Magdlyn

Thank you CoNGs, for introducing some sense into yet another Chili mess. (I do wish people would not bother arguing with him. I find if a waste of bandwidth.) Adding in the similarity of the Hebrews' myth to the Sumerian myth is just the shot of rationality this thread needed.

Here is more. I posted this on another board where we were discussing YHWH's "curse" upon man and woman.

It's a myth (sacred scripture of an ancient culture). We do not have to accept it as literal truth. Humans did not get started as a couple in a garden. We evolved.

Now, as far as the myth goes. It was written down by the Jews around 500ish BCE, just post-Babylonian/Persian exile. They did not have the benefit of the kind of science we have.

"The devil" was not in the garden. Nor was Satan [or Lucifer! :rolleyes]. It was a snake. The snake was a common symbol of the Great Goddess, transformative power and wisdom, as you may have noticed in Cretan and Egyptian art of that period and earlier. (In another myth, Moses' staff turns into a snake through a miracle of his god, in the court of Pharaoh. Later, Moses of Egypt holds up a bronze snake talisman in the wilderness, which protects his people. This relic was written to be saved and revered for centuries. [Finally written to be destroyed by a reformer king named Hezekiah, right around the time of the A&E myth's commitment to papyrus! Ah, what a coincidence. Not.])

Trees were also heavily used as a symbol of the Goddess in many religions of that region.

The Eden myth reflects the conflict between the male dominated Yahwism and the popular Asherah worship common in the same region. The faiths and beliefs were sometimes in competition, sometimes co-existing peacefully.

Asherah, as a fertility goddess, was thought to protect and support women in conception, pregnancy and childbirth.

This myth reflects an attempt to rob women of their power and to subvert the divine feminine that was recognized at the time.

Later translators further obscured the themes of the myth by translating the same word two different ways. The same Hebrew word which could mean hard work/labor or pain or sorrow was translated as "work" for the man, and "pain" for the woman.

The story also naively attempts to answer the question, why is life so hard?

Disclaimer: the above explanation reflects theories I have read which take both antropology, archeology and comparative religion into account. It does not reflect "orthodox" Jewish or Christian thought.

YHWH, in the mind of the authors of this myth, was warning the Hebrews against the imporoper worship of so called false or foreign gods. They were no more false than YHWH. But they were in competition with him. The author, possessed of a BCE mindset, saw this as dangerous to the prosperity of his people.

muidiri

Hmm PDH~... Through several different translations, god cites the eating (for Eve) and the listening to the wife (for Adam) as the crimes. {We'll just skip over that whole "listening to the wife" thing for now - that's a whole nother discussion.} It seems obvious to me that he punishes them for eating the fruit when he told them not to - he punishes them for their disobedience, not for passing the buck.

This still comes back to it being rather nasty of him to punish them for something they had no way of knowing was wrong... seeing as god made them with no knowledge of good ro bad.

PDH~ you discuss the "command to life"... but I'm not really sure what you mean. God tells Adam & the *at that point un-named* female not to eat the fruit or they will surely die. The serpent tells the woman "Surely you won't die?!!?!" And lo and behold... they don't die after eating the fruit. So god kinda lies to them, doesn't he? He then kicks them out because they *might* go after the fruit of life next.

Anyway - aside from all of this... the OP was based on the "inerrant" hypothesis of the bible... so alternative interpretations, such as yours and Chili's (which is VERY alternative) are interesting, but a little bit off topic. Interesting though.

Plognark

Of course the bible is innerant. Now if we can just sort through the staggering array of personal interpretations and baises and figure out which interpretation is the right one... :funny:

Chili

God is the first cause in Gen.1 who created the essence of existence with "God said" and in Gen 2 that which God created in Gen.1 came into existence when it was "formed" by Lord God. Gen.1 and 2 places the essence of existence prior to existence (God is an Idealist), and in Gen. 3 "intelligence" was added to place God inside of nature itself to be the leading edge of creation.

In Gen.3 "like God" was created in the Tree of Knowledge who's accumulations were to be added into the Tree of Life from where the "woman saw that the TOK would be good for gaining food, wisdom and beauty." Thus whatever the TOK accumulates would be "tied down" in the TOL to enrich the essence of Man for this generation and would also become part of the enriched womb of man that conceives and nurtures the essence of God in the next generation. This new or updated essence of God is pro-created outside of Eden but was conceived inside of Eden.

Really, what we have here is that the Intelligent Design is built into the species to make adaptation possible in a competitive environment. These three chapters show how the spiritual world precedes the material world and that Jerusalem is needed to decorate the New Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the conscious mind and the New Jerusalem is the renewed conscious mind, or, alternatly, the conscious mind is an obscured image of God (=like god) until realization clears the fog in our mind.

I get it from the bible sir and am reading the same passages you are.

No, God also created the animals and Lord God is also part of the animals for they also have a TOL and a TOK. Intelligent Design inside of creation must include that intelligence is an intrinsic part of the species. It may be beneficial for me to point out that God is Love and Lord God is God's love become manifest in Life with "like God" being the particular who is in charge of God's destiny (sic, lol).

It may also be noted that the woman has no "created identity" of her own in the metaphysical world, which, of course, is a necessary condition if the two trees are placed opposite to each other from where the emnity emerges that creates the competition spirit inside evolution.

Chili

You and who?

Plognark

Humanity in general, I guess :huh:

Child of No Gods

I think that's the most abstruse attempt to reconcile the two contradictory creation stories in Genesis I have ever read. Interesting, but truly weird. The usual way to deal with the problem is just to say that Gen 1 takes us up to day 6, Gen 2 takes over after the creation of humans, and Gen 3 describes the fall and its aftermath.

I've never heard of "god", "lord god" and "like god" being treated as separate entities. A new trinity, perhaps? Of course, that ignores the fact that the Bible usually translates El as God, YHWH as The Lord, and treats them as a single entity. When Moses is on the mountain, the YHWH reminds him that he is the same as El, the god that made a deal with Abraham:
In the early western semitic pantheon, El (the sky god) and YHWH (the thunder god) were separate entities, so I guess there's some justification to what you're saying. It's just weird to here it the way you put it. Is this a new philosophical theology?

Even so, we must not forget that it is, after all, mythology.

Child of No Gods

I don't think I'm going to post any more replies to Chili, he's just too weird. But I can't let this one pass.

This is absolute drivel. Here's the etymology of "human" from the Miriam-Webster on-line dictionary. Perhaps we should burn all our dictionaries along with our Bibles.

Killer Mike

Im an atheist so I would not buy this explanation. But christians who believe the Garden of Eden myth as history would probably say that it was not so much the apple per se, rather the disobeying of God. :Cheeky:

Magdlyn

BTW, it wasn't an apple. Much more likely a fig, as they are native to the area, and as those were the leaves the "sinners" used to make their stylish coverups.

We are talking about the fig of knowledge here, people. Just how seriously do you want to take all this?