Women and Men - Wrapping Up the Garden Story

I just want to finish up the story of the Garden of Eden with the last few details that happened after God gave the serpent, the woman, and the man a good talking to. You might have noticed in my previous post that I always referred to the woman as "the woman" or "ishsha". That's because up to that point, the "unto dust you shall return" point, ishsha was the only word used to refer to her. Now, in the very next verse (Genesis 3:20) Adam gives her a personal name, "Eve", that means "living", because she was to be the mother of all living people. In Hebrew it sounds more like "heva". She is one of very few people in the Bible who is named, not for something that has happened, but for something that is going to happen. The only other person I can think of like that is Jesus, whose name means victory.

God hasn't quite left the scene yet. In the next verse, he makes them coats of animal skin and clothes them. Now in the movies, these clothes are depicted as minimal (especially for the pretty actress playing Eve) primitive leathery things; but don't you think God could be a better tailor than that? I'm not suggesting a black leather Harley Davidson outfit: I'm suggesting that before the ground was cursed it was not the kind of threat it is now to our health. I think this is when Adam and Eve got covered with skin. Fits great, doesn't it? I remember a long time ago a dermatologist telling me that the skin layer really doesn't do anything except protect the innards from dust and germs and abrasions, etc.

This skin may moderate our nakedness, but it's clear from other scriptures that it does not completely hide it; and so we fashion other clothes and cover ourselves more. I am not very uncomfortable with nudity, but as I said before, this nakedness has something to do with the intimacy of the godhead and by extension, with our own dignity. I cover my nakedness, not because I'm embarrassed by my appearance, but because I think the sight of my sexual parts somehow rubs the noses of my fellow sinners in the fact of their sinfulness. And I think it sort of exposes God in a way he did not intend originally. This is all highly speculative, so take it for what it's worth. By the way, that word "make" is the same word he used to describe making Adam and Eve.

So the last thing that happens in this story is that Yahweh Elohim says, "Look, the Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he get a hold of the fruit of the tree of life and live forever..." The Lord God boots them out of the garden and puts some Cherubim on guard with a flaming sword to keep them away. Thanks, God, for keeping Adam and Eve from having to live forever in their sins! As bad as things are, they would have been far worse. Adam did indeed die and return to the adama from which he came.

So why is it a problem for Adam and Eva to be like God in knowing good and evil? After all, they were made in His image, right? I believe that the answer lies in image-making. When you make an image of something, a symbol of something, you are making an abstraction of that something. In other words, an image is like the something that it's an image of - but only in certain ways. If you are a java programmer like me, you may have heard this definition of abstraction: the process of simplifying something by ignoring certain details.

God created the Adam-image of Himself and deliberately designed it to not include the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe that was why (or at least one reason) He planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the Garden, as an artistically contrasting theme. In that tree, and in the tree of life, he abstracted two qualities of Himself that were not present in Adam. Well, honestly, it is not clear whether Adam would have lived forever if he had remained as originally constituted.

Anyway, it may have been that He felt the requirements of artistic composition in planting the Garden to include those trees and the Adam. Adam was designed to demonstrate fellowship and loving intimacy. So it really bent the design for the knowledge of good and evil to get into them. God was more than ready for this, as I've already outlined. It was a very robust design, as it turns out.

Women's Place - and Men's - the Fall and Beyond

So here we are in the Garden of Eden, the man and the woman, naked and unashamed. Next thing you know, there's this serpent, more crafty than any beast of the field that God had made, and he talks to the woman. Where did this son of a talking dinosaur come from? Is he actually an animal that God had made? Maybe not. There is virtually nothing directly said about it in the Scriptures, but we commonly suppose this is an embodiment of Satan, the enemy, the father of lies. How he got there is completely outside the scope of the story, and so there is very little to be said about that, only speculation. It's always good to keep in mind your limits.

And while we're out of the box, let me be the pot criticizing the potter for a moment and ask, why the heck is that tree in the garden? Didn't you know that this would happen? The whole history of mankind looks like the consequence of an error in judgment, doesn't it? Well, I have to believe God did know. Again, maybe there was a reason he planted it there that is outside the scope of this story, but I don't think so. Here is my theory, and that's really all I can call it: God is such an incredibly cool person that He longs to be known as fully as possible. He can't help being under-appreciated; it is in His nature to want to be known. That is why he chose to personify Himself; that is why he created this work of art we call Creation, and Adam in particular, then Ish and Ishsha. And still there's more to be revealed. If it were any other person, that person's ego would be outrageously inflated to have such an attitude; but in God's case, it is only what He deserves. So He has set the stage for another increase in entropy that will reveal his loving nature to be greater than anyone thought possible.

The serpent says to the woman, "Yeah, so did God say you couldn't eat from any tree in this garden?" Was he fishing or did he know the answer?

An Unspectacular Wonder

As I was returning from a jog along the beach this morning, I happened to notice that the little tidal creek that flows under my street looked quiet and full. Normally you can see it moving upstream or down, but this time I noticed that it was just at the turning point. On the seaward side, water was flowing out; on the landward side of this very narrow creek, it was just perceptibly flowing in. The turning point was right under my feet as I stood on the bridge.

It was a subtle thing, but the idea that I was standing right at the point where the passing moon was losing its grip on the waters of this bit of wetland made me feel as if I were in orbit at a Lagrange Point. As it happened, I was warm and cozy on the surface of my planet, but there I was, in a momentary point of balance between the Moon and the living surface of the Earth.  I took a moment to give thanks and worship the Lord for the wonderful complexity the creation has, even in our little corner of the universe, then I ran home to get my camera.

