pain causes or can cause suffering. Did Jesus not suffer on the cross?
Exodus 21:1 uses מִשְׁפָט (mish-paht), “judgment”, not “torah”; the two are very different concepts.
BTW this is one of the dangers of cross-referencing based on English; it is not uncommon to translate two or more very different words using the same English word, and considering them as though they are talking about the same thing is all too often very misleading. Mishpaht and torah are frequently both rendered as “law”, but mishpaht indicates a verdict or predetermined penalty to be rendered while torah indicates a (type of) action to be pursued. With a mishpaht there is no prohibition, only a statement of what is to be done in response to some action (or lack thereof); with torah there is guidance prior to action. With mishpaht there is no thought, only prescribed reaction; with torah there is thought and an admonition to understanding. Mishpaht is narrow and set; torah leans towards principles.
So the Ten Words aren’t mishpahtim, “ordinances”, they’re key ideas meant to guide more than just the specific behaviors they address (Martin Luther does a nice job of showing this in his Small Catechism, the best example being:
You shall not steal.
What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not take our neighbor’s money or possessions, or get them in any dishonest way, but help him to improve and protect his possessions and income.
Jesus also shows this in the Sermon on the Mount).
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Pain also leads to avoiding suffering. For example, if I step barefoot onto hot sand at a beach, I have just been ‘warned’ against staying barefoot there!
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Genesis 2:17 for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die
This sounds like a warning to me. The difference between a law and a warning is the nature of the consequences. Not only is there is no word used here for law or commandment but there is nothing suggesting that dying is a punishment or even a result of disobedience. It sounds to me like just a consequence of eating the fruit.
Nor can I find any reference in the Bible to a law or commandment given in the garden of Eden.
No this pushing of this as a law or commandment is all a product of legalizing everything in the Bible and thus making religion a tool of control over people. It is the elevation of lawyers and legalists with all their distortions.
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The Garden represents the garden of God’s presence, where “the man” and “the woman” met with God. That’s why the holiest spaces in both the tabernacle and temple were decorated with themes from Eden, as well as the high priest’s garments.
Being exiled and banned from the Garden means being exiled from the presence of God and prevented from re-entering childhood. Once that threshold is crossed, it can’t be undone.
Well said, but there’s no reason to believe the fruit was literal. Here’s how I summarized it in a previous article:
In the evidence above, note the reoccurring dates 100 ka and 35 ka. Trade networks, symbolic behaviors, and the globular brain all are associated with that period. From these converging lines of evidence, it seems protolanguage began around 1 million years ago and continued to evolve until a breakthrough to “modern language” and symbolism around 100 ka. Language and symbolicity continued to co-evolve with the globular brain to bring us to “full modernity” about 60,000 years later.
On top of everything else, the same process granted humans the ability to fully share our thoughts and emotions with another person — a type of communication we learned to call “love.” Intention-reading, which Michael Tomasello credits with providing the evolutionary motivation to speak, involves not just a shared frame of reference (“Look at that beautiful sunset . . . .”), but an inborn instinct to share our psychological state with others.
What is the significance of these developments? Simply, for the “fall” to occur, humanity had to reach a certain level of sophistication in language and symbolic thought. Mature human morality is rooted in our capacities to symbolize actions and generalize them to an abstract category. Cognitive neuroscientist Peter Tse explains, “The birth of symbolic thought gave rise to the possibility of true morality and immorality, of good and evil. Once acts became symbolized, they could now stand for, and be instances of, abstract classes of action such as good, evil, right, or wrong.”
Is following the law without question a mature moral choice?
Warnings don’t function as tests. If I tell my kids not to play in the street, I’m not testing them to see whether they’ll obey me. It’s a traditional, but wrong, interpretation to view the warning not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge as a test.
But as I’ve written before, toddlers and young children are hard-wired to trust everything adults say and treat it like “law” handed down from God.
Here’s the piece: The fall in evolutionary history - Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology
Absolutely it was experiential knowledge. It’s like learning to speak or ride a bicycle.
