Adam and the Genome 11: Chapter 7- The Variety of Adams and Eves in the Jewish World and Chapter 8- Adam, the Genome, and the Apostle Paul

We continue our review of the book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight . Today, Chapters 7 and 8.

Chapter 7- The Variety of Adams and Eves in the Jewish World, is an attempt by Scot to set up his theses in Chapter 8 about how Paul viewed Adam.  It lays the groundwork from Jewish literature about how Paul’s predecessors and contemporaries used Adam.  Although somewhat dry and academic, I appreciate Scot’s attempt to set up any interpretation of Paul as grounded thoroughly in his Jewishness.

Philippians 3:5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

If Paul himself, describes himself as a “Hebrew of Hebrews” why wouldn’t we think he was influenced by his culture and heritage?

Scot contends there is a broad and diverse history of interpretation of Adam.  He sketches out three main reconfigurations of Adam and Eve in the Jewish interpretive tradition based on the study of Felipe de Jesus Legarreta-Castillo of Adam in Jewish literature :

1. Hellenistic Interpretations. Interpreting the story of Adam and the fall incorporating Hellenistic traditions.  Portraying Adam a paradigm of humankind and the ancestor of Israel who faces the dilemma of freedom and its implications.
2. The “rewritten” Bible Interpretations. These interpretations express the hope of future reward for Israel on the condition that one keep God’s commandments contained in the Law.  Adam’s sin is the prototype of the historical transgressions of Israel and the nations that brought into the world all sorts of misfortunes for humankind.
3. The Apocalyptic Interpretations. They emphasize the story of the fall over the story of the creation of humankind to explain the hardships and the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.

The first piece of literature Scot summarizes is “The Book of Sirach” sometimes called “Ecclesiasticus” written sometime around 200 BC, and usually included in the Old Testament Apocrypha.  The Adam of Sirach is the volitional Adam, or the Adam of free choice.  Sirach 15:15 says, “If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice.”  Sirach broadens that from Adam to Israel to Everyone.  So a literary Adam becomes an archetypal Adam as Israel, or more narrowly focused, a moral or ethical Adam.  Adam (and Eve) in Sirach, then, can be called archetypal figures for the human summons and responsibility to live well before God.

The next book is “The Wisdom of Solomon”, another OT apocryphal book written in Egypt in the first three or four decades of the first century AD.  It was the author’s attempt to win back Jews who had shifted towards Hellenism and is written in eloquent Greek with Greek rhetorical forms.  The author is interested in “incorruption” and “eternity”, each tucked away in a dualistic framework of body versus soul, all concerned with avoiding “death”.  Immortality for the soul, then, requires wisdom and Torah observance or righteousness which is the supreme characteristic of Adam and Solomon, who are made in God’s image.  It is wisdom that can protect Adam and Eve and all humans from corruption unto death and preserve them to immortality.

Wisdom protected the first-formed father of the world, when he alone had been created; she delivered him from his transgressions, and gave him strength to rule all things. (10:1-2)

Since the Wisdom of Solomon states each human is “a descendant of the first-formed child of earth” (7:1) this author believed in a genealogical and biological Adam.

Philo of Alexandria (ca. 30 BC – AD 50) is the paradigmatic example of Scot’s thesis that each Jewish author saw in Adam what one believed and used Adam to prop up a theology or philosophy.  Scot says:

Adam for Philo is the paradigm of the Greek theory of the human made of body and soul.  Writing in Alexandria, Egypt, and fully conversant with Greek philosophical categories of his day (Platonism and Stoicism), Philo combined exegesis of Scripture, philosophy, and apologetics into a strategy for articulating Judaism in a way that made it palatable to non-Jews.  One might be accurate in saying Philo sought to argue that God’s revelation is mediated through Wisdom, the Logos, and when interpreted aright, the Torah of Moses and the entire Jewish tradition is a manifestation of that cosmic Logos-Wisdom.

The Book of Jubilees, sometimes called the “Lesser Genesis,” was probably written in the 2nd century BC and records an account of the biblical history of the world from the creation to Moses.  The author of Jubilees uses Adam to emphasize his own concerns with Torah observance, like Sabbath practices.  Adam thus becomes an archetypal Adam of Torah observance.

