The ZigZag Café - June 21
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What do you see as the building blocks for the biblical narrative in Genesis 2-3?
8 comments:
What do you mean by "building blocks"?
Carter,
Thanks. Let's say the 'stuff' of stories.
What I 'think' is that the creation stories of Genesis 1-3 were written down while the people were captive in Babylon. Surrounded by the false gods (the acceptance of which led to the downfall of Israel and Judah) the story needed to be told about how they got where they were--captives in a foreign land where they could not sing the songs of Zion. The creation of the world in chapter 1 parallels the Babylonian/Mesopotamian with a clear distinction that the sun and moon are not named as the gods that they are in the surrounding culture. Rather, they are just things created by the Lord God. Give me a few minutes and I'll try to apply this to Genesis 2 & 3.
In attempting to figure this out, in the cosmological creation, God makes the world "good." But (as Yeats said), "things fall apart; the center cannot hold." If a holy god made a good world, why is there evil? Why do I do the thing I would not do and why don't I do the things I should (to be Pauline about it)? I think the Hebrew people were looking for an explanation for evil with the understanding that God did not create evil. Then the question becomes one of reconciliation.
Just my rambling thoughts.
Carter,
I like your thoughts. The polemical force of Gen 1 in its ANE setting seems likely. And perhaps captivity, or at least exodus, was an experience that brought Israel into a situation where a founding narrative would have been appropriate.
Carter,
Yes, God makes the world good until it is not good for man to be alone 2:18. Good in chapter 1 may be a good for its purpose good.
But this may also point to the possibility that there are two creation stories in Israel that later came together. God is YHWH Elohim in 2-3.
So, I agree that in 2-3 the writer struggles with evil, as we do. Two points seem to be made: God is the creator of the wily serpent 3:1 - they are not equal - and God is absent from evil when it occurs 3:8ff.
Part of the 'stuff' of the story seems to be symbols - talking serpent, magic trees, sanctuary like garden, and other ANE myths that tell about humanity, nature, and the divine, which Israel no doubt interacted with to some degree. The kind of world being portrayed in the story, may be a possible world.
I agree that there are 2 creation stories. In the second, man is created before plants and animals and then co-acts with god in naming them. Only later does god create the woman. In the first story, man and woman are created at the same time. Now I see what you were asking about building blocks! And I was an English major! Yes, yes!! But I think it all to be mythology or allegory with a theological significance to distinguish Hebrew from Babylonian theology.
Carter,
Yes, the theological distinction is remarkable and this has natural world implications as well: nature is not divine and neither is humanity, to name two.
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