The People in the Garden

Introduction

Last week we looked at the overture to the book of Genesis, and to the whole Bible, in . Genesis opens up with a beautiful poetic depiction of God’s creation and ordering of the world. It affirms the basic dignity and value of all humans, and tells us about a God who not only knows what is best for us, but who has done all he can to provide the good for his creatures. This is a God deeply involved in his good creation, and who desires to be in close relationship to the creatures he has made and loves. Yet, by the end of chapter three, we see a scene where God speaks curses over his creation, and exiles these humans from the garden. How did we get here? What has happened to make this so?

v. 2:4-17

The overture concludes and the story begins. God creates a man, in hebrew, Adam. And he makes the man, Adam, from the earth, adamah. God has also created this space, a place called “Eden”, which in Hebrew comes from the root that means “pleasure” or “luxury”. In this paradise, God plants a garden and he places the man that he has made in the midst of that garden to “till and to keep it”. That’s what many translations read, but these words aren’t so clear as that. These words “till” and “keep” in hebrew can have several different connotations. It can mean “till” and “keep” like you would do in a garden, but these words are more often translated as “serve and obey” or “worship and obey”. So God has not just created a gardener here, but a priest! This might remind us of the temple theme in , that portrays all of creation as God’s temple where he “rests”. The same idea is once again affirmed here. That man was made not just to “till and keep” the garden, but to “worship and obey” as priests before the creator.

So God plants a garden in paradise for his priest, and he provides all of the food and care that this man could need, with one stipulation. “of the tree oof the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Adam can have food from any tree in the garden except this one, because this tree is “not good” for him. It will lead to death.

Much of Jewish and Christian tradition has struggled with understanding this one tree. What is this tree? Why put it in the garden if it’s deadly? What does this passage mean? I think this is the wrong way to look at this passage. Bible scholar Walter Brueggeman suggests that, in this passage, humans are characterized by vocation, permission, and prohibition. He says:

“It is telling and ironic that in the popular understanding of this story, little attention is given the mandate of vocation or the gift of permission. The divine will for vocation and freedom has been lost. The God of the garden is chiefly remembered as the one who prohibits.”

I agree with Brueggeman here. God has created this man for a specific purpose, a vocation, and has given him immense freedom in carrying out that vocation, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden...”If God has set a boundary, it is certainly for our own good, in order to help us live within the freedom and vocation that God knows is good for us. This tree is something that lies outside of our vocation, it is not for us, and is, in fact, inherently not good. So we should, perhaps, not focus so much on the prohibition of God in this passage, but on the vocation and permission he has given as a gift to Adam.

v. 2:18-25

Fruit is not the only gift that God has given Adam, and the tree is not the only thing God proclaims “not good” in the garden. It is not long before God sees that “it is not good that man should be alone.” And so God makes him a partner, in Hebrew, an ezer. So he causes Adam to fall into a deep sleep and creates Woman from one of Adam’s ribs. Adam awakens, and is so overjoyed that he begins to sing, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, ishshah, for out of Man, ish, she was taken.” So, just as God created Adam from Adamah, so now he has created ishshah from ish.

So what was this Woman created for? How was she to be a partner for Adam? Firstly, this woman was created to help fulfill the blessing of , so that Adam could “be fruitful and multiply”, and she does this as both man and woman come together as “one flesh” (I won’t go into too much detail, but I think it’s obvious why Adam needs the Woman to help him here!). Secondly, the Woman is to be a partner in carrying out the mans vocation gifted to him by God, not only to “till and keep” the ground, but also in serving as priests who “worship and obey”.

Much has, unfortunately, but made of the language of the Woman as man’s “partner”. Some have suggested that the Woman is created as naturally subordinate to the man, but that’s simply not the case. The word “ezer” used for “partner” or “helper” is often also used to describe God’s role in helping mankind. The term does not in any way suggest an inferiority or a social hierarchy. Man and Woman are created as equal co-workers in the garden.

v. 3:1-13

Chapter 2 ends with the statement, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Chapter three begins “Now the serpent was more crafty than any otehr wild animal that the LORD God had made.” There’s a bit of word play going on here that we unfortunately don’t pick up on in most English translations. The people are “naked”, in Hebrew, arom, and the Serpent is “crafty”, in Hebrew, arum. I think it would be better for us to translate, then, that the humans were “nude”, but the serpent was “shrewd”.

By using this kind of wordplay, the author of Genesis seems to be contrasting the innocence of these humans with the cunning and cleverness of the serpent. So who or what is this serpent? Most of us are aware of the tradition that connects the serpent in the garden to Satan. This association of the serpent and Satan goes very far back to Jewish apocalyptic writings, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus, and is continued in early Christian writings such as Romans, John, Revelation, and the Church Fathers. Genesis never makes this connection itself, however. The term for sanke used here, nahas, an onomotopoeia for the hiss of a snake, is usually translated as just “snake” or “serpent”. The context itself , by calling the serpent a “wild animal”, also seems to suggest that the “serpent” really is just that: a serpent.

