“Nakedness”, as in to look upon someone’s nakedness, is a euphemism for witnessing sexual activity, and this is probably the case in the Noah story. At the same time, the actual condemnation in that account isn’t about being naked, it’s about laughing at Noah for being naked – and that the two sons with the blanket made sure not to look fits with the euphemism.
Textually that makes sense, but wow is that different from the story as it stands!
Read carefully in Leviticus. Most people don’t see it because uncovering nakedness is not an idiom we have so they breeze right by. Heck, even in Hebrew it isn’t clear unless you slow down and examine the verses.
BTW, the euphemism can also mean having sex with one’s father, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator.
Because we want scripture to make sense. There are a lot of things about Hebrew we’ve only learned because someone wanted to figure out how something made sense.
And/or why Canaan was enslaved by Egypt and later by Israel.
If Satan was from the heavenly realm, why didn’t he just ask God directly? …if it was an innocent question. He instead asks Eve and its pretty clear there was some motivation behind it that wasn’t good. He was looking for a wedge, to cast doubt with a simple question.
Thanks for stating your source. I am familiar with E. W. Bullinger who I believe had his own view and it could be that Brown, Driver and Briggs simply disagreed. Bullinger published the Companion Bible that some cults use to suggest that Jews are the children of Cain, are the Kenites.
The idea is that Satan or the serpent was an angel, “shining one” that literally had sex with Eve and produced literal children, and they somehow snuck on to Noah’s Ark. I dont believe that. The seed of Satan is spiritual, not literal.
The Lucifer account is a lament on the king of Tyre. That its talking about Satan is speculation… very old speculation but still what it is.
Why would he ask God a question meant for Eve?
Bullinger was not a source, just an indicator that this was known back when BDB was written. That this was also known to ancient rabbis also shows that this is no new idea, though whether that information was available to Brown et. al is another question.
My view is that the angels were assigned the task of giving challenges to living things, which is required for living things to evolve and develop. Lucifer was therefore on task in challenging Eve in this way.
Adam and Eve simply needed to follow advice given by God, or failing that ask God how they could remedy the situation. That would keep God in the parental/teacher role which was so much to their advantage. Instead they risked the death God warned them of, and instead of seeking to learn from their mistake they chose the bad habit of blaming their mistakes on others.
Then why did God blame Lucifer. He didn’t. It was Eve who did that. If God would uphold mankind in the role of lords of creation, then we had to learn how power and responsibility go hand in hand. Giving over the responsibility (blame) to another is to give them power over you (and creates an enemy). That is why God chose to reassign Lucifer to the role of our adversary. It also gave us a better alternative to blaming God for things.
Anyway… that is how I read the story.
I see that I miss-read your original comment. I thought you might be trying to say that the serpent really had that question, was innocent in asking it without having some ulterior motive.
Right, he made use of the source, ran with it and the result didn’t go in a good direction. Where things lead can be a good truth tester, but at the same time, original sources may also be misunderstood.
I think the problem with this is if Satan was really assigned this task, why was he then punished also? We have enough of a challenge with our flesh. Looking more carefully at the punishments, note that the serpent is cursed directly and is said to eat dust (you are what you eat?).
With Adam the ground is cursed for his sake, and he eats what grows out of it.
This connects the serpent to the ground which also represents the flesh. That the serpent or ground is cursed for Adam’s sake; that indicates that it, the flesh, being in the flesh is to his benefit for testing/challenging.
punished? Where is he punished?
Genesis 3? No. He was just given a new task.
Punishment is for children to learn.
He is a servant (a tool). His existence is to serve in whatever way God chooses. And when the task is done and is no longer needed, then it is logically disposed of.
Indeed. His new task was to be the personification of evil and death (the opposition to life).
Like I said, this is how I read the story. And I make no pretense to objectivity – a pretense which I think is both delusional and counter to the only purpose I see in religion. It hardly surprises me that others read the story differently and these other ways (yours included) simply do not work for me (frankly many sound a little stupid and useless). Sorry, but that is just how different people are.
I tend to think that the serpent being Satan is really reading something into the story that is not there. I think the first mention of Satan as a serpent is in Revelation, and even then not specifically that serpent. In Genesis, it is just a talking snake, evidently not an anomaly in the garden, as described as just the craftiest.
The Serpent in the Garden of Eden and its Background | Bible Interp.
