Stalkers and a Secret Admirer – Genesis 2:4 - 24 It is reported that 20 percent of college aged women are stalked. What starts out as friendly social contact transforms into an obsession for one, and a life of fear for the other. I certainly do not intend that this trauma be minimized by using it as an example. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The deep, scarring fear of being stalked is something the people of the Ancient Near East knew well. Only it was much, much worse for them. They were being stalked by the gods. They lived in fear, wondering if something they would do might offend this god or that god. They often reasoned that a storm which blew over their corn stalks was sent by an offended deity. So they ran from sacrifice to sacrifice, hoping to appease just the right god at just the right time. And so ANE literature is populated with superheroes who have both human and god-like attributes. The study of ANE literature and modern superhero comic books (as a form of literature, believe it or not), for example, is fascinating in its parallels. The same sense of dread among the people of Gotham in the face of the capricious designs of the Joker can be found among the people of the ANE. And they had their ‘Batman’ too. This second telling of the story of creation is not the appearance of the superhero, though. It is much better. The first telling of the story of creation demoted all other pretenders to the role of ‘god’ – leaving that role to the most high god who speaks everything into existence and then orders it for the good. This second telling here is much more personal. It pulls back the curtain on the gods to introduce the reader to the ‘LORD God’. There is a sense in which what was thought to be a horde of stalkers is revealed to be a secret admirer. But before doing this, we see the first of ten introductions throughout Genesis: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day the LORD God made earth and heaven.” From here we will go to the generations of Adam, of Noah, of the Sons of Noah, of Shem, of Terah, of Ishmael, of Isaac, of Esau, and of Jacob. Scholars are all but universal in their agreement that this, more than anything else, provides an organizing unity to Genesis as we have it today. That these are the “generations of the heavens and earth,” though, is very important and provides a clue that will help us offer a possible answer to some tough questions. This also shows us that the range of meaning for ‘day’ is not limited to the sunrise and sunset. But back to the curtain as it is pulled back, revealing the “LORD God.” This is a unique combination of Hebrew words. The first comprises the consonants YHWH. Among Christians this might be commonly pronounced ‘Yahweh’. Some support for this can be found in old Greek texts, but there is no basis for this particular pronunciation in the Hebrew Bible because the ancient Hebrews and later Jews would never pronounce this when coming upon it in reading the Torah. It was thought that one could not violate the commandment not to take the name of the LORD ‘in vain’ if one never spoke it to begin with. Hebrew scribes about 1000 A.D. provided markings for vowels (ancient Hebrew does not have any vowels) to help Jews dispersed in Europe retain their ability to read the Torah. They signaled this vocal substitution (‘adonai for YHWH) by taking the vowel markers from ‘adonai and adding them to YHWH. With these vowel markings, if they are actually vocalized (which, again, a devout Jew would never do) it would come out as ‘Yehovah’. This is, of course, where we get ‘Jehovah’.

The second part of this is the same ‘Elohim’ as used in the creation story. Again, at least if we imagine a ‘name’ as that by which a ‘person’ is ‘known’, ‘Elohim’ is not a name in the proper sense. It is rather, something of an ‘appellation’. (For example, Hong Kong, in China, is known by the appellation ‘the Pearl of the Orient’) The reason our English Bibles translate this “LORD God” is because in place of trying to pronounce “YHWH” the observant Jew would say ‘adonai (Lord) instead when reading aloud. But since there are other places in the Hebrew Bible where ‘adonai appears, in those instances the English version will use the “proper” case (“Lord” or “lord” as the context may suggest is proper). When the English Bible uses all caps (LORD) it represents the appearance of ‘YHWH’ in the Hebrew original. And this was the ‘covenant name’ of God as revealed to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus. This is where the creation story really becomes remarkable. Not only have all pretenders been demoted in the story, but the most high god has a proper name. What makes this so remarkable – and also explains the commandment with respect to not taking the name ‘in vain’ – is that ANE religious thought believed that to know the name of a god gave one access to that god’s power in magical rituals. And this god – the most high god who created everything – certainly fit the bill when it came to power.

