10 Uncomfortable Things about Adam and Eve That Christians Misunderstand
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This post is a follow-up to my previous post “What if Adam and Eve Didn’t Fall?” I grant that if you follow my essays, this first section is repetitive, but I will keep hammering on this point because I wish someone had told me when I was a new Christian 60+ years ago.
1] In the Hebrew, it’s clear. Genesis 1–4 contains at least 3 different ancient documents or narratives, written by 3 different authors at different times. Later editors, or “redactors,” valued them equally and wove them together as one story, using Gen. 2:4 as a bridge between them. The style changes, the narrative's purpose differs, and each document gives God a new name.
That does not imply 3 different Gods. Yahweh had several appellations throughout the Hebrew Bible. Nor does it suggest that the narrative is just a human story that we can ignore. I believe it is inspired, sacred, and authoritative. Jesus quoted Genesis. Nevertheless, the creation narrative is a theological metaphor.
The purpose of the story was to combat pagan Mesopotamian beliefs and legends which were inscribed on clay tablets and spread abroad by scribes and troubadours. It gave the Israelite diaspora a moral, monotheistic belief system to cling to while they sat in a foreign nation and thought, “What do we do now?”
2] Adam and Eve were not the first humans. Homo sapiens were around hundreds of thousands of years ago, and sapiens weren’t the first upright, hairless, tool-making hominids. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were just two later contemporary lines that were more successful than the others. We don’t do God or Jesus any favors when we ignore scientific realities, no matter how good our intentions are.
3] There were no dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. Humans would not have thrived while competing with them. It’s one thing for a group of hunter-gatherers, clad in animal skins, to throw spears at a wooly mammoth, but a dozen men taking down a T-Rex or two? Or fending off a swarm of small compsognathus? Or what if a herd of hungry brontosauruses decided to stroll through a village and eat the thatch on the roofs like elephants do in Africa? Two T-rexes would have eaten every lion, tiger, and bear on the ark. Be glad they’re gone.
4] Facing the realities above means we have to redefine what Genesis, Paul, and Jesus meant by “death.” Adam and Eve did not drop dead when they ate from the tree of knowledge. They just became wise, like adults, like parents, like humans who were supposed to reign over the world and fill it with others like themselves. “Death” is separation from God, who is our real Life, and from the best version of ourselves, which would be blessed and enhanced by His favor and grace.
Paul wrote, “Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. (Romans 5:14)
Long before the literal timeline of about 6,000–4,000 BCE, the planet was awash in death for millions of years. There were floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, climate changes, and wars among hominids. There were millions of species mating, giving birth, eating other species, and dying. Death and perishing, as in John 3:16, are a spiritual state.
5] There has never been a talking, upright snake. Both Testaments of the Bible use the serpent image as a metaphor for an intelligent, psychologically sophisticated entity that can easily pass from an immaterial world into our mortal, analog existence.
We can find this character and his goons in both Testaments. He turns up in Revelation 12 of the Christian Bible, but he is also being studied by ordinary citizens, government officials, military personnel, and the intelligence corps of several nations. There is a new official awareness that ghosts, demons, spirit guides, and aliens are real. Today, the serpent would be designated an NHI, a non-human intelligence.
The question today is: what are the so-called aliens, where do they come from, what do they want, how do they do what they do, and if we communicate with them, can we do those things, too? People connected to the UFO/UAP community are probing these mysteries. It should be an inescapable conclusion that what the Bible says about heavenly angels is also true. However, that opens a new thread that deserves its own post.
6] The Garden of Eden was just a small, restricted part of Eden, which was probably on the southern end of the Tigris-Euphrates region where the two great rivers flow into the Persian Gulf. Eden was east of where the author was located when he wrote, probably ancient Sumer, and the Garden was in the east of Eden.
