The Lost World of Adam and Eve (19 page)

In a third approach, others might talk about what sin
does
rather than what sin
is.
In this sort of investigation, sin can be seen as a threat to relationship with God—it results in alienation.
8
This differs from the direction represented in the discussion of the paradigms above in that they addressed the consequences primarily with regard to us (burden, debt), whereas alienation addresses more particularly the consequences pertaining to our relationship with God. The concept of alienation is well recognized in the Old Testament, whether in the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden or the exile of Israel from the land. It is built into the ideas surrounding sacred space in which holiness must be maintained for the presence of God lest he be driven away. Sin is therefore disruptive to the relationship with God that is the deepest desire of humans. Relationship was God’s intention in creation of human beings. It was lost in Genesis 3, and the rest of Scripture documents the stages of its being re-established. Another way to express this is in terms of the disequilibrium caused by sin.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive, and though the first two have their validity and make a contribution to our understanding, it is the alienation/disequilibrium model that will serve as the focus for the discussion of this chapter. This is a significant theological trajectory that is often neglected or not even recognized. If Genesis 1 is about order and sacred space, the disorder aspect of sin takes on new importance.
10
Disequilibrium (disorder) has disturbed equilibrium (order) that God had set in place. Systematic theology eventually develops other trajectories and gives them high priority, but in the Old Testament, this view takes account of how sin is introduced in these early chapters of Genesis where order and its antitheses are so important.

The Old Testament never refers to the event of Genesis 3 as “the fall” and does not talk about people or the world as “fallen.”
11
This is logical enough terminology since biblical language does refer to “falling into temptation,” etc., but we should be cautious about giving the concept too large a role in our discussion of the biblical text. The Old Testament does not speak of Adam’s sin bringing sin on everyone, though the effects of sin are seen to be pervasive throughout the Old Testament. One of the earliest uses of “the fall” is found in the pseudepigraphal book of
2 Esdras
7:118:

With that disclaimer, I will continue to use the term throughout the chapter for convenience and because it has traditionally been used to encapsulate the problem of sin.

As we consider the Old Testament information, we should be clear that the fall is not just disobedience or eating forbidden fruit. These actions could be considered crimes, but they were crimes that were simply the expressions of the fall.
13
The fall was the decision to be like God, conveyed by the serpent’s words (Gen 3:5), the woman’s response (Gen 3:6), God’s assessment (Gen 3:22) and the reason for the banishment (Gen 3:23). The way in which the man and woman have become like God is qualified in relation to what the tree represented. No suggestion is made that they have become omniscient or omnipotent. I propose that, by disobediently taking the fruit, they were trying to be like God by positing themselves as the center and source of order.

God is, by definition, the source of wisdom, and his presence therefore establishes a center of wisdom. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom in its biblical focus concerns seeking order in all categories of life (speech, family, government, interpersonal relations, relationship with God, decision making, etc.). Wisdom is the result when we perceive order, pursue it, preserve it, promote it, procure it and practice it. True wisdom finds its source and center in God, not in oneself specifically or humankind in general.

In taking from the tree, Adam and Eve were trying to set themselves up as a satellite center of wisdom apart from God. It is a childish sort of response: “I can do it myself!” or “I want to do it my way!” These are not a rejection of authority per se but an insistence on independence. The act is an assertion that “it’s all about
me
,” and it is one that has characterized humanity (individually and corporately) since this first act. With people as the source and center of wisdom, the result was not order centered on them but disorder. This disorder extended to all people of all time as well as to the cosmos, and life in God’s presence was forfeited. We will discuss this in more depth in the next chapter.

Wisdom is good, and we can therefore safely assume that God did not intend to withhold it from humanity. But true wisdom must be acquired through a process, generally from instruction by those who
are
wise. The fall is defined by the fact that Adam and Eve acquired wisdom illegitimately (Gen 3:22), thus trying to take God’s role for themselves rather than eventually joining God in his role as they were taught wisdom and became the fully functional vice-regents of God involved in the process of bringing order.
14
If humans are to work alongside of God in extending order (“subdue” and “rule” [Gen 1:28]), they need to attain wisdom, but as endowment from God, not by seizing it for autonomous use. Given this interpretation, I would disagree with those who see the fall as disobedience to an arbitrarily chosen test case. I refer to the view that the trees had no inherent properties but just served to provide an opportunity for obedience (knowledge of good) or disobedience (knowledge of evil). In this view God could just as easily have said that they shouldn’t walk on the beach. Instead, I maintain that
what
was taken (wisdom) is not arbitrary and that it is more important than
that it was
taken (failed a test).

If, as proposed earlier (proposition 8), a legitimate option is that from the start people were mortal, and pain and suffering were already a part of a not yet fully ordered cosmos, we cannot think of death and suffering as having been foisted on us by Adam and Eve’s malfeasance. Many have thought it unfair that all of us should suffer the consequences of their offense. Instead, we can have a much more charitable attitude toward Adam and Eve when we realize that it is not that they initiated a situation that was not already there; it is that they failed to achieve a solution to that situation that was in their reach. Their choices resulted in their failure to acquire relief on our behalf. Their failure meant that we are doomed to death and a disordered world full of sin. These are profoundly significant consequences for what was a serious offense. In contrast, Christ was able to achieve the desired result where Adam and Eve failed. We are all doomed to die because when they sinned we lost access to the tree of life. We are therefore subject to death because of sin. Christ succeeded and actually provided the remedy to sin and death.

