Notes prepared by Skylar H. Burris
Genesis -
The name comes from the title given to the book in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures used in the 4th and 3rd century B.C. The Hebrew title simply took the first few words of the book--"in the beginning." Authorship of Genesis (and the other four books of the Pentateuch) is traditionally attributed to Moses. Beginning in the 18th century, with the birth of "Higher Criticism," a new view came to be widely held. This view, called "The Documentary Hypothesis," maintains that the Pentateuch is the result of the combinations of several sources, which were edited into their final form during the Babylonian Exile (700 - 600 BC). The sources contain different versions of the same stories, and often more than one version of a single story was retained in the Bible. The presumed sources are identified as follows:
J Yahwist - Presumably written during David's reign, it refers to God as Yahweh.
E Elohist - Presumably written in the northern part of the divided kingdom, around the 9th century BC, it refers to God as Elohim.
P Priestly - It is hypothesized that during the Exile, the priests collected the sources and edited the Pentateuch into its final form, no doubt adding new material of their own in the process. The Pentateuch was then known as the "Torah" or law.
D Deuteronomic - Presumably, the Deuteronomic code was written during the reign of Hezekiah. Scholars accepting this hypothesis believe this code is "the book of the law" rediscovered during Josiah's reign. Deuteronomic historians are also credited with writing Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings
Supporters of the documentary hypothesis point out the different names used for God and refer to apparent duplicate stories (such as the two accounts of creation, the two accounts of the flood , and the three stories of a man who tries to pass his wife off as his sister). Opponents of the hypothesis argue that there is no valid reason to dispute the long tradition of Mosaic authorship, and they are wary of the documentary hypothesis because it rests partly on the presumption that there is no supernatural revelation. (Thus, if a prophecy actually comes true, higher criticism assumes it must have been written after the fulfillment and dates it accordingly.)
God -
The Hebrew word used here is Elohim, a term which is used variously throughout the Bible. Some instances include: "For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels" (Ps. 8:5); "I have said, ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most High" (Ps. 82:6); "...and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment" (Ex. 12:12); "Then his master shall bring him unto the judges" (Ex. 21:6). Because Elohim is plural, liberal scholars argue this word is evidence of the early pagan influence on the Bible. Conservative scholars, however, maintain that the plural is only intended to imply the extent of the power of God and perhaps to indicate the existence of the Trinity. The Bible employs various names for God, including Adonai and YHWH, among others.
Day -
Fundamentalists argue that "day" here must be interpreted as a 24 hour period. The Ryrie Study Bible, for instance, says "everywhere in the Pentateuch the word day, when used (as here) with a numerical adjective, means a solar day." This argument is somewhat tautological. It means a solar day everywhere in the Pentateuch only because it is everywhere interpreted to mean a solar day. The same Hebrew word for day is used in Genesis 2:4, where it clearly does not refer to a solar day: "in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." (Granted, "day" is not here preceded by a numeral.) The insistence on a literal interpretation is, I presume, intended as a protest against the theory of evolution, which would be better contested on scientific grounds. God's greatness is not altered one iota if He created in seven days, seven seconds, or seven centuries. Our focus should be on the fact that He is the Creator, and His artistic proclivity can be witnessed by viewing the wondrous diversity that surrounds us in His creation.
Whales -
or sea monsters; the same word is used to describe the serpent into which Moses's staff is transformed and the dragon in the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel. The word has alternatively been interpreted to refer to whales, crocodiles, and hippos.
Let Us -
The liberal interpretation is that the use of "us" reveals a primitive, polytheistic concept in pre-Israelite tradition; the conservative interpretation is that "us" here implies the Trinity. Another and simpler possibility is that God is using a sort of "royal we"; Kings and Queens often spoke in the second person thus.
male and female -
"man" refers to both "male and female"; both are "created in the image of God, indicating an equality of position with reference to the image" (Hindson and Kroll 14). Furthermore, God grants them both dominion over the earth: "And God blessed them, and God said unto them . . . replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (1.28; emphasis added).
