Did I do something to upset you?
Well I answered myself by looking at a bunch of Jewish websites, and it seems that Jews have a variety of interpretations. Does Judaism always have so many interpretations?
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I’ll try to answer this another way. Did Adam and Even have belly buttons?
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OK I’ll bite: it doesn’t matter because their kids married humans who did.
Doesn’t this view leave open the idea that certain segments of the human population never interbred with Adam’s descendants? How does that work with the idea that the image of God was imparted to Adam and Eve, or the idea that the sinful nature affects Adam’s descendants. Couldn’t this idea be used to support all kinds of racist ideas?
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I find it doubtful that two adults who are suddenly poofed into existence (no parents, culture, language, etc.) would have the ability to successfully raise children.
Wait, you didn’t read how they were terrible parents?
Adam and Eve literally raised Cain.
Goodnight everybody! Tip your waitresses!
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I’m game. I will say no—because people who have taken on special roles as symbols in a parable don’t have lots of “detail”. It is like asking if Uncle Sam (a symbolic character in American political cartoons) has blue eyes and a Scots-Irish ethnic background which brought his ancestors to America.
I didn’t say that Adam and Eve were “fictional”—just as there are various explanations of “Uncle Sam” which identifies the symbol as possibly based upon a real person who was amplified into a symbolic role. There are many examples of real people who take on parabolic roles. For example, George Washington was the first President of the United States but parables utilizing him as a “mythological” character were once very popular, and we still remember one of those parables which never ACTUALLY happened: the story of a young G. Washington chopping down the cherry tree but he couldn’t tell a lie.
I won’t try to summarize all of the various hypotheses about how Adam and Eve could have been the first Imago Dei creatures (whether in actual chronological first or as symbolic of same, as in the Federal Head view of Adam.) But we surely have to start with the possibility that Genesis 2 & 3 is a type of genre familiar with the ancients but foreign to us.
One thing I have learned to keep telling myself in the years since I was a Young Earth Creationist is that an ancient text being true and an ancient text being historical narrative of events which happened exactly as told are not the same thing. Now that seems obvious to me but it wasn’t obvious to mean when I was a Young Earth Creationist.
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If God magically poofed two people into existence as adults they wouldn’t have been able to speak normally. And there was no language for them to speak anyway. So we have to invoke more magic here.
I am not a fan of poof ing. The many other people around who had already made wheels, ox carts, language, knives, a social rules, and domesticated animals. …God goes poof over their heads? Maybe it’s cool for Adam. But seems like knowledge of good and evil was a struggle then, and seems like not total agreement now. The point is the inventors of the story had divine inspiration, but then as now,not clear on what is THE relationship between man and woman. A good story but a lot of details don’t survive scrutiny. And those details don’t change how you should behave. Mostly.
A human can’t learn a language properly, either spoken or signed, unless he learns it by age 7 or so.
last time we did not have a resonating communication experience. then maybe you are saying my words are still unintelligible.
but directly responding in innocence- schools teach other languages, typically at an older age. Colleges still teach language. Military trains interpreters for what ever country they invade, in under 6 months. I remember Peace Corps training of 3 weeks to learn a new language.
A native of Switzerland says 3 languages is a minimal expectation to get out of highschool, French, German, Italian. The 4th official language is similar to Latin. She got work as an interpreter because she also spoke english. My sister learned and teaches sign language, but way after 7 yrs old.
so i disagree with your statement.
but it comes without context. or connection to overall theme. “poof” was used by an earlier contributer to discribe something between magic and miraculous. (?) i cannot connect this with Eve
Adam is the first human man. Eve is the first human woman. Your question is where did Eve come from.
From the perspective of evolution I think we can have a pretty simple answer.
The first human would be the first individual to receive a crucial mutation involving the brain, making this individual capable of the mental capacity that separates humans from animals.
This individual would have been born to a mother who was a lower species of hominid.
At this point, this individual, Adam, is the only human in existence.
With his superior mental capacity he is unable to find a suitable companion among the species which gave birth to him. His experience would perhaps be like that of an adult among children. Or a normal person among the mentally disabled. Or a genius among idiots. Or Tarzan among apes.