Titus Flavius Josephus was a first-century Roman-Jewish scholar, historian and hagiographer, who was born in Jerusalem—then part of Roman Judea—to a father of priestly descent and a mother who claimed royal ancestry.  He was a contemporary of Jesus and Paul who rewrote the Bible’s history to appeal to Roman tastes.  The Adam of Josephus is the “first man”, that is, the genealogical Adam with slight modifications to make him the archetypal virtuous figure and example, so as to be palatable to Roman tastes.

A late first-century AD dialogical apocalypse called 4 Ezra presents a theology of Adam similar to the apostle Paul.  In 4 Ezra Adam is a literary Adam who has become, because he is also a genealogical Adam, a moral and fallen Adam.  This portrait of Adam is not identical to the apostle Paul’s, but it is much closer than the Greek- and Roman-sounding Adam.  Similarly, the apocalypse called 2 Baruch came into existence after Jesus and Paul, probably closer to AD 130. For 2 Baruch, each of us is our own Adam, meaning that our own destiny, and the destiny of the world, is in our hands—we can choose to obey God or disobey, but the matter is in our own hands.  In this text we have the literary, genealogical Adam who is archetypal of all humanity; here we find Adam as Everyone.

Here is how Scot summarizes this chapter:

“There are elements of the so-called historical Adam present—genealogical Adam, fallen Adam,– in these Jewish sources, but the historical Adam that Christians now believe in has yet to make his appearance on the pages of history.  Perhaps we will encounter him in Paul, or perhaps not, but this point must be emphasized: the construct Christians use when they speak of the historical Adam is not to be found in the Old Testament or in other Jewish sources.  This does not mean that Christian theology, even if that theology develops after the New Testament, is not true, but it does mean that it is postbiblical.”

Scot and co-author Hauna Ondrey wrote a book: “Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy”.  He notes that, in essence, those who leave the faith discover a profound, deep-seated, and existentially unnerving intellectual incoherence to the Christian faith.  On his blog, discussing the book, Scot notes:

“My personal top challenges–those nagging back seat issues that keep forcing their way to the front seat–are: various issues of intellectual implausibility, few and far between “God moments,” random suffering, and the fact that Christians can be complete jerks to each other and everyone else (I being chief among them, to borrow Paul’s words).”

Obviously, Scot is not laying all deconversions to the “science vs. the Bible” issue, but still he makes the point that, particularly in regard to human origins, the reality of the historical Adam is a deal-breaker for many, especially young, people given the science since the Human Genome Project.  For any Christian who takes the Bible seriously, the passages that count the most are 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, 45-49 and Romans 5:12-21 (New International Version (NIV)).

21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

45 So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. 46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 47 The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. 48 As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. (1 Corinthians 15:21-22, 45-49)

12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.  15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ! 

18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.  20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:12-21)

Scot organizes his arguments into 5 theses.

Thesis 1: The Adam of Paul is the literary, genealogical, image-of-God Adam found in Genesis.

This is a state-the-obvious point before he moves into more particular details later.  However, he makes the point that what Paul knew about Adam was not gained by scientific examination as we now know science.  What Paul knew about Adam and Eve, he knew from the scriptures; the literary and genealogical tradition he inherited from his forebears, which he did not question.

Thesis 2: The Adam of Paul is the Adam of the Bible filtered through—both in agreement and in disagreement with—the Jewish interpretive tradition about Adam.

Jews of Paul’s day did not pick up the book of Genesis as if it had never been read prior to them.  Like you and me, when they read the Bible, they encountered the text of Genesis with terms and categories that had become familiar to them and that shaped what they saw.  The Adam of Paul is a Jewish Adam—that is, he is not simply the literary-genealogical, image-of-God Adam but is instead that Adam as interpreted in the Jewish tradition.

Thesis 3: The Adam of Paul is the archetypal, moral Adam who is the archetype for both Israel and all humanity.