Walking back from taking the video, I passed by a woman who was just parking her car there to get to the beach. On impulse I walked over to tell her about this so she could see it before it was gone - but as I approached, her scowl turned to fear. I said, "Good morning, are you headed to the beach?" She moved away a little on her seat and started rolling her window up. I said, "I just wanted to tell you that the tide in the creek up ahead is just now perfectly balanced at the top and you might like to see it." She kind of squinted at me. "Okay," I said, putting my hands up in surrender, "sorry to bother you." And walked away, wondering if she had understood anything I'd said. She looked about my age, but how far apart we seemed. She had the wall up so fast, utterly uninterested in the slightest fellowship with a stranger, it really made me sad.

Women's Place - and Men's - In the Beginning

When Jesus was asked whether it was lawful to put away their wives (Matthew 19 and Mark 10), he first engages the legal question on the Pharisee's turf. He asks, what did Moses say? Then, he launches into a deeper discussion of causes. In the Beginning, Jesus said, he that created them made them male and female; for this cause the two become one flesh. I always wondered what that meant, and the remark is made in four different places. For what cause, exactly? and what does that mean, becoming one flesh? I think the answers to both of those questions lie in Genesis.

Near the end of the sixth day, God, elohim, the mighty ones, said to himself/themselves, "Let's make Adam in our image, after our likeness..." So He did, and Gen 1:27 states, "in the image of elohim he created him; male and female he created them." God also told them to be fruitful and multiply. How they were to accomplish this we don't know.

The language is confusing because, I think, both God and Adam were a single entity that had a plurality of persons, and Adam abstracted something of Elohim into the flesh by being male and female. Some years ago, I heard a funny radio commercial in which a guy was advised to become "at one" with himself. He replied, "Yeah, it would be really hard to be at two with myself." Adam was able to directly experience in his/their flesh the kind of multiple-personal intimacy of the godhead that leads us to talk about the trinity. God gives them dominion over the earth and the animals, and tells Adam so, then looks it all over, pronounces it very good, and takes the next day off. Perhaps one reason He hallowed the seventh day and wants us to remember it is because it was the only day off he ever got.

Okay, so on to Chapter 2. God forms Adam out of the dust of the ground ("adamah" in Hebrew) and breathes the spirit of life into him. God plants a garden in Eden and puts Adam there to take care of it. In this garden is every tree that is pleasant to the sight, every tree that is good for food, and two more trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. More on that later.

Things sound pretty smooth and peaceful, but immediately, God goes on to introduce the next artistic theme. It is not good that Adam should be alone. Say what? It had been very good on friday evening. Well, from that moment on, it wasn't. God - and starting with after the seventh day he is referred to as the LORD God, Yaweh Elohim, I Who Am the Mighty Ones - God alters the design and sets himself a creative challenge: make an appropriate companion for Adam. I've written about this before, so I will repeat that the LORD God makes an artistic counter-move and creates an instance of every beast and bird he's thought of, and brings each one to Adam to see what he would name them. And the name Adam gives them is the name they get. Naming things, symbolizing things, is in Adam's nature and is one important way he and his children can participate in Creation with God. Okay, so finally God puts Adam into a deep sleep and takes out a rib, from which he created a woman. When the LORD God brings her to Adam, he names her, not Adamita, to continue the naming convention that God had started, but ishsha, because as he said, she was taken out of ish. Thus Adam also renamed himself: he knew that he was missing more than a rib. And here the Holy Spirit interjects a bit of omniscient narration to say for the first time, "Therefore shall an ish leave father and mother and cleave to his ishsha, and they two shall become one flesh." Wherefore? Because only be recombining can they recreate the Adamic image of God. This is more than just having sex; they have to recreate the personal relationships. But it is thoroughly bound up in the flesh, so sexual combining is part and parcel of this achievement. God has revealed something about himself in this higher entropy that was not knowable before. That has to be behind Jesus' unusually hard line about divorce. And the only reason it seems like such a hard line is the hardness of our hearts.

I was so angry with this google blog - but have figured something out

I spent all afternoon on my next post, and all afternoon, the editor told me it was automatically saving every word as I went along. I had to stop to go hear my granddaughter's piano recital, but no problem, right? It was all saved. WRONG!! It was all gone when I got back, some crap about a form error. I think now that what happened might be that it was indeed saved on the site, but when the browser came back up, only the very beginning was in the form it had saved, and I killed what was on the blog server when I tried to save at that point, blah blah blah.

Well, I have realized from this that I am trying too hard to write a complete composition for each entry. This is the new millennium and I should just lighten up and write what I can, and when I run out of steam or time, just save it and let you all read it. It goes against my sense of literary content and good composition, but losing a whole afternoon's work and having to reconstruct it when I had been rolling so well is WAY more annoying. So think of it as more opportunities to jump in and comment. It's the Sesame Street approach to essay writing

Women's Place in the World, and in the Church

I want to undertake this ambitious subject because of discussions I have been having with a woman who is smart, independent, and sensitive to women's issues. Being a man, I find that I have not been nearly as sensitive as I always thought I was about the way some of our more glib brothers talk about God's intended design. So I intend to conduct the most thorough review of the Scriptures on this subject that I can manage, and I intend to write a series of posts as I go. Please come along and help me.

Let me say at the outset that my beliefs as to what the Bible says about women are probably more liberal than many, but there are some places where I am forced to draw the line as to how women can best fulfill their intended role in Creation, if I am to respect the authority of the Scriptures. I think this is a matter of entropy and not value. By that I mean that men and women are different enough, both by original design and as a consequence of the Fall, that their paths through this life have distinct differences. That said, I assert that every one of us, man or woman, has a unique path to follow through this life, and we are all sinners, all needing to receive the redemptive work of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, all equally valuable members of His body when we do. And so I hold the notion of women's equal value with men as one of the most important revelations that Christianity has given the  world.