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Creation stories and myths
Summary of Genesis chapter 2 and 3
The relationship of Adam and Eve
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I. This week’s analysis will focus on the Genesis 3:1-24 reading from the Bible, because I found this primary source and the encounter described in Genesis 3 to be fascinating as a result of the midrash that can be deduced from the experience. Primary sources are incredibly essential to the essence of a religion because they are and have been worshipped and held in high regard for centuries upon centuries; thus, to understand and interpret primary sources, as in this case, brings the reader a step closer to understanding fundamental beliefs that are at the heart of Christian theology, such as the concept of original sin and the belief that as humans, we carry the sins of Adam and Eve within us. II. In this particular excerpt from Genesis, …show more content…
The story was described in a manner that was easy to understand, which I assume to be the goal when a religious group wants to encourage the spread of their religion and make it accessible to all those who could potentially follow it. Some questions that came to mind while reading this portion of Genesis 3 were the following: Why is the Snake the most clever of all God’s creatures and what makes him this way? Was this intentional? What was in it for the Snake to tempt Eve and have her, along with Adam, banished from the garden? (There was no potential gain for him, as far as I could distinguish.) Why is it that God did not want Adam and Eve to be wise? Wouldn’t he want to create intelligent human beings that had the capacity to distinguish between good and bad? And finally, why did God curse and banish Adam and Eve from the garden when it is emphasized multiple times throughout the Bible that God is a benevolent being with good and loving intentions? The answers to these questions, although some are unattainable, would benefit the understanding of the reader, and in my instance, allow me to connect more with the text if I understood the intentions of the characters. Ultimately, as with all midrash inquiries, you are unable to ever come across a definitive answer, and thus must place your trust in God that he did and still does the correct thing in complicated situations such as this …show more content…
In conclusion, reading and interpreting primary sources opens doors to interpretation and deeper understand that every individual interested in religion or theology ought to take upon themselves to do so to deepen an unbiased personal comprehension. Instead of listening to an individual’s understanding of a particular story or scene from a sacred text, it is important to study it yourself first and then converse with others regarding it, so that your initial impression is not a biased one and that multiple perspectives can be heard, not formed by one sole perspective. Ultimately, I believe that to engage in a primary source’s text, such as the Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, or the Quran is to promote a connection with the text that is deeper and more intimate and intellectual than one that can be found in a church or religious study group, where perspectives and beliefs can be shaped and molded. Churches and study groups are extremely beneficial in the religious realm, but nothing can surpass one’s own personal
It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers may, and probably will, claim that the unity they find is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the creative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified; only the reader's attempted taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that one might recover a stage of the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).
During the peaceful time in the garden God gives Adam and Eve a specific rule. God allows Adam and Eve to eat off any tree except nothing from the tree of good and evil. God explains that death would be the result of eating off this tree. This part of the story relates to the heroes journey’s step of the call to adventure or the problem. Now the decision of obeying or rebelling became upon them. Eve begins to wonder around in the garden, she discovers the tree of good and evil. She notices something different, Satan, in the form of a serpent. Satan tries to entice and persuade her to eat fruit from the tree. Satan begins to ask her, ‘Has God indeed said, “You shall not eat of every tree in the garden’? (Genesis 3:1).” She feels hesitant at first, not wanting to sin against God, but Satan begins to persuade her with all the right words. Eve feels reluctant and does not know what to do. Satan encourages Eve in a negative way to disobey God. As
In Genesis 3, the Fall of human beings is described. The serpent asked Eve if there were any trees that Adam and Eve could not eat from in the garden. Eve told the serpent that God said that they could not eat the fruit from the tree or touch the tree in the middle of the garden. The serpent told Eve that they would not die, but they would be open to the knowledge of good and evil like God. When Eve and Adam ate from the tree in the middle of the garden, they were opened to the knowledge of good and evil (The New Oxford Annotated Bible: With the Apocrypha...
In The Battle for the Beginning, MacArthur directs believers to recognize the scriptural claim that first three chapters of Genesis concerning creation are the record of a literal and historical event. MacArthur senses a growing shift amongst modern evangelical believers who seek to revise or interpret the events of creation in a non-literal or naturalistic way. Macarthur reasons that a non-literal or naturalistic interpretation discounts what the scriptures says, and ultimately undermines Christian theology. For MacArthur the Bibl...
In this essay I will take an interpretive look at Genesis chapters 5-9. The main focuses will be: the relationship between God, Noah, and Noah’s generation of mankind; the barriers and boundaries for humankind that were present and created by God in these chapters, the characteristics of God throughout the text and the overall importance and message of this passage in the Bible.
