Consequences, Consequences: Genesis 3.14-24

Last time in this series on the first chapters of Genesis, we saw the saw the tragic scene in the garden play out. The first man and woman allow themselves to be swayed by the serpent’s lies and eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — the one and only thing God has commanded them not to do. The results are immediate and profound: They become self-conscious and ashamed of their bodies, fearful of God, and shirk responsibility for their actions, laying blame anywhere they can but at themselves. But the consequences of their disobedience in the story don’t end there. Today’s study will focus on the speech God gives in response to their disobedience and denial.

Text

[3.14] The LORD God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. [15] I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.’

[16] To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’

[17] And to the man he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it”, cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; [18] thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. [19] By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’

[20] The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all who live. [21] And the LORD God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them. [22] Then the LORD God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’— [23] therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. [24] He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. (NRSV)

Experience & Encounter

This is, for lack of a better word, a depressing passage. We see the continued unraveling of the peaceable world God created, and more and more of the sad signs and symptoms of life as we know it. In fact, the passage reads as an origin story for a lot of these: snakes presenting a real and present danger, humanity’s unusually high risks and pain associated with childbirth, the patriarchy, the harshness of agricultural labour, and ultimately death.

And yet, linking in with the ‘Encounter’ portion of the study, it’s also apparent that God is pulling punches here. In the original commandment, God said that “on the day you eat [from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] you will die” (2.17). But, while Adam and Eve (now named) no longer have access to the tree of life, they do not die right away. Instead, they are exiled from the garden and go out into the wide world to eke out a living. Moreover, God does not leave them unprepared for this, providing them with clothing to replace the coverings they’d scrounged for themselves from leaves.

So at first glace, there seems to be more going on here than just ‘crime and punishment’. There is grace and providence at play here too.

These reflections leave with two questions I’d like to explore:

• What do the specific consequences and / or punishments mentioned in God’s speech tell us about the nature of sin?
• What does the story tell us about the lasting impacts of Adam and Eve’s disobedience for humanity’s relationship with God?

Explore

Sin and Its Consequences

The passage serves as an aetiology (origin story) for a number of things that make human life unsatisfying, difficult, and dangerous (Barton & Muddiman 44).* But are there any generalizations that can be made about them and do they tell us anything about how the story conceives of sin and its consequences? Let’s look at them more closely to see.

The Serpent

The serpent is cursed to spend its life slithering on the ground. This is reads as straight punishment, since it is neither a natural consequence of its lies, nor is there any restorative or educational aim. The curse also introduces enmity into the world. This is the first real crack in the original unity of creation: the ‘very good’ peace between humanity and the animal world is now broken, at least where the serpent is concerned (Harper).

The Woman

The woman fares very badly in this story, having to live with two devastating consequences for her gullibility. The consequence of difficult childbirth is a harsh sentence indeed, considering that, without access to modern medicine, upwards of a quarter of women would die in childbirth. This is especially noticeable when compared to the relatively easy births of most animals! This introduces a break in the natural order of reproduction — we might say humanity’s relationship with itself as an animal being, as the natural blessing from Genesis 1, to “go forth and multiply” is now fraught with danger (Sarna (1989) 27).

To make matters worse for the woman, she is also subjected to the rule of her husband. (And in the aftermath of God’s pronouncement, Adam names her at last, as a symbol of his dominion over her.) This is actually a remarkable detail, since it assumes that patriarchy is not God’s original intention, but a manifestation of sin. So here, God’s original blessing of unity and partnership of man and woman is broken and replaced by division and subjugation (Barton & Muddiman 44, Brueggemann, Harper).

The Man

Compared to the serpent and the woman, the man gets off a bit easier in the story, but the consequences are still significant and represent a dramatic shift in relationships. The very ground is cursed, so that the easy tending of the garden is turned into the back-breaking physical labour of large-scale agriculture (Barton & Muddiman 41). The same word is even used to described the woman’s toil in childbirth and the man’s toil in agricultural work (Sarna (1989) 28). So here, it is humanity’s relationships with work and the natural environment that are broken.