Giving Purpose to Creation Where the first telling of creation was replete with active verbs, here there is much more attention to setting the scene. These settings provide reason and purpose to the action verbs. The first setting describes an earth with no “shrub of the field” and no “plant of the field” because rain had not fallen and “there was no man to cultivate the ground.” “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” The LORD God goes on to ‘plant’ a garden and ‘place’ the man in it to cultivate it. This ‘forming’ evokes the work of a potter on clay, forming it into a shape useful for his purposes. The larger land becomes the ‘setting’ for the next things that the LORD God will do. A river flows out of Eden to “water the garden” and then divided and became four rivers. Before tackling the names of these rivers we first should take note that this would place Eden at the ‘mouth of the rivers’. In other ANE literature we learn that people believed the ‘mouth of the rivers’ to be the dwelling place of the gods. So to hear (as we will shortly) of the interaction between Adam and God in the garden will not be a surprise to the ancient ear. What is interesting about the setting is that two of the rivers are known – the Tigris and the Euphrates. The other two – the Pishon and the Gihon are unknown to us. We need not speculate on the unknown here; what matters is this setting is clearly known to the ancient reader. Again, in light of ANE religious literature, this is important. God’s activity in creation does not happen in some ethereal, fanciful place as do the activity of the gods in other ANE stories. God is active in a location with which the reader of this story would broadly identify, but not so much in a ‘point on the map’ sense that we identify location. This is the land of their fathers and grandfathers rather than a place on a map. And it is here that we have to observe the difference between this and our modern sense of geographic place. We are asked as kids to come to the front of the class and locate a country on a globe. And so ‘place’ for us is specific and identifiable in the context of a global geography we know

from hundreds of years of exploration and cartography. Not so ‘place’ in the sense of these ancient stories. Here ‘place’ is the location of family memories. In a sense, we might want to imagine how this story would read were God to have chosen to reveal Himself to the ancient Chinese rather than the ancient Chaldeans. I suppose that this part of the story would refer to the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, Eden would be at their point of origin, and the riches noted would be things one would find along their banks. This would then place the creation story in the land of Chinese memories. What this does is locate creation – the active working of the good motives and intentions of the most high god – in the land of our family memories instead of at a place on a map. This makes the most high god intensely personal. We are introduced to him by name, and the land of his good motives and intentions is the land of our family memories. And then we are given purpose and direction. God “took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.” The direction comes in the form of the command not to eat fruit “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The command also comes with a consequence. If the man were to eat of the fruit of this tree, he “will surely die.” Again, understanding the stories of the Ancient Near East helps us here. Other creation stories and even an ancient flood story (we will look at it much more closely when considering the biblical flood) show us that the idea of a “tree of life” is something the ancient hearer would have recognized from other stories. The fanciful idea was that a tree or plant somewhere was the ‘fountain of youth’ and by eating of it one would gain immortality. Previously we hear of man being formed from the dust and the “breath of life” being given to him by God. But much like the existence of the most high god, the human urge to ‘be young again’ and to live forever is affirmed. But it is also radically reinterpreted. Life itself does not come from the tree, but from God. The ‘tree of life’ is thus the object of a desire that permeates humanity – by the design of its Creator. We will not fully appreciate this until the next chapter, but the loss of this idea we so ardently long for happened for a reason – one which was decidedly not the design of the Creator. But to know ourselves better in this respect, we first have to know ourselves more fully – as man and woman. This passage ends with a fascinating piece of storytelling. The first, and easily most significant feature, is God’s monologue. In the first telling of creation, the narrator provides the information: “And God saw that it was good.” Here it comes in the form of a monologue: “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him.” It is notable that God does not say “Let us make a helper…” The focus of the monologue is less on the intention to create woman than on the judgment that it is not good for man to be alone. The second feature is the exercise of God’s prerogative in creation. Up until now God has “called” things as they are known – day and night, for example. But here God forms every beast of the field as he had previously with man. He then “brought” the animals to the man to see what he (the man, of course) would “call” them. Among the ANE, to name something was thought to be an exercise of god-like faculties. But this happens in a way that evokes imagery in which we – without necessarily being naughty about it – can enjoy a little humor:

God is lining up the animals as Adam walks by. Not having seen them before, Adam’s curiosity is piqued. So he pauses to watch. God completes the lineup and waves Adam over. “Adam, behold my creation!” God says with a smile. “These beautiful creatures will come before you and you will name each of them. That which you call them – male and female – shall be their names forever.” Adam raises his eyebrow a bit… It is an honor to participate with the Creator like this. So each pair – male and female – passes and Adam names them. But something begins to puzzle him. He looks down at his own midsection quite often as he names the animals and wonders to himself: “OK, each of these pairs – well, this one over here,” he says, pointing to the male, “has something I have too. But he also has a partner made just for him. Me?” He turns to the left and to the right. “Well, uh…” God turns around as Adam calls out: “Yo! God! What’s up with this?” God smiles and says to himself, “Yes, I can see that it is not good for man to be alone.” He touches Adam on the forehead and Adam falls into a deep sleep. God takes a rib from Adam and fashions from it a woman. He brings her to the man, still sound asleep. Adam is dreaming and feels a bump on his side. It seems part of the dream for a moment, but then he realizes something very much like an elbow is nudging him right where that rib once was. Waking up with a start he sees the woman at his side. “This one!!!” he exclaims as if he had never fallen asleep. “This is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh and shall be called ‘woman’ because she was taken out of man.” Of course this a bit cheeky and a tad ridiculous, but the story here drives home a very important point I will raise shortly so we can understand the significance of the story in our time. The narrator starts us down that very road by interpreting the story for his hearer: this is why the man leaves his parents to join with his wife – and they are to become as ‘one flesh’. We’ll reflect on that below, but first let’s back up and reflect on some of the larger questions about this story.

Adam and Eve as Characterizations of Humanity I will make what might be a controversial suggestion here. But before I do this, it is important to point out that the biology of procreation did not require a medical degree of ancient people. It was fairly obvious that behind every human person was a mom and a dad. And behind every mom and dad were two sets of other moms and dads, and so on… It did not require anything special – other than common sense, which today seems sometimes to be special – to reason back to a first mom and dad.

So to have this ancient story build characters around that first mom and dad should not be surprising. But because this is the “generations of the heavens and the earth,” and because the Hebrew ‘adam can take both the sense of a proper name as well as the sense of ‘mankind’, it is not necessary to insist that this story should be read as some reporter’s notebook or the script from a video posted on God’s YouTube channel. Please understand, I do not argue here that there wasn’t an historic “Adam and Eve.” (To so argue would be biologically ridiculous, of course.) I do argue here that Genesis is less concerned with “Adam and Eve” as historic individuals and more concerned with “Adam and Eve” as characters in the story. They are not mere “symbols” that we would read our own fanciful ideas into them. They are characters in whom the inspired author invests motives and intentions, and reveals those to us in dialog, that we might know ourselves better through engaging with them in the story.

Two ‘Tellings’ of Creation There have been a number of efforts to reconcile the first telling of the creation story with the second. The problem with these efforts is the desire to see the seven days of creation as a literal chronology. I have no problem with the idea that God could have done it this way. I just do not think the story – again, told by a uniquely inspired storyteller – is meant to be read or heard that way; it tends to distract us from the characters and their motives and intentions. If we do not feel compelled to locate what happens here within any one or more of the seven days of the prior ‘telling’, then the problems caused by trying to harmonize these two ‘tellings’ disappear. I call these two chapters ‘tellings’ because I do not think they are two different stories. I do not think there is a ‘gap’ in actual time between them. (This is one theory often offered by those who read these stories in a very literal fashion.) I believe it is the same story, told in two distinctly different ways. And the key is the combination of ‘YHWH’ and ‘Elohim’ – or the ‘LORD God’. In the first telling, the most high god creates everything. This is something an ANE hearer can digest. But that hearer is drawn in powerfully first by the idea that everything is created from nothing by the mere speaking. And then here that most high god has a name. The second telling is compellingly personal, relational and intimate. The first telling is a constant rapid fire of God doing things. We see God at work here as well, but the ‘doings’ are much more elaborately set in a context which the reader will be able to identify with on a personal level. To say this is a revolution in the ANE religious tradition is a staggering understatement. All other pretenders have been demoted in the story. There are no capricious, inscrutable gods stalking in the shadows that mankind should live in fear. There is only one, the most high god, whose creation is ordered for the good. Or as Israel would later proclaim: “The LORD (YHWH) is God (Elohim); there is none else.”

