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?



The woman says, "We may eat of any of the trees in the garden. Oh, except for that tree in the middle of the place. We can't eat its fruit or even touch it, lest we die." Either she was embellishing for the serpent, or maybe Adam embellished for her, as men seem to do. You see that tree over there? Don't eat it, don't touch it, okay? God said so. Or we'll die. Something like that could have happened.

The serpent goes, "You won't effing die! God just said that cuz he knows if you eat this fruit, you'll become like him, knowing good and evil."

Now, I don't think she was clear at all on the good-and-evil thing, but the serpent had her at "you'll be like elohim". Who wouldn't want that? Once you've met Him, and you've gotten over the feeling that you're gonna die, you want to be as much like Him as you can. So thinking that over and seeing that the fruit looked good, she took some and ate it, and gave some to Adam, who also ate it.

And suddenly "their eyes were opened", by which I think we could say, they had a whole new perspective on things. They were embarrassed to realize their nakedness and made some fig-leaf aprons to cover up. From each other! Even with the loving intimate relationship they had, suddenly it felt wrong to see each others nakedness. And let's be clear, we are talking about the sexual organs, which to this day people generally feel wrong to expose to others, even their intimates. It is the differences in our flesh due to gender separation that have revealed, ie made naked, some of the Adam's original inner God-like nature. The big exception to that is when they are feeling amorous, wanting to come together, and then the sense of nakedness gets lost in loving oneness. At other times, nakedness causes a loss of human dignity, which is due to this bi-polar perspective of right and wrong, good and evil. It is the beginning of death due to sin.

Then they heard The Lord God's voice as he came walking in the garden in the cool of the day, when the breeze picks up: the start of evening I think. God loves evenings and mornings so much that he invented them before he even made the sun and moon to bring them to the earthly world. Maybe God was humming quietly to himself, or maybe he was talking to the various trees and animals he'd put there. Maybe he made a point of making some noise so the man and woman would hear him coming, like the cowboys yodel for the cattle. They were afraid enough as it was. Maybe He was singing the blues. It had to be a sad moment for Him.

By the way, in the conversation between the woman and the serpent, they both referred to God as just elohim again, the mighty ones, a more impersonal term; but once we return to Moses' narration, it's back to Yahweh Elohim, the more personal, more detailed, I Who Am - the Mighty Ones. The man is also referred to by his personal name, Adam, here.

The Lord God calls to Adam and says to him, "Where art thou?" These days, this sounds pretty formal, but in fact it is the familiar form, now out of use in English. If I may suggest a wording that gives a better flavor of the moment, it would be a sort of singsong, "Oh AAAdam, where aaare you?" You think God didn't know where he was? It was really Adam who didn't know where he was any more, relationally. Adam blurts back, "I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and hid myself." Again I want to say that it is with grief and not anger that God asks, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from that tree I commanded you not to eat from?"

His answer is very telling. Rather than take responsibility, he tries to blame God and of course, the woman; and men have been trying that ever since. "The woman, that you gave to be with me, she gave me some of that fruit and, well, I ate it." Now I can see God getting a little huffy. He turns away from Adam to the woman and says, kinda like Seinfeld would have, "Whaadizthis?" . The woman answers in a more straightforward, repentant way, "The serpent fooled me and I did eat."

And now He turns to the serpent. No need to ask any questions here, the serpent isn't going to learn anything: he is incapable of repentance. Now come the consequences; the Creation has to change again to accommodate this mess. The serpent becomes a snake, cursed above all other beasts. Cursing involves a particular kind of hostility that's difficult to detail further, but suffice it to bring in that idea of hostility. You know what it is. God promises to put hatred between the woman and the snake, between her offspring and its, and further says the snake may strike her seed's heel, but he's gonna whack its head. That seems to be what happens between people and snakes at the simplest, most physical level, and I think that's too bad. Snakes do have useful place in the world's ecology and suffer abuse from humans, even in places where this story is not well known. I admit that when I had a snake lunge at me from the bottom of my steps one day, I went after him and bashed his head in, to protect myself and loved ones from further attacks. It felt very instinctual. Away from my house, I leave them alone.

The serpent slinks away, smug in the thought that he has caused all this trouble. He was wrong though. This apparent disaster was actually part of the Creation performance that the Lord God had conceived from the beginning. I think that God was speaking prophetically here, of the time when Satan would manage to get Christ crucified, and Christ would make an open show of his triumph over death as a result. Satan did not get the hint. Had he gotten it, he would never have crucified Jesus.