7] Adam and Eve were not instantly “created” in Genesis 2:7 like they were in 1:27, where both are spoken into existence on the same day. In 1:27, both were made together, both blessed with dominion, and both are the image and likeness of God. In Gen. 2, Adam is created first out of mud, so he could not possibly be construed by the ancients as a demigod like Gilgamesh or Hercules. Nor could Eve be a creative mother goddess because she came second and is made of the same stuff as Adam.
8] The fact that Eve was created second and was described as a “helper suitable for Adam” is easily interpreted as meaning that the female was meant to be a supportive subordinate. However, the Hebrew implies that she was his equal, the other half of him, the flip side of the coin, of the same substance, and someone that he was to love as he loved himself. His name infers “Dirt.” Her name means “Life.” That should tell us something.
9] We like to blame Eve for bringing death into the world. Because of her, mankind and all creation “fell” and became “broken.” Men have to work by the sweat of their brow and women have to suffer the pains of childbirth. The real truth is much less theological and more scientific. Sandee Oster, a science writer on Medium, recently posted an article about the evolution of female pelvises in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. She writes,
“So childbirth is difficult, but perhaps not for the reason many of us have long believed. Yes, walking upright is still ultimately involved; a pelvic floor only has to hold everything up the way it does because we are bipedal, but the trade-off isn’t about walking efficiently. Zollikofer and his team concluded that the evolutionary trade-off may have been about giving birth to a large-headed baby while keeping the pelvic floor able to hold everything else in.
The study does more than reconstruct two broken pelvises; it gives us the first real chance to test a 60-year-old theory against a species other than our own, and provides crucial insights into how one of our closest relatives gave birth and since we now know the two species interbred, it tells us those hybrid babies were born much the way ours are, with mothers from both species likely facing the same painful problems.
So maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh on poor Eve; we modern humans would have had a hard time giving birth regardless of her decisions.”
Women don’t suffer in childbirth because we are sinful creatures in a broken world. We have difficulties, and even death, because we live in a material world where things go wrong. Our bodies are wonderfully complex. Every part of the myriad biological processes is subject to disrepair, neglect, environmental damage, accidental injury, or deliberate harm.
As Adam and Eve, representing humankind, stepped out of the Garden nursery, where even in that rarefied environment they couldn’t be protected from the charlatan fantasies of the serpent, and into the vast material world they were always meant to live in, they had what they needed to survive. They had wonderful bodies, vast environmental resources, a brain with which to think and invent, and, not the least of blessings, the help of a benevolent deity to guide and teach them.
Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer,
The Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
Who teaches you to profit,
Who leads you by the way you should go. (Isa 48.17)
10] All of the above begs a certain question. If I’m right in my ponderings about the first couple, where does that leave the doctrine of baptism, the sacrament initiated to wash away original sin? My personal opinion is: I’m all for celebrating sacraments. I consider baptism to be a kind of dedication, similar to a man presenting an engagement ring to his beloved, meaning two lives are committed to joining into one unit.
The idea of Original Sin depends on a literal interpretation of Gen. 1-4. I don’t believe that we are born stained with sin, but because we are free-will creatures with the ability to make wonderful and terrible choices, it is a certainty that we WILL sin. I don’t mind the rite of baptizing infants, but those children need to be trained and nurtured to make their own decision at a certain age. Salvation was never meant to be one-and-done. The rebuke in Revelation to the Laodicean Church should caution us that we should always grow in knowledge and discipleship during our walk here on earth.
Can water baptism assure us that we are “sealed forever,” that our ticket to the Good Place is punched, and that our citizenship in the heavenly afterlife can never be revoked? Not at all. As long as we are free-will creatures, nothing can be that certain. If the angels in heaven could walk away from the Father, so can we. But our own rebellion is all that can break that engagement. It would have to be our own choice.
Life can go seriously wrong here on Earth, and in addition to all the dangers we face, we also have to contend with an invisible enemy who knows how to push our buttons and who wants to destroy us. We are all the more vulnerable to this monster if we don’t believe that he/they are real, that they hate us, that they are powerful and wily. That’s the challenge, and by the grace of God, we can face it.
It’s also a privilege if we live to face it as adults.
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