Episode 277: Pete Enns – Pete Ruins Genesis (Part 1)

Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns. 

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

Pete: Hey, everybody. You know, funny thing, I’ve done a bunch of Pete Ruins podcasts over the years, but I’ve never done one on Genesis. And that surprised me until I realized why. I’ve been ruining Genesis here and there for a lot of years. And, you know, Jared and I, you might remember, we wrote a Genesis for Normal People commentary, which came out in 2012.

Laid a lot of stuff out there and I also have a few episodes and blog posts over the years on various issues concerning Genesis. Not to mention some videos and stuff I’ve done on social media recently. And I guess with all that I just thought my work here is done and just move on. But you know what?

Here’s the thing: It’s just not my personality to leave loose ends. So at the end of the day, I’d hate to have a series on the Bible that didn’t include Genesis. That would just be crazy. Here’s what we’re gonna do. I’d like to go through Genesis again and summarize some of what I’ve written and said over the years, because I think it would be nice to have it all in one place, but there’s a lot to cover, even just giving the highlights.

So this is going to wind up being a multi episode series like I did for Exodus. Right now I’m aiming at four. Here’s the thing too, I’m actually excited about doing this. I love the book of Genesis. It’s filled with interesting stories. And from an academic point of view, why it’s so interesting is that you can find in Genesis all of the major issues that have occupied biblical scholars for centuries.

Topics like authorship, who wrote it, or myth and folklore and a bunch of other things. And in a way, if you’re looking for an introduction to the modern academic reading of the Bible, you would hear everything you need to hear just by working through Genesis. It’s all there. 

“Myth and folklore are part of ancient stories of the deep past. Why should we expect the Bible to avoid that ancient cultural literary convention? Think about it, you can write a story with characters living long ago. You can mention real cities and customs that are verifiable at the time, but the story can still be filled with fictional action and fictional characters. Maybe the stories of Genesis are like that.”

The big issue that we’re going to keep in mind is the question for modern biblical readers. And that’s the question of history. Did the stuff we read about in Genesis happen? Is Genesis a historical record? And if so, what sort of historical record? Or, as it’s put in some circles, the issue here is the relationship between text and event. What’s written and what happened. That’s been the issue in the modern period and in biblical scholarship. And it all began with the stories in Genesis. The historicity of Genesis, that’s the more technical term, the historicity of it, which means having to do with history and historical reliability and stuff like that.

Anyway, the historicity of Genesis has been a battleground since at least the 16th century, at least in a serious academic way. That’s when we see the emergence of the scientific exploration of the solar system, with telescopes and math, and the discovery that the Earth, lo and behold, revolved around the sun, not the other way around, which is how Genesis and every other part of the Bible describes it. So that began a few hundred years ago. 

The problem of Genesis in history isn’t new. Jumping ahead to the 18th and 19th centuries, two big factors emerged that made the problem worse. The first is the field of geology and the age of the earth, which is old, millions and then eventually billions of years old. And that casts some doubt, some rather strong doubt I might say, on the idea of a 6,000 year old creation. It also casts a lot of doubt on the idea of a global flood. 

The second is very different, but no less impactful. It’s the emergence of what would come to be called source criticism, or also literary criticism. Now we’ve talked about that issue a bit on this podcast, and it’s a bit much to get into here. And if you’re interested, you can listen to episode 125. Or maybe just do a quick keyword search on our website. But the gist is that around this time, the 19th century, European scholars began to try to explain what attentive readers had seen for some time: that Genesis shows clear marks of being a compilation of several—specifically at this time, four—literary sources. It’s not a book written by one person at one time, but older works were written at different times and different places and reflected different theological perspectives. 

In other words, Genesis and actually the Pentateuch or the Torah as a whole are not so much authored as they are edited. And all this really affected how people understood the historical value of Genesis.