For early readers of Genesis, however, there may have been a few other connotations that they would have picked up on. Firstly, nahas is closely related to the Hebrew “seraph”. A seraph, or “seraphim” for plural, was a giant six winged fire snake. It was a heavenly being well known through out the ANE, and it even makes a few appearances in the Bible, such as in Isaiah where we see seraphim around God’s throne, shouting, “Holy, Holy, Holy”, as well as one Seraph approaching Isaiah with a white hot coal to cleanse his sins away. It is possible that this “serpent” is meant to be one of these Seraphim beings, especially since there is an allusion to God creating the heavenly beings in .

It is also possible, and perhaps more likely, that the nahas in would have been associated with a very common theme of snake worhsip in the ANE. Snakes were symbols of life and death and of wisdom. They were the symbol of astrologers who studied the stars and the wisdom of the Gods. They were also often associated with various gods in Egypt and Canaan. Snakes were also associated with the great Chaos monsters of the sea such as Leviathan, Tiamat, Yam, and Rahab, which Yahweh is explicitly mentioned as creating on day five in .

So, while Genesis doesn’t explicitly link this serpent to Satan, I don’t think the classic association of Satan with the serpent is wrong. Even early readers would have understood that the serpent in the garden is meant to symbolize more than just a snake. While we’re not sure whether it was supposed to be a Seraph, a representation of Canaanite gods, or a symbol of Chaos and destruction, the serpent is nevertheless clearly a force that has alligned itself against God, and who wants to drag humans away from God as well. So while this association of Satan and the serpent is a later interpretation, and it would be incorrect to think that the author of Genesis had Satan in mind when writing this passage, it is nevertheless a fitting theological adaptation of the text.

Nevertheless, I’d like us to put that aside for a moment in order to engage with the narrative a bit. The Man and Woman find themselves face to face with this strange creature in the garden, who begins to question them. “Did God say, “You can’t eat of fruit from any of the trees in the garden?” the serpent asks. This, as Eve quickly points out, is not at all what God said! What God actually said, the woman declares, is that the humans can eat of any tree in the garden, just not the tree of knowing good and evil. If they touch that tree, they will surely die. “You will not die!” says the serpent, “God knows that if you eat from that tree your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing Good and evil.”

The serpent truly is a crafty creature. He has directed the human’s attention away from the vocation and permission of God, and toward the prohibition of God. This command of God was a boundary meant to give life to the humans, but the serpent has twisted it into a threat . “You shall surely die” was a warning to the humans about their limitations, not a sly intimidation tactic. God was concerned with life, yet the serpent has caused humans to be concerned with death. And so, as Walter Brueggeman puts it, “… God’s rule is no longer the boundary of a safe place. God is now a barrier to be circumvented.

The serpent promises the humans that, if they ignore God’s rule, they can rule for themselves. Up until this point humanity has relied on God to know what is “good” for them. But the serpent offers the chance for them to define what is “good” and “bad” on their own, without God. And so, Eve looks at the fruit of the tree and, “saw that it was good for food” and so she took it and ate it, and so did her husband, who was with her. The humans were now in charge, they would decide for themselves what was good.

And just like that, they became ashamed of their nakedness. They were no longer innocent as they had been before. Adam and Eve, in defining Good and Evil for themselves, suddenly realized that they could no longer trust one another. What if Eve were to look at Adam’s nakedness and decide it was “not good”? Or if Adam were to do the same with Eve? You see, the humans wanted knowledge rather than trust. And now that they had the knowledge, they could not have the trust. And so they covered themselves with fig leaves, to hide from one another.

v. 3:

Then they heard the sound of God coming in the garden, and they hid themselves from him too. “Where are you?” called God. “I hid myself,” answered Adam, “I was afraid, because I was naked.” The word here for “naked”, erom, is a little different from the one used before, arom. This word, typically, is associated with guilt. “Who told you you were naked, erom, guilty?” asked the LORD. “Have you eaten from the tree?” Adam answers, and digs the hole a little deeper. He blames the woman, the woman that God had given to him. He shifts the blame to both the woman and even to God himself. What a human thing to do! The woman, whom God had declared good, Adam was now trying to declare “not good”. Adam now sees the good that God has proclaimed for him to be the very source of his troubles. So God turns to the woman, and her answer is no better. She too tries to shift the blame.

It becomes obvious what has happened. This act of rebellion has completely twisted the humans, and God’s good creation. God created the humans with a vocation: to worship and obey, with freedom so as to carry out that vocation, and with boundaries so as to promote life and safety. Now the serpent has offered something different, which, once again, Walter Brueggeman puts very well: “ [The serpent] insists… that the freedom of human persons to enjoy and exploit life and the vocation of human persons to manage creation are set in the context of the prohibition of God.” God, in other words, is what is holding humanity back, instead of the person providing life and abundance. Knowledge of Good and Evil for myself, human autonomy and freedom, is better than Trust of God.