Very much like the Adam discussed in Chapter 7 in the Jewish literature, Adam is presented as the one who was summoned by God to obedience, who disobeyed, and who brought death and destruction.  Paul says nothing about biology and genetics (of course) but instead presents Adam as the man who made the wrong choice and that choice ruined himself and his descendants in both Israel and all humanity.  Paul’s presentation of Adam sets up an antithesis between the first Adam (a tragic hero) and the second or new Adam (a redeemer hero, Christ) schematized as follows:

---

Adam	Christ (the second Adam)
Sin	Obedience
Death	Life
Condemnation	Justification
Union with others	Union with others

---

What matters in the context of this discussion is that Paul uses Adam to bolster his Christology and to magnify the accomplishments in Christ.  It is a re-use of the literary Adam for theological purposes.  Adam as type is the reverse image, or the negative, of Christ.  As to whether Paul thinks of Adam as historical Adam, Scot quotes James D. G. Dunn:

“Whether Paul also thought of Adam as a historical individual and of a historical act of disobedience is less clear.  Philo should remind us that the ancients were more alert to the diversity of literary genres than we usually give them credit for.  And Paul’s very next use of the Adam story (Rom. 7:7-11) is remarkably like 2 Baruch 54:19 in using Adam as the archetype of “everyman.”  Be that as it may, the use Paul makes of Genesis 1-3 here is entirely of a piece with the tradition of Jewish theologizing on Adam in using the Genesis account to make sense of the human experience of sin and death.”

Thesis 4: Adam and all his descendants are connected, but original sin understood as original guilt and damnation for all humans by birth is not found in Paul.  In Jewish fashion, Paul points his accusing finger at humans for their sins.  How there is continuity between Adam, all his descendants, and their sins and death is not stated by Paul.

Scot points out that the Greek in Romans 5:12, έπί ὅς, translated as “because of” in the NIV, was translated by Augustine (following Jerome) into the Latin in quo, “in whom”.  This started the long theological tradition in which all humans were guilty in Adam’s original sin.  The expression, έπί ὅς, is found in 2 Corinthians 5:4, Philippians 3:12, and Philippians 4:10 and never means “in whom”.  What Paul is saying in Romans 5 is that each person, like Adam, sins and therefore dies, NOT that all have sinned IN Adam and therefore die.  So death spreads to all because, like Adam, everyone sins.

Notice also, to maintain the symmetry of the passage, that just as one man’s disobedience brought death, so one man’s obedience brought life; but just as one must act—believe—in order to benefit from the one act of Christ’s obedience in order to inherit eternal life, so we need to act—sin or disobey—in order to accrue to ourselves the ultimate death—our separation from God.  Which leads Scot to conclude:

Thesis 5: The Adam of Paul was not the historical Adam.

Scot repeats his 7 criteria for what it means to call Adam and Eve historical from Chapter 5:

1. Two actual (and sometimes only two) persons named Adam and Eve existed suddenly as a result of God’s creation
2. Those two persons have a biological relationship to all human beings that are alive today (biological Adam and Eve).
3. Their DNA is our DNA (genetic Adam and Eve); and that often means;
4. Those two sinned, died, and brought death into the world (fallen Adam and Eve) and ;
5. Those two passed on their sin natures (according to many) to all human beings (sin-nature Adam and Eve), which means
6. Without their sinning and passing on that sin nature to all human beings, not all human beings would be in need of salvation;
7. Therefore, if one denies the historical Adam, one denies the gospel of salvation.

As he looks over the list Scot believes that Paul may have believed in #1, even though he doesn’t explicitly say so.  But there are no explicit observations by Paul with respect to 2, 3, or 5.  Paul did explicitly affirm #4, but Paul does not anchor his gospel of redemption in the historical Adam, at least as Scot has explained “historical”.  Scot then says that Paul affirms what his fellow Jews affirmed: people die because they sin.  Paul’s gospel does not require that definition of “historical” Adam; what it requires is:

• An Adam and Eve who were made in God’s image
• An Adam and Eve who were commanded by God not to eat of the tree
• An Adam and Eve who chose to disobey
• An Adam and Eve who therefore were aimed toward death
• An Adam and Eve who passed on death to all humans.

And Scot believes it requires an Adam and Eve who are paradigms of the condition of all humans; faced with the demand of God, each human in history chooses to disobey and therefore dies. Scot’s concluding paragraph of the book is:

“If we are to read the Bible in context, to let the Bible be prima scriptura, and to do so with our eyes on students of science, we will need to give far more attention than we have in the past to the various sorts of Adams and Eves the Jewish world knew.  One sort that Paul didn’t know because it had not yet been created was what is known today as the historical Adam and Eve.  Literary Adam and Eve, he knew; genealogical Adam and Eve, he knew; moral, exemplary, archetypal Adam and Eve, he knew.  But the historical Adam and Eve came into the world well after Paul himself had gone to his eternal reward, where he would have come to know them as they really are.”

