Refrigerator logic, or a shower thought:
According to Genesis, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating fruit of the tree of wisdom, specifically of knowledge of good and evil.
Serpent talks to Eve, calling out God’s lie: God said they will die from eating the fruit (as in die quickly, as if the fruit were poisonous). They won’t die from the fruit, Serpent tells them. Instead, their eyes will open and they will understand good and evil.
And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of wisdom, learning good and evil (right and wrong, or social mores). And then God evicts them from paradise for disobedience.
But if the eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, this belies they did not know good and evil in the first place. They couldn’t know what forbidden means, or that eating from the tree was wrong. They were incapable of obedience.
Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.
Putting the tree unguarded and easily accessible in the Garden of Eden was totally a setup
Am I reading this right?
According to Dan McClellen, Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1 revised according to the sensibilities of a later century, according to scholarly consensus. Of course, also according to scholarly consensus (and revealed to students in seminary) the bible is not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant, even though many denominations assert these by fiat. (Otherwise they wouldn’t give ministries authority to tell their flock not to be gay.)
It’s not though. Genesis 1 is the Elohist creation myth, Genesis 2 is the Jahwist creation myth. They both just got jammed together.
This is why Genesis 1 has animals created first, and man and woman created at the same time, while Genesis 2 has man created first, then animals, then woman.
Two different mythologies.
it’s also important to note that Gen 1 was pretty much intended as propaganda. it was riffing off other mythologies; except trying to one up them. “OUR god is so STRONG that he created the world ALONE. In SIX DAYS. and he NAPPED on the SEVENTH!!!”
It gave justification for a few of the earlier genocides, because their god was stronger than the other peoples, so it’s all cool.
Which is interesting, because the very first line… Gods is plural. That carried over into Latin, then was singularized after that.
Which makes sense if you consider the commandments:
Exodus 20:2-3
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me."
It’s acknowledging the existence of other Gods, but I am YOUR God.
Oh. That’s another thing.
The exodus didn’t happen. Or, rather, the Israelites were always there. What most scholars think is that refugees came up from Egypt and their story was adopted as they assimilated into the broader culture .
Yup, yup. There’s no evidence the Jews were enslaved in Egypt and the Sunday school stories about slave labor for the pyramids is equally nonsense.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-egyptian-pyramids-not-slaves
https://historum.com/t/egypt-knew-no-moses-evidence-on-why-exodus-never-happened.194987/
these days my favorite sunday school lessons include cute, featherless dinosaurs.
i know. I know. but who doesn’t want to live in a world with cute featherless dinos?
https://youtu.be/uguXNL93fWg
to be fair, I did specific “featherless”.
(also, that video now just made the rounds to all three other people working in my office… Eh. it’s friday. we mostly bullshit and wait for something to go wrong.)
Monotheism (as opposed to monolatrism) is a much more recent thing than the scripture itself, an invention of the middle ages at earliest.
Also, plants come before the sun in Genesis 1, which just sounds like bad planning on God’s part.
Terms like Elohist are not used anymore by scholars. The documentary hypothesis collapsed in the 70s…
It stems from how God is referenced in Hebrew in the two chapters. Genesis 1 is Elohim. Genesis 2 is Yahweh.
I know that, but the idea that behind these different names of God are different authors/schools is not accepted by mainstream historians nowadays.
In this particular case, it seems evident that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different authors, but not the Elohist and the Jahvist, in that you can’t necessarily link this two passages to others in the Bible which would use the same names for God.
I tend to see in Genesis 1, with the emphasis on the fact that the man and the woman are created as the same time (verse 27) an answer to Genesis 2, which in that case would have been older. In the Bible, a lot of texts are answers to other texts. It totally breaks the idea of inerrancy, but it makes the Bible a very interesting polyphony.