A Focus on Thinking
Into and Out of the Garden
Last time, I introduced Konrad Schmid’s article on the story in Genesis 2–3, which I’ve been calling “Into and Out of the Garden,” as a “sapiential” text — that is, a text that comes out of the biblical Wisdom tradition. I want to use this post to trace a line of thought that seems to me to make sense out of the Garden story as a wisdom text. You may or may not agree with the line of development I’m about to draw; that has no bearing on the perspective Schmid presents, which I would say is widely accepted, that wisdom, knowledge, and human thought are a major concern of this story.
My own perspective on how that came to be — not unique to me, though I do not want to claim that every other Bible scholar you encounter would accept it completely — can be summed up this way:
Deuteronomy is strongly influenced by the Wisdom perspective, that is, by the role human reason plays in human life. As I’ve written elsewhere, it is a biblical book with a very deliberate focus on the mind. Another biblical text might warn you not to worship idols or commit abominations; Deuteronomy will warn you not to learn to commit abomination (18:9) or let anyone teach you to do so (20:18). Deuteronomy insists that you must love YHWH “with all your heart” (6:5 and elsewhere), but “heart” in the Bible never refers to the organ that pumps blood; it refers to what we would call your “head.” What this Deuteronomic expression is saying is that you must love YHWH “with all your mind.” There mustn’t be any thoughts in your head that do not align 100% with what YHWH wants from you.
H, as biblical scholars call the author of the Holiness Code (with its kernel in Leviticus 17–26) was a priest who wanted to combine priestly tradition with the ideas and ideology of Deuteronomy. I think what attracted him was Deuteronomy’s intense social justice perspective: “Justice, justice shall thou pursue,” as many of us were taught to translate Deut 16:20. As a priest, H translated this social justice perspective into a democratization of holiness: Not just the priests, but all of Israel should aspire to the holiness (קדושה qedusha) and purity (טהורה tehora) that were required of priests who would serve inside the Tabernacle, the Torah location that stands for the ultimate Temple in Jerusalem. (See Lecture 3 here for Micah Goodman’s discussion of how ultra-Orthodox Jews in contemporary Israel similarly want to “democratize” religion.) I don’t know whether H attributed the same importance to psychology that D did, but you do find the same kind of psychological awareness in the Holiness Code that you find in Deuteronomy.
H is responsible for creating the Torah, as described in the book The Sanctuary of Silence by Israel Knohl. I accept this perspective but I realize I don’t recall the arguments for it well enough to present them to you here in capsule form, so I will ask you to take it as a given for the sake of following the rest of my discussion.
Contemporary scholars agree that the Torah was assembled from earlier sources. The Torah says so too! — though of course not in the same way as modern Bible scholarship. When Num 21:27 recalls the poem beginning “Come to Heshbon,” it is quoting an earlier piece of writing, perhaps The Book of the Wars of YHWH quoted in vv. 14–15 earlier in that chapter. For present purposes, let me point you to the earlier post discussing the possibility that earlier sources were woven together with a literary as well as a religious eye. See here for a reminder of one possible such example in what we’ve read so far.
It’s therefore reasonable to assume — although this is not the “traditional” assumption of the Documentary Hypothesis — that we can (1) identify different original sources in the Torah and nonetheless (2) find linkages that connect passages from those different original sources into a more or less unified whole. I’ve podcasted and spoken before about the quite obvious literary linkage between the beginning of Genesis 12 and the beginning of Genesis 22, but I haven’t posted or published anything about it to link to. Nonetheless, you can find a hint of it here and in the article by Yoel Bin-Nun you’ll find linked in that essay. Because Gen 12:1 mentions YHWH, it must be from J, since E and P do not reveal that name until Exod 3:15 and 6:2 respectively. Gen 22:1, which calls God elohim, is understood to be from the E document. Yet the literary connection between them cannot be a coincidence. It must have been created by the “composer” (as I like to call him) of the Torah, “H” of the Holiness Code.
I am therefore quite happy to conclude that Genesis 2–3, though most likely originally from the source biblical scholars call J, has also been shaped, and was included after Genesis 1, by H as composer of the Torah as a whole. Later in this series, perhaps when we get to Genesis 5, I’ll have occasion to discuss an article by a scholar named Bill Arnold, who considers what we’ve been calling Version 1 of the creation story as specifically a Holiness “preamble.” He writes, “The Holiness preamble views Gen 2–3 as authoritative to the point of being unassailable. I do not believe the chapter was written to replace or supplant Gen 2–3, but rather to nuance that text and prepare the reader to frame it properly.” As I’ve said, I would not be surprised if H did some rewriting to frame those chapters “properly,” that is, as the down-on-the-ground view of the more scientific-sounding Genesis 1.
I’ve mentioned some of these ideas before and will continue to discuss them as we proceed. For now, with the introduction of a snake as shrewd as the humans are nude, our final bit of background information has been included. When Gen 3:1 continues, the plot of Version 2 will move into high gear.