Well, that was one sophisticated argument, although if you don’t buy it, I suppose to you it was just sophistry.  Nevertheless, if you are going to take science seriously and you are going to take the Bible seriously, then some form of Scot’s argument is going to be the way forward.

There is no way the ancient authors of scripture, including Paul or even Jesus, could have imagined the implications of current genomics.  To them, if you wanted a sheep you bred a male sheep to a female sheep, if you wanted a cow, you bred a male cow to a female cow, if you wanted a man, then a man and a woman had to get together.  So at some point, logically, there had to be a first pair of sheep, a first pair of cows, and a first man and woman.  What other explanation could there be?  There is no way they could have imagined a population emerging, hell, I have trouble imagining a population emerging.  If our species emerges from a primate lineage, when and where did the first morally culpable human arise?  Are there lineages of humans that were/are not morally culpable?  What is sin, how is it revealed to us, and what are its origins?

The only way we are going to get satisfying answers to the question of origins and who we are as living beings is for scientists like Dennis Venema to keep pushing the frontiers of science forward and theologians like Scot McKnight to think through the implications.  There is no going back.

Adam and the Genome 10: Chapter 6- Adam and Eve of Genesis in Their Context: Twelve Theses

We continue our review of the book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight. Today, Chapter 6.

One of the elements of reading Genesis 1-11 in its ancient near East context is to realize that, despite the pre-modern science, the people of the ANE were observing, testing, thinking, and drawing conclusions about reality.  What they say about various elements in the cosmos and how it works are their perceptions and were as much “facts” to them as DNA reveals “facts” to us.  In that respect, the Bible’s opening chapter is a form of ancient near East science, Scot thinks.  I see his point, but ever since Kant and the rise of modernism a sharp distinction is now drawn between the natural and the supernatural, the physical and the metaphysical, and the that which can be verified, or better yet, falsified, and that which will always remain in the realm of speculation.  It seems to me that to the modern mind, spiritual truths are no longer truths at all, but culturally derived matters of opinion.

According to Old Testament and ANE scholars, the ancients did not draw that distinction, or certainly not as sharp as moderns do.  That is why Scot calling the first chapter of Genesis “science” gives me the heebie jeebies. Science has become the “sine qua non” of modern thought.  It is why YEC is so strong in some people’s minds, and so manifestly a modern invention.  If the Bible doesn’t CONCORD to modern science then the Bible is false, untrustworthy, not God’s eternal Word; that is why they fight so vehemently to say the earth can only be 6,000 years old, Noah’s flood had to drown every living human being, and, of course, Adam and Eve were the first two and ONLY humans. To say the Bible contains ancient science, despite being so manifestly obvious, is nevertheless, tantamount to saying the Bible (and God) are liars in their view.

Scot then gives four brief sketches of other ANE creation stories.  The first is the Enuma Elish (“from on high” the opening line), the Babylonian creation story.  From Wikipedia: “The Enuma Elish exists in various copies from Babylon and Assyria. The version from Ashurbanipal’s library dates to the 7th century BCE. The composition of the text probably dates to the bronze age, to the time of Hammurabi or perhaps the early Kassite era (roughly 18th to 16th centuries BCE), although some scholars favor a later date of c. 1100 BCE”.  The tl;dr version is that the god Marduk kills the god Tiamat and creates the earth and the sky from her body.   Marduk then creates the calendar, organizes the planets and stars, and regulates the moon, the sun, and weather.  The gods who have pledged their allegiance to Tiamat are initially forced into labor in the service of the gods who sided with Marduk. But they are freed from these labors when Marduk then destroys Tiamat’s husband, Kingu, and uses his blood to create humankind to do the work for the gods, that is humans were created to be the god’s slaves.

Scot then sketches the story of Gilgamesh.  In the epic, Gilgamesh is a demigod of superhuman strength who builds the city walls of Uruk to defend his people and after the death of his friend Enkidu travels to meet the sage Utnapishtim, who survived the Great Flood.  Prior to his death, Enkidu is taught to be a human and acquire reason by prolonged sexual concourse with the prostitute Shamhat.  Grieving his friend, Gilgamesh sets out on his epic journey to achieve immortality and finds out that the gods sent the Great Flood to drown all humans.  Although Gilgamesh ultimately fails to win immortality in the story, his deeds live on through the written word and, so, does he.

