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A Story of Biblical Proportion
Rev. Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of Edmonton,
February 11, 2007
“In the beginning”. Such an important phrase. A number of years ago, I received specialized training to become a minister who organizes a brand new congregation. One lesson stood out from that training: how you begin influences the life of that community for a very, very long time. Creation stories have lives of their own, and as they become mythologized in the years that follow, those creation myths generate unassailable doctrinal truths.
It is certainly true of the most famous “In the beginning…” story, the one found in Genesis. Its messages and underlying themes have shaped the cultures of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds, particularly attitudes towards God, sin, women and the environment, and not always in a good way.
Consider the everyday allusions from that book that have instant meaning for us: Tree of Knowledge, forbidden fruit, the Garden of Eden, the serpent and the fig leaf. Consider also the doctrines welded on to this story that have so shaped our culture and our planet, particularly the notion of original sin, the subordination of women, the shamefulness of our bodies, the concept that Man is master of the Earth, and the idea that some knowledge is too large for humans to possess.
This Wednesday afternoon and evening, we begin the Bible for Liberals course. Over the next six weeks we will look at how the Bible was written. We will try to peer behind the curtain of mostly Christian doctrinal teachings that shape the little Biblical knowledge most of us carry around, and see if there is anything in the Bible for us as religious liberals.
Today, let’s start “In the beginning…” with a small sampler:
Having grown up as a fairly typical Roman Catholic non-Bible reader, you can imagine my surprise when a college professor informed us that there were two creation stories in Genesis. I had read them but missed the obvious discrepancies in story and style. It never occurred to me that it might not be one divinely inspired story.
I read you a section starting at Chapter 2:4, skipping entirely chapter 1. That’s the story of the six days of creation that starts, “In the beginning…” How do we know they are two separate stories? Because in Chapter 1:27, it reads, “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” No rib, no clay, no breath of life just ZAP! Followed by, “Go forth and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.”
The fact that there are two stories edited or ‘redacted’ together is buttressed by scholars capable of reading the original Hebrew. The stylistic and philosophical choices of Hebrew words and names for God, show that the accounts come from two different sets of writers. There are the Jahwists so named because they call God Yahweh, and the Elohists who use Elohim, an older generic term for divine being.
The “In the beginning” or six days of creation story is Elohist, identifiable by language, by the distant nature of God and the lack of narrative detail. The Adam and Eve story, written 300 years earlier about 1,200 bce, but placed second in Genesis, comes from Jahwists. The Jahwist school offers the most detailed and colorful stories where Yahweh is a real, physical presence who walks in the garden and sews clothes.
If nothing else, these simple discoveries should challenge our notions of the Bible as one seamless, orderly tale. It is something more, much more, and much more interesting than the fantastical collection of miracle stories and ‘Thou shalt nots’ many of us dismiss as silly.
In fact many biblical stories aren’t even original. Far from fact, some of those stories were borrowed and adapted to make moral and religious points for this newly emerging and uniquely monotheistic faith.
Adam and Eve is one such story, with parts borrowed from the Sumerians. Sumer once existed where today stands Iraq and relates to the ancient Hebrews the way we relate to the Roman Empire. The peak of Sumerian influence was about 1,800 years before the writing of Adam and Eve, but Sumerian writing, religion, culture and business practices remained a strong influence long after the city states fell to Babylon.
Listen for a couple of parallels:
The Sumerian pantheon was ruled by the goddess Ninhursag or “Lady of All” who created a magnificent garden called Edinu and left it in charge of her lover, Enki. However, she told him to tend it, but not use it.
Now, this pantheon had senior and junior gods. The seniors lived in splendour while the junior gods did all the work digging river channels, forming the mountains and so on.
In time the juniors rebelled. To keep the peace, Enki fashioned the first humans out of clay, spittle and the blood of a slain god, so that the men could work and the gods could rest. The theology may differ, but the story sounds familiar.
Meantime, Enki became curious about this garden over which he had charge. His assistant Adapa offered seven plants to Enki which he ate. This enraged the Ninhursag who caused him to fall ill. Enki felt pain in his rib, which is a Sumerian pun. The word ‘ti’ means both ‘rib’ and ‘life’. In other words, the illness was going to kill him. The other gods pleaded for mercy. In the end, Ninhursag spared him.
Ninhursag is seen by the Sumerians (and under other names by many other prehistoric cultures) as the Mother of All Life, a role filled by Eve in Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions.
Well, the parallels are obvious. There is Garden of Eden, the temptation by a third party and there is punishment for eating the fruit. There is the first human being formed out of clay and having life breathed into it. And there is the rib…the Jahwist writers obviously didn’t get the joke.
Today I read such things and think, “Hmmm, that’s kind of interesting. It looks like the Hebrews borrowed popular stories and recast them to suit their theologies, the same way the Christians rewrote things like Saturnalia and the Spring festivals into Christmas and Easter.”
But then I stop to ponder how shocking it would have been for me to learn these things 40 years ago when I was still a devout young Catholic. Since the cradle I had been taught that God had inspired every single word written in the Bible. I used to think that Matthew and Mark and Genesis (yeah, I thought it was one guy) and Isaiah and all the rest, gathered around and listened to God and then ran off to their parchments to write.