See, the bottom line of source criticism is that the five books of Moses, the whole Torah, was not written anywhere near the time of Moses, roughly around 1300 BCE (if there even was a Moses, right)? It wasn’t written then at one time, but it was written over many centuries. 

Some parts of the Torah date as early as Israel’s emergence in the land of Canaan. That’s around 1200 BCE. And then, you know, into the period of the monarchy, which ended in 586. And then those sources, which happened during this time, those sources were brought together and edited into what we call the Pentateuch no earlier than the 6th century BCE. It’s only at this point that we have a Torah, a Pentateuch that looks more or less like what we have in our Bibles today.

All right. If you’re still listening, folks, you might be saying, who cares? So what? Get on with it. Well, I’m just bringing this up because it’s huge. All of this, the science and the source criticism, they cast doubt on the historical veracity of Genesis. And that was a big shift away from what had been thought most of history before that point.

If the sources post date Moses by a few centuries, and if the editing process was not completed until a millennium after Moses, well, what value does it have as a historical witness to actual events? See, that was and is the question. It’s still with us. This source critical analysis of Genesis, these four sources or traditions, right? The source critical analysis of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch, they picked up a lot of steam in popular circles in the 19th century and it’s still very much part of contemporary biblical scholarship, even though there have been modifications to earlier ways of putting it, the idea is still very much with us and it’s not going anywhere.

Now the 19th century, while we’re on that, it also brought its own scientific challenges. And I’m, I’m talking of course about what else would I be talking about? The gift that keeps on giving in the 19th century, evolution. And then also the impact of other sciences in the 20th century, like cosmology, quantum physics, cultural anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, to name just a few, that have provided us with models of reality that do not resemble the models of reality in the ancient stories that make up the book of Genesis.

One other field, and you can’t talk about anything in the Bible without talking about this, but one other field that had an impact on our reading of Genesis is archaeology, which began as a real systematic science in the 19th century. It unearthed information from other ancient cultures that were far older than Israelite culture, but that also shared ways of looking at the world. See, they overlapped. 

The best known examples are various creation stories and flood stories from Egypt and Canaan and Mesopotamia that are undeniably similar to the biblical stories. Not exact matches, necessarily, but a lot of overlap. And these similarities got people thinking that if the Babylonian and Canaanite stories clearly aren’t historical, they’re myths—well, what reason can we have for not saying that the biblical stories are also myths?

That question is still before us today. You see, the question of Genesis and history is central and it can’t be avoided. As for me, I’ve concluded that Genesis cannot be called a historical record in any sense that might use the term today. Yeah, there are elements of Genesis that generally fit with broad historical observations, but see that doesn’t make the book of Genesis a historical account.

For example, the fact that Abraham’s migrations from Ur in Babylon up to Haran in Syria and then down to Canaan, the fact that Abraham’s migrations are consistent with the idea of nomadic movements that we know of archaeologically in the early second millennium BCE. Right? The fact that we have these migrations, and Abraham is set to migrate, all that is great, but that doesn’t mean that the Abraham story is historical.

You see where I’m going with this here? Just because you have things archaeologically that can fit the story of Abraham, it doesn’t mean that the story of Abraham itself is historical. The author of Genesis may be, for example, incorporating old oral traditions about migrating ancestors into his story. He may very well be doing that, but again, that doesn’t mean that Genesis is giving us a historical record. And it doesn’t even imply that Abraham was a real person. So you think about it, you can write a story with characters living long ago. You can mention real cities and customs that are verifiable at the time, but the story can still be filled with fictional action and fictional characters. Historical novels do this all the time. They tell a fictional story set in a real time and place. Maybe the stories of Genesis are like that. 

Anyway, okay, all that about history is important to put on the table right away because it’s, again, it’s an issue that’s not going anywhere and we’re going to keep seeing it throughout the series.