Mortality

While the original commandment came with the warning that “on the day you eat of [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil], you will die,” Adam and Eve still live — for now. But we see death seeping into everything. All of these consequences are deaths of a certain kind, whether literal or metaphorical. The most symbolic reference to mortality, comes in the very last verse of the story, where God exiles humanity from the garden and places angelic guards and a flaming sword to bar them from eating of the tree of life again (3.24). As much as the consequences outlined in God’s speech may beat around the bush about it, the commandment, its breaking, and consequences, were always ultimately about mortality, or at least our awareness of it. In this sense, Genesis 2-3 fits in well with Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature, in which the human quest for immortality and life-giving trees were common themes (Barton & Muddiman 44).

Humanity and God

And yet, the humans are spared the immediate fatal consequence of their disobedience. As Brueggemann puts is, “The miracle is not that they are punished, but that they live.” Life is not what it might have been — they are no longer welcome in the garden and have lost the easy, un-self-conscious communion with God it symbolized — but they do live. Moreover, God makes them clothes before sending them on their way, suggesting some degree of rapprochement, if not reconciliation (Sarna (1989) 29). From the broader perspective of the Bible, this is a fascinating detail, for elsewhere, clothing is a symbol of belonging and life (see, for example, Joseph’s coat in Genesis 37, Saul clothing David in his armour in 1 Samuel 17.38, the ‘garments of salvation in Isaiah 61.10 (cf. 2 Corinthians 5.4). These may not be garments of salvation, but these garments of hide still demonstrate God’s ongoing concern and care (Barton & Muddiman 44). Elsewhere in ANE literature, such as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, exchanging nudity for clothing is a symbol of rejecting primitive life in favour of civilization, so in a sense this gift of clothing is not just a gracious act of concern, but also one that recognizes Adam and Eve’s new status as moral subjects (Sarna (1989) 29).

This suggests, in keeping with many Jewish traditions about the story, that humanity is far from ‘graceless’ after the garden. As Bruggemann puts it, “This is not a simple story of human disobedience and divine displeasure. It is rather a story about the struggle God has in responding to the facts of human life. When the facts warrant death, God insists on life for his creatures.”

And that’s far from nothing.

Challenge

While the interpretation that has emerged here may represent a challenge to some of the ways the garden story has been interpreted in Christianity, it is still very much a Christian reading of the text. In the Challenge section today, I’d like to briefly think through one common Jewish reading of this text: as an allegory for the loss of innocence involved in growing up.

As we’ve previously seen, the most likely signification of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the development of independent moral reasoning. And it’s hard from our ‘after-the-Fall’ experience to see this as a bad thing; after all, this is a critically important part of growing up, and not going through this stage of life is tantamount to remaining a child, dependent wholly on others. We also saw how the tree of life was a common trope of biblical Wisdom literature, where it signified the good life of wisdom and communion with God. With these symbols in mind, the Genesis 2-3 story easily reads as a parable warning the reader against choosing independence over communion, and knowledge over wisdom (Brueggemann). In choosing knowledge, humanity got more than it bargained for and instantly regretted it. There is a sense in which ignorance really is bliss. And yet, that same blissful ignorance also makes us incapable of acting and choosing knowledgeably, of changing course to stave off impending disaster. And so there’s a paradox here. Knowledge is the enemy of trust and faithfulness, yet without it our faithfulness is impoverished.