There are people born with insensitivity to pain. They invariably die young.
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Which is part of why Solomon’s additions to Temple decor were acceptable: they empahsized the “garden-ness” of the Temple.
Among other things.
Though I would say “direct presence”.
Okay, warnings can function as tests, whereas commands don’t – commands just have (set) consequences.
Ah, good old Piaget and Kay!
I knew a guy who couldn’t feel pain on his left forearm due to an injury. He chose Father Damien De Veuster as his patron because he had to do self-checks regularly any time he engaged in something that could hurt that arm.
Scary!
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I believe early humanity experienced the presence of God in a way that ceased after we reached “adolescence” and chose selfishness rather than cooperation. As far as what that experience was, I have no idea.
“Direct presence” reminds me of that old country hymn “In the Garden,” where “He walks with me and He talks with me …” Frankly that comes across as psychotic. haha
This seems like a semantic game. Warnings are never a test. No one, let alone God, puts out a sign that says, “Slippery when wet,” as a test to see whether people obey it. After all, the set consequence of violating the “law/command” doesn’t apply in the end. Neither “the man” or “the woman” died in the day they ate from the fruit.
For me, these kind of totally metaphorical interpretations are too much like seeing a picture in the clouds.
By contrast, understanding Genesis 1 as declaration that all these things of nature are not gods but creations of God, is good fit to the text.
Of course I have no interest in understanding the Genesis 2 story contrary to the findings of science.
But making the Garden story about adolescent rebellion puts it into too large of a literary category – one of hundreds of thousands of books with such a theme. I see this as an extreme which diminishes the meaning of the text almost as much as the ones contrary to science. And you certainly don’t have to go anywhere near so far for compatibility with the findings of science. An “historical” story with symbolic elements looks a happy medium to me, for science certainly cannot speak to the existence of two particular people from long ago.
God picking out someone to have a special relationship with, far from being extra-ordinary in the Bible, is instead the recurring pattern of the whole collection of 66 books.
Why should understanding it have anything to do with science? It’s mytho-theological, not scientific.
Besides that it is projecting modern scientific concepts back into mytho-theological material!
Das ist gewißlich wahr!
A picture in clouds is seeing something that may or may not be there. Understanding the Garden as a sacred space where humanity encountered God’s presence is a theme that runs throughout all 66 books of the Bible.
That isn’t in contrast. I’m speaking of Gen. 2-3, not Genesis 1. In addition, you’re limiting Genesis 1 to the declaration that the sun and moon aren’t gods. There’s a lot more there than that.
The Garden story isn’t merely about adolescent rebellion. It’s also not merely about how the first man and first woman committed the first numerical sin in history. That’s a footnote, as Kierkegaard noted. The literary category is mythology, and the main characters are archetypes. Numerous theologians across the ages have noted that “the woman’s” sin is representative of every “first sin” of every human in history. That’s why the story has resonated down through the ages. Everyone, male or female, identifies with the woman’s thought process – question the “rightness” of the rule, question the motives of the rulegiver, weigh the decision against your own interests, and make a selfish decision. It’s a universal tale that everyone understands, and it universally happens around adolescence.
On the contrary, the recurring pattern of the whole collection of 66 books is God seeking relationship with people who are estranged from him.
If you’re saying that God picked two people named “Adam” and “Eve” out of an existing population to have a relationship with, I’d say that’s misguided and unbiblical. Ha’adam and ha’issah were created, not chosen. To say otherwise is to read massively into the text to accommodate science.
Taking it further, on what basis and at what age did God select these two individuals, and what qualified them to represent all of humanity? Once they failed the test, wouldn’t it have been more just to kill them “in the day” that they ate of the fruit and start over with two other selected individuals that might pass the test? Sorry. It makes no sense.
No, it’s not. The earliest Christian interpreter of Genesis, Irenaeus, viewed them as children at their creation. He was neither modern nor a scientist, and if you bother to read the material, I take the ANE mythological material into consideration at every step along the way. Maybe read before you spout crap out your ass.