Then the Lord God turns back to the woman. "I'm going to really increase your
sorrow and your conception." I have always taken those to be more or less separate, that the woman would have more sorrow generally in life, and she would have children more often than originally designed; but I think that because God rephrases it in the next line, he makes it pretty undeniable that he is talking about the labor of childbirth. This seems needlessly vindictive to me, and more so to a woman, I'll wager, but I have to trust God that is was necessary for our good. I'm sorry, ladies. I was present at the birth of my three children, and it grieved me a great deal to feel that there was so little I could do to help. I wanted so much to take her pain upon myself, but there was simply no way. Actually, the word being translated 'sorrow' here has an interesting confluence of meanings, among them are pain, sorrow, hardship, labor and toil. This Hebrew word appears only six times in the Old Testament, three in Genesis. The first is here; the second is coming up with the man's consequences. Meanwhile the pain and labor of childbirth is now a metaphor for rest of our history, until the end of the age.

So she must bring forth children with painful labor; and yet the woman's desire will be for her man, and he shall rule over her. This is the consequence of her sin, that even though it will become more difficult to have children, it's going to happen more often; and even though the man tried to duck responsibility, the woman [ishsha] will still have a desire to be with her man [the word used here is ish, invoking the intimate but separated pair], who is now specifically charged with taking responsibility for them both. The word for rule here is entirely different from the one used in Genesis 1, in which the Adam are given dominion over all the animals. Honestly I haven't established the connotations of the two roots, but I will look for it, and expect to find that the kind of rule Adam had over the animals was one in which Adam was hierarchically above them, while the kind of rule an ish is expected to have over an ishsha is not. You may be worth many sparrows, but I assert that a man is not worth more than a woman in the eyes of God; still, it seems that somebody's got to be in charge in any purposeful group of people. Perhaps God chose the less apt one so that His strength could be perfected in our weakness.

And now back to Adam. "Because you have listened to your woman's voice... cursed [that same hostility that the serpent got] is the ground [the adamah, remember?] for your sake. In sorrow [ie pain and hard work - here is the second use of that word] will you eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread, until you return to the adama; for out of it were you taken. For you are dust, and to dust you will return." That last remark takes Adam from the rich good earthy dirt to dry old dust. Boy, you're name is dirt!

Notice that God did not tell Adam, hey you're in charge here now, so rule over your woman. No, he had Adam looking outward, at the work he was going to have to do, and the land that was now cursed. The woman's sin brought consequences to her body, but Adam's sin brought death into the world. Remember he was not deceived by the serpent: he ate that fruit fully aware it was against God's command. Was he too hungry, too lazy, or just a wimp? Honestly! And now the woman is going to ruled by him? Talk about pain and sorrow. In a world oriented to good and evil, sin and death make this "natural" tendency a difficult proposition to say the least.

So what sort of example should we men look to for how to rule our wives, or what sort of behavior should a woman accept as being ruled over by her husband? The only direct command I know of is from Paul: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her... In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church -- for we are members of his body." That last hints at the next increase in entropy, the resurrection of the dead, the assembling of the bride of Christ, the living temple of the living god. In the resurrection, as in heaven now, there is no male and female, no marrying or giving in marriage. We are being built together into a single body; we are just building blocks individually, and though we will continue to have bodies of flesh, it will be glorified flesh, with no taint of sin, able to be ruled by our new spiritual nature. Our intimacy with each other and with the Lord will make the church an astonishing revelation of God's love.

For now though, Adam's sin (and don't forget our own contributions, being in Adam) affects the entire planet, indeed the whole universe. Remember Paul says "the whole creation groans and travails in pain [as in childbirth] to this moment." Backing up a few verses (Romans 8) he says,

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Here is good news: it was God who subjected the creation to this frustrating vanity, for Adam's sake. See, these design changes God declared in consequence to the sin of the Adam are not punishments so much as a course correction, the introduction of a new thematic element in the performance art of Creation. With sin and death comes an opportunity for grace to appear. God is taking an immense personal risk, tolerating all the misery and death that sin has brought to us; yet where sin abounds, grace much more abounds. And here we are, still male and female, trying to work for our living, raise our kids, in a world that is somehow hostile to our good-and-evil orientation. When we find the Lord and our spirits are reborn in Christ, we become bizarre contradictions in the world, fountains that give forth sometimes sweet water, sometimes brackish. We are in the world but no longer of it. As we go on through life in this form, the more we can focus on Lord Jesus, who personifies love, the more we can move beyond the good-and-evil orientation that only brings death. For us men, if we will focus on loving our wives, the ruling will take care of itself: the more we focus on ruling, the more we will screw it up, just as people who go around demanding respect never seem to command it.

Women, I am much more at a loss to give any advice; but there is one man you can always trust, the man Jesus Christ. Loving him and letting him rule over you will reveal everything important about the nature of God and Life. The rest of us men are far from perfect, but perhaps if you can find one to take up with, you might find yourself experiencing something of the loving nature of God that we men cannot know. Your body is a metaphor for the Church, for the history of Mankind, for the story of the Natural Universe. I counsel not focusing on that ruling stuff in favor of loving. I like to think it's worth the trouble.