In the 1960’s this sort of scholarship was dangerous stuff, at least in North America. Perhaps that’s why the Germans led the scholarly debate for nearly a century. The English speaking academics were fascinated, but a little afraid of it.
Well, let’s look at some key themes that emerge from this adapted creation story.
The demotion of women
First and foremost is the demotion of women. In Sumeria the supreme divinity, as in most prehistoric cultures, was the goddess, she who was fertile and maternal. The goddess was the giver of life. In Genesis, life itself comes from a male god, and the female is only created to give companionship, carnal, temptation, sexual release and, oh yeah, to perpetuate the human race. It is a pretty significant demotion and the beginning of patriarchal religion. Within Jewish tradition there are a set of commentaries that have almost as important place as the Scripture itself. Often these commentaries expand upon the narratives and even introduce new characters. One such shadowy figure is the fascinating Lillith. In one account she is created before Eve. She is the unnamed one in the six days passage, “in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” According to one commentator, Lillith, was been created in the same instant and was therefore fully the equal of Adam.
But that wasn’t what God intended. Lillith refused to be sexually submissive and so was banished from the garden and became a night demon. And so the pattern was set down some 2,700 years ago for the second class status of women, a tradition we still struggle to change today. As I said at the outset, be careful how you begin, for the echoes of creation last forever.
I also came across a fascinating minor commentary trying to reconcile the two accounts. He suggested that the, “created them male and female,” passage meant that Adam was created as a hermaphrodite, with both male and female genitaillia. When God saw him lonely, he put Adam under and performed the first recorded transgender surgery. On one hand it’s kind of silly in how far it stretches itself to patch up this textual problem. On the other hand, can you imagine the impact on gender identity had this been widely accepted? Transgender people who still fight so hard for respect and acceptance would have been seen as God’s first children, and maybe that would be a good thing.
Tree of Knowledge of good and evil
Often the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil is mistaken for the tree of life. There is a tree of life, but once named, it disappears from the narrative. There is a popular notion that if you ate the apple from this tree, you would gain eternal life. Well, Genesis doesn’t say that, and never is an apple mentioned. What the story promises is death to whoever touches it, suggesting that Adam and Eve were created immortal. They already had the everlasting life.
Instead the tree contains knowledge of good and evil in its fruit. The serpent tempts Eve by saying that this knowledge will make them ‘like gods who know what is good and what is bad’. The temptation for Eve and Adam is the acquisition of god-like wisdom. The irony is their discovery that the gaining of wisdom is offset by the loss of innocence.
And one sad consequence of this story is that the first thing they discover is that they are naked and they feel ashamed. It’s a point that has been picked up and hammered home again and again leading to veiled women, sexual abuse, segregation of the sexes and an unwillingness to celebrate one of the most fundamental aspects of being human, our physical embodiment. And so began 2,500 years of people feeling pretty weird about their bodies, their bodily functions and their sexuality.
Dominion over the earth
In the first creation story, God creates man and woman together and blesses them saying, “Go forth and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all living things that move on the earth.” And then, God gives them the trees, grass, plants and everything else.
And we have acted like we own it ever since. The ability to own land, animals and even rights to the sea and air are enshrined in the secular laws inspired by Genesis. Take a look at first nations traditions and you will find nothing like this sense of land ownership, for theirs was not a religion inspired by Genesis. Instead, you find notions of interdependence with the earth and a call to walk reverently and to be in harmony with all things. Not so in Genesis. There is no Biblical injunction to be careful or responsible stewards, and so we have gone on to believe that we were almost Gods and that all creation exists to serve us. And look where that has gotten us.
Original Sin
Finally, the story of Adam and Eve forms the basis for the doctrine of original sin, a doctrine that insists that we were all born corrupt and sinful because of Adam and Eve. And the worst part is that this pervasive and oppressive doctrine is base on a bad translation!
Paul, writing in Greek wrote, "Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned,". Three hundred years later, St. Augustine, working with a Latin mistranslation, understood Paul to have said that Adam's sin was hereditary: "Death passed to all men because of Adam, [in whom] all sinned.” Original sin then became a cornerstone of Christian theological tradition.
Over the centuries, a system of uniquely Christian beliefs has developed from the Adam and Eve story. Baptism, which predates Christianity, has become understood as a means of washing away the stain of original sin.
But the greater impact, combined with the biblical love of shame has been to create 2,000 years of guilt-ridden focus on our sinfulness, on our corrupt natures and on our inability to do anything about it other than to beg for divine forgiveness. Because of these three short chapters, we have suffered an impaired ability to celebrate our humanity, our ability to love ourselves as physical beings, and our strength to become decent and loving people.
Over those centuries we have recovered much of that Original Blessing as Matthew Fox calls it, but the forces of finger pointing still shout that we should stay focused on human moral sickness instead of the possibility of human moral health. That’s a big weight from three small chapters and generations of bad interpretation. Be careful of your creation stories. They have the power to shape generations.
I think that the Bible is a great collection of stories, but I am deeply troubled by how literalists have used it to insist that there is only one God and only one way to understand God. They have stolen the Bible’s texture and richness with a narrow view that batters instead of uplift, that demeans instead of teaches, that shames instead of celebrates human existence. In our course, I hope we can discover some of the beauties in this collection, explain some of the historical quirks and free it from the weight of chain that has come to surround the Scripture.
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