I don’t think the OT canon was fully set nor was the NT canon even fully written by the end of the first century. I put 2 Peter in the second half of the second century to be honest. Luke-Acts anywhere from 60-130CE and the final form of John at the end of the first century. These works still needed time to disseminate after being written. I am not sure what councils you are referring to in the 1st and 2nd centuries. Did you mean 3rd and forth? I think we have evidence of over 40 gospels used by the early church now. The myth that only four gospels were always accepted by most Christians cannot be sustained generally until the 4th century and beyond. Certainly by the end of the second century the fourfold gospel was gaining in prominence and that only continued throughout the third century. Mark’s narrative was also popular early as two other authors copied large portions of it possibly within a generation of it being written.
I know the canonization process wasn’t a formal vote but this seems like saying people don’t vote the president in, they discover who the president is. Those books are only authoritative because orthodox Christians (the ones that won) were choosing to use them and then the big whigs eventually agreed on most of them. The Church had to make judgments here and I hardly think they took polls of every region throughout the Christian world nor did anyone have access to all that information. Apologists like to simplify this but Christianity existed for 300 years in a lot of places before these canons were finalized in the 3rd and 4th century. Claiming the whole church had this settled early is an assertion that cannot be substantiated. Oral tradition itself was probably still widely important well into the second century. The whole process of Orthodox Christians choosing orthodox books itself excludes a lot of other books Christian groups did read and it ends up being circular in that regard. It’s like polling a young earth creationist university on evolutions polling all Christians on an issue. The results will be skewed. Not to mention most Christians couldn’t read or even own book. They were probably at the mercy of the books chosen for them/that their communities inherited. Lots of Christian communities used books not found in our canon the same way we use the books inside and they did so for centuries.
Yes, plenty of bad apples and doctrine that should be disagreed with but these councils of Bishops really only tell us how some Christians interpreted the scriptures. The Nicene creed was a direct response to the Arian controversy: Christians with different beliefs. We know which side won but my point is even in the 50s there were already false teachings as a cursory reading of NewTestament epistles reveals. Second century authors spend lots of time battling heresy: Christians that disagreed with them on some issues. That is putting a lot of faith in the early church that won which is but a stone’s throw from Catholicism and apostolic succession. Did God just abandon the Church after the canon was set?
And these “first” creeds come 10-15 generations, or 300 years after Jesus as far as I am aware. “Early” is a word that needs to be considered carefully because creeds in the 300s don’t necessarily dictate what all or most Christians in the second and third century believed. Nor does what the majority believe = correct belief. Sola scripture saws off the branch it sits on. One needs faith in tradition–specifically the tradition that won- as well. There are no polls of what Christian everywhere thought were authoritative the first 300 years of its existence. We know which books won. I see the emerging Church as part of the same inspiration process as scripture. We really can’t have one without the other.
That is a very interesting thought. Thank you for it.
Thanks. Your critique was quite substantive. My understanding is a lot of this stuff seems to change frequently as new evidence comes along. I appreciate your critique. It sent men down a rabbit hole of reading articles. I think part of the description of Austriaco’s beliefs were off:
Did you mixed part of this up. Pope Pius believed in an original Adam. Per Austriaco: “In other words, at face value, Pope Pius XII ruled out polygenism because he could not imagine how an account of several original first couples could be reconciled with the Church’s teaching on original sin. As we will discuss in the chapters that follow, this was not surprising because scientists in 1950 believed that the human race was descended from several original first non-human couples who were scattered throughout the planet.”
Pope Pius actually wrote:
When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. . . .
. . . Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
So even if Pope Pius allowed for belief in evolution, he is very much pro primordial couple. Austriaco actually seems okay with polygenism in his 2016 writing:
I think if we want to maintain a historical Adam we will have to do so in a representational fashion as two humans chosen by God rather than in terms of biology. I mean, after all, as Walton points out, the death of Jesus covers us without the biological link. Why can’t the sin of Adam and Eve di the same?
Vinnie
Good point. He was never a son (child) of God, not a heavenly being or angel that fell. So there is nothing for him to learn from.
I think that is his task from the beginning. If we see him as the flesh, he was evil and dead to begin with… already cursed. When God formed Adam of the dust and breathed life into him, the struggle between life and death began.
This apparent life that the flesh (serpent) has is only animated by the spirit breathed into it. Satan was already in his death throes.
The battle is between life (God) and death (Satan). The battlefield is us (Adam).
I see no problem with that progression in relation to the text. I have long thought that Satan started off fairly neutral but only grew more and more into a Foe over time.
Some people believe evil has a inherent value. I do not. Some people believe good requires evil as a contrast like the Zoastrian religion. I do not.
