Original Sin or Original Sinfulness?

2: Genesis 1–11

It is only possible to understand chapter 3 of the Book of Genesis if we understand it within the context of chapters 1–11. There is widespread agreement among commentators that chapters 1–11 constitute a distinct literary unit within the fifty chapters that make up Genesis. Chapters 1–11 are sometimes referred to as the mythological chapters since, unlike chapters 12–50, they do not pretend to be about events or characters in history, except in the very broad sense that what they portray is true or typical of what actual historical people did and do. They are not history but myth, albeit the myth of the Hebrews is quite different in style and character from the myth, say, of the Greeks or of most other peoples. Hebrew myth is free of the fantastical tales spun by the Greek imagination, and there is evidence that it had already undergone a degree of ‘demythologisation’ by the time it was written down, so that instead of the myriad gods, goddesses and fabulous creatures of the Greeks we find only a strict monotheism.

The mythological chapters of Genesis are organically linked to the historical sections of the bible that follow; they belong to the same literary composition because they act as a prelude to these later sections. By this I mean that they are analogous to the musical overture to an opera or a symphony. They introduce, briefly but tellingly, the themes and motifs we shall encounter in the longer and more detailed work that is to come; they provide a taster for what follows; they depict patterns and schemes and disclose moral and spiritual insights that we come to recognise as typical in the bible narrative. At the same time they contain messages of their own that transcend time and place because they exemplify forms of human behaviour that are universal.

We can begin to gain some insight into the literary characteristics of Genesis 1–11 if we attend to the major protagonists in each sub-section. In chapters 1 and 2, where we encounter the two distinct accounts of creation, God is the main, indeed the sole, protagonist. In chapter 3, speech is introduced; in the first half the snake is the main protagonist and, in the second half, it is God once more. The woman has an important but fairly brief talking role towards the middle of the chapter and the man, who says nothing, is assigned a crucial walk-on part. Chapter 3 almost has the characteristics of a self-contained short story with its own beginning, middle and end. It begins by introducing the snake as the most cunning of all wild creatures and ends with the dramatic image of the revolving flaming sword that bars the way to the tree of life. In between there is a sense of heightened tension, a conflict between the divine and the human wills, followed by a painful denouement. It is a gripping, fascinating tale despite the fact that the language in which it is told is generally simple, muted and undramatic. At the climax of the story we read simply that the woman took and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge; “and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.” (Genesis 3: 6) As many commentators have noted, chapter 3 makes no reference to a “fall” or “fallen nature” and words like “sin”, “lapse”, “disobedience” or “rebellion” are conspicuous by their absence. So what is happening in chapter 3? At this point, I shall confine myself to saying that chapter 3 is broadly about a change wrought in Man¹ that causes him to be seen as profoundly different from the other animals created by God.

In chapter 4, the style of writing changes yet again. The man and the woman, only recently named Adam and Eve, have children and most of the story concerns the slaying by their son Cain of Cain's brother Abel. The tone of the language is far less muted than in chapter 3 as we read of how “sin is couching at the door”, of how Cain “rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him”, of how God chastised Cain telling him “your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground”, and of how Cain cried to God “Am I my brother's keeper?” From chapter 4 onwards, Man is centre stage and human beings are the main actors, the agents who do things and get things done. With chapter 4 we enter human history. The history is still in the form of mythological narrative; we are not dealing with actual historical events; but we are dealing with Man presented as a self-determining agent of change and with the passage of time, as one generation follows another. Chronology begins to take on a much sharper focus than was the case in the first three chapters of Genesis. With the passing of time we read of the downward moral spiralling of the human characters, of the evil things that they do and, alongside that, we read of the emergence of what we would call civilisation: the invention and manufacture of musical instruments, the invention of bricks and the building of the first cities. Human violence and civilisation both come to the fore in chapter 4. In the remaining chapters of this section of Genesis, Man shares centre stage with God and what is recorded is a working out of a new relationship – or covenant – that is established between God and Man. In keeping with the traditional interpretation, I wish to maintain that what occurs from chapter 4 onwards is presented as following, as effect from cause, from the events that are recounted in chapter 3. Chapter 3 plays a pivotal role in the switch from God as the major protagonist in the bible to the situation in which the main protagonists are Man and God as related beings.

