Bible Study: Genesis 1-3

Genesis 1-4
I joined an email discussion group that will be reading the Bible together. I am posting my responses here as well. Before I do so, I want to talk about how I view reading the Bible. How should people read it? What should you expect?

1) It is not a science textbook, and it's mostly not meant to be taken as a literal history throughout. It is part mythology, and chronicle of the growth of a religion but its main purpose is as a spiritual guide. Parts of it contain beautiful and almost universal spiritual truths, and some parts are just entertainment, political propaganda or an attempt at historical archiving. There's also parts that are just plain useless junk. The thing that's so great is no one knows which is which!
2) It is difficult and cryptic, a one-time read-through is not at all enough. Of course it won't make sense if you just read it as a straight narration meant to be taken entirely at face value.
Because it contains stories written by different authors over a period of several thousand years, there will be many contradictions. These don't invalidate the text at all, because it was never meant for all authors to agree with each other- it wasn't planned ahead of time like a modern book and it's not meant to be read like one.
6) I'm not pretending to be some expert, I'm at best an amateur theologian, at worst just someone with a lot of time on my hands and an interest in religion.
7) I'm going to include references to other books, because it helps me, as well as links to Bible Spam and The Brick Testament for fun.
7) We're reading The New Jerusalem Bible which is supposed to be the most accurate (Christian) translation. The group's name is lectiodivinia, at yahoogroups. The NJB is a Catholic bible, highly respected linguist and fantasy author JRR Tolkien was one of the original translators/editors. At times I was not able to use the NJB because I don't own it, so I've also used this one online. Partly because I simply didn't trust half the versions that turned up in my google search. This online one is not well typed out, sadly and someone forgot to do line breaks at one point, so I've occasionally been forced to resort to my NIV (curse you, Rupert Murdock).

This week's readings were
Sunday, Jan. 1: Genesis 1-2 and Mark 1:1-13
Monday, Jan. 2: Genesis 3-4 and Mark 1:14-28
Tuesday, Jan. 3: Genesis 5-6 and Mark 1:29-39
Wednesday, Jan. 4: Genesis 7-8 and Mark 1:40-45
Thursday, Jan. 5: Genesis 9-10 and Mark 2:1-12
Friday, Jan. 6: Genesis 11-12 and Mark 2:13-17
Saturday, Jan. 7: Genesis 13-15 and Mark 2:18-28

Here is Insidian's take on Genesis. And from Brick Testament, the Garden of Eden story.

Genesis.

The earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep and a divine wind swept over the waters.

The "Old Testament" has some of the most beautiful language in world mythology, if it doesn't put this part of the bible in the top ten of the most incredible writing ever. Whether it is accurate or not is irrelevant, it's more important what it teaches us about people, and what we learn about that is extremely relevant.

God creates man last, and gives him special intelligence and special jobs to do. Man is given dominion over all the plants and animals, but man is also charged to take care of those things, these things were not given to us just to use up and break. Light is a creation of God, but darkness is pre-existing, chaos is older than order. Perhaps God didn't create evil after all, then. Or perhaps when he separated light from darkness, he created the concept of good and evil at the same time.

It says that God created the heavens and the earth, but it does not specifically state that God created the entire universe. This leaves plenty of room for speculation on where God itself came from, and is not really addressed in Genesis. Knowing how thorough these authors were, if they had thought of an answer they would have included it.

Perhaps one of the reasons why they don't ask the question is because they have borrowed much of their mythology from the Babylonians. Babylonians were the descendants of Sumerians, ironically the people who gave us Abraham. They can't answer the question because it is not asked by the original inventors of the myth. Likewise, the Noah story doesn't give a reason why God wanted to destroy the world, other than people were "sinning", but the Sumerian version does. The older gods were annoyed at how loud the human parties were, and the humans weren't doing the work the gods had given them to do.

There are two versions of the creation story in Genesis. They were written at different times and the variations tell us a lot about what was going on with the authors. One may have been written during the reign of King David, when Israel was powerful and wealthy, and monotheistic. The other, written during or just after the Babylonian captivity, when Israel was beaten down and thrown in with a strange, foreign culture. But since this was the culture they had originally come from many generations ago, they'd already been traveling around with a similar myth, sprinkled with some bits from Egyptian and Canaanite beliefs. There are actually four different authors or groups of authors thought to have worked on this book.

It's not actually clear in some places whether this "God" is one god or several. Elohim is plural, a word that seems to have been borrowed from Canaan.

"Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves".

"Behold Adam is become as one of us knowing good and evil: now therefore lest perhaps he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever."

