Artemus

My wife asked me yesterday if it had been considered that the Garden of Eden story was first written just as an analogy to the loss of innocence that can never be regained as a child ages. Neither of us think that it was originally written as part of a creation story since there are already other people around for Cain to avoid when he was exiled (and Cain had a wife, of course). I've always assumed that it was absorbed into the creation story at a later time, but I've never seen the specific interpretation my wife asked about addressed. It seems so obvious that I think it must have been, though.

John Kesler

I think that the Eden tale serves an etiological purpose. The curses pronounced on Adam, Eve, and the serpent provide answers to big questions: Why is childbirth painful? Why does man have to work so hard to make a living? Why are humans afraid of snakes? Why don't humans live forever? Genesis 3:14-19,24 provides the answers.

paarsurrey

Hi

I must say your wife is very intelligent. In a sense it is correct. Man evolved in millions/billions of years in many tribes and perhaps in different parts of the world till man was thought by GodAllahYHWH to be responsible enough/mature enough for RevelationWord from Him and man was named Adam by Him. In a way man's previous stage was of innocence till he was born into the new era of responsibilities.

I hear a child travels into all the physical forms/stages he has come thorugh, in the womb of its mother. The film 'evolution' moves rapidly in the darkness of the mother’s womb; when it finishes the child is born into the light of the 'Modern Era' whichever it is.

I would like to share with my friends here some verses from Quran in this connection:

The Holy Quran : Chapter 76: Al-Dahr

[76:1] In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful.
[76:2] There has, certainly, come upon man a period of time when he was not a thing worth mentioning.
[76:3] We have created man from a mingled sperm-drop that We might try him; so We made him hearing, seeing.
[76:4] We have shown him the way, whether he be grateful or ungrateful.
[76:5] Verily, We have prepared for the disbelievers chains and iron-collars and blazing Fire.
[76:6] But the virtuous shall drink of a cup, tempered with camphor -
[76:7] From a spring wherefrom the servants of Allah will drink - they make it gush forth - a forceful gushing forth.
[76:8] They fulfil their vow, and fear a day the evil of which is widespread.
[76:9] And they feed, for love of Him, the poor, the orphan and the prisoner;
[76:10] Assuring them: 'We feed you to win Allah's pleasure only. We desire no reward nor thanks from you.
http://www3.alislam.org/showChapter.jsp?ch=76

I think my friends here who themselves don’t own any RevealedBook would have also enjoyed these verses at least the part about evolution of man.

Thanks

I am an Ahmadi peaceful Muslim; open for more truth, though I am already on truth.

Malachi151

No, I don't think so. You have to understand that much of Genesis, including the Garden of Eden stories, is based on earlier regional religions.

The Garden of Eden account is based on earlier Sumerian/Babylonian type stories. The stories that we find in Genesis are to a large degree commentaries on the earlier polytheistic religious stories. They take those stories and then put a spin on them to create new meaning.

The story of Adam and Eve is an example of this, the story of Noah is an example of this, and the story of Abraham and his son Isaac is likely an example of this.

The Adam and Even story is, I think, a much more realistic account than one might expect.

This all has to do with understanding Sumerian religion and the possible roots of Sumerian creation stories.

Here is a link that, while not perfect, I think conveys much of this concept: http://www.bibleorigins.net/UrukNake...ngHarvest.html

The Adam and Eve story is based on regional creation accounts, similar to what we find in the Sumerian accounts. The question then is what is the root of those accounts?

I believe that the root of those accounts is a real description of the real process of the development of early civilization in the region.

My understanding of the Sumerian creation story is that the Sumerian creation story is actually describing the process of the creation of the first cities and an early time when men became rulers and organizers of early civilization. In the Sumerian account the "gods" are the real human rulers. The "humans" were the uncivilized people living outside the cities who became early slaves of the "gods". The process described in the Sumerian account of the first people acquiring knowledge and becoming "like the gods", "knowing good and evil", and then adopting clothing (all part of the Sumerian account) is describing the process of the uncivilized slaves becoming civilized and learning the ways of the city dwellers and learning to abide the law.