Adam and Eve grasped at that freedom and power to choose for themselves, and it set all of creation on a path of ruin.

v. 3:14-24

The next section in is typically interpreted as God putting a curse on the humans. This is not, however, what is portrayed! These curses aren’t a harsh punishment that God is dishing out on Adam and Eve, they are the natural consequences brought about by the damage of human rebellion. Interestingly, the only “curses” mentinoed in the text aren’t directed at Adam and Eve at all, but at the serpent and at the ground. Firstly, the serpent is cursed to crawl on its belly, to eat dust, and to be at war with the offspring of the woman. This imagery of the serpent crawling on its belly and eating dust is an obvious allusion to the nature of snakes as we know them, but it is more than that. This is meant to show a posture of defeat for the serpent, which is important because the very next phrase tells us that the serpent is about to be in conflict with the humans. Some translations might say that the offspring will “strike” the serpent’s head and the serpent will “strike” his heel,as if to suggest that both parties will suffer death, but this isn’t entirely accurate. The hebrew protrays a very one sided battle: the humans will crush the serpent, and the serpent will only “snap” at the heel of the humans. This passage has sometimes been called the “first gospel”, and has been interpreted as a foretelling of Jesus.

Next, God proclaims the consequences for the woman. While God blessed her to “be fruitful and multiply”, the blessing has now been twisted so that she will onlly be able to bear children through great pain. Nevertheless, there is hope for the woman in that God has also just promised that, despite the pain of childbirth, it would be through this painful process that the salvation of the humans would come to crush the serpent.

But the rebellion of the humans has done more than that for the woman. It has also twisted and broken her relationship with her husband. “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Many have taken this as a prescription of God’s will, as if it was God’s desire that men be the “head of the house”. This is not God’s will, however, but a curse. It was not meant to be this way! God created the humans to be partners, his vision was of the garden was one of equality and mutuality. Yet, because of human sin, the relationship was turned into one of control and domination.

Lastly, God declares that, because of Adam, the very ground is cursed. Where once fruit in the garden was freely provided, now Adam will have to work all of his days struggling to provide. Where once God had granted humans life, now that they had ignored the boundary of life, humans would be subject to death.

And so humanity was exiled from paradise. They left the temple where they dwelt with God, where they served as priests, because they wanted the power to decide what was best for themselves. They broke the trusting relationship they had with God because they wanted ultimate knowledge for themselves.

Yet, despite all of this, God grants them mercy. Though the humans deserved death, God made a path to life. Even as they left the garden, God clothed the man and woman in animal skins. He covered their nakedness. The irony is that Adam wanted to hide his erom from God, his nakedness, his shame, his guilt. He was afraid of the judgement of God. Yet, when confronted with Adam’s sins, God’s response is not wrathful vengeance. God is, as it turns out, not at all the controlling tyrant the serpent portrayed. God responds in loving kindness. He clothes the people, he covers their shame, their guilt, their nakedness, and gives them a vision of hope, that one day the work of the serpent might be undone.

Conclusion

We often like to get caught up in all the details of the story in . Who was the serpent? How did he get in the garden? What is the fruit that Eve ate? Where is the garden? How historically accurate is this story? Did Adam and Eve have bellybuttons?

I would hate for us, in getting caught up in those details, to miss the point of the story. There’s a wisdom tradition in the bible that, if read a certain way, might agree with the crafty serpent. The word used for “crafty” or “clever”, arum, is only found in one other place in the Bible: Proverbs. Proverbs, in fact, encourages us to be “crafty”. says:

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”

Proverbs has a wisdom/ foolishness dynamic. Those who do not seek out wisdom are foolish. Genesis, I think, offers an important critique of proverbs. That is not to say that Proverbs is wrong, and certainly not to suggest that Genesis is encourging human ignorance. But that Genesis wants to see the wisdom/foolishness paradigm kept in check by a kowledge/obedience paradigm. Genesis wants us to understand that human wisdom has limits. That there is some wisdom not meant for us to have. And so, perhaps, sometimes it is wiser to be foolish! The gospel, after all, is foolishness.

There is wisdom in trusting God, and in recognizing the boundaries and limitations of being human. The serpent would have us believe that autonomous freedom is the ultimate good. But human freedom that does not discern the boundaries of human life leads to anxiety, fear, and destruction.

Our society constantly attemtps to play off of this anxiety bourne out of our quest for total freedom. Consumerism and nationalism, both staples of American culture, would have us believe that we can find stability, life, and security outside of God.

Failure to trust God, however, leads to death.

“To trust God with our lives is to turn from the autonomous “I” to the covenanting “Thou”, from our invented well-being to God’s overriding purposes and gifts.” -W.B.

“Man’s happiness does not consist in being ‘like God’ so much as it does his being ‘with God’...” Sailhamer