Genesis 3

So what is it exactly that occurs in Genesis 3? That is the central question I wish to address in this article. To find the answer, let us begin with the statement that follows the central incident, the eating from the forbidden tree: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” We have seen how Augustine interprets this as evidence of a conflict between the rational faculties of our first parents and their bodies; the shame that caused them to cover their nakedness was a product of their inability, resulting from the first sin, to control their bodily urges by means of reason. Augustine felt that this shame was empirical proof of sin, a concrete fact he could point to as evidence that Man had sinned. By contrast, I wish to propose the view that the sense of shame experienced by Adam and Eve was a result of their becoming human. For ancient people only animals went about naked; humans were distinguished from animals in so far as they alone wore clothes; for the ancient Hebrews, clothes were appropriate, nakedness was inappropriate, for human beings.² Wearing clothes was a human characteristic, one that marked out the difference between Man and the beasts. James Barr tells us that the word used for ‘shame’ at this point in the story is not associated with guilt or wrong-doing but simply means ‘shy’ or ‘embarrassed’³– for these ancient people it was undignified for human beings to be seen naked; and we are not so very far removed from them in our attitudes to nakedness today, as a moment's reflection should confirm.⁴ The fact that Adam and Eve experienced shame so suddenly – at the end of chapter 2 we were told that the man and his wife were naked and unashamed – was because they had suddenly become human. Before they ate from the forbidden fruit they were not human, at least not fully human. Now they were human. In recognition of this fact, the Lord God, once he had meted out to them the punishment due to them for their misconduct, made garments from skins “and clothed them”. Augustine cites this as evidence of God's solicitude for our first parents shortly after they had offended him by sinning.⁵ It takes on an altogether deeper significance if it is seen to be an acknowledgement and acceptance by God of the pair's new human status and as his fatherly preparation for them to go forth into the world as self-determining historical agents. The social and psychological importance of clothes for humans could hardly be more touchingly revealed. The human status of the couple is reinforced by the fact that it is at this point in the story that for the first time we are told their names, Adam and Eve. They are now named persons.

The punishments the Lord God administered to the first humans are another way of indicating their difference from the other animals. The woman is condemned to bear children in pain and to be subject to her husband; the man is condemned to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow; the ground is cursed because of him and we are told that it will yield him “thorns and thistles”, symbols of pain and hardship. The pain of childbirth was something that must have struck the ancient authors as a distinctively human characteristic since, although other animals can suffer “difficult births”, as a rule they do not suffer the intense pains of human labour.⁶ Likewise, the other animals do not work on their environment in order to make it support them; rather they interact with their environment and appear to enjoy its fruits without the intervention of hard work. So it is that the mythical tale of Genesis 3 portrays what the authors perceived to be distinctively human characteristics, and ones humans complain of as unpleasant, as punishments meted out to them by the Lord God for their action in eating from the forbidden tree. This is an aetiological myth, a tale that explains how things are by explaining how they came to be that way. In this it resembles the Just So stories of Rudyard Kipling, a form of story extremely popular in the culture and folklore of the Indian sub-continent, which frequently involves talking animals and the like, and which attempts to explain by means of a fanciful tale how some factual but distinctive feature – such as the camel's hump or the leopard's spots – came to be. As we find them in Genesis 3, the punishments support the claim that Genesis 3 is about the origins or birth of Man as fully and recognisably human. What the tale clearly does not say is that the image of God in Man was defaced or diminished on account of the human action described in Genesis 3.⁷