This command disproves the common misconception that the Fall was somehow related to sex; Adam and Eve were expected to procreate before the Fall. Milton, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, takes special pains to disprove this interpretation of the Fall by depicting sex as having been more fulfilling in Eden. This is the most frequently repeated command in Genesis.
it shall be for meat -
This verse implies that the original state of man (and indeed all the animals) was vegetarian. This must have been so, for before the Fall, there was apparently no death. However, God gave man explicit permission to eat meat after the flood: "Every moving living thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things" (Gen. 9:3). God later imposes restrictions on what kind of living things can be eaten in the dietary laws found in Leviticus. Christians are later freed from these laws in the New Testament, and Paul urges Christians not to judge one another based on their diets.
Second Account?
Does Chapter 2 of Genesis mark the beginning of a second account of creation? Some have argued yes, based on differences in the stories. For example, in Chapter 1, animals are created before man, but in Chapter 2, they are created after. Some scholars argue that two different stories of creation were circulated in oral tradition, and both were ultimately recorded in the Bible. Fundamentalists dispute this interpretation and argue that the two accounts can be reconciled: Chapter 2 simply provides a more detailed view of the events sketched in Chapter 1.
Mist -
Other interpretations have been offered for "mist": fountain, spring, irrigated canal, and a watering resulting from a regular evaporation and condensation.
Man -
A possible play on words: adam is the Hebrew word for man; adamah is the Hebrew word for ground.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil -
In secular circles, the Fall is often presented as a kind of felix culpa (fortunate Fall); it is argued that Adam and Eve "awakened" by eating of the forbidden fruit, that they in effect "grew up." (There is also a sort of felix culpa circulating among some Christians, who see the Fall as fortunate because it brought us the grace of Christ; but how necessitating the crucifixion of God can be seen as fortunate, I cannot conceive.) The secular view has worked its way deep into the human (and particularly the academic) mind; this may be because we tend to remember the part about "the tree of knowledge" but drop the part about "knowledge of...evil." Thus, God is seen as deliberately withholding knowledge from man, and man's grasping at the forbidden fruit becomes a Prometheus-like rebellion. But the picture here is of an innocent--not an ignorant--creation. C.S. Lewis tackles this issue in his book Perelandra. In it, he tells an alternate allegory of the creation story, in which the man and woman do not fall. Having refused the forbidden thing, they are not left without understanding; rather they are more aware than they would have been had they disobeyed: "We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking." Richard John Neuhaus says it differently in his book Death on a Friday Afternoon. The fall cannot be, he argues, an intellectual maturing: "It is as though a paraplegic, marvelously skilled in the complex maneuvering of a wheelchair, were to despise the healthy as belonging to a lower order because they walk simply, in blithe ignorance of the complexity of movement that the paraplegic knows so well."
Help Meet -
This is one of many phrases in the creation story that implies the equality of man and woman. According to Lawrence Richards, the same word is used to describe God as man's helper. The Hebrew term translated "help meet" in the King James Bible signifies power and strength; one scholar translates Genesis 2:18 as "I will make a power [or strength] corresponding to man." (Kaiser 93). Another scholar, Freedman, "even suggests on the basis of later Hebrew that the second word in the Hebrew expression found in this verse should be rendered equal to him" (Kaiser 93-4).
Rib -
Another sign of equality is the creation of Eve from Adam's rib. This word usually means "side" in Hebrew; therefore, "as some Reformers put it, woman was not taken from man's feet, as if she were beneath him, or from his head, as if she were over him, but from his side, as an equal with him" (Kaiser 95). This saying originated at least as early as Thomas Aquinas, who concluded that "man and woman should be conjoined as allies" (Nolan 12). It was paraphrased by John Donne in a 1620 sermon, in which he said that woman "was not taken out of the foot to be trodden upon" (Donne 290). The rib is also significant because in contrast to "an ancient view that the gods played a trick on man by creating woman of inferior material," God's choice of the rib "affirms the woman to be of the same essence as man ('bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,' Gen 2:23)" (Kaiser 666). Some Jewish traditions maintain that this word should be translated "side part," implying that man was originally a hermaphrodite before the sexes were separated into male and female.
Bone of my bones --
According to Kaiser, this phrase connotes "'a very close relative,' 'one of us,' or in effect 'our equal'" (Kaiser 94).
one flesh -
Here we have the first picture of marriage as God intended it; the re-uniting of male and female, in both a literal (sexual) and figurative (spiritual) sense
touch it -
Note how Eve expands upon the prohibition, for God said nothing of touching, only of eating. Already she is exaggerating the requirements God has laid upon her.
