Return to the Garden

This week, we turn our attention to the creation story in Genesis 3: 1-7. We've heard these stories so often that we often think we know what's there, only to find that it's not. Many of us think that Eve ate an apple, but it wasn't until John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in the year 1674 that Eve eats an apple. If we read all of Genesis, we might be surprised to find two creation stories. In the earliest one, God creates each part of the world and declares it good, and very good. It's in the second creation story, written much later, that we get this story of judgment.

 
Many of us have been taught that this story tells us how evil entered the world, but that's much too simplistic. In her meditation for A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church, Dr. Wilda C. Gafney says, "In the garden God offers life, provision, knowledge (conditionally) and boundaries. . . . It is useful to consider the serpent apart from the crutch of postbiblical misidentification with Satan. . . . Perhaps rather than 'tempter,' the serpent is 'tester.' What will humanity do in response to boundaries? Test them, bend them, break them" (p. 80).

How would our current life be different if we had been taught to see Eve as someone who tested boundaries, not someone who disobeyed? She makes a choice and faces the consequences. There's a long line of thought that would argue that she makes it possible for full human expression. With the knowledge that she secures for humans, humans have more options--some of them will be wonderful, and some of those options will be horrible. There's a long line of intellectual thought that says that having those options is better than being puppets in a garden.

I think about our approach to Eve, and I compare it to our approach to Jesus. Jesus also broke the rules of his society--and they were rules that God gave the Israelites centuries before Jesus lived among us. But we celebrate Jesus. Eve, on the other hand, has been used to justify the oppression of women, because if she hadn't disobeyed God, we'd all still be happy in the garden. Men have used this argument to prove that they should be in charge. In an essay that appeared decades ago, feminist scholar Phyllis Trible says that men having dominance is a punishment, not the way that life should be. We've taken the punishment and used it to shape our society into a one that is far from what God intended.

However, Trible still sees this story as one that can give us hope: “The Yahwist narrative tells us who we are (creatures of equality and mutuality); it tells us who we have become (creatures of oppression); and so it opens possibilities for change, for a return to our true liberation under God” (81).