How then did Man, God's creative masterpiece, become human? The answer is that he ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The ability to discriminate between good and evil, moral discernment, was – once more – a characteristic that Man did not share with the other animals. The ancient Hebrews saw knowledge – and the powers that go with it – as belonging in the first place to God, as a divine attribute.⁸ Chapter 3 of Genesis depicts Man's eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge as a “breakthrough” moment, as a decisive and irrevocable step taken by Man, causing him to become distanced from the other animals created by God and closer in his make-up to God himself. It is true that the second creation story, which like the story of Adam and Eve belongs to the Yahwist tradition, relates that at the moment of creation God breathed his spirit into Man, indicating how he differed from the other animals. But that was only the first step in the “humanising” of Man. What I am suggesting is that the “humanising” of Man is reported in Genesis as coming about in two stages: first, God creates Man by breathing his spirit into the dust of the earth. In this way, hominid Man is created: at this first stage what is created merely has the potentiality of becoming the human being known to the authors. A second stage was needed to bring about a fully recognisable human being, the creature whose puzzling nature and make up the Yahwist authors are seeking to explain. This second stage occurred when Man ate from the tree of knowledge. Man suddenly came to enjoy one of the supreme attributes of God himself, namely knowledge. This second stage in the humanising of Man makes history possible: possessed of knowledge and the freedom of action that goes with it, Man was now equipped to become a self-determining agent of change and discovery. Man was about to embark on the great journey known as human history. Man is now fully human and capable of entering human history as a self-determining, intellectual and moral being. He is no longer tied to God's apron strings nor can he expect any more to play a merely passive role protected by divine guidance and control; he has achieved a maturity and level of intelligence that enables him to become creative in his own right. The story of the Fall of Man, as it has traditionally been called, that follows on the story of God's creation is, in fact, the story of Man's ascent to the very knowledge that will enable him to become a co-creator of the planet under God. The sudden shame experienced by the man and the woman once they have eaten from the tree of knowledge is evidence of the dawning of human intelligence and freedom. For it is the same human self-consciousness that makes men and women aware of their nakedness and wear clothes that also causes them to be capable of moral discernment. Pace St Augustine, it is not that the human couple have suddenly become ashamed of involuntary sexual arousal but rather they are now self-present, self-aware, and possessed of a sense of their dignity in a way that is not possible for non-human animals.⁹

The question then arises of why the authors of Genesis present Man's acquisition of freedom, knowledge and powers of decision as an action forbidden by God. Here I would confine myself to saying that the Israelite authors who edited the materials that make up Genesis 1–11, probably during the exilic or post-exilic period (approximately the sixth, fifth or fourth centuries BC), besides feeling themselves constrained by what had been passed down to them, were determined that God could not be held responsible for the forms of behaviour manifested by these free and intelligent human beings. By this stage there was clear acceptance that freedom and intelligence made sin possible and the authors wished to dissociate God completely from sin, which was solely Man's responsibility. They could not allow Man any excuse for blaming his own sinful conduct on God. Hence they told the tale as one of Man's illicit acquisition of gifts that are first and foremost attributes of God himself. But the tale is more complicated than that. It is also possible that these ancient peoples could imagine a time when men and women were much closer in nature to the other animals. There is evidence of this in the folktales of many primitive peoples, and the Hebrew author of Ecclesiastes considers that Man has much in common with beasts even if he is divinely created (Eclessiastes 3: 18f). How Man, of all the animals on earth, came to be so singularly different from the other animals was something requiring explanation. The explanation devised by the ancient Hebrews was that Man somehow acquired an attribute of God himself, a particular kind of knowledge that the other animals manifestly did not have – knowledge of good and evil.

The Primitive Tradition

If we are to gain an insight into the meaning of the story told in Genesis 3 by entering into the mindset of the ancient Hebrews, then a good starting place would seem to be to attempt to understand the story as it would have been understood by the Hebrews during what anthropologists term the “primitive period” of their existence. Fortunately for us, we have an excellent guide to the modes of thinking of primitive people, and in particular of primitive Hebrew people, in the work of the distinguished anthropologist, Mary Douglas, in her by now classic text, Purity and Danger. ¹⁰ Although Douglas illustrates the theoretical position she sets out in that book by reference to the Book of Leviticus and, in particular, the ‘abominations’ and prohibitions we find in Leviticus 11–15, it is my belief that her thinking has broader application and throws a very sharp light on the narrative we find in Chapters 1–11 of Genesis and, in particular, on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden recounted in Genesis 3. For the sake of clarity, it will be necessary for me first to set out Douglas's theoretical thinking at some length, a task made less onerous by the brisk directness of her writing style, before attempting to show in some detail how it might be thought to apply to Genesis 1–11.