Throughout history, it is clear that men are usually seen to be advantaged by the logic of domination while females tend to be disadvantaged. Whether it be in the workplace, household, or even the bible men have always been inferior to women. Through history, cultural norms and stereotypes gender roles were created and have been present throughout society. Although it is believed that males are more advantaged than females the texts Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread by Phyllis Trible and The Creation and Fall of Man and Woman explain how men and woman are in fact equal and maybe even disadvantaged by these cultural arrangements. Therefore, throughout history it is clear that gender discourses would allow one to believe that men are advantaged
Now, to the untrained eye, it may be possible to interpret the aforementioned text as having certain "scheisty" tendencies coming from both the serpent and, believe it or not, God himself. As possible as it may seem, the main theme of the passages of Genesis are not trying to show God as being greedy with the knowledge of good and evil. It isn't like God was worried that Adam and Eve would gain knowledge that would empower them and make them as gods. That is almost preposterous to think that God, the almighty creator of heaven and earth, would be worried about two mortals obtaining a little bit of information. In all actuality, that idea is incredibly far from the truth. God gave Adam and Eve the world, literally. This perfect world, a "heaven on earth", was just given to them out of the goodness of his heart. All they had to do was look over God's creations and enjoy true eternal bliss. As a matter of fact, the only rule that God gave to Adam and Eve was to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. All they had to do to live in the eternal paradise, with all the cookies and milk they could stomach, was to follow that one freakin' rule. Acknowledging the fact that the serpent (a.k.a. Satan Incarnate) did do its part in persuading Eve to eat the fruit and to give the fruit to her husband. Even still, Eve should have realized that she was risking eternal happiness for the words of a snake.
In order for a written work to be considered as Literature; it should portray any element of literature such as: figurative language, irony, simile, symbolism, personification, metaphor, etc. Some of these elements are portrayed in the book of Genesis. As for example in its third chapter, there is a use of figurative language. The term figurative language refers to a word or a phrase that an author uses to extend the meaning of the language which is exactly what the author of the Genesis 3 did by using the serpent as a character. In the text, the serpent is not only a normal serpent; it also happens to be a representation of the devil. As professor Dafni in his article “Genesis 2–3 and Alcibiades’s Speech in Plato’s Symposium” points out, “the serpent changes fundamentally the meaning of the divine command and bears malice toward Yahweh, God the Creator… So the talking serpent as a devil articulates its most decisive argument (Gn 3:5): ‘God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil’. The serpent concealed and suppressed completely the possibility of death and makes God seem a liar and a fraud”(Dafni,2015). When the author of Genesis, portrays the serpent talking and making God looks like a liar makes a deviation from the literal meaning of the word serpent because is something that a regular serpent
Harris, Stephen. Understanding The Bible. 6 ed. New York City: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 2002. Print.
With people wanting understanding over their lives, they can be deceived easily, just like Eve from The Book of Genesis. This religious story of the first sin has given the snake as well known face of evil and a untrustworthy character.
Around 1400 B.C. Exodus was written in Hebrew. The Exodus, which is one of the books in the Old Testament, are rules, similar to Hammurabi Code placed by God for the descendants of Abram. This literature gives insight into the structure of the Jewish community, which includes the hierarchy of their community as well as the roles important in this community. Scholars can further understand the Hebrew community by reading Genesis. Genesis consists of religious stories that talks about how farming, slavery, and the world came into being. But overall, scholars can see a society very much center on religion.
There are more than two different levels of biblical interpretation; however in this paper I am going to be focus in two of them which are historical-literal and theological-spiritual. In Genesis 3: 1-7, "The Fall of Man" shows something happen that forever changes our world. Before the beginning of chapter 3, the end of chapter 2 explains the relationship between the Lord, Adam, and his wife Eve. In contrast, in Genesis 3, there was a sin that changed the world we live in recently. Religious scholars and theologians have debated over whether it is the devil or a choice to guilt that led all humans to be sinful on
The “Fall of Man” story in The Bible, better known as the “Garden of Eden “story or “Adam and Eve”, is the story of how sin entered the perfect world that God had created.According to the Genesis 3, the book and the chapter in which the story is located, God gave Adam and Eve, the only two humans ever to be created at the time, a perfect place to dwell, a paradise called the Garden of Eden . This garden contained everything they needed and it was good. They had only one condition, they could not eat from the tree that was in the center of the garden, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because God said that if they ate it the would “ surely die”. Well one day a snake came along, or should I say Satan disguised as a snake, to tal...
Thus, an effort is made to highlight how Bible interpretation – through its publication – has developed in the history of Christianity.