God is smarter than you think ...

A closer look at Adam and Eve

As I ordinarily do on Mondays, I spent a bit of time last week reviewing the upcoming Bible text for this past Sunday. I do that for this newsletter’s edition of the Sunday Stretch (if you’re interested, subscribe to get Sunday posts every week at 6 a.m.!) and this past week I also did it in preparation for guest preaching at a local church here in Minneapolis.

As it was the first Sunday in Lent, the season of repentance, preparation, and focus on the Cross in the 40 days prior to Easter - minus Sundays, I preached a sermon more generally focused on all of this past Sunday’s texts, especially Jesus’ temptation by the Devil in Matthew 4.

Because of this, I didn’t have time to really delve into the Hebrew Bible text the way I wanted to - and it’s a doozy. So this week, in the Tuesday newsletter, I want to spend some time with Adam, Eve, the Serpent and the Fruit (hint: it wasn’t an apple!). Here we go!

For reference, the text I’m going to focus on here is Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7. That’s the Hebrew Bible text for this past Sunday in churches that follow the Revised Common Lectionary (a majority of mainline Protestant and Catholic churches across the country, as well as some more conservative denominations).

Here it is, from the New Revised Standard Version:

Gen. 2:15   The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.  ¹⁶ And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;  ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Gen. 3:1   Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”  ² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;  ³ but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”  ⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;  ⁵ for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  ⁶ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.  ⁷ Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

In case you haven’t heard this said quite so explicitly before, let me state it here unequivocally:

This very passage has been used to codify, excuse, and promulgate subjugation, discrimination against, and abuse of women in Western Christianity for thousands of years.

So immediately, whenever I read this passage, especially as an ordained woman whose very status as Pastor is called into question literally every single day - my antennae goes up. I’m reading with a critical eye. I’m thinking of the casual way that the text comes along to blame the woman. She’s the actor, the aggressor, the leader, even.

I’m thinking about all those dumb sermons preached by men that paint them as the victim of the seductress woman - them made helpless by some faux-biological science that paints men as victims of their own anatomy.

I’m thinking of the sex education I received as a teenage girl in the church in 1990s: how I was supposed to dress and act to guard against men’s supposedly uncontrollable sexual urges.

I was 13 and already in a double-bind. Be sexy but not sexual. Be beautiful but prim. Be powerful but submissive. Be smart - but not smarter than boys.

And poor Eve. For so many raised in the church, it all goes back to Eve.

Now, let’s take a moment to dispense with the idea that Adam and Eve represent real individuals. That fiction breaks down pretty quickly with the introduction of wives for Cain and Abel. If Adam and Eve were the only humans, where did these wives come from?

Instead, Genesis 2 represents a category of Scripture represented by allegory and fable. It’s the use of story, narrative, and characters to tell a broader truth. The fact that Adam and Eve can’t be traced to scientific, verifiable individual human beings does not mean the story the Bible tells about Adam and Eve isn’t true.

For a longer explanation of how narrative and storytelling that strays from verifiable facts nonetheless communicates broader truth, I’d point you to author and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s masterful work, The Things They Carried, and specifically, his short story: How to tell a True War Story. Incredible work that changed forever how I understood the Truth.

I think it’s important for theologians and all of us who study the Bible to understand the complexity of Biblical and Spiritual truth. The purpose of the Bible is not to give an exhaustive factual history of the Ancient Near East and the peoples who populated it. Rather, the purpose of the Bible is to tell a true story that explains God and God’s relationship to God’s people. Viewed through that lens, we can begin to study Scripture with an eye toward that greater purpose, and dispense with the pieces of Scripture that have to do with historical or scientific truth - though there are indeed parts of Scripture that can be verified by historical and scientific analysis.