But a personification of evil does serve a purpose when people are a mixture of good and evil. In this way the Fall changes everything. There is a need to separate the good and evil within us. So I disagree. I see no need for a personification of evil before the fall.
On that line, the question could have been innocent, but when Eve came back with a distortion of God’s command an idea may have arisen that Yahweh’s plan could be derailed, resulting in a scoffing, “Oh, no, you won’t surely die!”
I read something a while back on a Jewish site that Satan’s first sin was resentment of an assignment to engage with these new material creatures, and that the first manifestation of that wasn’t the opening question per se – though the wording can be argued as being suspect – but that the declaration that they wouldn’t die was the actual first act of rebellion. Essentially, then, he was punished for calling God a liar and thus changing the path forward to a harsh one.
Well, we do now after the Fall – though apparently that change isn’t the huge one it is traditionally taken to be, given that Eve already screwed up God’s instructions (I suppose would could say she set the pattern for putting a “hedge” around the Torah).
Given a nakhash as a heavenly being, that is one heck of a curse!
It does two things, or three: First, it in essence says, “No more back and forth between the realms; you’re now stuck in the material realm just the way the two humans are”. Second, by confining it to the same realm, it demoted the nakhash from a status higher than that of the humans. Third, by decreeing it must go about on its belly, God set the new status as one lesser than the humans!
In a way it’s like God saying, “You behaved like a mere beast, you’re going to live like a mere beast, only worse – you get no wings or legs, you have to slither!”
In basically calling God a liar, the nakhash had already stepped into that role, so if God was assigning it to him in the curse, it was just affirmation of what had already happened. So the appearance of a personification of evil actually happened along with the human fall.
I actually agree with graft2vine on this. That is indeed one of our biggest challenges. It is the foundation of the life of the human mind. Do we act according to the needs of the mind or are we dominated by the body?
But my suggestion is not that God sent Lucifer to provide us with this extra challenge. It is only that Lucifer was acting within task he was given. In other words, I don’t agree with this idea of the commandment being some kind of test. God is not a parent giving His children a warning not to play in the street and then trying to tempt them to go into the street to see if they actually obey His warning. It is not all about obedience and those who make it about this are twisting things badly. But nor do I think God is the parent who gives this warning not to play in the street and then redirects traffic so no cars use the road passing their house. The whole point of a parental commandment is the transition from the toddler to learning how to take care of oneself.
At the start, perhaps, but the moment he indicated to Eve that God was a liar he screwed that up.
Hmmm… contradicting God’s commandment does sound a pretty dubious way of serving God. Of course, He wasn’t exactly lying, playing on the complex nature of what was going on. And while using this looks dishonest to us, we don’t know so much about the angel’s capabilities compared to ours (I have always thought them a bit more like a computer than we are). In a sense you could say Lucifer was giving us a choice between physical life and spiritual life. Of course, Eve could have gone to God or Adam for a clarification: what does the snake mean when he says we will not die?
That’s one reason I think the nakhash was a heavenly being: if it was just a talking serpent, indeed a serpent who just started talking, why would she have not gone to ask? It makes sense that she not only recognized it as someone that might know what it was talking about but that she was probably familiar with.
I keep thinking that there’s a lot more to the story!
I agree that God is very much acting like a parent in the story. Your parent might say not to play in the front yard where they cant see you through the window. If you do you will get kidnapped… someone will take you away and you will never see them again.
So the serpent might be like the kid next door, maybe a little older and he wants you to come over to play in his yard. He tells you, “No your not really going to get kidnapped, look my yard is just like yours.” You could say he wasn’t lying but he was certainly undermining your parents authority.
If this serpent is this kid next door that you have known for awhile (as you grow up you get to know your own flesh), you could certainly be convinced not to go check back with your parents.
It would be so much worse if it was the kids parent (a heavenly being with a lot of authority) that was convincing you to come over to their yard. That makes no sense at all. They are a parent and parents don’t like other parents undermining what they tell their children.
And then there is the whole “you will become like God” thing, which is an even worse half truth.
That one is so bad I cannot object to graft2vine’s kidnapping comparison.
Even if I don’t believe God was out to test them. I have basically set the serpent up as one who is testing them.
Yet I cannot believe the serpent is actually evil, because putting something evil in with your children does not sound like good parenting to me. And besides I think the intention of the story is to explain the origin of evil.
I like the computer analogy because even though they have no free will of their own (or at least not the same kind or same order of free will), interacting with people who do have free will can have some very unpredictable results.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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