With this in mind, many Jewish interpreters read the story as something of a felix culpa, a ‘happy sin’ — not, obviously, in the Christian sense as the rationale for the coming of Jesus, but in the sense that this act of disobedience was a necessary act of independence that allowed humanity to grow into adulthood. In the words of Rabbi Ben Harris:

[I]t’s possible to read this story not as a morality tale about the perils of disobedience, but as the beginning of humanity’s path to fulfilling its destiny. Man’s first act is an act of rebellion. And in so doing, Adam and Eve exercise the very freedom of choice that is essential for their progeny’s choices to have any meaning at all. Had Adam and Eve remained in the garden … their choice to do God’s will would be of little significance. Obeying God only has value if we have the option of doing otherwise. (Harris)

He goes on to further assert that this is a necessary and valuable part of humanity’s history with God, and cites the story of Abraham convincing God to save Sodom for the sake of the faithful there as evidence of the benefits of this new relationship. One might say that, according to this reading of the text, Adam could never be of use to God, but Israel — ‘he who wrestles with God’ — is; and only Israel can truly live into humanity’s vocation.

Rabbi Kari Turing echoes this idea, writing:

Eventually, we grow up, become adults, and must work for a living. We begin to learn the ways of the world. We must leave Eden to know what it means to feel pain. However, growing up also means gaining knowledge. When we gain that knowledge, we become aware of our ability to affect the world around us. We learn to take responsibility for our lives, leaving behind the familiar as we venture into a new, unfamiliar realm. Viewed in this light, Adam and Eve’s misbehavior is part of the human condition. We all fall short and have to face the consequences of our behavior, but we have our family, our community, and our relationship with God to show us the way. (Turing)

One of the biblical scholars whose work I’ve found most helpful in this study, David McLain Carr echoes this sentiment in his reading of the text:

These pre-flood stories depict the gradual emergence of the first humans from a state of childlike (and animal-like) lack of shame (Gen 2:25), gullibility, and naivete (Gen 3:1–6) into the hard work and hard choices of life outside the garden. This certainly involves human mistakes and misdeeds …. Nevertheless, humans also gain important adult capabilities along the way, such as godlike “knowledge of good and evil” (3:7,22), and God does not only respond to their actions with anger, but also with compassion (Gen 3:8–24; 4:9–15).

So, it’s very possible to read this story not as a catastrophe but as the kind of mistake that, yes has big consequences, but is also a crucial step in growing up and taking responsibility for ourselves.

Expand

So where does all this leave us? As the fallout from the humans’ decision to eat the forbidden fruit continues to be revealed, we see the ongoing breakdown of the original peace of the garden: The intended human relationships with the natural environment, with animals, with work, with their own perpetuation, and between the sexes are all damaged, along with their original easy communion with God. If we understand humanity’s original purpose as being God’s agents of shalom-keeping in creation (as Harper, I think correctly, posits), we see here a systematic breakdown of that vocation. The original community of faithfulness is a thing of the past (Harper, Bruggemann).

And yet, God remains faithful. God still chooses life for Adam and Eve, and sets them up for their new life outside the garden, as difficult as it will be.

It’s hard to judge all this from our perspective, since we’ve never known life in the garden. Could God really have imagined a perpetual childhood for us — innocent and carefree, but utterly dependent? Is love truly love when there is no alternative? We simply cannot answer these questions since we cannot fathom the alternatives to life in the world as we know it.

Perhaps we’d do well not to think too much about it. For the story shows God to be remarkably creative and resilient in love and faithfulness. God doesn’t come across as a blood-thirsty, letter-of-the-law judge here, but rather as a pragmatic and matter-of-fact parent, who realizes they now have to deal with their growing children as responsible beings with minds and hearts of their own. God rolls with the punches — there are consequences yes, as there must be, but life outside the garden is not all death and pain and toil. The relationship changes, as it must, but the relationship persists, and there is a different kind of joy possible in faithfulness and love that exists despite the odds.

The interpretation that has emerged here is, however, quite different from how vast swaths of the Christian tradition have read it. Terms like ‘the Fall’ and ‘original sin’ have barely been mentioned in this study. Over the next posts, I’ll shift gears a bit and turn to these doctrines and how they connect — and don’t — to Genesis 3.

 

* See the series bibliography for more details.