So, I think that the gods of early Mesopotamian religion are based on real human rulers. Not necessarily directly based on specific rulers, but on the concept of ancient rulers and ancient civilization that had become mythologized at a later time.

The Hebrew religion and the Hebrew texts are descendants of these earlier Mesopotamian religions, i.e. the Jewish religion evolved from this earlier religion, thereby meaning that the "god" in the Adam and Eve story is ultimately based on a story about real human rulers, probably over 1,000 years removed by the time the early Hebrew accounts crystallized.

You still see traces of that in the Genesis accounts though, with God walking through the Garden, with mention of the Adam and Eve becoming "like us", etc.

What we find in the Hebrew accounts are stories where they transform older polytheistic stories about many gods into stories about their single tribal god, Yahweh.

So, no, I don't think that the Adam and Eve story is about youthful innocence, first of all I don't think that the stories were that sophisticated. That assumes a lot of sophistication in terms of symbolism that I think simply didn't exist in writings of that time.

Its also important to note, too, that Genesis 1 is probably hundreds of years more recent than Genesis 2. Genesis 2 is actually the older and more traditional Mesopotamian style account, whereas Genesis 1 reflects the more "modern" views of Mediterranean cosmology from probably around the 5th century BCE.

The account in Genesis 2 is an adaptation of the earlier Mesopotamian creation stories, which are, I believe, mythologized accounts of the dawn of early civilization in the region. Genesis 1 is a further adaptation of Genesis 2.

eliotsj

It's an interesting idea in a literary sense, but I think that interpretation is coming from modern understandings of symbolism and the idea of innocence. Malachi's theory is closer to how I would interpret the origins of Genesis. The symbolism we use today has evolved from what the originators of the myths intended to be literal accounts.

Artemus

OK, thanks for the responses. I've never thought of symbolism and innocence as modern ideas, but that makes sense. I'll send her to Malachi's link and let her go from there.

karlmarx

What evidence is there to suggest that the originators of these myths intended them to be literal accounts?

In what way does, say, Namma, the Sumerian mother goddess, or An, the sky god, correspond to human rulers? What evidence is there to suggest that Sumerian mythology is a result of civilization, rather than a prior development? How does one explain Australian Aboriginal mythology, which predated civilization and any sort of system of government (other than tribal organizations)? Aboriginal myths refer to gods as an explanation for natural phenomena - are these too based on "human rulers"?

It's an interesting theory, but I wonder if there is anything to back it up.

Malachi151

These questions are, to a large degree, separate issues, and the answers much more nuanced than you would have it.

The first issue is whether what we call myths were intended by their tellers to be viewed as "symbolic".

I don't think that there is any one single answer to this. It appears that some religious "stories" were intended and believed to be literally true by their chroniclers and others weren't, even within the same religious traditions.

Trying to figure out "original intent" now is often next to impossible. However, my sense of it is that the writers of the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Jewish creation stories did believe those stories to be literally true and intended them to be understood that way. That's my sense of it, and I don't think that there is anyone who can definitively prove the issue either way. We can't even prove the original intent of things written by the founder fathers in the Bill of Rights for that matter.

Certainly by the first century the dominant Jewish view was that the Genesis accounts were literally true.

Secondly, I never said that specific Sumerian gods corresponded to specific human rulers. I'm saying that my view is that the gods of Mesopotamian religion are based on the worship (either during or after their death, not sure) of early rulers. I have never claims that there is a single universal explanation for the origin of all named gods or of religion or god belief, or even that various types of origins are mutually exclusive.

What we do know about the Mesopotamian gods and religion is that #1 the Mesopotamian gods are described in very human ways, #2 the Mesopotamian gods are credited with building the cities, crafting laws, developing agriculture, developing irrigation, and overseeing the labor of the first workers, and #3 Mesopotamian rulers were worshiped as gods.