The Holiness of Yahweh

We should be better able to understand what Mary Douglas is saying in Purity and Danger if we develop an appreciation of the concept she considers to be central to the designations of ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ as applied to animals, food and other things by the ancient Hebrews. This is the concept of divine Holiness. For the ancient Hebrews, at least by the time the various sections of the Book of Leviticus came to be written, God was totally ‘other’, an exalted being far beyond humanity and human understanding. This is a motif that is repeated throughout the OT, one that forms a constant backdrop to everything that is recounted there. As it is expressed by the prophet Isaiah:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55: 8–9)

It is a theme of many of the psalms:

“The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens! Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down upon the heavens and the earth?” (Ps. 113: 4–6)

To express this divine exaltation, the Hebrews employed the word “Holy”. This is the quintessential attribute of Yahweh. It means more than we normally think of when we use the word “holy”. For the Hebrews the word “holy” could only be employed of people or places metaphorically since it was, strictly speaking, a word reserved for God himself. It was a word suggesting how God was set apart, different from all else:

“I am God, and not man, the Holy One in your midst.” (Hosea, 11:9)

Isaiah frequently refers to “The Holy One of Israel”, suggesting how God is inscrutable, incomprehensible, awesome, and the same phrase is found in other books of the OT. Holiness as used of God is not a moral category; it would be absurd to say that God lived a holy life.¹¹ Rather the word suggests that God is not a thing alongside other things, that God stands apart from everything else, that no mere human can bear to stand in his presence:

“Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?” (1 Samuel 6: 20)

At the very centre of the temple in Jerusalem lay the “Holy of Holies”, the place where Yahweh was present among his people, where no one might enter, save the high priest, and that only once a year. The temple's architecture was designed so that proximity and access to this Holy place was determined by the holiness of the office bearer in the eyes of the community.¹² The animals offered as sacrifice in the temple had to be unblemished and perfect of their kind.

The Holiness of Yahweh is strange, frightening and awe-inspiring. After seeing Yahweh in a vision, the prophet Isaiah proclaims: “Woe is me! For I am lost; I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5) Uncleanness is the opposite of holiness; things that were unclean or defiled were things that were somehow opposed to the holiness of Yahweh.¹³

Purity and danger

It is from this central concept of God's Holiness, according to Mary Douglas, that there follows or flows the classification of some animals and other creatures as ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ in chapters 11–15 of Leviticus and, hence, as fit or unfit to eat. Commenting on the Hebrew meaning of the word ‘holy’, she says that apart from its root meaning of being “set apart” holiness connotes “wholeness” and “completeness”:

“To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and of the kind. The dietary rules (of the Book of Leviticus) merely develop the metaphor of holiness on the same lines.”¹⁴ She continues: “But in general the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their class; or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world.”¹⁵

The holiness of Yahweh was for the ancient Hebrews the central principle or fact by means of which they organised their universe and distinguished between what was dangerous and what was propitious:

“Fertility of women, livestock and fields is promised as a result of blessing and this is obtained by keeping covenant with God and observing all his precepts and ceremonies (Deut. XXVIII, 15–24) … positive and negative precepts are held to be efficacious and not just expressive: observing them draws down prosperity, infringing them brings danger. We are thus entitled to treat them in the same way as we treat primitive ritual avoidances whose breach unleashes danger to men. The precepts and ceremonies alike are focused on the holiness of God which men must create in their own lives. So this is a universe in which men prosper by conforming to holiness and perish when they deviate from it … ”¹⁶

Holiness requires that members of the tribe or race should not confuse the different classes of things; it involves discrimination, definition and order; “morality does not conflict with holiness, but holiness is more a matter of separating that which should be separated than of protecting … rights.”¹⁷ Because holiness is associated with completeness, wholeness and oneness, hybrids and the confusion of classes are regarded as abominations. It is from this general category of holiness that the ancient Hebrews derived their classification of what could and could not be eaten and the taboos attached to this classification. So for example, cloven-footed animals that chew the cud could be eaten, but those that were only cloven footed but did not chew the cud, such as the camel, or which chewed the cud but were not cloven-footed, like the badger, were taboo and could not be eaten. Likewise the hare, “because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you.” Pigs were also outlawed because they failed fully to conform to what was perceived to be the perfection and wholeness of the class of animals deemed fit to eat; for this reason they were judged to be unclean. (Leviticus 11: 3–8)

The abominations and prohibitions of Leviticus are not irrational, as some have claimed¹⁸, nor were they imposed simply for reasons of hygiene, as others have maintained¹⁹, but derive from the requirement to observe holiness in one's life in conformity with “the oneness, purity and completeness of God.”²⁰“The abominations of Leviticus are the obscure unclassifiable elements which do not fit the pattern of the cosmos. They are incompatible with holiness and blessing.”²¹ As Douglas puts it in a slightly later work, “In Purity and Danger I argued that the dietary rules in Leviticus XI afford a shorthand summary of the categories of Israelite culture … The dietary rules, I suggested, should be taken as a whole and related to the totality of symbolic structures organising the universe. In this way the abominations are seen as anomalies within a particular logical scheme.”²²

To breach these basic classifications by, for example, eating or even touching animals deemed unclean, was to make oneself unclean, to become polluted. And to be unclean was to be a danger to oneself and to others.