The third story is Atrahasis.  The Atrahasis is the Akkadian/Babylonian epic of the Great Flood sent by the gods to destroy human life. Only the good man, Atrahasis (his name translates as `exceedingly wise’) was warned of the impending deluge by the god Ea who instructed him to build an ark to save himself.  Once again humans are created because the gods are lazy and want human slaves to do their toil for them.  The fourth story Scot calls the “Assur Bilingual Creation Story” which didn’t bring up anything on a Google search and by Scot’s description in the book is like Atrahasis only slightly different.

Scot then presents his twelve theses for reading Adam and Eve in context.

Thesis 1: God is one, and this one God is outside the cosmos, not inside the cosmos as the gods of the ancient Near East are. The God of Adam and Eve is unique as the superior one.  Genesis 1-2 is more about God than Adam and Eve or the creation of the world.  This one true God of Israel, as the New Testament will state explicitly, creates the universe through the Son of God, who is the Wisdom of God.

He contrasts the gods of Mesopotamia to the one God of Israel.  The religions of Israel’s neighbors were polytheistic, mythological, and anthropomorphic, describing their gods in human forms and functions.  Whereas Genesis 1 is monotheistic, scornful of mythology and engages in anthropomorphism only as figures of speech. That doesn’t mean there isn’t borrowing of ideas and terms.  There is the idea of the divine counsel, God surrounded by supernatural “advisors” hinted at in Genesis 1:26; “Let us make mankind in our image”.  The opening of the book of Job shows this idea even more explicitly.  The personification of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs foreshadows Jesus as that personified Wisdom, who is also the Creator.

Thesis 2: There are occasional elements of theomachy in the Bible, even if the Bible routinely minimizes and perhaps even deconstructs the ideas of theomachy.  Adam and Eve are not the result of a cosmic battle but the product of God’s good design for the cosmos.

“Theomachy” being the term used to describe “conflict among the gods”, and is a common feature of Mesopotamian creation stories.  Scot says there are hints of this in the Bible, for example, the battle with a kind of Tiamat called Leviathan, in Psalm 74:13-16 (NIV).

13 It was you who split open the sea by your power;
you broke the heads of the monster in the waters.
14 It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan
and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert.
15 It was you who opened up springs and streams;
you dried up the ever-flowing rivers.
16 The day is yours, and yours also the night;
you established the sun and moon.

An honest reading of this scripture admits that the biblical author was influenced by the thoughts and concepts of his time and culture.  It doesn’t necessarily mean the biblical author bought into them, but it does acknowledge he was familiar with them.

Thesis 3: God orders creation into a temple.  Adam and Eve are designed by God to worship and to lead all creation to see its God.

Here Scot brings out John Walton’s theses in “Lost World of Genesis One” that ANE people were more interested in function and purpose than raw materialistic explanations.  Genesis is not so much a description of scientific material origins as a description of God ordering all creation for a purpose.  This is a fair exegesis; thus when God creates light the issue is not so much the material origin of light but the function of light as ordering day into night as markers for seasons. Compare Genesis 1:14-18 (NIV):

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.

The key to understanding the temple motif that Genesis represents is given in Genesis 2:2:  And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

A reader from the ancient world would know immediately what was going on and would recognize the role of day 7, and would conclude this is a text of a temple inauguration.  For example consider:

1 Kings 8:65  And at that time Solomon held a feast, and all Israel with him, a great congregation, from the entering in of Hamath unto the river of Egypt, before the Lord our God, seven days and seven days, even fourteen days.  And…

2 Chron 7:9  And in the eighth day they made a solemn assembly: for they kept the dedication of the altar seven days, and the feast seven days.

In the ANE when a palace or temple was dedicated the king or god was said to sit on his throne and “take his rest”.  It means he has completed his tasks, set everything in order, and now begins his normal rule and reign…  For example:

Psalm 132:7   We will go into his tabernacles: we will worship at his footstool.  8 Arise, O Lord, into thy rest; thou, and the ark of thy strength.  13 For the Lord hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his habitation.  14 This is my rest for ever: here will I dwell; for I have desired it.

Hebrews 4:10  For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.

Isaiah 66:1  Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?

The 7 days relate to the Cosmic Temple Inauguration.  Man is installed in the temple as God’s Image i.e. His likeness, representative, priest, caretaker.

Thesis 4: All humans—male and female—are made in God’s image.  Adam and Eve are unique and special and carry both great freedom and great responsibility for the earth.