Here, for example, is one Sumerian creation story:

And part of another:

When you combine this with the fact that in Sumerian religious artwork you have gods portrayed as clothed men and women sitting on thrones being served by masses of naked people, I think this bolsters the view that human rulers were seen as gods - the "gods" were human rulers.

Now it may be, even in the Mesopotamian case, that there was some pre-existing concept of gods based on the natural elements, but it seem that even if this were the case, that this god concept was merged with the worship of humans as gods and that many of the characteristics of the Mesopotamian gods were taken on after this merger, i.e. the gods as law givers, the gods as judges of people's actions, the gods as creators, the gods as rulers, etc.

What I tend to think is that the written Sumerian creation accounts came hundreds or thousand of years after the origins of the earliest cities and that the accounts they give are religiously transformed mythologized accounts that are infused with real accounts of the origins of the first cities and the dawn of "civilization".

We are talking here about oral traditions that had been handed down over generations, mixed with other religious traditions and also incorporating and memorializing accounts of real things that happened.

The gods in Mesopotamian religion, though, are very humanized, and they are depicted as living on earth prior to their "creation of humans", the point of which was to remove the need to do labor from "the gods".

Here are parts of Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story:

I'm not claiming that Enki or Marduk were real ancient kings, I'm simply saying that I think these accounts incorporate both the real and the unreal and that the concepts of what a god was in ancient Mesopotamian culture was heavily based on the worship of humans rulers. The gods have the qualities of human rulers and human rulers were worships as gods.

Actually there was another website I was going to reference here, but it seems to be offline now: http://cc.usu.edu/~fath6/contents-bible.htm

That was a website by an anthropologist that discussed the relationship of "eden" to Mesopotamian culture, in which what he was saying was that "eden" comes from a word that meant "wilderness" and his reading the Adam and Eve story is that it was a commentary on an existing Mesopotamian creation story from the perspective of the "wilderness dwellers". The Sumerian and Babylonian stories are from the perspective of the "city dwellers".

What his theory is, is that the Jewish story comes from a tradition of "rural" people and perhaps slaves, who viewed city life as bad and corrupting who idealized rural life. They were, perhaps, the other side of the equation from the Sumerian type accounts. What they did was take the existing pro-urban mythology of the region and turn it up side down, instead of praising the building of cities and agriculture, as the Sumerians and Babylonian did, they praised the time before the people were introduced to the cities, the simper time in the wilderness before people became subject to ruler and laws and city life.

This seems pretty plausible to me, especially since there are other similar cases in Genesis, for example the Noah flood account, which is also clearly a reinterpretation of a prior religious tradition that turns the meaning of the prior story on its head.

So, the Genesis stories seem to be giving a different perspective on a common ancestral Mesopotamian religious tradition. One side of that tradition is recorded the Sumerian and Babylonian accounts, this is the side of the dominant cultures, who were the masters of civilization, and the other side is recorded in the Jewish accounts, which reflects the views of perhaps slaves or other dominated people, who were the ones being trampled on by the dominant civilizations.

So we have these dominant cultures which originated these traditions, and then we have these conquered people who's cultures were overtaken by the dominant cultures, but they rejected it and put their own spin on it.

This would be something very similar to Afro-Caribbean or Afro-American religious traditions, where their own prior traditions were largely wiped out by the cultural upheaval of the whites who enslaved them, thus they adopted much of the religious traditions of the dominant civilization, but, especially in places like Haiti and Brazil, they also infused that tradition with their own beliefs and also turned much of it upside down, writing their own perspective into it.

I don't think that there is really much comparable between native Australian religion and the forces that shaped early Jewish religion or Mesopotamian religion in general. Mesopotamian religion was clearly heavily influenced by farming and the building of cities and establishment of empires, things that never happened in Australia.