Ye shall surely not die -
Was the serpent right? Adam and Eve ate, and they did not die, not, at least, with the immediacy implied in 2:17. Possible explanations:
(1) God means they will become mortal in the day they eat, susceptible to death. This would imply that they were previously immortal. In this view, the Fall brings death into the world for the first time. It is only at this point that God says, "unto dust thou shalt return" (3:19). Life-spans are long at first after the Fall, and then begin to become shorter, a curiosity that would fit well into this theory.
(2) This is to be taken figuratively. In the day the eat, they will experience a spiritual death in the loss of innocence. Since the creation story is written as a Hebrew poem, it would not be unlikely to employ figurative language.
as gods -
Most commentators have translated this "as God" or "like God" rather than "as gods"
unto her husband with her -
This phrase negates one tradition, perpetuated by Milton in Paradise Lost and embedded in our cultural fabric, that Adam and Eve underwent separate and independent temptations. Rather, they were together. Milton, however, added a separation scene to his epic, because if both were together, it would have been technically difficult for him to make Eve's transgression seem inspired by deception while making Adam's appear inspired by love for Eve. Nevertheless, Paul supports the notion that Adam was undeceived: "And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." (I Timothy 2:14). This is a difficult passage for which I have so far encountered no useful explanation. It presents an interpretation of the events that is not substantiated by the Genesis account itself (but which may have been in Jewish tradition). It also seems to imply that Adam was not culpable for the Fall, yet Paul does later condemn man also.
The woman whom thou gavest -
As is human tendency, Adam does not take responsibility for his sin, but he instead blames Eve and, in effect, God who gave her to him. Eve in turn blames the serpent. But all have a share in the Fall and all are cursed. They fall, and the world falls with them (Jer. 12:4).
it shall bruise thy head -
Genesis 3:15 constitutes the first Messianic prophecy in the Bible. Satan bruises the heel of Christ (via His passion and crucifixion), but Christ bruises the serpent's head, crushing Satan and Death with His resurrection.
multiply thy sorrow and thy conception -
Apparently, there would have been little or no pain in child birth in Eden. Paul later says women "shall be saved in childbirth" (I Tim 2:15), whatever that means (commentators have reached no consensus on this murky phrase).
desire [shall be] to thy husband -
Some argue that "desire" should here be translated "turning," and that the mistranslation can be credited to a 16th century Dominican monk (Kaiser 97). Eve is consequently turning from God and to her husband, and the sad result is that the husband will take advantage of her ("rule over thee"). Others claim that the husband's rule is not a result of sin, but the will of God. These scholars argue that the verse "thy desire shall be to thy husband" has been mistranslated, and should read "against thy husband." This implies that woman will not be a willing subordinate, but will be in a state of rebellion against her husband, who should rule over her (Hindson 23). The former argument seems more sensible, as this pronouncement is made just after the Fall and in the context of the curses, not in the context of normative commands.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread -
While Eve is cursed with pain in labor (childbirth), Adam is cursed with pain in a different kind of labor (work). One curse was not enough for us women, however; we fought to take the second upon us as well, and now that we have it, I think we cannot easily shake it off.
Eve -
Eve means Life-Producer
Liberal critics see these verses as evidence of an original, primitive, polytheistic view, something like the Titans against the gods of Greek mythology. The argument is that these verses preserve a pre-monotheistic tradition in which Adam and Eve do gain something valuable from eating the fruit (much as man gains when Prometheus steals fire from the gods); the gods (or God) then fear that if Adam and Eve gain immortality, man might become a potential rival. ("Behold, the man is become as one us...lest he put forth his hand...therefore the Lord God sent him forth..."). Traditional Christian scholars, however, see this banishment as an act not of fear but of mercy. God is here saying that if Adam and Eve eat from the tree of life, they will become immortally fixed in a fallen state. To prevent that tragedy, God banishes them from the presence of Eden, and puts into motion his plan for Redemption. "One of us," again, can be explained either by the Trinity or the use of a "royal we," or perhaps even a reference to God and all His host of angels. This traditional explanation is an excellent one, but the only thing it does not address is just what, precisely, God means when He says that man has become as Him. Did not the serpent say, "your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God?" I would love to learn further commentary on this verse. If you have some insight, e-mail me at ssburris@msn.com.
Site Contents | Bible Studies | Guest Book
Last Updated: Sunday January 02, 2005 09:53 AM -0500