Some would follow this same line of reasoning to suggest that what we call original sin is the result of our ancestors “pulling out of the program” prematurely. James Gaffney identifies these approaches as involving a view that our human condition is underdeveloped, failing to achieve the intended goal because we wanted to do it our way—“not paradise lost, but, as it were, paradise ungained.”
15
I would go a step further. We did not lose paradise as much as we forfeited sacred space and the relationship it offered, thereby damaging our ability to be in relationship with God and marring his creation with our own underdeveloped ability to bring order on our own in our own wisdom. Yoda laments similarly about Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie
The Empire Strikes Back
that he is not yet ready because his training is not complete (“Reckless is he . . . now things are worse”).

Thus far, the treatment in this chapter has been trying to recover an Old Testament perspective on these issues. In that way, the lost world we seek to recover is being revealed from analysis inside the biblical text. We can now turn our attention briefly to the ancient world outside the biblical text.

There is nothing like the fall in ancient Near Eastern literature because there is no idealized primeval scenario. In Mesopotamian thinking, civilization in the urban environment was the ideal and the “world outside” was populated by “wild animals, primeval monsters, demons, drifting souls, and nomads.”
16
That “world outside” picture was also the description of primeval times. There is no original pair, no sacred space, no disobedience of a command, no grasping for wisdom to become like God.

Even discussion of sin is problematic in an ancient Near Eastern context. They certainly understood the concept of offending a deity and suffering for it. But the gods had not made their expectations known. As described in chapter nine (p. 88), the Great Symbiosis in the ancient world is that the responsibility of humans is to meet the needs of the gods. This mostly involved ritual performance, but it also included ethical behavior insofar as it was recognized that the gods desired sufficient justice in order to ensure a smoothly operating society. A lawless society would be a less productive society, and people would not be able to grow their crops, raise their herds and make their gifts to the gods.

In both the ancient Near East and the Old Testament, sin was often objectified; that is, it was seen as something almost physical to be carried and could be lifted off a person. It was realized in physical consequences (illness especially). But as mentioned earlier, these deal with the consequences of sin. Both contexts may have dealt with sin as objectified, but when we ask what constituted sin, strong differences emerge.

Though ethical behavior was essential in the ancient Near East, a moral imperative based on a discernment of God’s nature, as is found in Israel, was lacking. The gods had not revealed themselves, and they were not known to be consistent in character.
17
Consequently, we find many of the same ethical expectations in the ancient world at large as we find in Israel,
18
but the source of such norms in Israelite thinking (God instead of society), the reasoning behind them (holiness for retaining the presence of God) and their objectives (being godlike) are all very different. The ethical norms of the ancient Near East are most concerned with order versus disorder in society whereas in Israel the main focus is on relationship with deity and what is right or wrong as one seeks to live in accordance with the holiness of God. We likewise find similar ritual performances, but, again, they are driven by a very different ideology.

For these reasons, we expect nothing like the fall in ancient Near Eastern thinking. The people of the ancient Near East had to have seen themselves in relationship with God for that relationship to be broken. Neither the gods nor the people desired relationship outside the confines of the great symbiosis. What we find in the Old Testament is a reflection of the revelation of God that resulted in a theology uniquely Israelite. The lost world then needs to be recovered not by learning more about the ancient Near East but by getting back to the Old Testament texts in their ancient context before taking into account the way the interpretation of those texts unfolded in the New Testament and the articulation of theological understanding throughout church history.
19
That does not mean rejection of the later developments, but for the purposes of understanding the Old Testament text in its context, it is important to see the issues that frame the text in their ancient setting.

In conclusion, Genesis 3 is more about the encroachment of disorder (brought about by sin) into a world in the process of being ordered than it is about the first sin. It is about how humanity lost access to the presence of God when its representatives tragically declared their independence from their Creator. It is more focused literarily and theologically on how corporate humanity is therefore distanced from God—alienation—than on the sinful state of each human being (with no intention of diminishing the latter fact).

A similar reflection of the differences of perspective can also be seen in how we think about theological anthropology. We are used to talking about the body, soul and spirit as we discuss who we are as individuals and what parts will continue to define us in eternity. Egyptians talked about the human person in teleological terms, also showing an interest in the afterlife (terms such as
ba
and
ka
). In contrast, Babylonians were more inclined to think of humanity in terms of protology—that is, human beginnings as defining us. In Israel, the terms they used (
nepeš, rûa
ḥ
,
often translated, respectively, as “soul” and “spirit”) are terms that help define our relationship to God.

Nepeš
is given by God (Gen 2:7) and departs when a human being dies (Gen 35:18). Interestingly enough, God is also characterized by a
nepeš.
Nepeš
is not something that people have; it is something that they are. It is life, and it is associated with the blood (Lev 17:11). In contrast,
rûa
ḥ
energizes and is related to consciousness and vitality. Each person has God’s
rûa
ḥ
,
and it returns to him when the person dies. God’s
rûa
ḥ
sustains human life. In this way, we might understand their viewpoint as relational and theological rather than psychological components.
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Neither
nepeš
nor
rûa
ḥ
is considered to exist in the afterlife.