Despite this he still mates with at least one member of his mother’s species. One of his children is a female also bearing the crucial mutation.
This is Eve. The second human. When she is old enough, she mates with Adam and they produce human children in addition to whatever other human children Adam may have produced with his other matings. Since the intelligence mutation is desirable it rapidly spreads and the population of humans grows. This is a simple picture of how speciation occurs in evolution.
And of course it also means that Eve is quite litterally part of Adam’s flesh (she is his daughter).
We can go even further down the rabbit hole by noting that God puts Adam to sleep during the process, and sleeping in the Bible is commonly used as a euphemism for sex.
So there you have it.
I admire you thoughtful inventiveness. We each try to salvage some of the story and build a reasonble story around it.
I think the business of a larger brain giving you an evolutionary advantage, is likely. maybe you could throw a rock better? escape predators better. plan a defensive strategy. such that there was some evolving for larger brain. maybe from Lucy, millions of years ago to Neandrathal, hundred thousand yrs ago. And the head kept getting bigger, limited only by the birth canal. women did not evolve enough for the brain to keep getting bigger without end. there was a larger period of childhood. A baby deer can run for her life on the day of her birth. we walk at 9 months? etc. Given a million years a lot of changes can happen.
I question the special creation theory. Adam could not have been father to american indians, no time.
rather develoment, growth takes time. God is not in the hurry that we are. each animal he cherishes. The flowers in the field, his eye is on the sparrow, and watches over me.
the difficulty is sharing God with sparrows, and monkeys… we need to think we are the most important of all creation, aren’t we winning? putting concrete roads in all over the world? From the perspective of God who notices the life of the sparrow, maybe we are overly full of our own self imporance.
if it all started with only one couple, must have been a lot of incest for a lot of years? Maybe the Neandrathals had something, did some cross breading with Homo Sapiens. and there were others out there, not of our tribe. That God was watching, we did not notice.
So i have no problem with gradual. Theology has seen gradual development, no? Used to be killing your first born would get you some where. They did it to launch the Trojan War. Abraham was at that cross road.
On Abraham, having children with your slave, who you acknowledge when you like and dump when you don’t, well, we should have grown out of that by now. . maybe that is too political.
How about slavery? are we agreed it is not a good thing? for St. Paul, it was OK. Since the Civil war, we officially reject it.
We did go thru a time when circumcision was essential, and now it is not so much.
And there was a time when the Church would rule the political world (think Innocent III), and now we think not.
so these developments, take time. and they are cultural. Biological evolution is much slower. witness the pain in childbirh, still got it.
So i think God sees all of life, i think we should respect all of life. first i am thinking of all human life- then sparrows, aligators, dogs, frogs.
but the rib just doesn’t work for me. “male and female he created them”
When the bible says he created Adam from gathered up dust and then breathed into it, I might suggest that it is the breath of God which is important here, not the dust, and in the case of Eve, not the rib.
However, before dismissing this we can agree that God creates our bodies from the elements of the earth, and the rib of Adam would be important to insure genetic compatibility of Eve for procreation. So regarding the physical bodies of Adam and Eve, and in staying with scripture instead of abandoning it when inconvenient, it does say that God created these bodies outside of a womb. The answer to the proverbial question, what came first, the chicken or the egg…it is clear the chicken did by this passage in the bible. Many would seem to question how God could do that? I have a theory on that but it would distract from the argument. But to keep it simple, if God can create and encompasses the entire universe, don’t you think he could gather up does and transform it into the body of Adam?
But all of the physical aspects are not as important as the breath of God. This is the true life giver, the soul, made in the image and likeness of God. Without this breath, no matter how big a brain we would have had, it would not be the essence of mind and who we are in relationship to God. Our physical body dies, it is essentially nothing, even though scientists lift it up as an amazing creation But the mind and soul, wow! The natural body dies and is raised as a spiritual body on the day of judgment. What a great creation.
In summary, Genesis all makes sense in this context, doesn’t it?
Neal.
in Gen 2,7 the breath of God makes Adam. and it is done before there is any vegetation. no grass, no shrubs
In Gen 1,27 male and female humans were created after everything else.
There are at least two stories offered. And the english is so famous, even tho the original is in some language i don’t know, i love the story.