But now let’s, let’s back up from all this stuff and do what we always do in these podcasts. And that’s to take a 30,000 foot view of Genesis as a whole, and then begin focusing on some specifics. Now, Genesis is 50 chapters long, and it covers a lot of ground. It takes us from the creation of the cosmos to the beginnings of the story of Israel, which begins with Abraham, and then three generations after him: Isaac, then Jacob, and then Jacob’s offspring, which are, to get to the chase here, twelve sons that become the twelve tribes.

Jacob and his sons wind up migrating to Egypt, this is toward the end of Genesis, due to a famine in the days of Jacob and his sons. And this, you read about this in the Joseph story. So that sets up the book of Exodus where the Israelites become enslaved in Egypt after a few generations of enjoying highly favored guest status.

So how much time elapses in Genesis? Well, that’s hard to answer, but according to just following the contours and the logic of the story itself, in other words, taking it literally, we’re going from about 4,000 B. C. E. to about 1500 or 1600 BCE, which is about 2,500 years. No other book of the Bible takes up as much of the biblical timeline as Genesis.

And most of that, except for about 300 years, most of that 2,500 years is covered in chapters 1 to 11. But, again, please folks, to be clear, this timeline that I’m expressing now is a result of taking the biblical stories at face value as historical records. Very few biblical scholars would agree with that. In fact, only those who lean hard into the conservative side of the spectrum would probably try to make that case. I don’t. 

Now, let’s talk about an outline of the book of Genesis. There are multiple ways of outlining Genesis, and they all make sense. And the most ancient way is provided for us in the book itself. Ten times we read this phrase, “these are the generations of,” and then it’s followed by a family line. Those notations each begin a new section, a new family line. And the Hebrew word translated “generations” is, in Hebrew, toledot. You have ten of those. And like I said, they introduce a family line, like Adam, Noah, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and a few others.

The only exception to that scheme is the first toledot, which appears in the creation story. It doesn’t introduce a family line, it more introduces the idea of creation. Regardless, the editor, or maybe editors, we don’t know, they had an organizational scheme. But I feel it’s not the best way of following the action in Genesis.

I mean, for example, the first six tolidotes, there are only 10 of them, the first six occur in the first 11 chapters. So, I don’t find it very helpful, and I think a simpler way, though, is to divide Genesis into four main sections. And the first is about how things began. That’s chapters 1 through 11. The second one centers on Abraham and Sarah, and that begins in chapter 12 and goes into chapter 25, part of the way through 25. So basically, chapter 25, halfway through the book, is when Abraham dies. 

The third section picks up, and it’s about Jacob and Rachel. And that’s the middle of chapter 25 through chapter 36. And the fourth is a story of Joseph, which is the final 14 chapters. Now, these are not neat divisions. There’s some overlap in places. For example, the Jacob section ends in chapter 36, but only in the sense that the focus now shifts to Joseph. Jacob’s still around. He’s not going to die until chapter 49, right? So there are, let’s say, shifts in focus in Genesis, but still with overlap. Older characters linger in new sections. 

Now, you might notice that Isaac, right, Abraham and Sarah’s miracle son, he doesn’t get a section. I’ve often wondered why, but I think it’s for this reason. His story plays more of a bit role in the Abraham and then the Jacob sections. For some reason, he doesn’t like get his own chunk of material. He’s sort of spread out all over the place. 

And you know what I do? I mean, just, you may want to do this. If you have nothing to do on a rainy Saturday or something, just get out your Bible. And on the top of a piece of paper long ways. just write like a, a number line that goes from one to 50, and then take each of the major biblical characters that appear in Genesis. You can start with, uh, with Adam rather than maybe go to Noah or whatever, and, and then Abraham and the others, and draw a line where that character is introduced and where that character sort of is left off.

And actually, I think it’s a fascinating exercise because you can actually sort of see for yourself where Abraham ends, but where does somebody else start? Where is the overlap and who gets the most attention? That’s another thing too. So anyway, I find that to be very, very helpful, just for getting a sense of the whole.