Adam and Eve is not one of those stories. Biblical scholars in the 20th Century went through the book of Genesis and proposed what’s known as the documentary hypothesis, which assigns various authors to different parts of Genesis. Rather than the traditional (and admitted preposterous) understanding that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible, the documentary hypothesis proposes the existence of at least four major sources: E, J, D, and P. These sources represent different time periods and groups within the Hebrew people. Understanding that the Hebrew Bible and Torah is made up of these different sources makes reading it much clearer. For example, right at the start of the Bible, we get two different and conflicting creation stories, with Genesis 1 telling of creation on 7 days, and Genesis 2 telling of creation through the lens of Adam and Eve.

The documentary hypothesis theorizes that the Adam and Eve story comes from the J source, the oldest source, and the one most prone to using allegories, fables, and even humor to tell true stories about God and God’s relationship to God’s people.

Reading Genesis 2 in this lens brings new light to the story. What if it wasn’t about the curse of Eve after all? (It’s worth noting that just a few chapters later, the so-called Curse of Cain was used by later white Christians to discriminate against African Americans - explicitly so in the case of the LDS church in America, which forbid entrance to priesthood for Black Americans until 1978).

See, the Bible itself is not inherently racist or sexist, generally - but the cultures of Christians who have read it and explained it in later generations have been overwhelmingly white, European men who were racist and sexist. They wrote their own prejudices into Scripture. It’s our task, as modern readers and followers of Jesus, to then deconstruct where their own prejudice came in - and what the text might actually be intending to say.

After that lengthy digression, let’s go back to the text at hand. Adam and Eve: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7. Again, I always have to laugh - because Adam comes across so helpless here. It’s such a classic Christian male excuse:

The woman made me do it!

So often we spend way too much time examining what the humans of the Bible did or didn’t do, that we neglect understanding God’s role. So let’s look back at the text from the perspective of understanding God’s intentions and actions.

God creates human beings in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Why would God do this? Reading into the rest of Scripture and especially the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (the lens through which Christians interpret all Scripture) we have to understand that God’s goal in all creation was bringing all creation into relationship and harmony with God, Godself. God desired deep relationship - and remember - God only exists in relationship, thus the frame of the Trinity for how Christians understand God in three persons.

With that desire for relationship in mind, we read in Genesis 2 that God has brought the first humans, named Adam (אָדָם in Hebrew, which simply means man or mankind) and Eve (נָשִׁים in Hebrew, which also means woman) to the pristine Garden of Eden.

God has created humankind and thus knows everything about God’s creation of humankind. God knows that the great temptation of humankind is to be god. God knows that human beings inherently desire the very thing it is that they cannot have.

Knowing that, God explicitly says to Adam: “You can eat from every single tree, except this one.”

This is where the title of this blogpost comes in. So often do we as modern-day western Christians shortchange God. We don’t give God enough credit. We think we, as human beings, are smarter than God.

Look at how we’ve interpreted this verse: “God said one thing not to do. And we did it!”

Do we really think that God gave this command, being the creator and inventor of human beings and human will and human sin, not knowing that stating the one forbidden thing would lead Adam and Eve directly to that place?

Of course they were going to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How could they do anything else?

(By the way, the identification of this fruit as an apple is also a modern-day/European/Western version of this story. The Bible writers would have had no idea what an apple was).

So here’s my proposition. God knew they’d eat the fruit. God knew it was the woman who would take the decisive action, at the urging of the serpent (representing the inherent evil of the world: the evil which still leads to death and destruction today), and God knew the man would blame the woman. There is nothing God does not know.

The Bible writers share this story, then, as a real reminder of human agency, and as a beginning - and entrance - to the long story they will continue to tell us about God’s desire for relationship with God’s people, and God’s people’s desire to be god - which always comes into conflict with our shared desire for relationship with God.

This isn’t a story about sexuality or gender roles or history. It’s a story about God, about human beings. It’s not a story that knows its ending yet. It’s an entrance into a beautiful story of love and loss and sin and death and resurrection.

Anything else, well that’s us reading our own sin and prejudice into a story that was never intended to do anything but prepare us for the story of God and God’s people, that is, all of us.

Adam and Eve by Giovanni della Robia, the Walters Art Museum

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