In the beginning Bill Geeks and Steve Jweebs invented the Internet. It was very good. Using it, people kept in touch with their friends much better and faster, they improved their education, and they broadened their minds.
But it wasn’t long before Harry Hacker came along in his black hat. “Has anyone put any restrictions on the way you’re to use this?” he asked. “Er – no,” said Steve. “Not that we know of. But we feel kind of obliged to use it for good.” “You know, you could get a lot more out of this than just all that goody-goody stuff,” Harry said to them. “Let me show you how to use it to really broaden your minds. You can look at pictures of beautiful naked women. What’s more, you could make a lot of money, and undermine the government; they’ve got it coming to them anyway.” “Wow!” said Steve and Bill, who didn’t want to be thought of as narrow minded; and they immediately tried what Harry had suggested. After them their successors saw no reason to stop even where Bill and Steve had. The result was that very quickly the internet was completely swamped with porn, violence, and lies.
So how are we to understand the first chapters of Genesis?
One issue here concerns the names in Genesis 1-3, which all have meanings; and how to deal with them is a translation problem that has no consistent and perfect solution. And indeed our English translations all exhibit glaring inconsistencies. The Hebrew text is seamless, whereas our translations begin talking about ‘the man’ and then suddenly switch to ‘Adam’ (which is just the same thing in the Hebrew), and they can’t even agree on where to make the switch. Also in Genesis 3 we have the inconsistency in our versions that Adam and Eve’s names are transliterated whereas the snake’s name, which would be Nahash if transliterated, is instead translated. Complete consistency is never possible in translation, but the most consistent way here would be to just translate everybody’s names all the time; so instead of the transliterated names Adam, Eve, Abel, and Nahash, I suggest the translations Everyman, Lifebearer, Fleetingbreath, and Snake. Reading an account with these names gives a much different impression to an account with the transliterated names! The former does indeed read like a story about real individuals, whereas the latter reads like an allegory.
The issue about names is a neglected aspect of the debate about how Genesis 1-3 should be understood. Let us now look briefly at other aspects involved. Literal-six-day Creationists insist that Genesis 1-3 must be taken literally, while others see allegory in part or the whole. A cornerstone argument used by Creationists is that Jesus and Paul both referred to Adam and Eve, thus confirming the belief that these were real people. But preachers often talk about Christian, Hopeful and the Giant Despair, not at all meaning to say these are real people.
Besides there are two other significant places where Genesis 1-3 is referred to in the NT without any interest in the literal meaning. John 1:1-5 gives a commentary on Genesis 1, interpreting ‘light’, ‘darkness’, and ‘life’ allegorically. This of course doesn’t necessarily mean that John denies the literal meaning, but he certainly does pick up a hint given in Genesis 1; as Augustine pointed out, whereas the light and the day are approved, it does not say ‘and God saw that it was good’ after mention of ‘night’.
And in Romans 7:7-12 Paul treats the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 as something that happens in miniature to each one of us, the experience of Everyman (note that verse 9 really doesn’t apply to Paul personally, since he was taught the Law from earliest years).
For these reasons, and more that I will mention below, I argue for an allegorical understanding of the passage. In some ways Genesis 1-3 is like an abstract painting. The style is not far from Realism, maybe comparable to Impressionism. As one critic said about Picasso’s Guernica: ‘It transcends a mere factual chronicle.’
There are important implications here. For example there is a danger that in taking Genesis 1-3 literally we can miss the main point and get sidetracked by irrelevant questions, like “How could there be light before the sun is created?” “Who did Cain marry?” and “Didn’t God overreact to Adam and Eve breaking what seems to be a rather arbitrary, petty rule?” – not to mention the zealous but misplaced concern that not taking Genesis 1-3 literally is equivalent to jumping on the slippery slope that leads to the abandonment of all faith.
Having these red herrings cleared out of the way, we can see more clearly the big points that the author wants to get across, such as:
God made everything. The sun, moon and stars are not deities, contrary to widespread belief at the time. And evil was an intruder that came later.
So from this position I believe we get a correct understanding of the story and its implications. For example the problem of evil is put into its correct perspective. God was showing the first people the wonderful world he had made for them. After traversing vast distances they came to a small area which God pointed to and said: “See that tiny little area over there? That’s called ‘Evil’. Don’t go there. It’s not good.” … Not long after God left them they were over there looking at it, curious. Wily Satan used one of his many disguises to lure them and they found to their regret that God was right about it.