“A polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone … Pollution can be committed intentionally, but intention is irrelevant to its effect – it is more likely to happen inadvertently.”²³

On the peculiar nature of the dangers pollution unleashes, Douglas comments,

“This is as near as I can get to defining a particular class of dangers which are not powers invested in humans, but which can be released by human action. The power which presents a danger for careless humans is very evidently a power inhering in the structure of ideas, a power by which the structure is expected to protect itself.”²⁴

The breakdown of the strict system of classification by which the cosmos is ordered creates a dangerous situation, and that is why hybrids and other anomalies are regarded as dangerous and why ‘transitional states’ are dangerous.

“Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others.”²⁵

Douglas refers approvingly to Van Gennep, an anthropologist who

“saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous … The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him (the initiate) from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status … To say that the boys (novices) risk their lives says precisely that to go out of the formal structure and to enter the margins is to be exposed to power that is enough to kill them or make their manhood. The theme of death and rebirth, of course, has other symbolic functions: the initiates die to their old life and are reborn to the new. The whole repertoire of ideas concerning pollution and purification are used to mark the gravity of the event and the power of ritual to remake a man.”²⁶

Application to Genesis 1–11

It strikes me that this sustained argument from a distinguished anthropologist on how primitive people made sense of their universe by means of distinctions and classifications grounded in their most profound religious concept²⁷ helps us to see the basic pattern of the events recounted in Genesis 1–11. With their powerful understanding of the oneness, wholeness and completeness of God, the ancient Hebrews must have regarded whatever came from the hand of God as sharing the same oneness, wholeness and completeness. Above all, the creature who stood at the summit of creation, the one regarded as God's masterpiece, who was made in the image and likeness of God himself, must have been considered to be endowed with these qualities of integrity and completeness. For man then to breach that integrity, to shatter that state of completeness, by trespassing on what was strictly speaking the divine attribute of knowledge of good and evil represented a breakdown of order and definition of immense proportions. We have seen how even to breach basic classifications in the matter of dealing with animals considered as potential foodstuffs was to incur pollution, to become defiled; how much more must it have struck the ancient Hebrews that to cross the threshold separating the created realm from the divine was to incur pollution and defilement and unleash danger on a cosmic scale. The basic order of the cosmos was shattered by Man's acquisition of the divine attribute of knowledge. Man was now a strange anomaly, a hybrid of animality and divinity. The danger unleashed in the world on account of this violation of the boundaries, as described in chapter 3 of Genesis, is seen in what follows – Cain's fratricide and the violence that fills the earth. It is little wonder that God begins to take stock and wonder about wiping Man out and starting all over again.

Anomolies

Commenting on anomalies, Mary Douglas says:

“Any given system of classification must give rise to anomalies, and any given culture must confront events which seem to defy its assumptions. It cannot ignore the anomalies which its scheme produces…This is why, I suggest, we find in any culture worthy of the name various provisions for dealing with ambiguous or anomalous events.”²⁸

How to deal with the anomaly of the newly emerged human, the hybrid of animality and divinity, was the problem confronting the Lord God from chapter 4 of Genesis onwards. The strange hybrid of animal impulses and ‘divine’ rationality had unleashed great evil upon the world, resulting in Cain's violent slaying of his own brother. Mary Douglas considers how primitive societies react to such anomalies:

“There are several ways of treating anomalies. Negatively, we can ignore, just not perceive them, or perceiving we can condemn. Positively, we can deliberately confront the anomaly and try to create a new pattern of reality in which it has a place.”²⁹

It is, I would suggest, this second, positive course of action that we come across in Genesis 1–11. The dangerous ‘transitional period’ that follows on Genesis 3, during which Cain becomes an outcast and violence fills the earth, culminates in the Flood and the new creation. The evil unleashed by Man's fateful crossing of the line separating the divine from the created realm should not be thought of as typical of human life or history, but rather as characteristic of a specific interlude or “transitional period” leading up to the Flood. Douglas quotes Eliade on the aptness of the imagery of water to suggest death and rebirth:

“In water everything is ‘dissolved’, every ‘form’ is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a ‘sign’, not an event. Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth … Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores – even if only for a moment – the integrity of the dawn of things.”³⁰

Chapters 7, 8 and 9 of Genesis show how God made use of the Flood to create the world anew so that the new post-Flood order of reality ‘fits’ with the new condition of Man. The anomaly represented by the ‘New Man’ that comes about after eating from the fruit is overcome by God's act of re-creation as he designs a universe in which this ‘New Man’ can fit. This clears up the meaning of the much disputed words of Yahweh to Adam indicating that he would die on the day he ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (from which Augustine infers that Man was created immortal, the “launching pad” for his argument in support of original sin), since these words refer to the fact that when this happened Man would die to his old self; in fact, the story of Man at this point is a narrative dramatisation of the ritual death and re-birth that is gone through by the novices referred to by Mary Douglas, a ritual death and re-birth brought about by the dissolution of the old world by flooding and the creation of the new.

A Rite of Passage

In an age that is weak on ritual, it is easy to underestimate the importance for primitive societies of rites of passage leading from childhood or adolescence to adulthood. Anthropologists divide such rites of passage into three phases: separation, when a rupture occurs within the normal routine of societal and family life and the novices are isolated from the rest of society; a period of transition or change which is often associated with marginality or liminality, when the novices are placed outside the limits and control of the wider society, a period often associated with danger, licence and disorder; and re-incorporation or initiation when the novices are finally initiated into their new adult roles and status in society. Rites of passage often have a strong transformational intention behind them, aiming to transform boys into men or girls into women, and so forth. Certainly the shift from their previous state by the novices undergoing these rites was seen to be as definitive as it was abrupt. The pattern typical of rites of passage should, I am suggesting, be seen as the one that underpins the stories told in Genesis 1–11: an age or stage of innocence and total dependency on God, found in Genesis 1–2; a stage of disruption and separation from God, sparked off by the events recounted in Genesis 3; and finally a stage of re-incorporation and readjustment – but on new terms because Man has come of age and is now capable of enjoying the freedom, and with it the responsibility, that goes with his new adult status, to be found in Genesis 9–11. The new “adult” relationship God forges with Man can be found in the covenant he establishes with Noah and his descendents, and the terms governing that relationship are spelled out in Genesis 9: 8–17.

Chapters 4–8 of Genesis – from Cain's fratricide to the Flood – should be seen as concerning the middle period, the dangerous period of transition, a period when humankind was outcast upon the earth and hence out of control, when ‘violence filled the earth’ and God wondered if he should destroy humanity and start anew. It was during this dangerous interim period that there occurred yet another violation of the human-divine boundary, yet another indicator of the breakdown of the proper order of things, with the unnatural sexual union between some angels (‘sons of God’) and women (‘daughters of men’: see Genesis 6: 1–4): “this Near Eastern myth is cited to illustrate the increase of sin and violence that led up to the great flood.”³¹ On reflection, because of the worthiness of Noah and his family, God decides to form a covenant with Man and to bring about a new creation. Within the terms of the covenant Man will be enabled to mature and grow in the exercise of his newfound freedom, to refine his ethical and spiritual understanding and so to come to terms with his newly acquired divinity. The covenant is to be the instrument through which God will educate humankind and help Man to live at peace with his newly acquired ‘divine’ powers, to take possession of them and begin to use them properly – as God wishes him to use them. God chooses not to destroy Man but rather to re-cast the whole of creation around this new “anomalous” creature. The “historical” sections of the bible that follow on Genesis 1–11 are the story of God's education of Man through his election of the Jews for his special covenantal tuition, leading up to the coming of Christ.³²

To interpret the story of Genesis 1–11 in the thought categories of ‘Primitive Religion’ is to see it as it was probably first narrated, as a story attempting to make sense of humankind by explaining Man as an anomaly of nature, as a strange hybrid with characteristics in common with the other animals but also as possessing attributes that set him apart from the other animals, just as surely as Yahweh is set apart from all of creation. To view Genesis 1–11 through the lens of the primitive tradition has the value of enabling us to grasp the basic outline of the story shorn of the various interpretations that were to become attached to it later. It is to see it in the most basic terms of creation, “transgression”, anomaly, pollution, danger and divine accommodation; but also as possessing elemental human significance not unlike the tale of Oedipus in Greek mythology – except that the Hebrew story is told as a prelude or overture to the history of a people and the “divine accommodation”, as I have termed the covenant, is something that will be played out and developed in the course of the history of this people.

