Homo sapiens Did Not Learn to Cook Food in the Garden of Eden

 Bible Tidbits are shorter than blogs. I send them to an email list. 

Thelink below is from ASOR, American Society for Oriental Research, and their newsletter "Ancient Near East Today." The link talks about archaeological research into when Homo sapiens and the ancestor Homo erectus and other Homos began to control fire and cook their food. It's a good short presentation on the consensus of human development. 

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/when-did-humans-start-cooking-food

Why am I sending this link under Bible Tidbits? Because it has to do with our interpretation and application of Genesis 1-4. Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that has to do with how we interpret the Bible and other literary subjects. Do we take those chapters literally? Are we falling away from Jesus or failing God if we take them metaphorically and plumb them for the theological message therein?

Here's the thing. I think I've written about this before, but it's worth a refresher. I didn't learn this in church. I read those 4 chapters from 1965 til 1980 and never noticed anything amiss until I read them in Hebrew, sitting at the kitchen table of Rabbi Bernard Schwab in Lexington, Kentucky around 1980. Then there was a followup article in the Biblical Archaeology Society journal "Biblical Archaeology Review." Here's the link but you may not be able to open it without a subscription: 

  https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/genesis-as-rashomon/

In Genesis 1-4, there are 3 documents sewn together as one, and there are differences which the authors knew about and didn't care. Genesis was written probably after the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC. The proof is in Genesis itself, but if you don't know Israel's history, you won't notice or recognize the proofs. In each document, the name of God changes, and those changes are reflected in the English translations (e.g., NIV, KJV, RSV etc).

Document 1: Gen 1:1 to 2:3. *God is elohim in the Hebrew.***Language is exalted, organized, literary.***Heaven is mentioned before Earth.***The verb is "create" all throughout, indicating that when God spoke, things popped in out of nothing.***Men and women are created the same. Ha adam, "the Adam", is a title. God creates ha adam male and female and blesses them both to rule and subdue the earth.***Men and women are created last of all, the apex of all that God created.

Gen. 2:4 has aspects of ch. 1 and 2 and is clearly a deliberate literary bridge, bringing the two documents together, not into an historically unified narrative, but a theological narrative showing a captive people the difference between their God and the foreign creation tales. It has both "heaven and earth" and "earth and heaven."

Document 2, Gen. 2:5 to the end of the chapter. ***God's name is Yahweh elohim, LORD God.***Earth is mentioned before heaven.***Lack of rain is mentioned first, but mankind needed to be made, so streams appear to water the ground.*** The Adam is "formed" (not created) from the dust/dirt of the ground.***The Adam is mentioned before the LORD God makes all the trees and environment. That doesn't mean Adam was formed before rain or trees, just that the careful listing of the order of creation is lacking here. Mention of streams but no rain, mention that the Adam (no Eve yet) is created from dirt, mention of a garden, then all kinds of trees and plants for food.***Mesopotamia is described. Second mention of the Adam being "settled" into a garden.***Command given about the tree. God sees the man should not be alone. Mention (surely out of proper order) of the LORD God making all the beasts and birds out of the mud, just like the man. There is no verb "create" in the chapter. Everything is "formed" or "built", and the order of creation is not consecutive.***Finally Eve is created, but being made from the man's rib means that they are the same stuff, equal but different, a suitable team complementing each other.

Document 3, Gen. 4. The story is continuing in the post-Fall narrative. Adam and Eve have 3 children to begin with. God's name is now Yahweh, (the LORD). Cain kills Abel out of jealousy and is cast away from his family. He whines to Yahweh that other humans will find him and kill him. Who are these others? They are clearly not the family of Adam and Eve, so there are other humans out there in the story, which the author/authors don't explain because it isn't important to them. There's no sense trying to make a scientific text out of all this. It's about theology, about our relationship to God and to each other, about the definition of family, and the beginning of violence. Thus the link above.

It took me decades to discover all this, and without the knowledge of the Hebrew it's almost impossible to unpack it all. I understand that you are not called to be aficionados of Hebrew literature and that heavy word studies like this are not on your every day list of to do's, but many of you are Christians and are interested in biblical topics. I hope you are still sticking with me after this tidbit (and this is pretty meaty stuff for the average Christian).

Remember that you all have access to several Bible translations at biblehub.com and biblegateway.com.