This pattern repeats itself all the time: for example a father takes his son into the town and shows him all the wonderful places; then they pass a brothel and the father simply says, ‘See that? That’s called a brothel. It’s a bad place. Don’t go there.’ ‘Why, Dad?’ ‘Believe me, you don’t need to know any more. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to know any more’. …But his curiosity is piqued and he spends more time thinking about the brothel than about any of the other places in the town; until finally he goes there and peeps in the door. A pimp standing there says “Do you want to become a man? Come in there and we’ll make you one!” “I certainly don’t want to miss out there,” he thinks, and so he goes in … Or, in another analogy: A rich benefactor rescues a poor man out of squalor and settles him in a wonderful mansion in the middle of beautiful grounds and lets him marry his daughter. “All this I’m giving you,” he says; “but just one thing, don’t go near my other daughter…” But the other daughter was debauched and bitterly envied the happy couple. She used the naïve curiosity that had been aroused in him by the warning to lure and then seduce him; and the fallout was huge.
So in fact the mess the world is in is not because God threw a fit about them breaking a rule that seems to be without rhyme or reason. It is because there has been a revolt against God, which quickly took on massive proportions. Genesis 4-6 outlines how that revolt spread and how the rock-bottom of depravity was reached in no time.
Genesis 1-3 is presented with the use of symbols. For people in a traditional culture the tree is a source of many things, such as shade, timber, and fruit. In Vanuatu every part of the coconut tree for example had a use. Hence its choice in this story to represent a source of useful knowledge, of knowing about evil (whatever that is, said Adam and Eve); and the other tree represents the source of Life Itself. The snake is a symbol of all that is cunning, hateful and harmful. People who live in modern urban situations don’t make these connections and so misunderstand the story.
Recognising the cues to the meaning in a piece of literature from another culture can be tricky. Often there are no overt clues, but the insiders simply know, because to them these things are loaded with meaning. cf. Obama’s inaugural speech: ‘…every so often the [presidential] oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.’
So I understand this story to be saying: God warned people that there was something called Evil. They were curious as to what this was, but God knew that even explaining it to them would compromise their wonderful pure state of innocence. So he simply said: ‘Believe me, keep well away from it.’ But their naïve curiosity (and underneath that, a chafing at their limitations vis a vis God which Satan was able to stir up) got the better of them and gave Satan, an utterly depraved creature, the chance to lure and entrap them. After this everything turned sour, and the floodgates were open to a deluge of every imaginable (and unimaginable) evil. It happened to our first ancestors and it happens in miniature to each one of us (Rom 7:7-12).
Notice the key word ‘took’. ‘God saw that it was good’ was repeated several times in chs 1 and 2. Now the same clause is repeated, with a fatal addition: ‘Eve saw that it was good—and took it.’ A powerful and insistent compulsion to take, get, have, possess, to make it mine, mine, mine, has blighted mankind ever since. This is why we can’t leave beautiful countryside untouched, why I’m tempted to pick my neighbour’s luscious grapes growing within arm’s reach over the fence, and why I can’t just admire a pretty girl without feeling I must have her for myself. Admiring is okay but we can’t seem to separate it now from greed and grabbing.
Many questions we might like to ask about the fall of man receive no answer here. However three key points are made: 1. The danger of deception pouring into open ears and hearts, leading to 2. the sudden lunge; then 3. blame-passing – how apt and quick we are to it. The same pattern can be seen in other parts of the Bible, e.g. Proverbs 7:22.
You could ask questions of this passage such as Where was Adam and what was he doing while Eve was being tempted? We read at the end that he was ‘with her’. So was he asleep, unconcerned, trying to stop Eve, or what? I think it’s important to realise that the story doesn’t say. It is written to make certain points, and we get sidetracked trying to deduce other things from it or read other things into it.
That is why recognising the allegory is of key importance. Take the case of Pilgrim’s Progress. In trying to get to the proper meaning of the book, we must not wander off into questions such as:
*What about the journeys of the other people Christian meets, such as Evangelist? Some of them seem to be stationary, others moving around randomly.
*Work out the total distance Christian covered in kms.
*The places mentioned are all presumably somewhere in England. Try to locate them on the map.
So in the same way we can make a list of questions that it isn’t legitimate to ask of Genesis 1-3, things extraneous to the message it is designed to communicate. Then we can properly extract the meaning of the passage, not distracted by questions such as:
*How could there be light before the sun was created?
*Where exactly was Eden?
*Who did Cain marry?
*Why such an extreme punishment? Death seems over the top as a penalty for eating a bit of fruit.
*How can Paul blame Eve as the deceived one when the story says Adam was there with her? Was he asleep? Was he also deceived? Or did he arrive late on the scene? Or did he just go along with it because he didn’t want to be separated from her?
*Where did Satan come from? Why is he so evil? How did he get into the Garden?
It’s important to realise that the story simply does not address these questions.
However it does address some very big questions, like:
*Who started this whole show off?
*Why are there always weeds in the garden, literally and metaphorically?
To which it gives the answers:
*God did.
*Things were made good. Evil came in later. Mankind gave evil the power it has; it was not the fault of God. But the biggest part of the blame rests on the Enemy of God and man.