Yes, that sacred space where God’s presence is is the temple of God. We are the temple of God and therefore are also the garden of God. God places mankind, the son of God, in the garden which is the human body, to dress and keep it. In the midst of the garden is the brain, “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” and the heart, the “tree of life”. Both trees branch out throughout the body to water the garden. The serpent is the flesh, wrapped around that tree. Serpent means “to hiss”, or to “whisper”. It represents the flesh communicating non-verbally its fleshly desires to the brain through the nervous system.
The river of life flowing out of the mist of the garden is the blood, the lifeforce of the body. The mighty river flows between the heart and the brain and then parts into four heads, flowing into four regions, to our hands and feet. And there is gold in one of those lands which is good, a gold ring on one of the hands, a reference to marriage.
Adam represents the Spirit of Christ and Eve is our spirit, the bride of Christ. He takes on our sin because we were made to be with Him, surely dying in our place and being resurrected again… eating of the tree of life before being sent out, to overflow the body, extending the hands and feet of Jesus, doing the work of spreading the Gospel. Till the ground, subdue it, subdue our flesh and fill the earth with the presence of God, with the image of God.
And God saw everything that He made, that it was good!
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That’s an impressive collection of New Age eisegesis!
Nice allegory.
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It is seeing patterns in what is most likely purely random. In this case something which never even entered the minds of the writers. It is projecting things which you think about but very likely not what the writers thought about at all.
I think it is misleading to project such onto a time when there were no “literary categories.” There was only the fireside tales which served the purpose of all these things we have divided into specializations: history, philosophy, law, theology, entertainment, and more. In other words, we have created this for ancient tales which don’t fit into our categories/specializations and are not quite sure what to do with. Yes I think this was written down from an old oral tradition.
Sounds good superficially, but I don’t buy this projection of modern paradigms on the past. I think it has resonated because it of the big questions it calls to the forefront of our attention… where did we come from? are we are different from other animals? Why do we feel something is wrong?
I don’t know how I could when don’t see much in the way of Eve’s thought process in the text.
The person I trust says that one will kill me and the stranger says it will not. Is this the rebellion of the teenager or the naivety of the toddler?
In Walt Disney’s Robin Hood, the animals represent the people in the story according to their character. Saying that is misguided and not true to the film sounds like lunacy to me. No doubt that story is also about teenage rebellion, LOL.
They didn’t “represent all of humanity” they were chosen from homo sapiens to become all of humanity.
Indeed. They were created as all living things are created, by participation in their life. God formed them from the dust/bone (stuff of the earth, matter) according to the laws of nature (evolution) and provided the inspiration (divine breath) which brought the human mind to life.
God chooses people for many reasons. But He likely thinks they might listen to what He will teach them. It also typically has to do with their circumstances. Being in the right place at the right time, like Moses. In the case of Adam and Eve, I think they were very young, who got separated from others. There are many places on the earth which are like paradise and even young children can do very well with the warm weather and abundant food.
What test? I don’t see any test.
He didn’t choose them in order to test them. He chose them in order to teach them something new.
Indeed. This testing garbage makes no sense at all. A parent says, “don’t play in the street or you will die.” But the child plays in the street and is hit by the car to become crippled and unable to walk. Of course the parent doesn’t say, “you disobeyed and I said you would die, so now I have to kill you” – such silliness. Anyway I think this was about the death of the spirit because of self-destructive habits, like blaming others for your own mistakes rather than learning from them.
I think so.
And so do I. So what?
I could care less about ANE mythological material, but saying that to @St.Roymond seems a bit silly to me. It is his opinion. And you have yours. And I have mine. We in our very different experiences and conceptual frameworks, quite naturally, find meaning in this text in very different ways. We should not be so surprised at such differences.
There were literary categories as early as 2200 BC. Even oral forms had distinct categories.
