Spin off: Adam and Eve

[Jejune]

off-kilter's question about Christianity made me remember rereading the Adam and Eve story a number of years back. It was a strange thing because I saw it in a very new light. If you look at it as a story, rather than literal truth, there seems to be an interesting double metaphor going on. If God is the Father, then Eve could be the hero of the story. Eve brings knowledge, with its double edge of pleasure and pain, to the world. Sure it's painful, but it's a powerful metaphor for growing up. The story mirrors adolescence so beautifully, down to the father pleased to see his children grow up, but saddened by what he knows growing up must mean. But in order to grow, the children need knowledge and pain and ultimately to leave the sacred and beautiful and SAFE garden of their childhood. The pain of childbirth that is Eve's alone could be less about punishment than about consequence.

I had always disliked that story, but when I read it last, I saw a lot to like. Are there any mythological stories (and I'm not being disrespectful in saying this - I don't believe the Bible is literal, especially in Genesis, but I think myth is a powerful form of truth) that you interpret in a different way than the standard given form?

[Lori]

I like the Garden of Eden story, as well, because of interpretations that vary from the more traditional ones.

I find the traditional interpretation of the Garden of Eden absolutely horrifying, honestly. If God is a parent, then he's a pretty horribly abusive parent, to exile and disown his children, and condemn them and all of their offspring to an eternity in hell, for the first mistake they ever make, when they don't even have any moral understanding. We'd consider a human parent who disowned their two-year-old and decided that they were worthy of death because they disobeyed their parent one time was a monster, and I would consider a god who did that a monster, as well.

But, if the story is interpreted as more about inevitability and growing up, then I think it's really quite lovely. I think it works on two levels. On one level, it's about how our alienation from God, sad as it may be, is an unavoidable fact of life. If we are to be free human beings, who are capable of making real choices (which I don't think someone without moral knowledge can be), then we must be separated from God. Otherwise, we'd be only extentions of God (puppets, in a cruder sense), not free moral agents. And, on another level, it's about how we can't be innocent forever, and have to grow up some time, with all of the good and bad that comes with it. The central fact in that is not that God led Adam and Eve out of the garden, because all parents have to let go sometime, but that God continued to provide them with what they needed even as they went off on their own. In that interpretation God goes from being a cruel, punishing father, to a loving one.

On a side note, a really interesting thing, to me, is that the word that is interpreted as "toil" in reference to Adam and "sorrow" or "pain" in reference to Eve is the same Hebrew word, etzev. So one way to read it is that, just like Adam will produce life from the soil through toil, Eve will produce children through toil, which has a much more empowering and productive tone, since getting something through hard work can be very gratifying. I think it's very interesting that the same word is interpreted so differently in the two contexts.

[Lori]

As an add-on, because I had two big glasses of chocolate milk tonight and am still too wound up to sleep ;), the best interpretations of stories from the Hebrew Bible that I've read, including of this story, have either been Jewish in origin or from Christian theolgians who were heavily influenced by Jewish interpretations. On the whole (although there are many varieties of interpretations in both religions), I think that Judaism has done a far better job in intepretating the Hebrew Bible than Christianity has, which makes sense, since they've had thousands of more years to think about and through the stories. But it seems like, on the whole, Judaism manages to locate truths in the stories without getting bogged down in issues of whether or not events actually happened in the way they are described, and don't feel the same need to think that if something didn't literally happen as described, then it must be meaningless, that seems very prevalent in much Christian OT interpretation (especially interpretations that aren't based in the Jewish interpretative tradition).

I think that Christians had and continue to have a tendency to approach the Hebrew Bible with a theological framework already in place, and then fit the stories into the slots that are there. So the story of Adam and Eve gets interpreted the way it does not because that's the most obvious way to read the text, but because it's the way to read the text that most supports the theological suppositions of the Christians who are reading it. But, the same texts ARE the theological framework for Judaism, so I think the texts are taken more seriously and looked at more completely within that tradition. I think that, on the whole, Christians would do very well to pay more attention to the ways that the Jewish tradition has interpreted the OT texts, particularly the creation and "fall" narratives, because it seems to me that the Christian interpretative tradition has gotten so bogged down in whether the creation narratives are true or how to make them accord with modern science or what genre they were intended as (technical questions) that the meaning of the texts in the context they were written in gets lost.

[off-kilter]

Well, since you read my response in the other thread, I obviously don't read Adam and Eve as having done something "wrong" that needed punishment and I did feel they were set up for failure. I like your spin on it as being metaphorical for reaching the age of reason and growing up to be "born" as true people. Very interesting.