Could God have done it anyway he wanted? of course. But i think of god as careful, cautious with his miracles. Jesus announces that he is going to raise Lazarus from the dead so people would believe in him. makes me think god doesn’t disrupt the natural order (that He created) without a good reason.
What we call evolution is insight into the way creation is done. A drive to life, and sophisticated life begins in the atoms that god created. we don’t have all the details, but a lot of pieces fit the theory.
we were warned “My thoughts are not your thoughts” and a million years to us is like a second to God . maybe forming life on earth in billion years appeals to him in ways we don’t understand. Maybe god reveals himself at the pace of our understanding. starts with clay and a flat earth, then as we grow up, boats on the ocean suggest a curved, spherical earth, then to a solar system. i don’t think we should force god to fit into Genesis just because it is a nice story for us. i think we grow up and can understand a little more of the world god created.
Genesis makes sense in the realm of magic, like the Greek gods make sense. God’s description in the garden is a cartoon who walks like Zeus . As Adam left the garden, god appears as a petty despot cursing two innocents who crossed a line that they did not really see. By the time we hear God talking to Moses, he is a compassionate god. And when God talks to David, “his mercy endures forever”. maybe it is not God that grows up, it is us.
This might not be the answer you were looking for. Many historians of the Ancient period, consider the “rib” reference to be clever word play, based on the Genesis writers’ knowledge of the earlier myths.
“Ninti is also one of the eight goddesses of healing who was created by Ninhursag to heal Enki’s body.”
From the Wiki article on “Ninti”:
" Her specific healing area was the rib (sumerian Ti means rib and to live)."
Enki had eaten forbidden flowers and was then cursed by Ninhursaga, who was later persuaded by the other gods to heal him. Some scholars suggest that this served as the basis for the story of Eve created from Adam’s rib in the Book of Genesis."
TO the Sumerians, her name was a wonderful pun: “Lady of Life/Lady of the Rib”. For she was born to specifically cure a man’s injured Rib… helping regain Life!
Excerpt from: “Biblical parallels in Sumerian literature”
“The one who cures his rib is named Ninti, whose name means
o the queen of Months, (Kramer & Maier 1989: pp. 28-30)
o the lady of the Rib, or
o she who makes Live.”
"This association carries over to Eve. (Kramer, History Begins at Sumer 1981: pp. 143-144) In Genesis, Eve is fashioned from Adam’s rib and her name hawwa is related to the Hebrew word hay or living. (New American Bible p. 7.) The prologue of “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Underworld” may contain the predecessor to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This tree not only contains a crafty serpent, but also Lilith, the legendary first wife of Adam. The huluppu tree is transplanted by Inanna from the banks of the Euphrates to her garden in Uruk, where she finds that:
…a serpent who could not be charmed made its nest in the roots of the tree, the Anzu bird set his young in the branches of the tree, and the dark maid Lilith built her home in the trunk. (Wolkstein and Kramer 1983: p. 8) It should be noted that Kramer’s interpretation that this creature is Lilith has come into quiestion of late. "
Read more at : “Biblical parallels in Sumerian literature”
But, @David1, if I were to give you an answer relevant to the various views found within the BioLogos audience, I think we could say that Eve is depicted as coming from a rib as more a feature of cultural influences, than one that God specifically used for theological reasons. Not everything in the Bible is theologically relevant, right?
The Old Testament describes specific treatments for slaves. Is that theologically significant? Or is it a feature of the relative nature of mercy - - where instead of teaching society to outlaw slaves (but to outlaw eating lobsters), the Old Testament teaches limits to how to treat their slaves.
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I appreciate your input, the overall summary is that the writer of Genesis may have borrowed from ancient pagan writings? I, personally, don’t feel right accepting that.
As far as the slavery, I think an in depth study in Hebrew slavery will reveal that it was not chattel slavery, and that “man-stealers” were sentenced to death. Therefore, the only alternative way to get slaves was if the individual sold himself, which was usually done to secure his family financially by giving them the money he sold himself for, or his new master would give the payments. A good idea? No. But it was just how people functioned in ancient Israel, especially considering they were squatters in the Torah.
I think what you mentioned is definitely worth looking into, as far as Adam and Eve. Thanks for your input again!
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