Ditto that. It’s debated even that ancient writers thought in terms of archetypes.
“When did I first make choices for myself?” could be among them, of course.
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Wow… that one would never have occurred to me because I always made choices for myself. But I guess some people might have experienced things differently. But for me it was more the other way around – slowly learning to listen to the suggestions of other people.
This is not ‘New Age’ at all. New Age takes a bunch of other religions an combines them however they choose. My exegesis is entirely based on the the description in Genesis along with clues from other parts of scripture, some very basic understanding of human anatomy and guidance from the Holy Spirit.
Thanks!
Classic complaint that you didn’t leave your brain at the door like you are supposed to.
No it isn’t new age at all, that I can see. Way too Christian… Christian mysticism at most. But focused on finding meaning in the Bible and no connections I can see with the ideas of other religions. There is more of that in talk about a so called “soul.” Though… the reference to gold puzzles me since I don’t see that in in the text.
The soul is simply our person. We are all different persons, having different experiences but come from the one same Spirit. The soul is what needs saving. When I say Eve is our ‘spirit’, I could have interchanged that with soul. The soul is the weaker vessel influenced by, beguiled by the desires of the flesh. So there is enmity, a struggle between the offspring of Eve (spirit) and the serpent (sinful flesh).
- Gen 2:10 Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads. 11 The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there.
Pishon means to “spring up” or “leap”… Ah, the joy of the Holy Spirit!
Havilah means a “stretch of sand”. Like on the edge of the waters… expanding the Kingdom of God!
Onyx can make a very nice gemstone to place in the gold wedding band, and bdellium makes a nice perfume to wear for Jesus, your Bridegroom!
- Gen 2:13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush.
Gihon means a “bursting forth”, a “gushing”. Is the Holy Spirit gushing out of you?
Cush means “as if he were getting smarter”. Yes, He will teach you all things!
- Gen 2:14 The name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.
Hiddekel means “keen frivolity”. From (1) the verb חדד (hadad), to be sharp, keen or swift, and (2) the verb קלל (qalal), to be light or frivolous.
Assyria means “to go straight on” …Be keen, swift and light footed as to take the straight and narrow road!
Euphrates means “good or noble” and “to be fruitful”. Amen!
In the Bible, yes. It is the belief of some people that this is a non-physical thing inserted into the body which is more from Gnosticism, Greek philosophy and other religions. I do not believe in such a thing. The spiritual body of 1 Cor 15 (which comes after the physical body), I believe in. In particular, I don’t believe there is some non-physical thing inserted into the body to make it alive and/or a person.
Well the breath of life was inserted at least once, abiogenesis, with “mankind” made of “dust”.
- Gen 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
God had the author (Moses we presume) think of the smallest thing he could think of, and this was a speck of dust. Really God was talking about the first single celled microscopic organism… By the way, verses 10-14 are parenthetical, the mature garden, but here it is just starting out. The “man” is the first “kind”.
Mankind was then placed in the Garden, like a symbiote.
- Gen 2:8 The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.
With science, the first microbes are bacteria, and later the mitochondria within a single cell is very similar in form to bacteria. So there is a form of symbiosis with the mitochondria having its own DNA apart form the DNA in the nucleus in the midst of the cell.
The word for Garden means to “hedge about”, and “eastward” can mean at the “forefront” or “edge of”. The East in ancient times was thought to be the top of the world (or North) where the Sun rises. The garden then hedges about, along the edge of, surrounding Eden instead of just being adjacent to Eden.
- Gen 2:9 And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
So, the garden wall is the cell wall, “the man” the mitochondria and the growing trees are at the nucleus.
The story goes on from there… Adams rib taken out of his side represents cell division. Eve being brought to him, represents the first clonal organisms, they hid under the leaves of the tree like mushrooms (fungi), by eating something else they have become animals and God exchanges their covering of fig leaves for animal skins before being sent out of the garden, become multicellular and work for food.
Yes, the spiritual body comes after, or rather is awakened within us.