Okay. One last point before we get to the first section. The book of Genesis has a purpose, or perhaps to be fairer, it has purposes. In one sense, Genesis is an introduction to the Torah, which is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also called the Pentateuch. And there are many ways of describing the function of Torah in the Hebrew Bible. But one angle I want to express here is to see Torah as an entrance ramp to what I think is the heart of the Hebrew Bible, which is the story of the kingdom of Israel, which begins with the conquest of Canaan. It’s told in the book immediately following the Torah, the book of Joshua. And I think of Torah as an entrance ramp to the heart of the story, and I think of Genesis as the entrance ramp to the entrance ramp.

Now, related to that is a second point. As much as Genesis is about reflecting on Israel’s deep past, it does so for the purpose of addressing the realities of the times in which it was written. Now, I spent a whole podcast on this, it’s episode 172, so I’m just going to mention it here and come back to it later here and there.

But we see in Genesis occasional moments that seem like they were really written for the benefit of people living at a much later time. Namely, the time of the monarchy and even later, and again, I’ll mention some of those along the way. No need for us to spend any more time on that here.

Okay. With that, let’s look at at least some highlights from section one, which is Genesis one to 11. This is how things began. That’s what this section is about. Now the opening stories in Genesis are sometimes referred to as the primordial history or the primeval history, but personally, I would rather avoid using the word history to describe Genesis 1-11.

There are rather clear mythic and folkloric elements here. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if we don’t accept the mythic folkloric dimension of this section of Genesis, we will wind up misunderstanding it. And I know that comment is problematic, perhaps for some, because it seems to cast aspersions on biblical authority or biblical inspiration and those sorts of things, but I simply don’t see it that way.

I think it’s important, don’t you, to recognize the type of literature we are reading rather than to assume what type of literature it has to be, historical narrative. And if you do that then you run into very serious problems trying to defend it once you see the mythic and folkloric elements. Myth and folklore are part of ancient stories of the deep past.

Why should we expect the Bible to avoid that ancient cultural literary convention, especially when we remember that the Bible is actually an ancient collection of documents? Now, Genesis begins, quite famously, I’m sure you all know, with the story of the six days of creation and one day of rest. See, at the very beginning, there is a problem, already introduced to us in the very first verse.

The problem is this, the heavens and the earth are in a state of chaos. That’s the problem. Over the course of six days, God will restore the order. I don’t know if that sounds odd to you, but that’s the gist of Genesis chapter one. So let me explain. Let me flesh that out a bit. It’s commonplace among biblical scholars to translate the opening verse of Genesis differently then we might be used to hearing.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void. Though well known, this is almost certainly a mishandling of the Hebrew. Rather than in the beginning God created, a better translation would be when God began creating the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void.

Do you hear the difference? The conventional translation suggests that God is creating the heavens and the earth out of nothing. The second reading is not only a better handling of the Hebrew, but it’s more in line with what’s happening in the verses to follow, which is, God is working with pre existent material in order to create order where there once was chaos.

Genesis 1 is not about creation out of nothing, simply put. Rather, it’s a story of God ordering the chaos that already exists. The state of the chaos at the beginning is darkness, formlessness, and emptiness. And the main culprit here seems to be something called The Deep, which is a cosmic ocean of chaos.

In the Babylonian story of creation, this object of chaos is a divine figure called Tiamat, which is linguistically similar to the Hebrew word for deep, to home. And this is one reason why scholars have seen in Genesis 1 echoes of not only Babylonian stories, but also Canaanite and Egyptian stories. Some force, some presence is keeping the cosmos from flourishing with life.

Genesis 1 is Israel’s version of what their God will do to tame that chaos, to put that chaos in its place, to provide borders for it so it goes no further. So, we have a state of darkness and oceanic chaos, and as a result, The earth is formless and void, which is a common way of translating the Hebrew tohu and bohu.