The Christian era

The language of perfection, which we saw to be the language used in the OT about God, is also the language used in the NT about Christ. The Hebrew word for ‘perfect’–tom– refers to one who has kept his integrity and is in this way like God. So at the start of the Book of Job, Job is described as a ‘perfect and upright man’; here ‘perfect’ indicates blamelessness, being without blemish, and refers to someone who is lacking in duplicity or deceit. In the NT, the Greek word for ‘perfect’–teleios– also means complete, finished and when used of a person means ‘adult’ or ‘mature’. So in 1 Corinthians (14:20), Paul urges his listeners, “Do not be children in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in thinking mature (teleioi).” And the model for maturity is Christ, as Paul indicates when he tells the Ephesians that the gifts of Christ are “for the work of ministry, for building up the Body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine … ” (Eph. 4: 11–14).

In Hebrews 5: 14 there is a striking image of maturity that links directly to a central theme of this article. The author complains that his audience have become “dull of hearing” and are not ready to understand his explanation of what he means when he describes Jesus as “being made perfect” so that “he became the source of salvation”, adding that “though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of God's word. You need milk, not solid food; for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. But solid food is for the mature (teleion), for those who have their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.” This reference back to knowledge of good and evil suggests that this is knowledge that needs to be acquired, developed and refined over time, not a once and for all gift or acquisition; its proper use requires regular practice, resulting in growth and maturation. The author of Hebrews is suggesting here that maturation, growing in perfection, is the work of history, of time, taking forward what the OT reveals about the covenant and its purpose. The ability to discern between good and evil links back to the central event of Genesis 3 and, when cultivated and developed over time, is seen to be a mark of maturity and spiritual perfection. One might also ask if the development of this ability would be so lauded as an indicator of spiritual maturity if, as Augustine believed, Man's acquisition of the power to exercise it was a heinous crime against God!

The vocabulary of the Christian era harks back to the vocabulary and conceptual scheme of more primitive Hebrew thought, conveying the message of Christ as complete, mature, holy, through whom the Christian reaches up to the holiness of God himself. In the NT, we find three notions that come together: God as perfect; Jesus as the perfect man; the Christian who is urged to “put on Christ Jesus” (Romans 13:14), to be perfect in and through Jesus. In the NT, the word ‘perfect’ (teleios) appears to be more self-consciously developmental, to include the idea of becoming or growing to perfection; one becomes more like Christ over time and in this way more like God. In the Christian era Christ emerges as the one through and in whom, by the power of his Spirit, we are divinised, reconciled with the Father, and drawn into the Trinitarian life of God. The modern Christian thinker who has perhaps best expressed these ideas is Bernard Lonergan who comments on the notion of conversion in a way that is pertinent to a developing topic of this article, by linking conversion to consciousness, and precisely to what he calls the fourth level of consciousness, the existential level that goes beyond thinking and reasoning (though it does not leave these behind) and is concerned with deliberating, evaluating, controlling, deciding and acting: consciousness as moral, as – in a word – conscience. He then adds,

“But it is this type of consciousness at its root, as brought to fulfilment, as having undergone conversion, as possessing a basis that may be broadened and deepened and heightened and enriched but not superseded, as ever more ready to deliberate and evaluate and decide and act with the easy freedom of those that do all good because they are in love. The gift of God's love takes over the ground and root of the fourth level of man's waking consciousness. It takes over the peak of the soul, the apex animae.”³³

So it is in this way that Man, the anomaly of nature, is to be made whole and complete though conversion to Christ and, as such, once more worthy of union and fellowship with God. This is the divine plan of salvation. But the work of completing Man, now in possession of the divine attribute of knowledge and freedom, and making him whole again is not without struggle and difficulty. And it is this incompleteness of Man during his life on earth that constitutes the basic human situation in which sin can take root and flourish, a theme I shall explore in my next article.