Garden of Eden - Who lied?

by refiners fire 17 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  JanH

  rf,

  Though it is contradictory in some ways because God has already commanded them to become fruitful.

  In our Bibles that appears to be the case, yes. The sentence you refer to appears in Gen 1:28. However, there are two different myths in the first chapters of Genesis. One, the most famous one, is Genesis 1:1 to 2:2. The second creation account in Genesis (the oldest) begins in 2:3. Note the change from Elohist to Yahwist from verse 3. I sometimes suspect the guy who redacted these together had some sense of humour.

  In the second account, we find no command to be fruitful. Indeed, quite the opposite.

  This is actually not the only example of Yahwew being jealous of human sexuality. One can speculate that the religious command to cut a tip of every man's penis is related to the idea that when humans procreate, they in fact infringe on a divine activity, and have to "pay the price" for that.

  Recommended reading: Jack Miles: God -- A Biography.

  - Jan
  --
  The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.
• 

  refiners fire

  ah..so.
  well and good, even more information for attacking the fundies with.
  Actually, if you just LOOK at that first page of the King James you can SEE the change Jan mentions. The "Elohist" part is much denser. Closer type. Then the text spreads out.
  Amazing.
• 

  chappy

  Of course you're right RF when reading the passage literally. What I meant was that if the creative days are "interprited" as more than 24
  hours then it would stand to reason that the day of dying would/could be likewise.

  Zecharia Sitchen has written some interesting articles on the subject of the sexual inuendo. He implies interbreeding between early humanoids and an alien race. I'll see if I can dig up one of his articles. It's entertaining if you like that kind of stuff.

  later,
  chappy
• 

  Frenchy

  The account does not prohibit sex. More has to be 'read into it' in order for the reader to come away with that idea. The account does tell us that a change came over the man and the woman even before God spoke to them. They became ashamed of their nakedness. An innocence was lost with the partaking of the fruit, a relationship died that day. Some theologians say that the death of which God spoke was the spiritual death of Adam and Eve. God did not lie. The serpent was not entirely untruthful either, but then how many liars do you know use the truth to mask their falsehoods? They all do. The serpent said that she would not die. She died, figuratively, spiritually, and eventually literally. Why was that fact not brought out in the discussion yet? Why is only God accused of lying?

  The Bible does more than relate past events. It serves to help us see ourselves, our motives, our hearts. It appears that we can only see what we allow ourselves to see. Some see good there, others see only evil. Adam and Eve were allowed to see in a way never before allowed them. They became like God in their ability to see evil and good and what was the result of that marvelous insight? What did they see when their eyes were opened and the viewed paradise and looked upon themselves, the crowning achievement of God's creative work? The saw something about their bodies that made the ashamed. Of all the wonderful things to see, they saw something ugly in something that was beautiful...Sort of like when we look into the Bible. What do we see???
• 

  Mindchild

  I find it interesting to look at the changes in meaning of text over time. You can easily do this even with modern nursery rhymes and stories which often had rather ugly inspirations. Knowing this trend happens over time, you can look at the Bible in the same way.

  Refiner's Fire...your example is one that I had thought of before as well. When this story was first passed around orally people knew what a "day" was. They didn't get some wild idea that a day was 1000, 7000, 49,000 years or whatever. Further, as we know that the material in Genesis came from at least several different authors, it is likely that these same people never seen any internal errors in their stories until much later when someone started writing them down collectively and on top of this the meanings changed over time. Thus, the impossibility of taking anything literally.

  I do think it interesting to see some ancient themes emerge though. You have the "fear" theme popping up all over the place for example. God is worried that man will become godlike (wasn't there something like this in the Greek Mythology also?) and so the God's that be, need to step in and spoil that plan. Same thing happened with the infamous Tower of Babel. God is the big spoiler you know.

  If you go even further in looking at the Bible without the Watchtower blinders on, you see some other interesting things to think about too from the Genesis account. Take the big "TEST" for instance...that the dubs love to point to, that we are trying to prove God is worthy of worshiping so he can exterminate anyone who isn't a dub. Well, I guess God lost back in Noah's day, he ended up destroying the world according to the Bible and then he was sure pretty pissed off with the results after that. Looks like God is always at the losing end of things...no wonder he is so angry and pissed all the time!

  Kind Regards,

  Skipper
• 

  anewperson

  The man & woman did die in one "yohm" the Hebrew word translated either 1) day in the sense of 24 hours, or 2) day as in an indefinite time period as when we speak of the day of the dinosaur, Napoleon's day etc The second meaning is the correct one. God (=the Source of all life) did not lie.
• 

  drawcad_1

  Looks like a question that I have spent some time pondering, so that I will give my two cents worth, and hopefully before this discussion gets to old.

  Before I get in to this to far I want to point out that I believe this to be just another myth that, like what was said earlier, has the gods holding something back from man.

  I had quite the argument with my JW wife over this exact problem, and it took us an hour before I heard that “sometimes it just doesn’t make sense but you have to believe anyway”.

  It is very obvious who was the liar, and who wasn’t, and that this was just the first test of many that god put before humans. Now, if we believe that this was a tree of knowledge of right and wrong, then we have to know that they did not have this knowledge before eating from the tree. Think of the little game that you could play with a three year old. Who still doesn’t quite grasp the difference of what is bad yet, give them a marshmallow and tell them that you will leave the room for ten minutes, when you come back if they still have the marshmallow you will give them two, but if they eat it they will not get any more. This would be the same test put in front of man by a god that the books of Moses points to as a god that likes to test his creations.

  I would like to point out also that the devil was not a part of this story, and was a later creation. The author of this book did not even believe in Satan, but that both good and bad were dispensed by one god.

  Once, god finds out that man has eaten from the fruit, and discovered the knowledge of right and wrong, it is said, “look he has become like one of us”. I think that the knowledge of right and wrong, or free will, is what is being referred to, this god created us and gave us no ability to think on our own. After this took place he put guards around the tree of life, therefore stopping Adam & Eve from attaining everlasting life. In other words he changed the rules.
• 

  Abaddon

  The whole account is a fabrication.

  Now, if we use mathematical principles (two negatives make a positive), then someone lying in a fictional account is actually telling the truth. And someone telling the truth is, well, lying.

  Anyway, any sensible person knows we are on the back of four huge elephants stood atop a massive turtle, the Great A'tuin.

  No, seriously, isn't it funny how Greco-Roman creation myths are taken as myths, and the Biblical creation myth is taken as something to be poured over and discussed at length? Anyone not exposed to the Bible and then given it to read would assume that it was just another creation myth well before they got to the ventriloquist snake bit.

  People living in glass paradigms shouldn't throw stones...