Those are two words. Tohu, bohu. Now, I only mention that because you can find tohu, bohu, that would be spelled t o h u b o h u. You can find tohu, bohu in dictionaries, referring to some chaotic situation. It’s actually a thing. Let me be very clear, folks. The problem in Genesis 1 isn’t that there is nothing. The problem is that there is something, and that something is hostile to life. So the heavens and the earth exist in a formless and void, or formless and empty state. And God is about to give form and to fill. In other words, to undo the chaos, to undo the Tohu Bohu. That’s what the six days of creation are about.

Day one, God created light to combat the darkness, so that takes care of that problem. Day two, God addresses the problem of the deep. God creates a dome to cut the waters in two to separate them, as it’s usually rendered. The chaos enemy, the deep, is slain, so to speak, split in two by this dome. You know, think about a snow globe, but in reverse.

The water is outside and the snow globe is dry, right? It’s the water’s outside, not inside. The globe is dry. That’s a reverse snow globe. This is something like what’s being described here. Or maybe think of putting a deflated balloon in a bathtub and letting it sink to the bottom and then pumping air into it.

And soon you have a pocket of air in the water. It’s sort of like that. The dome, which is depicted as solid, it separates the waters, thus creating an empty space in between. We might call it atmosphere or air. You see what’s happening. What is formless is beginning to receive form. That starts in day one with light and day two, separating the waters above from waters below, leaving air, atmosphere.

On day three, we see another act of separation, but now it’s the waters below that are separated. The story itself says that the waters are gathered together in one place. and dry land appears. See, in other words, The waters that are being gathered into one place, they’re covering the earth, they’re covering the land.

But now, gathering them together, pushing them out of the way, the land, the earth is now revealed. See, this is a clear indication that the earth is not being created out of nothing. It’s already there. It just has to be liberated from the chaos. Now, before we move on, let me just say that God does do a good number of things out of nothing in Genesis chapter 1.

You know, there wasn’t a dome and yet there it is. God created one where there wasn’t one before. Was it out of nothing the way we sometimes think of it? Well, I’m not sure how the ancient writer was thinking about it. In fact, I’m guessing he didn’t really care to explain it one way or the other. I just mean that there is something there that wasn’t there before.

Likewise, on day three, God says, Let the earth put forth vegetation. So, was vegetation something always potentially there and just needed to be unleashed? Or is God more directly creating vegetation out of nothing? Again, I’m not sure, but we don’t need to parse this out too much. I don’t think the writer cares about our questions.

I’m only pointing that out, that according to Genesis 1, at the dawn of time, there were some things already there and other things that weren’t. These three days create the space for life to flourish. Now remember the earth was formless and void. Days one through three address the formlessness problem.

See now there is order. The chaos waters are kept at bay above the dome. There’s atmosphere and there is dry land. Now, what remains is for these areas to be filled. In other words, days four through six will take care of the void, or emptiness, problem. Day four, the lights are put into the sky, the sun, moon, and stars, to separate day from night.

Now, of course, you know, if you read the story, it becomes pretty self evident that day and night already happened way back in day one. God said, let there be light, and so it was, and there was evening and morning on the first day. How can the separating of day and night be due to both day one and day four?

That’s a good question, and here is my answer. The heavenly bodies, and day four, we are told, are to be signs for the seasons, days, and years. Signs for whom? Well, I’m sure for the humans to be created on day six. And also, these signs for seasons, days, and years are probably not about tracking the calendar in a secular or modern sense.

The purpose of tracking the passage of time is not simply to know what day, month, or year it is on the calendar. It seems to be more pointing at the ordering of sacred time. In other words, The heavenly bodies are there to track the liturgical year of the ancient Israelites, when to hold sacred feasts, sacrifices, and the like.

The heavenly bodies, in other words, exist to guide the people in service to the worship of God. And that is all the more interesting when we remember that heavenly bodies were thought of as deities in some ancient cultures. In Genesis, they are cut down to size. They exist to be servants of Israel’s God.