Life throws up difficulties—from the petty and annoying to major blows. These things often seem unrelated to our personal desert. This is perhaps part of the point of the ‘thorns and thistles’–the garden just does it. But first we have to recognise that it’s talking about a lot more than just agricultural problems. Note that the curses on Adam and Eve pick out their key roles in a traditional society, the man providing the food and the woman procreating, and so would be seen to extend to all their life. Virtually the same idea is repeated in the sentence ‘He will bruise your heel, but you will bruise his head.’ The ‘bruising of your heel’ indicates all the trouble and strife that comes to us in this world from Satan, and ‘You will bruise his head’ indicates the ultimate defeat of Satan.
Along the same lines, Paul says, discussing the general effects of sin, Creation is subject to futility and groaning. The French proverb tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse expresses it quite well. We could translate: Everything fades, everything jades, everything degrades.
A currently much-debated issue is whether or not the word yom ‘day’ used in Genesis 1 means a literal 24-hour period. I agree that a 24-hour period is indeed what the writer meant. However it’s clear that the whole story is highly schematic.1 One indication of this is the use of repeated formulaic expressions like ‘and there was evening, and there was morning’, and another is the fact that light was created before the sun. The details of the story are to be taken literally within the context of the story, but then the story as a whole is to be recognised as a highly schematized presentation. In some ways it’s similar to a parable. It would be foolish to try to work out the temperature and humidity of hell from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. So also we shouldn’t try to make scientific deductions from Genesis 1. Anyone who wants to line it up with a scientific account must to realise that the style, the method, and the scope are all vastly different.
Because of this, believing the story doesn’t mean we have to believe that God made everything in six strict 24-hour days.
Genesis 1 presents very big ideas in a very brief account. It would have been possible to choose a Hebrew expression to indicate more unambiguously the actual periods of time involved, but the simple yom was chosen to fit in with and contribute to the clean lines and majestic artistry of the narrative.
Genesis 2:9 ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. Here ‘good and evil’ is a kind of idiom that is really just talking about evil. (It’s a bit like we might say “I had a few ups and downs last year” really meaning I was down all the time.) They already knew about the good. There is a similar expression in Gn 31:24 where Laban is told ‘Be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad’, meaning ‘Be careful not to say anything bad to Jacob.’
Genesis 2:17 ‘…on the day you eat of it you will die’. When I was at university someone used to brandish a book called ‘1000 mistakes in the Bible’ and this was one of them. Of course they didn’t die on the day they ate the fruit. But in fact here is the first instance of an often-repeated feature of biblical language: a word is used that is taken by the listeners at first in one way, but later they realise another meaning was intended. Yes, they didn’t die physically: could it be that this is talking about something else that resembles physical death? Other instances of the use of this teaching technique are to be found in John 3:8 with the word pneuma (at first Nicodemus would have thought ‘wind’, but later he realised ‘spirit’), and in John 4:10 with ‘living water’.
The words ‘Adam’ and ‘ground’ (in Hebrew, adamah) are very similar. In 3:17 Adam is told ‘cursed is the ground because of you’. Here the Hebrew strikingly depicts how close the curse was to landing on him. See his last-minute reprieve: ‘cursed is adam—ah.’ But in 4:11, Cain by contrast is told, literally, ‘cursed are you from the ground.’ Here the Hebrew phrase ‘from the ground’ has a double meaning; one is ‘driven from the ground’, i.e. banished, and the other is ‘and not the ground.’ This time the curse was not diverted.
Fear and loathing of snakes is widespread in traditional cultures, and I would hazard to say that the less a culture is influenced by the modern world, the more likely that they will actually say snakes are demons or demon-possessed. Is this some kind of primal memory going back to Genesis?
‘you shall bruise his head and he shall bruise your heel’. Although snakes have caused pain and hurt to people, usually it is the snakes that come out second best. So our ultimate victory over evil is assured.
The creation event is put into a literary and artistic framework to make it vivid and concrete, and to aid memorisation.
Note on the translations of the names: Adam, Eve, Abel, and the snake, or Everyman, Lifebearer, Fleetingbreath, and Snake? Note there’s no other way of saying ‘Everyman’ in Hebrew, and aspects of the story seem to call for this, as the argument given above shows. Adam called his wife ‘Life’ because she was the mother of all life, hence my choice of ‘Lifebearer’. Abel means breath, brevity, futility, and ‘Fleetingbreath’ seems to capture it here. Capitalising Snake as a name is clearly called for since he behaves like a person.
Why do the standard translations not do this?
1. tradition: this was established by the Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible. This was hugely influential for centuries, and its influence has been passed down through other major versions. But it is wildly inconsistent in its renderings, not least with names; e.g. it translates Eve’s name in 3:20 and then transliterates it in 4:1. So it is not actually a very good guide.
2. to harmonise with other parts of Scripture that refer to Genesis 1-3. But arguably internal consistency in the passage itself is a higher priority than consistency with other Scriptures. At the very least we should see what Genesis 1-3 looks like when translated for internal consistency.
3. because of pressure from conservative Christians who don’t understand the issues involved, and who think that any departure from the traditional way is stepping into heresy.
