WWJD4aKlondikeBar

So Adam and Eve are hanging out in God's ant farm: The Garden of Eden. God told them not to eat from the tree that somehow teaches them how to procreate. Did he originally intend for it to be just that?

I know this is a semi-rhetorical question because the surreal nature of "God" lets us excuse him in so many ways. But to put ourselves in the context of the moment, did God really intend for the sum of humanity to be in that garden?

Mageth

I don't think the tree would teach them how to procreate. They had the equipment; I'm sure they figured that out for themselves. It would instead instill in them that sex was at least in some cases bad (don't boink the baboons and so on), nakedness was shameful, and so on.

Well, Gen. 1, 27-28 says:

So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

So it sounds from this like he intended for A&E to be quite (re)productive.

neilgodfrey

There was a hellenistic novel called Daphnis and Chloe by Longus that gives us a clue here. They were 2 shepherds in an idyllic pastoral setting who in their innocence took ages but finally learned how to reproduce. Innocent trial and error led them to test kissing, then hugging and finally lying beside each other -- still nothing happened. So then Daphnis sees how the sheep do it and asks Chloe to let him try it their way. But Chloe ain't slow and reminds Daphnis that that won't work since the sheep do it standing up and with their wool they do it more fully clothed than she is. Daphnis tries it just the same, standing up and clothed like a sheep, and feeling foolish realizes Daphne was right all along. But like the monkey who finally got to type out shakespeare they would of figured it out given enough time, and without sin they were going to live forever anyway.

Besides, Adam and Eve were naked so there was a good chance that they would have eventually succeeded where Daphnis and Chloe failed. I think the lesson we can learn from this is that the missionary position is sinful -- no doubt the consequence of Adam and Eve facing each other on eating the forbidden fruit.

(Actually in the novel Daphnis cheated and let himself be seduced by his neighbour's wife in order to learn how to do it, but that's just impatient pagans for you.)

Neil Godfrey
http://vridar.wordpress.com

4321lynx

Some wit has said that all that this section of Genesis does is to prove that God cared a damn sight more for his apples than for the humans that he had created.:angel:

Gamera

Well, he told Adam and Even to be fruitful, nobody else. What else could he tell them since they were the only people on the planet in the story. That doesn't mean he was addressing anybody today, in a planet with 6 billion people in it.

God told Adam and Eve and Abraham and David to do a lot of things. Doesn't mean it applies to us, even if you accept the inspired nature of the text.

Laurentius

The Bible is an ecletical thing.

Once Adam and Eve were supposed to live in the garden, obviously their job was not to commute to Earth and fill it with offspring.

And giving birth was actually some sort of punishment to Eve. Okay, maybe it was only about the pain she was going to go through.

I don't think God was going to tolerate people having sex in his garden, anyway. So his seemingly initial plan was to keep the place pure. Adam and Even's sin, in fact, did not come as a shock to him since he is omniscient - which is why the Bible mentions their task of populating the world before the fall is described. Well, God knew it all along, but sometimes you watch a good show with the same pleasure even if you've seen it before and know the outcome.

Mageth

The story doesn't say that Adam and Eve were the only people on the planet. That's read into the story, but it doesn't explicitly say that. And, even if A&E were the only ones, if they obeyed God, they were not alone for long, were they?

This appears to be some sort of weird non-sequitur, that is bringing up some imagined issue that I did not address.

That being said, can what you claim here be said of any passage in the Bible?

Again with the non-sequitur.

And again, do you apply that rule to any passage or person in the Bible, or just to selected ones?

Mageth

No, it was pain in childbirth that was given as some sort of punishment to Eve. The text doesn't say childbirth itself was given as a punishment.

In any case, this simply highlights the differences between the Creation narrative found in Gen. 1 and the one that begins a verse or two into Gen. 2. In the first, El gives the "multiply and replenish" command. In the second, YHWH puts the two in a garden, and gives no such explicit command, but punishes Eve with pain in childbirth.

Why not? The text provides no support for the above, in any case.

The text provides no support for the notion that God would have considered A&E having sex in the Garden as "impure". His command for them to "multiply" in Ch. 1 could even be taken to teach against that notion. Not having sex, after that command, would have been a violation of God's command!

Which is why he couldn't find them in the Garden, and had to call out to them? A problem you have here is that the "God" described in Gen. 1-3 is not described as being omniscient. The notion of omniscience hadn't even been ascribed to "God" yet.

Huh??? Your hammer-and-ducttape explanation makes little sense.

There are two distinctly different Creation accounts. It takes hammer and ducttape to try to get them resolved. But the explanation ends up looking like the jerry-rigged, ad-hoc account that you're making it out to be.

It simply doesn't work.

God enjoys watching reruns? LOL. That's part of your explanation? Sheesh.

Again, the "God knew it all along" explanation is a post-hoc rendering of the text that assumes "omniscience", a notion about God not found in the first chapters of Genesis. The El or YHWH described there is not portrayed as the "omniscient" God that the notion of God would evolve into much later.

4321lynx

All this argument, this "sound & fury" about a fairy-tale? Good god!!!!:angel::devil1:

Mageth

Whant an insightful and informationve contribution you have made to a thread in the Biblical Criticism and History forum!

I understand that it's a myth. This (Biblical Criticism and History) is a forum dedicated to discussions of the myth. Therefore, you will find discussions of the myth on this forum.

If you can't understand or accept that fairly simple concept, I suggest that you don't open threads found herein.