Our Story Resumes
Into and Out of the Garden
And … we’re back.
A refresher might be in order, so here’s a quick recap of the first year of this blog. Those who’ve joined us during the break can go here for links to earlier posts that go into greater detail about some of these things.
Having started reciting each “Day” of Gen 1:1–2:3 at the beginning of my prayers each morning, I realized I didn’t fully understand what I was saying. That is, I understood the words, but not what the writer was trying to convey. I could (more or less) translate the text but didn’t have time, first thing in the morning, to think about why each day of creation was being told the way it was.
I decided to begin exploring that and to invite you along for the journey. I learned so much that it seemed worthwhile to continue, and now here we are a year later in the middle of Genesis 3. I wouldn’t exactly call that a breakneck pace; on the other hand, we’ve certainly left some things unexplained and definitely turned back from trails that might have led us along a byway in who knows what direction.
Since religion is a private matter, I can’t expect my readers to believe the same things I do. Most of you will presumably have realized that I’m a Jew, not a Christian, and that I approach the text primarily as if it were a human document. My own life path, which slowly tugged me closer and closer over many decades to intensive study of the Bible, tells me there’s something else going on here as well, but your private beliefs most likely differ from mine. (There’s no accounting for taste.)
So I explain what I’m saying and why I understand the text the way I do based on the following assumption: Another writer who wished to be understood — like me, but thousands of years ago in ancient Israel — was trying to communicate certain things for certain reasons that good readers ought to be able to comprehend.
I don’t believe that the Israelites got the entirety of the Pentateuch from Moses, as some Jews and Christians do. Many things in the rest of the Bible seem to contradict that presumption — 2 Kings 22, for one.
I’m also not a “fundamentalist” about the biblical documents J, E, D, and P. I should point out that religious believers often think the Documentary Hypothesis was framed by Julius Wellhausen in the 19th century and has been lying on the table unchanged ever since; it hasn’t. Biblical scholars have been arguing about it for all those years. You’ll find a not-too-dated look at the current state of things (from a dozen or so years ago) at this link.
My own preference — which I realize is a reflection of how I read more generally, in English as well — is to recognize the writerly “voices” in the Bible. I discussed this at much greater length in a book written for a general readership, The Bible’s Many Voices, and in 22 episodes of a podcast I briefly did to accompany that book.
For me, the voices in the Pentateuch are …
D, the voice of Deuteronomy;
P, a priestly voice;
J and E, mostly (I believe) older material that doesn’t have either a D or P accent; and
H, a later priestly voice that Israel Knohl concluded in his book The Sanctuary of Silence was that of the writer who collected earlier material and created the Torah.
I understand the material we’re reading together now to have been assembled and to some extent rewritten by H, a priest who thought the priests needed to incorporate a Deuteronomic perspective into their worldview.
You can read or re-read a longer discussion that’s specifically about the two versions of the creation story (Version 1 from a priestly voice and Version 2 from J) here. I’m convinced they were originally distinct, but we’ve also seen things in the composite reading that suggest to me a later writer assembled them in a way that I would call literary; for example the use of terem and himtir in Gen 2:5.
To recap: We were “reading through the story of creation” in Gen 1:1–2:3, after which we examined 2:4, the hinge verse between the two different voices of creation. Now we’re reading through a much longer story I’ve called “Into and Out of the Garden,” which will take us through the end of Genesis 3. Our friends, the original human beings, have eaten something YHWH did not want them to eat, and the consequences of that are playing out right now.
In the last post before we hit the pause button, at the end of July, YHWH God asked the woman in our story — not yet named Eve, as you’ll remember — what she had done. He wasn’t just curious. מה עשית in Biblical Hebrew doesn’t mean “What did you do?” as we’d ask that question in English. It means, “What have you done?!”
When he asked the original earthling “Where are you?” it was a question he really wanted to know the answer to. Shortly, he will also address the third character in our story, the snake, and will not even bother to ask a question. But the woman is playing a somewhat intermediate role. In the next post, we’ll see how she replies to YHWH’s question.