Dear Goddess in the spring time please help me get past page two of Genesis.....
Why must it be so difficult to read this the way I would any other story of creation? I was not offended when I read the Native American story of how women were created from the bones of a wolf. Nope, that I found appealing. Of course nowhere in that story was a woman accused of condemning all of history. Maybe it is also because those words have never been used to oppress and mistreat women for more years than my stomach can bear to contemplate. I mean really was there such a need to understand the workings of the central nervous system that God and woman had to be blamed for the basic fact that nerve endings lead to both pleasure and pain? Is it not true that without sensing the pain that comes with child birth, lots of other things would not be felt either. Of course they did not know that when this was written...so lets move on and leave that open for discussion.
Up next is this idea of symbolism. Some say the fruit was actual fruit and even get into arguing over what kind of fruit. Others say that eating the fruit was a symbol for Adam and Eve having sex before they had reached the age of maturity (I guess I have found the root of the abstinence argument and why sex is considered such an evil thing). I enjoyed finding one universalist interpretation that said that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and were not physically naked but aware of the existence of right and wrong because they had actually behaved disobediently, thus felt guilty and ashamed.
But, alas, what is this paragraph I have never noticed. God who in self reference uses the term "us" (interesting use of the plural) says that Adam and Eve are now like Gods with the exception that they have not eaten from the tree of life and must leave lest they do and and become immortal. Hmm... see what you find when you get past page two? To this some say that God was taking mercy on them so that they did not have to live forever with the guilt of their disobedience ( but dude they lived for nine hundred years sooo what??)
Finally there are the begets...this person begot that one and so on and so on. Now to populate the earth that way there had to be some serious incest happening and what would that do to genetics...UGH!!! Are we really supposed to take this at all literally? Genesis is my Nemesis...Maybe some one else can make sense of this, I will try again tomorrow.
Ancient peoples would have benefited a great deal from a better understanding of basic biology!
ReplyDeleteSymbolism vs literalism is a pretty big issue, too. My father believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible, whereas my mother just quietly thought of it as a symbolic guide for an ancient culture.
One thing I've never been able to figure out is where Cain's wife came from. I'm going to look up Genesis and see what it says!
Alright, after killing his brother, he went off to the land of Nod and had a wife there. Was she also one of Eve's children? The text is pretty specific that Eve's next child was Seth, or perhaps that was just her next son, and the daughters were ignored entirely. :/