The LORD and Adam: Genesis 2.4-3.17, Part 2

The other day we looked at the symbolism in Genesis 2.4-3.17’s extensive descriptions of its primordial setting, paying special attention to the role of gardens in Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) royal iconography and the two trees. Today we’re turning to the two main characters of this part of the story and the relationship between them:

(See the previous post for the Experience and Encounter sections of the study).

Explore (part 2)

The LORD God

It’s striking when moving from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2, how much more, for lack of a better word, mythological the second story is. We move from an unchallenged, completely sovereign God who speaks creation into existence to a God who forms creatures from clay, who breathes life into them, who plants gardens, and puts things in their place. (Later in the story, this God also doesn’t understand what the human needs, is outwitted by the serpent, walks in the garden, is hidden from, and sews.) In other words, this God more closely resembles the humanoid and fallible gods of the ANE than the God we come to know as the Bible continues. This is not something that has merited a lot of comment in the scholarship I’ve read. It may, however, point to this text relying on very old stories, as the Bible became more comfortable with describing God in terms of a universal, bodiless spirit — and less as an embodied, human-like, and fallible character — as time went on. The ethical monotheism we know and love was largely a product of the later Prophets and Wisdom literature. I don’t think this difference in how God is portrayed is a problem with this text. After all, we continue to use anthropomorphic imagery for God in casual or devotional speech to this day. It just signals to us the kind of story it is. (A good analogy might be in how the idea of love might be portrayed in a cartoon; we don’t see something like ‘bugged out heart-eyes’ as a problem in this type of story, or think that the cartoon can’t say anything interesting or true about love because this is unrealistic; we just accept it as part of the symbolic language of cartoons.)

The text also famously introduces the divine name YHWH, though it couples it with the word ‘God’. The addition of the term God is thought to be a later addition to the text in the final editing process to clarify who this YHWH is, since it’s the first reference to YHWH in book as it’s currently arranged, and the story of the revelation of the divine name doesn’t happen until Exodus (Carr).

The Human

The most notable thing about the creation of the human here is that, the human (’adam) formed out of mud, or clay (’adamah). Genesis 1 used this generic word for human that is related to the word for earth, but did not elucidate the connection. But it’s fully realized here, to the point that the story envisions God as a potter or sculptor, working the clay into its human form. This tradition of human origins was shared with surrounding cultures. In Egyptian mythology, the god Khnum created living creatures on a potter’s wheel, and in Babylonian literature, Enkidu was similarly fashioned from clay; throughout the ANE there are also stories of humans being created from a mixture of the earth and the blood of the gods (Barton & Muddiman 43f, Sarna (1966) 14). By the end of the present story, these origins will take an ironic turn, with the man having to “work the ground from which he was taken” (3.23). Later characters, such as Cain and Noah, are also described as ‘men of the ground’, so the wordplay here is not incidental to Genesis, but seems to “stress … the integral connection of humans to the ground they farm” (Carr).

After shaping Adam, God breathes on the human; this is not a special gift of the Holy Spirit, but part of the general breath of life given by God that sets all animals apart as ‘living creatures’. The point remains, however, that this life is a gift from God (Carr).

The LORD and Adam in the Garden

The description of Adam in the garden here is very brief. God places Adam in the garden to be, essentially, its gardener. Again we have to point out the huge difference this represents compared to ANE mythology. There, humans are created as an afterthought to perform hard agricultural labour on behalf of the gods; here, humanity is created first, then given a royal garden to tend. There is certainly still work here, but the work of a gardener is very different from the drudgery of Babylonian canal-digging, or the back-breaking work of coaxing life out of the dry soil of ancient Israel. In this way the text is in harmony with the general (if not exact) thrust of humanity’s vocation in Genesis 1. There, it’s humanity’s stewardship over animals that’s in view, here it’s tending a garden, but both involve concern and responsibility for God’s creation (Sarna (1989) 20, Brueggemann, Carr).

God gives Adam all of the fruit trees in the garden as food — including presumably the tree of life — except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That tree is prohibited, with the warning that “on the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2.17). To the story’s original audience, that the commandment involves a dietary restriction would have been meaningful, giving a primordial parallel to the dietary laws of the Law of Moses (Sarna (1989) 21). From the beginning, it would seem, our relationship with food was understood to be of vital importance.

The prohibition also opens up a lingering question about Genesis 2-3, about whether the human was originally mortal. While the tree of life is mentioned earlier in the story, it is not a central element of the story, so we don’t know quite what was intended. The two main options are:

1. Humanity was created immortal; mortality is a punishment for eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil
2. Humanity was created mortal, but offered immortality through the possibility of eating of the tree of life; mortality is a return to humanity’s ‘natural’ state

While the first option is the one likely most familiar to most Christians, there isn’t much in the text itself to suggest it. The second option is preferred by both ANE parallels and the way the tree of life image was (and is) used in Judaism (Sarna (1989) 21). As we’ve seen in the series, the Epic of Gilgamesh refers to a tree whose fruit conveys immortality to those who eat it (Sarna (1955) 25, Carr);  and in the Wisdom tradition, the primary signification of the tree of life is a life lived in communion with God. If this is true, then the choice of whether to eat of it or to go our own way is a real one! And certainly that’s been the dominant interpretation of the story in Judaism: Each of us is Adam in the garden offered the choice, and ultimately, we all choose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There are grammatical reasons for preferring the second interpretation as well. As Carr points out, the formula is not one generally used for the death penalty, but more closely resembles statements describing dangerous behaviours with deadly consequences (Carr). (That is, not ‘if you touch the stove I will burn your hand’, but ‘if you touch the stove, you’ll get burned.’ The first is a punishment, the second is a natural consequence.)

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What can we say, then, about this story as of verse 17? Walter Brueggemann summarized it perfectly, I think:

These three verses together [Genesis 2.15-17] provide a remarkable statement of anthropology. Human beings before God are characterized by vocation, permission, and prohibition. The primary human task is to find a way to hold the three facets of divine purpose together. Any two of them without the third is surely to pervert life. 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. But the prohibition makes sense only in terms of the other two. The balance and juxtaposition of the three indicates that there is a subtle discernment of human destiny here.

What he’s saying is that we lose out if we only read this story in terms of the commandment, which, of course, is later broken. Just as important, if not more important, are the other elements of the story: God’s provision of the garden and humanity’s general freedom within it, and the human vocation to care for the garden.