has to say on the matter and to form our theology in deep interaction with the church fathers. But our starting point needs to be the text of Genesis itself in its cultural, literary and theological context.

As Mark Biddle points out, one of the most common ways that people think about sin today is as a crime, a view that Biddle considers to be inadequate biblically and theologically.
1
In another book,
Sin: A History,
Gary Anderson investigates the competing paradigms of sin as a “burden to be borne” and sin as a “debt to be repaid.”
2
The former metaphor, he contends, is the view supported by the idioms found in the Old Testament (“bearing sin/guilt/punishment,” as early as Cain’s statement in Gen 4:13). The latter imagery of debt becomes more prominent in the Second Temple period.
3
These paradigms speak eloquently to the consequences of sin (burden, debt) and point the way to its resolution.

A second way that one could analyze sin is by the various Hebrew words that are used to express it.
4
Here some caution is advisable. For example, it is not uncommon to encounter the statement that sin in the Old Testament means “missing the mark.” This kind of statement, unfortunately, exposes a misunderstanding of how semantics work. It is true that the verb
ḥṭʾ
can refer to failing to achieve an objective (Prov 8:36; Is 65:20) and is even used once for slingers who do not miss their target (Judg 20:16).
5
There is no reason, however, to think of these uses as reflecting the “original” meaning of the word that is translated “sin.” The meanings of words are derived from their use, not from their etymology,
6
and this verb simply means “to sin.” It is not necessarily limited to the idea of missing a mark or failing to achieve an objective.
7
The words for sin can help us to recognize its various guises (rebellion, transgression, iniquity, guilt), but such semantic analysis can only take us so far.