You see, this highlights what is in the background of this entire chapter, to make a distinction between what the Israelites believed about God and the world, and what the other nations believed. Even though Genesis repeats themes we find in other ancient myths, it does so with a twist, so that Israel’s worship of God can be distinguished from that of others.

And when we remember, too, that Genesis 1 is likely written in response to Babylonian exile, well, it makes sense that the author of Genesis 1 might want to drive some distance between Israelite and Babylonian religions. Now, that’s a whole other big topic we can’t explore here, but it’s enough to say that Genesis 1 is similar to these other ancient myths, While at the same time creating distance between them.

So on day four, the dome is filled with bodies of light. On Day 5, it is the sky and the oceans, created on Day 2, that are now teeming with life. We see here a pattern. Day 1 corresponds to Day 4. Form established on Day 1 is filled on Day 4. Day 5 corresponds to Day 2. On Day 2, God separates the water above from the waters below, thus creating the sky and the ocean.

Form: on day five, the sky is filled with birds and the oceans with fish. Likewise, day six, when land creatures are created like beasts of the field and eventually humans, which is like the crowning achievement, right? But on day six, when the land creatures are created, well that corresponds to day three, when guess what? The oceans are gathered together and dry land appears. Days one through three take care of the tohu problem, the formlessness of the cosmos. And days four through six fill the form, thus taking care of the bohu problem, the void, the emptiness. You know, we’ve spent a lot of time here on one chapter, but even so, you know, we’re just scratching the surface.

I could do a five part series on Genesis 1 and still have a lot to say, and maybe one day I will. But for now, I think this slightly deeper dive will have to do. Let me just add that this pattern of the six days comes to a well known climax in day seven, where God is said to rest from his labors and bless the creation as very good.

And that rest, by the way, is not giving God a breather. Think of it more as God sitting on God’s throne, observing a job well done, and saying, yes, this is very good. I think of how I feel after doing a lot of yard work, mowing, trimming, clipping, raking, whatever. It transforms this chaotic mess that was my backyard into something ordered and beautiful to look at. So, I pull out my Adirondack chair, pop open an adult beverage, and just bask in the glow. I’m resting.

Let’s move on to the Adam and Eve story. I’ve written a whole book on how I think this story works. It’s called The Evolution of Adam. It came out in 2012, and I’m tempted to cut and paste the first half of that book here, but that would be a bit much, wouldn’t it? So, let me just summarize in a few bullet points what’s going on here.

First, the Adam and Eve story is not an elaboration of Genesis 1. People can disagree with that, and I respect it, but I don’t see any way that Genesis 1 can be basically telling the same story again, just by elaboration. It’s a different creation story altogether. And scholars routinely argue that this is the earlier of the two.

In fact, Genesis chapter 2 and 3, the Adam and Eve story, it may very well have functioned as Israel’s original creation story, but then got moved when the six days story was written in response to the Babylonian exile. So they’re different stories, but together they form a beautiful sequence that will get lost if we think of them as basically saying the same thing. They aren’t. 

The way I see it, Genesis 1 tells of the creation of the cosmos, which includes the creation of humanity on day 6. Genesis 2 is not a repeat. Rather, there we begin to see the focus shifting toward Israel specifically. After all, the ancient writer was not really interested in dealing with questions of curiosity, like, hey, I wonder where people came from, man.

That wasn’t it. All ancient myths are concerned to talk about where their people came from and placing that event on the larger world scale. At least, that’s how I see Genesis 1 and 2 operating. Now, I need to elaborate a bit on what I mean when I say that the focus of Genesis 2 is to begin to focus on Israel and not the world.

I read the Adam and Eve story as a preview of the story of Israel. Again, The Evolution of Adam, I lay this out very patiently in several chapters. I first stumbled on this idea, however, years ago in a medieval Jewish commentary on Genesis and a few other places. The story of Adam and the story of Israel are parallel to each other. Just as God created Adam out of dust, brought him into a garden, gave him a command, and then punished him with exile when he disobeyed—Remember, he’s kicked out of the garden at the end of chapter 3 in Genesis, right? That’s the punishment. He’s driven out. In the same way that this stuff happened to Adam, so too did God create Israel out of the dust of slavery, brought them to the paradise like land of Canaan, gave them commands to follow, and exiled them when they disobeyed.