This is in contrast to many ANE creation stories where humanity has been created as slave labor for the gods.  Only the kings and pharaohs had value.  In addition, pharaohs, kings, and heroes were often seen as sons of gods, or at least as special mediators between the divine and human spheres.  Human existence in Genesis is emptied of any intrinsic divinity – while at the same time all human beings, from the greatest to the least, and not just pharaohs, kings and heroes, are granted a divine likeness and mediation.  Humankind has the royal office or calling or vocation to be God’s representative and agents in the world, granted authorized power to share in God’s rule or administration of the earth’s resources and creatures.

Thesis 5: Humans are distinct from the rest of creation.  Adam and Eve are unlike other creatures and therefore have a responsibility for them.

In many places in the Bible, man is said to be like other creatures in terms of his physical existence, but only humans are said to be made in “God’s image”.  Scot makes the point that the task of humans over creation is to participate in creations flourishing, not its exploitation.  Also this dignifies each and every person in the world for all time, but it carries with it an awe-inspiring responsibility to respect one another.

Thesis 6: Humans are gendered for procreation (one flesh) and mutuality.  Adam and Eve are to multiply in order to populate the earth with more and more “images of God” to rule and govern and nurture the earth.

Scot make a case for mutuality from Genesis 1:27; So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.  He notes all theologians today acknowledge that both men and women are made in God’s image. He says God genders humans into male and female so they can relate to one another in mutuality and reproduce.  Mutuality flows out of being images of God and expresses what being an image of God means at its deepest core.

Thesis 7: Humans are called to work the earth for its flourishing.  Adam and Eve are not like the ancient Near Eastern gods desiring leisure, nor are Adam and Eve like the humans whom the ancient Near Eastern gods want as slaves, but instead are called to co-create and co-nurture as part of God’s design for this earth.

Scot’s point in this thesis is that work and labor are not post-fall activities.  That God “worked” and created as an artisan and so decreed that for man as part of the image of God.

Thesis 8: Humans are called to name creatures in order to understand fit and function so that creatures might flourish.  Adam and Eve, following in the way of God, are to name creatures a result of observing and knowing them in order to nurture them into their divinely ordained functions.

Naming is an important function in ANE culture.  God creates and names showing his sovereignty over all creation.  The God brings all the creatures before the man so the he may name them.  Naming them will give the creatures a known existence, and the man will, by naming the creatures, be given a role as the governor (or sub-governor under God) of those creatures.  Naming involves observation, discernment, labeling, and therefore relating.  And then, of course, after naming all the animals the text says no suitable helper was found for the man.  God then creates the woman by taking her from the side of the man or half the man as some interpret it.  The man then names her as “woman” for she was taken out of man speaking of a relationship of both sameness and yet distinction.  God names her “ezer kenegdo” which KJV translates as “helpmeet” but Scot says the Hebrew means “helper corresponding to” which means someone to be with him, someone to work alongside him, and someone with whom he can form mutuality.  The idea is that the man needed an “ally”.

Thesis 9: Humans want to be more than they are and to extend their reach.  Adam and Eve, designed by God to sub-govern and sub-nurture creation in leading it to God, have the freedom to choose to defy God and the arrogance to think they can be “like” God.

God creates Adam and Eve and shares with them divine responsibility for creation.  This sharing of responsibility implies freedom.  Like God, humans have the power of choice.  We are all too familiar with this story and the certain way of interpreting it since Augustine.  It is hard for us to read it any other way.  But Scot asserts, after NT Wright, that neither the Old Testament nor Romans 5 ever blames Adam for the sin of others or blames Adam for our death.  We sin by choice, we die because we sin.  The text, in the context of the ANE, speaks of sin in terms of pride, arrogance, and a failure to trust the loving word of God.  And here is the fundamental tension of the first three chapters of Genesis when read together.  Adam and Eve are images of God, but that means they are to follow through on the divine assignment of governing the earth on God’s behalf.  The can be godly by doing so, but they are not designed to become godlike.

Then Scot deals with the consequence of their choices, in particular 3:16b: Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.  Is that descriptive of what will happen or is it prescriptive of what is now ordered by God to happen.  Those familiar with Scot’s blog know he is a champion of egalitarianism over against complementarianism, hence he believes it is descriptive only.  Scot quotes Walter Brueggemann:

 “In God’s garden, as God wills it, there is mutuality and equity.  In God’s garden now, permeated by distrust, there is control and distortion.  But that distortion is not for one moment accepted as the will of the Gardener.”