In fact, the Hebrew people were not always monotheists- the monotheistic Yahwist worship tended to be something only hicks from the mountains engaged in and Abraham did not come from a monotheistic culture. Yahweh may have originally been part of a pantheon, slowly gaining power until he staged a coup and was crowned king. There is actually a passage in the OT where Yahweh travels to the Council of El (the Canaanite high god) and berates the other gods for their lack of morals and concern for the humans. He becomes king of the other gods; much like Marduk becomes king of the gods in the Sumerian/Babylonian story.

God may be One, but with many emanations or aspects. The earlier creation myth, the Enuma Elish (from Sumeria) describes twenty four beings emanating from the Creator, each being was given rulership over one part of the world. But all these beings seem to be aspects of the original God and Goddess- Enki and Ninhursag are Ishtar and Tammuz. And above the first two God and Goddess mentioned, there is another Creator who seems to encompass them all.

"Man" here is used to refer to both man and woman, according to the footnotes. It's at least implied that Adam and Eve are created at the same time, which is similar to the original Mesopotamian myth in the way it doesn't differentiate between the creation of man and the creation of woman. A more obscure version teaches that Adam began as a hermaphrodite that then split into two people and two genders.

God said, Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. 21God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good. 22God blessed them, saying, Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. 23And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.

It's interesting that God does create birds and reptiles and "great sea monsters" before he creates cattle and primates, and that man comes last, which is not so terribly different from evolution. I once saw this painting of the evolution of man from ape to Homo Sapiens, all the creatures are standing in a line and at the end of the line is a primitive man reaching up his hand. God is standing at the end of the line, holding the man's hand as if to help him walk.

Terry Pratchett attempts to summarize our modern beliefs about world creation by saying "In the beginning, there was nothing. Which exploded."

More than twelve of the world's creation myths involve the world beginning as a formless, watery waste. Why is this so? There are reasons, but every reason involves people admitting something they don't want to admit. Either there really was a big flood (human beings probably didn't witness it, but found evidence later) or we really did all come from the same ancestor, or there really is a Great Universal Unconscious, or perhaps the Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Africans had earlier and more extensive contact with cultures on the other side of the world than traditional historians want to believe. Several myths also seem to include snake goddesses, and the stories often echo that of Marduk and Tiamet. An Aztec myth describes two gods pulling the "serpent goddess" apart to make the sky and the ground. The Aztecs were quite Egyptian in their architecture, worship style and dress, cocaine, maize (corn that grows only in the Americas) and tobacco were found in the stomach of an Egyptian mummy. The Bushmen of the Kalahari (southwest Africa) have a myth, their god had a wife and two sons, the sons taught the humans how to find food and the daughter of the god married a snake. The Algonquin have a myth with the "Sky Goddess" falling from the moon, which is similar to the Persian story of Astarte, another version of Ishtar/Inanna. Astarte could also be Asherah, a Canaanite fertility goddess, the descendants of these people were the Phoenicians and rocks have been found in on the east coast of the US that are engraved with Phoenician writing.

All the Middle and Near East, creation myths also feature a god creating humanity out of clay or mud. In the Sumerian/Babylonian version we are created from clay and the blood of Tiamet's monstrous husband Kingu, slaughtered by Marduk in the great war between the gods (what's that? A war in heaven? Hmm.)

The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom He had formed. 9And from the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad. 10A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches. 11The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where the gold is. (12The gold of that land is good; bdellium is there, and lapis lazuli. (Others: onyx ; meaning of Heb. shoham uncertain.)) 13The name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through the whole land of Cush. 14The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. 1

Oddly specific directions, aren't they? I don't think they knew, when they wrote that, that it would spark a war several thousand years later. There's a book called "Entrance to the Garden of Eden" that I'd love to get and read, it's about a Jewish man who experiences a crisis of faith and goes back to the Holy Land to find himself. He sets out with a Christian and a Muslim to walk the paths of the bible, they end up finding a lot of common ground (no pun intended).

God plants a tree in the garden and tells Adam and Eve not to eat from it; they can have anything else they want but not this fruit. The type of fruit is not specified, it is popularly thought of as an apple but it could also have been a peach or a pomegranate, or perhaps some fruit the world no longer has. Incidentally, those three fruits are associated with sex and especially sex with women, because they resemble parts of the female anatomy. Apples are part of the rose family and the rose is the sacred flower of the Goddess. Eve is tricked by "the serpent" into eating the fruit and giving some to her husband.