The plot line is the same, and people have noticed this for a very, very long time. This actually isn’t controversial. Now, the thing is, what I will say is that this story, it just keeps on giving, and it can legitimately be read in more than one way. I’m not saying this is the only way, this is just one of those ways, but I find it very compelling.

And if the story of Adam is not, you know, about where humans came from, but more a synopsis, sort of a table of contents of Israel’s whole story that ends in exile. Well, think about it, then the story of Adam isn’t in conflict with evolution. And I find that quite an inviting proposition. So the Adam and Eve story does not repeat Genesis 1 from a different angle, which is, I think, a common misunderstanding. We can debate it, but that’s my strong opinion. 

The big piece of evidence is that the orders of creation are different in the two stories. In Genesis 1, God creates, remember starting in day 5 and then going to day 6, God creates the birds and fish and the beasts and then last of all humans en masse, not just a couple of them, but humans, humanity.

In Genesis 2, God creates one creature, Adam, then the animals, and then a woman from Adam’s side. So you can’t reconcile this. You can’t reconcile the order. Some try, you can’t do it. See, if you look at, say, the NIV translation of Genesis 2:19, it says there, not that God made the animals, but that he had made the animals already before creating Adam.

That’s the implication. And that changes the sequence in Genesis 2, from Adam, animals, to woman, to match more easily the sequence in Genesis 1, which is animals first and then people second. But you see, besides the fact, this is the problem, because besides the fact that there are still numerous other issues that would need to be resolved in order to make Genesis 2 match Genesis 1, there is no justification, absolutely no justification for saying that God had made the animals, wink wink, earlier. There’s no justification for that other than trying to reconcile the two stories. 

Another big difference is in how God is presented. In chapter 1, God is, let’s say transcendent, sovereign, he’s sort of a button pusher where everything works out immediately. In chapter 2, God is more human-like, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, fashioning Adam out of clay and breathing life into him, and he seems surprised at what Adam and Eve had done. He even has to figure things out. You know, he sees that the man is alone and needs a partner, and so he, what does he do? He creates the woman? No, not, not first. First, he creates the animals. But when God saw that this wouldn’t do, then God goes to plan B, which is to create a suitable helper for Adam from his side.

For me, these differences need to be understood and not ignored and explained away. In fact, I see a benefit to embracing these two very different portrayals of God. We see God in these two stories the way we meet God throughout the Bible. Sometimes utterly transcendent and distant and just the rule setter and what he says goes, and other times this God is right in the middle of things, walking with us, more human like. I think this is a beautiful sequence, and if you try to ram these stories together, you’ll miss that. 

Alright, two more quick points about this story amid the dozens we could talk about. First, there’s no original sin in this story. I know that can get me in trouble with some people, but in this story, that’s the point, there is no original sin, at least not in the way that Christians have tended to think about it. You know, Adam sinned, and as a result, his sinful nature is downloaded to Cain and Abel and the rest of humanity. In fact, and this is especially true of Calvinism, it’s not just the sin nature that’s downloaded, but the actual guilt. We are born with the guilt of what Adam did, not just the propensity to sin, but the guilt of the first sin. All of this is just a foreign concept to the Hebrew Bible. This story doesn’t say any of that.

Adam’s punishment is mortality and difficulty in farming. Which I think that alone is a beautiful thing, because Adam is alienated from the ground from which he is taken, right? The word Adam or Adam in Hebrew means human, basically. It could mean a man, but it means human or humanity. Adamah, just add that ah at the end, that means ground or earth. It’s a pun, right? So Adam is taken from Adamah. It’s sort of like in English, the closest we have, at least that I think we have, is something like earthling came from the earth. . 