Creation, Evolution and Science I’ll tackle this in more detail at the end of this book in an Appendix, principally because I think that is where this discussion belongs – at the end after we have been transformed by these inspired stories. But we cannot really go further – at least in our community of American readers – without grappling with the debates surrounding the teaching of creation and evolution.

Among many Evangelical Christians, the ‘Theistic Evolution’ (TE) movement (see the Appendix on this for some references) is usually identified with the kind of ‘Genesis as Story’ interpretive approach I take here. I am deliberately staying away from TE discussions for two important reasons: 1) I really do not have a dog in this fight. I’ll explain more in the Appendix, but the rigors of empirical science and the formation of a ‘world view’ are very different things. TE seems to be compelled by a burden to reconcile Genesis to modern evolutionary biology. I feel no such compulsion – the reason for which I will explain in the Appendix. 2) What does compel me is the need to be able to interpret the seemingly random rhythm of life within a framework of redemption. Good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. We sometimes end up asking whether God has forgotten us. I believe we will be transformed in exactly this sense – the sense of having firm roots in a world view that has been transformed by the divinely inspired stories of Genesis which will tell us that “God remembered.” I simply refuse to allow the creation/evolution debate to get in the way of that.

Gender, Sexuality and Creation We cannot read these stories and not grapple also with the controversies spanning issues such as gender equality, gender identity and sexual orientation. In Genesis we are offered a foundation for belief, but also a caution of immense importance: •

The story of Adam naming the animals shows us that what we might call the ‘heterosexual complement of nature’ is not something that has been taught to us. It is something that was obvious in nature (and remains so) before there was anything to believe and teach. The moral reasoning of 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition is founded on this observation of nature. Thus when people argue that the biblical authors would have written differently about sexuality if they have lived today, knowing what we know today, they completely misconstrue the nature of this reasoning. Moral thought in the Christian tradition cannot be changed any more than church ‘authorities’ can decree a change in human biology and/or genetics.

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But this cannot be an excuse for an even more fundamental mistake. We have allowed our arguments – like the one above – to prevent us from seeing the image of God not only in ourselves but in our neighbors. It is not an accident that the idea of the image of God precedes the ideas of sexual complement in the story. The story makes it obvious that sexuality and gender are traits we share with the animals, not with God. This means that we bear in us the image of God equally – male and female. This does not mean we are the same, nor does it overturn the loving order of our relationships we learn of elsewhere in the Bible. What it does is call us to an original design. Even if we reckon that design distorted by ‘sin’, to which the next chapter will introduce us, we are called to look forward to the redemption of this original design – and to so present our intentions to each other today. (The big $10 seminary word for this is living proleptically.) It also forces us to recognize that even if we reason homosexual orientation and questions of gender identity to be unnatural and sinful – again, these are not things which implicate the image of God. We thus remain obligated to love the image of God into the lives of others by

first seeing in them that same image – gay, straight, ‘normal’, transgendered, or what have you. Anything which prevents us from seeing this image in ourselves and each other – well, that thing has then become our idol. It is entirely possible – and I will argue likely – that our arguments and definitions for things like marriage have become just that: an idol which prevents us from seeing the image of God where He created it to be seen – in each other.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Think about the person you trust more than anyone else. Write their first name down, and then under their name, write a few things they have done which have earned your trust. What do those things tell you about this person’s intentions and motives? 2. Now relate those observations to this story. What has God done here that shows intentions and motives which would merit our trust? 3. Consider these two possibilities and discuss which one you think makes the story most compelling. a. Adam and Eve are historical ‘personages’. This would mean that the writer would have to receive revelation of these events and dialogue as if he were actually to have been there – a form of first-hand witness. b. Adam and Eve are characterizations of historical personages. This accepts (as it would seem biologically necessary to) that there had to have been a first man and woman created by God. But this does not require that revelation take the form of first-hand witness. The writer can be inspired to reveal the truth about God and humanity in the form of a uniquely inspired story rather than a revealed first-hand witness. 4. The issues of gender identity and sexual orientation are hotly debated. Discuss the observation that gender and sexuality are traits we share with the animals, not God, and what this implies for seeing the image of God in each other.