Adam and Eve are depicted as the literary characters in a story that goes wrong.  We see them as imaging-but-failing Adam and Eve.

Thesis 10: Humans are called by God to relieve suffering, to undo the curse, and to labor in a creation now tempted to return to chaos.  Adam and Eve are called by God to continue in their role as God’s images in this world: co-creating, co-governing, and co-nurturing one another and the created order.

The question left hanging after the “fall” is: But after they sinned, did they remain images of God?  The answer to that question, Scot believes is in Genesis 9:1-7:

6 “Whoever sheds human blood,
by humans shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made mankind.

7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”

Scot says the mission remains.  They are not God’s slave labor, as in the Mesopotamian texts, but still summoned to see the earth as God’s cosmic temple and to mediate that knowledge to all creation.

Thesis 11: To read the Bible in context means to know where the Adam and Eve story will go in the pages ahead.  What will become evident to the one who reads the whole Bible is that Adam and Eve are not just two individuals but representatives of both Israel and Everyone.  Hence, Adam and Eve’s sin is Israel’s prototypical sin, their “exile” is Israel’s exile, and they therefore represent the sin and discipline of Everyone.

As Pete Enns said in “The Evolution of Adam”, the Adam story mirrors Israel’s story from Exodus to Exile.  God creates a special person, Adam; place him in a special place, the garden; and gives him law as stipulation of continued communion with God.  Adam disobeys and is exiled from the garden.  Israel is “created” at the Exodus, given a special land, the land of Canaan, and a law to obey.  Israel disobeys and goes into exile as a result.  Adam is to be a blessing to the whole earth and Israel, in Genesis 12:3, is called to be blessing to “all peoples on earth”.  What happens to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1-3 is that they become archetypal Adam and Eve, not only for Israel, but also for universal humanity.

Thesis 12: No matter how much emphasis is given to a literary, archetypal, and image-of-God reading of Adam and Eve, the fact remains that Genesis 1-2 presents Adam and Eve as what might be called the genealogical Adam and Eve. 

Again Scot brings up the point that any reference to a “historical” Adam must deal with what the science of genomics has revealed.  And that scientific conclusion is that our DNA does not come from either two or eight humans only; the minimum number is somewhere around 10,000 hominins.  Scot says:

“Having observed that all talk about a ‘historical’ Adam emerges more from modern sciences and history than from the world of the ancient Near East and early Judaism, I must add that an honest reading of the Bible also leads at least to what might be called a genealogical Adam.  I would contend first, though, that the genealogical Adam is rooted in the literary portrait of Adam and Eve over against their ancient Near Eastern contexts.  That is, the literary Adam and Eve are the ‘front porch’ to the genealogical Adam and Eve.” 

That seems a fair point to me, if you are going to take the science seriously, and I firmly believe we must.  And as I said in post #7, based on the reasonable computer modelling of Rohde and others, it is scientifically possible that a common ancestor to all of humans could have existed just several thousand years ago.  Adam of the Bible could very well have been the ancestor of all Israel, even if that is shrouded in the mists of time and legend.  As biblical anthropologist, Alice C. Linsley, says in her article, “Are Adam and Eve Real?”

“…it is not necessary to insist that Adam and Eve are the progenitors of all humanity. Instead we may understand them as the first ancestors of the people who gave us Genesis. This concept of the first ancestors or heads of tribes and clans is found throughout the Bible. Midian is the head of the Midianites; Jacob is the head of the Israelites, and Lot is the head of the Moabites.”

As Charles Fines remarked in the comments to that post: “And not only the people who gave us Genesis, but the people who gave us Jesus.”  Then I noted in the comments; If Jesus is truly God incarnate, then the incarnation MUST be tied to real human beings, otherwise we are Docetics. Jesus had real human ancestors, or he wasn’t a real human.

So, is Adam literary?  I think yes.  Is Adam legendary?  I think yes.  But behind the literary and legendary figure, was there a real human being?  Again, I think yes.

• • •

Other posts in the series:

• Adam and the Genome, part 1
• Adam and the Genome, part 2
• Adam and the Genome, part 3
• Adam and the Genome, part 4
• Adam and the Genome, part 5
• Adam and the Genome, part 6
• Adam and the Genome, part 7
• Adam and the Genome, part 8
• Adam and the Genome, part 9