This serpent makes no appearance before then, so people have spent centuries trying to figure out who exactly it was and what the purpose of this temptation was. Popular Christian thought makes the serpent the Devil/Satan, but seems to be confused as to why God allowed it to happen and why God couldn't fix it afterward. The serpent says to Eve, " God doesn't want you to eat the fruit, because if you do, you'll be as wise as a god- your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods".

This has had a threefold effect. It created a theology where it was deemed bad to be like gods, leading people to think it would have been better for us if we'd never been tempted. This is the Rebellion is Bad train of thought, which can be traced all the way up to today's dictatorial religious types. There is also the theory that the snake was some kind of hero or servant of God, who was supposed to push us in the right direction, God knew all about it but either couldn't change it or didn't want to. And finally, the theory that the snake was a rebel, who did it all behind God's back because it wanted to free us from the intellectual shackles God had put us in.

Adam and Eve do not actually die. But it's believed that they would have been immortal had they not given in to temptation. Through their sin, Christianity teaches, they damned the entire human race. God catches them, Adam blames his wife for the entire thing (setting a precedent for thousands of years of similar actions) and God throws them out of Eden.

As the footnotes say, it is never written that women's pain in childbirth or menstruation was because of her sin. Rather, the problem was between her and man; man would now seek to dominate her, instead of accepting her as his equal partner. It's never stated or implied that God wanted it this way, or that it's right, just that it happened.

Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain- a farmer and Abel, a shepherd. They both bring offerings to God, and God is not as excited about Cain's offering as he is about Abel's.

The Lord paid heed to Abel and his offering, 5but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed. Cain was much distressed and his face fell. 6And the Lord said to Cain,
Why are you distressed?
And why is your face fallen?
7 ( Meaning of verse uncertain.)Surely, if you do right,
There is uplift.
But if you do not do right
Sin couches at the door;
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master.


Cain feels as if he hasn't pleased God, and God tells him that it's okay, not to be discouraged because discouragement opens the door to sin (my interpretation, anyway). Cain takes this badly in spite of God's words. This has always come across as confusing, partly because people don't use the actual words of God in this scene, but sort of make up something. The message that comes across is that God didn't like Cain's vegetables, vegetables are not as good as meat and God wants blood sacrifices. Blood! BLOOD! Muhaahahahaa. But it doesn't look like the verse says anything of the sort.


8Cain said to his brother Abel... and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him. 9The Lord said to Cain, Where is your brother Abel? And he said, I do not know. Am I my brothers keeper? 10Then He said, What have you done? Hark, your brothers blood cries out to Me from the ground! 11Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, ( See 3.17.) which opened its mouth to receive your brothers blood from your hand. 12If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.

Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is too great to bear! 14Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth anyone who meets me may kill me! 15The Lord said to him, I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him. And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him. 16Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

This is one of the more misunderstood passages. People tend to think that it means Cain was only cursed, but God also extends protection to him. People have, at various points in history, tried to claim certain races were descendants of Cain, and used it as an excuse to treat them horribly.

People often criticize this story because they claim it makes no sense. How can Cain and Abel have such intimate conversations with God, when Adam and Eve were cast from God's presence? And why does Cain fear retribution when there are supposedly only two other people in the entire world and they're his parents?

The easiest answer is that this story was tacked on later, and does not mean what it seems to mean at all. It could be a metaphor for the reason why certain races have historically feuded with certain other races- an agricultural society's war with their neighbors. Something to do with Jews and Arabs, perhaps. But also there is an ancient ritual called the "scapegoat" ritual, where priests would drive a goat into the wilderness to atone for the sins of the community. This was celebrated around the same time as Yom Kippur is now (leaving room, of course for variations in the calendar). Sometimes they used a man instead of a goat, and the man would be marked so no one would touch him. This ritual is at least 7,000 years old. There is also a myth of two male gods, one a farmer and one a shepherd, fighting to be Ishtar/Inanna's husband, it appears to get quite violent.

When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, 2the divine beings (Others: the sons of God.) saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. 3The Lord said, My breath shall not abide ( Meaning of Heb. uncertain ) in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years. 4It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.

This part has always struck me as odd, especially since it's one of those passages that gets virtually ignored by everyone except fantasy writers. Another translation says that the women were taught magic by the "sons of God", which is just such perfect justification for the existence of people with the gene for being powerful witches and wizards. It could also be an attempt to divert attention away from the necessary incest that had to have happened in order for the human race to come from just two people.

There follows a long and very specific genealogy, listing exactly how long each person lives. If you're paying attention, this actually becomes quite important, but what strikes me is how painstakingly specific so many things are in this part of the Bible. They don't say "so and so lived to maybe something close to five hundred years" but "he lived for five hundred and sixteen years, three months, and two days".