But anyway, no part of that punishment implies in any way the passing down of a so-called sin nature. Cain’s murder of Abel is not an example of what happens when sin is downloaded to the next generation. See, that’s, that’s the very next story. After chapter three, you have Cain’s murder of Abel. And it’s not an example of what happens when sin is downloaded to the next generation. Remember that Adam and Eve sinned already without having downloaded a sin nature. This is why there is no original sin in Judaism.

I agree with that. It’s just part of what it means to be human. People do bad things. It’s just, they’ve got this thing that they just keep doing. And Judaism refers to it as the evil inclination. Humans have that. Why? Well, the Bible doesn’t explain that, and neither does Judaism. Cain’s murder of Abel is not because of some flaw that was introduced by his parents.

Actually, if you read that story carefully, side by side with the Adam and Eve story, you’ll see how much the Cain story echoes the previous chapter. See, in other words, in the Cain and Abel story, it’s like, here we go again. Cain, don’t screw it up like your father did. Resist evil. You got this. There’s nothing like, oh well, the effects of the sin of Adam. I guess he’s going to murder his brother, right? 

But he caves anyway. See, Adam didn’t cause Cain’s sin. The two stories are parallel stories about the proclivity to disobey, which is very much a part of Israel’s story as a whole. At no point in the Hebrew Bible is Adam’s act, Adam’s disobedience, ever even hinted at as the cause for why people do bad things. It’s utterly and entirely foreign to the Hebrew Bible. 

Okay, one last point, if I may, let’s talk about one of the punishments given to the woman for eating the forbidden fruit, and that is pain in childbearing. As the New Revised Standard Version has it, which is my favorite English translation, but it says, I, God, will make your pangs in childbearing very severe.

In other words, it’s going to be very painful. With painful labor you will give birth to children. And you know, that seems clear enough, but those words pangs and pain, they’re from the same Hebrew root and they can mean pain, but it can also mean like difficulty or distress. And also that word translated childbearing here, “I will make your pangs in childbearing very severe,” that word translated childbearing here actually connotes conception and pregnancy, not the act of actually birthing. That’s really important, folks. It makes a lot of sense if you just hang with me for a second. You know, if we play with that a little bit, the woman’s punishment, it may not be that the bearing of children will be physically painful, even though it is, but that the act of conceiving and then the act of having the children will be difficult, distressful, painful, but in another way.

I like this translation. I like this way of thinking about the woman’s punishment, because it makes more sense of the Hebrew. It also makes sense of what comes after in the story of Genesis and in fact, in the chapter immediately after this, to bear children was to have been a blessing bestowed by God, but now, ha, it becomes a source of sorrow. The blessing, it slipped on its head, now it’s a punishment, it’s a cursing. 

And we see this in Genesis in a couple of ways. One is a simple fact that Sarah and Rachel have trouble conceiving. The effects of Eve’s disobedience have been downloaded to these women. But second, those children who are conceived, well, there’s distress there, too, because they don’t get along. Their behavior is a source of sorrow. Right after the Adam and Eve story, what happens? The first act is sibling murder. And siblings continue to bring sorrow to their parents. Think of the rivalry between Jacob and Esau, and the animosity between Joseph and his brothers. The punishment in Genesis 2 is not just a random thing, it sets up the action to follow in the book of Genesis. 

It’s more pleasing for me to think of it that way because it’s just, you know, it ties together. I think it’s beautiful. Well, we’re going to bring this to a close now. We’ve gotten through four chapters of Genesis and I promise the remaining episodes will go a bit more quickly. I’m going to focus on certain highlights. It’s just that, you know, these opening stories are truly fundamental to the book, and to the Hebrew Bible, but they often are read in ways that obscure their impact. And so I tried to unpack a couple of things in a certain way. Folks, thanks again for listening. I always appreciate it and I’ll see you next time.

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Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don’t forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O’Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.