So, having prefaced my text – here is a reading of Genesis as the text has it, without any additional narrative or commentary:
Before anything else, one has to acknowledge a degree of discontinuity. Evidently the narrative has been pieced together from disparate sources and traditions. There are two separate and contradictory accounts of Adam being placed in the garden. Sometimes there are two trees in the center of the garden, sometimes only one. The word
Elohim seems on occasion to serve as the name of God, at other times it retains its plural sense as Gods, or should we say God and gods? But let this not disturb us too much.
Anyway ... the premise of the tale is the fairly common myth of a tree or trees whose fruits nourish and preserve the gods. In this version, YHVH – the main God among the gods – has planted a garden paradise to shelter the magic trees that grant the gods their powers. The fruit of one gives them knowledge – what is good, what bad, and so on. The fruit of the other tree gives them extremely long – possibly eternal – life.
To avoid upsetting sensibilities, I will refer to the singular deity as the Master, and the plural deities as masters.
Having created the garden, they, the Master and his court, being by nature an aristocracy, need someone to look after it. So the Master fashions a creature to tend the Garden – a serf. Now, this Garden being something of a Divine Court, it is necessary to keep the serf to some degree ignorant of the true nature of what grows there. So he tells his serf that the tree of knowledge bears a poison fruit (something of an untruth) and warns him in no uncertain terms that to eat it would be fatal.
The Master then notices that his serf is lonely, so decides to supply him with a helper. The obvious solution is fashion another clay creature, but instead he chooses to bring all the animals to the serf to see if any of them will suffice. They don't. In fact, in what scholars will in time call the Yahwist narrative (unlike the Elohist narrative of the first chapter of Genesis) the creation of the animals of the world is a series of inept attempts at providing the serf with a useful assistant (2:18-20). Only after this long succession of failures does the Master solve the problem by splitting the clay creature into two by removing one of his “sides” (or “ribs”) and shaping a woman.
Success. He leaves his serfs to their tasks.
We are told that our serfs were naked but not ashamed (2:25). To our Biblicised ears, this sounds like an indication of their innocence, but in the context of the tale, formed in a time of wealthy landowners and an exploited peasantry, it is evidence of the pathetic ignorance and penury in which their Master keeps them.
At this stage, there is no further pronouncements. Whether we should think of their situation as a good one, indeed perhaps as good as they are ever likely to get, or whether we should hope for some liberation from their existence as serfs, there is no comment.
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At this point a snake appears (not, in any sense, the 'devil', a figure the original authors of the story had not the faintest concept), the “wisest” or “shrewdest” of all the animals. When Eve repeats the – let's not beat about the bush here – the lie about poison fruit, the snake disabuses her: Of course you will not die, rather, if you eat, your eyes will be opened, knowing what is good and what bad, and thus you will become like the masters themselves.
Again, this cannot be stated with sufficient emphasis:
within the mythic narrative itself, it is the Master who has misled his creatures and it is the snake who is telling the truth. How do we know this? Well, rather than dropping dead, as they were told, the effect is just as the snake said, they discover their own nakedness and of how in ignorance they have been abused by their Master.
The Master's reaction is significant – after having discovered and suppressed this insurrection, and having dealt with the
agent provocateur, he hastens to the masters and, in somewhat of a panic, tells them that the serfs have been awakened from their conditioning and have indeed become like their masters, knowing the truth of things!
Now all they need to do is eat of the other magic tree and they'll become immortal!
Before this happens, they must be driven out of the garden (3:23). And so the Master expels the serfs from the garden and posts sentries to make sure there's no chance of their sneaking back in.
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As crazy as this might sound, anyone familiar with, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh, can scarcely fail to note that once again the gods are depicted as powerful, but also silly, stupid and cruel.
(By comparison to those older texts, the early Yahwist narratives of Genesis are models of awe and devotion.)
Later, the signs of redaction and mythical interpretation become more apparent. Cain and Abel is a morality tale (still with the ancient gods' preference for meat over vegetables on the altar). Then a short, enigmatic episode, clearly the remnants of a much more involved mythology of the Age of Heroes – in which the sons of the gods take human wives, and sire the mysterious
nefelim (giants), all of which fits the pattern of countless ancient myths about the sexual congress of gods and mortals, and of the demigods, heroes, or monsters born of their unions.
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With Noah one can discern the stirrings of a developed religious consciousness emerging from the mythical past. The tale has its roots in far older Mesopotamian stories of a great flood – eg the legend of Ziusudra, king of Shuruppak, the epic of Atra-Hasis, and of course the Epic of Gilgamesh. The earliest extant versions of the story are various tablets dating back as far as the seventeenth century BCE, but the story is far, far older than that. Yet, as best we can tell, its details remained fairly consistent over all those centuries. By the time of the final recension of Genesis, perhaps as late as the third century BCE, the protagonist has become Noah, but the basic shape of the narrative was largely unchanged; but its moral and spiritual tenor had definitely evolved.
In the tale of Atra-Hasis, the great god Enlil convinces his fellow gods that humanity should be destroyed principally because their numbers have now become so great that they make too much damned noise, the gods simply cannot get to sleep at night. Here the gods seem like a small community of irascible codgers, incensed at how loudly the kids in the neighborhood play their music late at night – though, in this case, they happen to be homicidal codgers. In the version preserved in Gilgamesh – very close to Genesis – Enlil is even more capricious; he decides to exterminate humanity – and the gods by so doing reveal themselves as blithering idiots.
Not only do they terrify themselves by the flood they cause, it never crossed their minds they might themselves be endangered. It never occur to most of them, until it is too late, that if humanity perishes, there will be no one to feed them, and they will starve.
Happily, one of their number, Enki, clearly has something going on upstairs and makes sure this does not happen, by counseling Utnapishtim to build his ark. Even so, food service is delayed. By the time Utnapishtim is able to make an offering on an altar, the poor dears are absolutely famished. Drawn by the “delightful fragrance of the smoke,” the gods “gather ravenously around the sacrifice, like a swarm of flies.”
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By comparison to that bunch, the God of Noah is a much grander, wiser, and more sympathetic figure. His reason for exterminating terrestrial life is not annoyance at humanity’s boisterousness, nor sheer caprice; rather, it is his distaste for humanity’s wicked deeds and evil thoughts).
It's notable that this God's reaction is to sexual intercourse between demigods and humans – proportionately far worse, in response, than the sin of Adam and Eve. They were kicked out of the garden. This mob were drowned. Whereas Adam and Eve were left to continue, this time God decided to wipe the slate clean.
Although an improvement on his Mesopotamian precursors. This God still wages total war and orders ethnic cleansing. He is a God of Purges and Pogroms...
... But bit by bit one catches the emerging glimpses of a later vision of God as theophanic, majestic, holy, hidden, and yes ... just.
