A liddle bibble (pt 1)

Fresh readings of an old text

This is my first blog post here, and while kvetching about politics is always fun, I thought I’d go upscale and make it an installment of my award-winning/death-threat-inspiring semiregular series, “A liddle bibble”.

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Starting near the top: the “fall” of man

Much hay has been made about the supposedly “fallen” nature of man/humanity/the world/YOU. But what does the text actually say?

So here we are at Genesis 3:14. English from the current JPS Tanakh. God has discovered that Adam and Woman have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, at behest of the serpent:

Then the LORD God said to the serpent,

“Because you did this,

More cursed shall you be

Than all cattle

And all the wild beasts:

On your belly shall you crawl

And dirt shall you eat

All the days of your life.

I will put enmity

Between you and the woman,

And between your offspring and hers;

They shall strike at your head,

And you shall strike at their heel.”

And to the woman He said,

“I will make most severe

Your pangs in childbearing;

In pain shall you bear children.

Yet your urge shall be for your husband,

And he shall rule over you.”

To Adam He said, “Because you did as your wife said and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’

Cursed be the ground because of you;

By toil shall you eat of it

All the days of your life:

Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you.

But your food shall be the grasses of the field;

By the sweat of your brow

Shall you get bread to eat,

Until you return to the ground—

For from it you were taken. For dust you are,

And to dust you shall return.”

Is man cursed? No. Snake is cursed to eat dirt, woman is cursed to her pyrrhic sexuality and patriarchy, and man is not cursed at all. Only the ground is cursed; now as before (Gen. 2:13) man’s task is to work the land.

“The world has fallen!” contemporary authorities say. By contrast, traditional sources compare the prior state of eating from trees to the later state of eating grasses, that is, the move to agriculture and cereal crops. The neolithic revolution. With hindsight from our industrial age, I will admit that in many ways the rise of civilization was a lateral move that we are only now improving on. But a lateral move is not a fall.

“But we have lost eden!” cry the those with a lust for debasement. These people suffer badly from the eternal fallacy that the grass is always greener somewhere else. Let’s remember, Eden was a specific location on this earth, plentiful in produce, but otherwise notable only for two trees in particular. Which brings us to the coda of this tale (Gen. 3:22):

And the LORD God said, “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” So the LORD God banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and stationed east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

To this, my first reaction was, “Of course! That’s exactly how an omnipotent, omnibenevolent entity would respond in this circumstance!” Snark aside, here is the dire consequence of our expulsion: not getting to attain something we never had to begin with, eternal life.

So what does the text really say about humanity’s “fall”? Not much. Putting aside the blatantly sexist crap, the “fall” consists of having to work in more adverse conditions for less desirable produce. Humanity itself, represented in the default/originator figure of Adam, receives no curse, and is not expelled from anyplace as much as his access to immortality, which he never had, is removed.

The myth of “The Fall of Man” is not a biblical myth. It does not exist in the text itself. It is a later meme, a disinterpretation created by the forces of world-hate and negativity.

Because, in this story, what has really happened? Humanity attained knowledge, got a new set of clothes, and got kicked out of housing to find work. We children of modern life know this experience very well: we call it graduation.