An Atheist Explores The Bible Part One: In which everything is created and it all goes downhill from there. AKA God wants you to be naked (Genesis 1-5)

Genesis 1-5

In which everything is created and it all goes downhill from there. AKA God wants you to be naked.

Genesis 1

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”

We begin at the beginning, with the creation of everything and, as creation myths go it’s pretty straightforward, with God creating everything Himself. There’s a nice progression from Chaos to Order throughout and, actually, it’s not enormously dissimilar to how things proceed under the Big Bang theory, except that liquid water would have come after solid ground as the earth cooled, and “light” before the sun and moon is odd but I guess you could count it as background energy? If you allow a “day” here to be more like a Brahma Day (i.e. millions of years) then it’s not, really, a massively far-fetched myth at all. Interesting.

I like how whales and cattle are the only species to be named specifically for some reason – cattle I can see as being important to a desert-dwelling nomadic culture. Whales, less so, but perhaps they are treated as an almost mythical being?

There’s not a lot else to say about this chapter. Nice repetition in the structure of the verses; also of note is that men and women are created at the same time here, with verse 27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” giving a tantalisingly ambiguous statement concerning the “gender” of God, which I think is sadly contradicted in the next chapter.

Genesis 2

“And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”

We have a few things occurring in this chapter. The first is God resting on the Seventh Day of creation, and thus ensuring that shops are closed on a Sunday. Looking more closely at this there are two oddities that strike me – the first is that an omnipotent being should need rest, which you could take as evidence on how incredibly difficult the act of creation was that it even makes God tired. The second is that human believers should seek to emulate, or perhaps honour, this effort, by enshrining in religious and even secular law proscriptions against working on the seventh day (whichever day that is deemed to be), even to the extreme measures taken by more orthodox Jews to avoid anything that might be construed as “work” on the Sabbath. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to get a day off. Having visited China where this tradition doesn’t exist there’s no sense of the “weekend” as life is equally busy at all times. But the fact that garden centres have to close at 4pm on a Sunday in the UK ultimately derives from this part of the bible, which is kind of odd in a modern society when you stop to think about it.

Next we have the creation of Eden, which, given the rivers and lands named here, is somewhere vaguely in the Middle East, probably around Iraq since the Euphrates flows from it. We also get a kind of revision of the creation of man from Chapter 1. In Ch.1, the beasts are created, then man, both male and female, on the following day. Here man, singular, with the world’s first pun for a name (Adam derived from Adamah, “Earth”) is created and placed in Eden, with the proscription not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Is God not familiar with the story of Bluebeard’s Castle? Anyway, Adam is alone so in this version God then creates a series of animals to be “an help meet” for him. Adam names them all, but none is quite right. I find the idea of Adam rejecting this endless stream of animals quite amusing.

“What about this one?”

“It’s a … donkey. I can use it carry stuff, but it’s not an help meet.”

“What about this one?”

“It’s a … chicken. I can eat its eggs, and maybe it too, but it’s not an help meet.”

“Okay, what about this one?”

“Um… dog. That one can guard my house, but, no, not an help meet.”

Etc.

And so Eve is created from one of Adam’s ribs, flesh of his flesh. Now, I kind of preferred the version in Ch. 1 where the two of them are created at the same time as this kind of “born second” concept will probably underpin the patriarchal douchery that I know is coming in the OT, and here Eve does have something of the feel of a mail-order bride, but there’s something quite touching about the whole “cleaving as one flesh” thing where Adam finally goes “Yes, she’s the one!”.

Final note here – they’re naked, but not ashamed. We’ll come back to this.

Genesis 3

“And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”

Oh Adam, you tell-tale. Yes, it’s The Fall ™. Having totally Bluebearded the first humans with a mysterious tree, God then gets angry because He has less understanding of reverse psychology than an average five-year old. And it’s all the fault of women. And snakes.

Yes, note, Ladies and Gentlemen, that there’s no mention of the Devil here – it’s a snake, pure and simple, that does the beguiling, leading to the little Just-So Story of How the Serpent Got Its Tooth (and lost its legs). Of course, “everyone” “knows” that it’s really the Devil, but that concept doesn’t come from this part of the Bible. Milton uses it, certainly, but he could easily be working from other sources. If so, and the Devil was merely sock-puppeting through the serpent, it’s a bit of a bummer for the poor snake to bear the brunt of the punishment.

But then this whole sorry affair is something of a hose-job. If Adam and Eve have no concept of Good and Evil before they eat the fruit, how can they possibly know that to do so would be wrong? And surely having this knowledge is better than living as some kind of un-moral automaton? Surely this is growth and development? Without the ability to make some kind of moral choice, morality becomes meaningless – if you are preprogrammed to be “good” then there is no virtue to it. Y’know I’m sure there’s an episode or two of classic Star Trek that deals with this!

And so for gaining the ability to make their own moral choices Adam and Eve are cast out of the easy life of Eden. Women are cursed to experience pain during childbirth for ever more (and in a pre-industrial society with no anasthesia and a good likelihood of dying during childbirth this is a pretty nasty punishment to inflict). Humanity has to work the land to survive and faces drought and other agricultural problems. Again, pretty nasty in a pre-industrial age and very much a death sentence. However, as with the knowledge of good and evil I would contend that it’s ultimately better for humanity to have to strive to survive rather than live like some kind of pet, but, whatever. And also they become ashamed of their nakedness.

Now, previously they were naked and unashamed, and God doesn’t seem to mind. He makes them that way after all. So, should they be ashamed? The implication is that before they didn’t know evil and thus didn’t know shame, but to me this actually seems to imply that it’s the shame of being naked, not the nakedness itself, that is the bad thing. To be unashamed of nudity is to be innocent (like small children are), and thus the better state to be in – not the absolute fear of nudity that some more puritanical proponents of religion have pursued over the years. That said, clothing serves another purpose other than covering “shame”. As gardeners I would have thought that Adam and Eve ought to at least have a decent pair of safety boots. (Oh, and I didn’t notice in the previous chapter but Eve only gets a name here. That shows the dangers of reading this thing assuming you know what it is saying).

Finally here there’s Verse 22 “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:” which contains a couple of interesting titbits. “One of us”? Linguistic quirk? Royal “we”? Evidence of earlier Hebraic polytheism? Who knows. But also after all that kafuffle about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, there’s an amusing little moment here where God essentially says “Well, at least they didn’t touch that other tree, that would have meant real trouble.” Because of course stealing fruit that makes you immortal isn’t this story, it’s Journey to the West.

Genesis 4

“And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?”

Also known as The Cowman and the Farmer Should Be Friends. Or, shepherd, but, well… oh, never mind.

A chapter of two halves, the first is the story of Cain and Abel. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, Abel a shepherd. When it comes to making sacrifices to God, it turns out that God likes mutton better than a … well, we don’t know what Cain specifically offers. A sheathe of wheat, let’s say. This makes Cain angry and he murders Abel. God is angry in return and casts Cain out of the land where humanity has been cast out to but, so that he doesn’t then suffer further, puts a mark upon him so that anyone who harms him will be harmed seven-fold.

The rest of the chapter is our first batch of begats, with various descendants of Adam and Eve giving rise to various crafts like herding, metalworking, music and so on. 

Now, the Cain thing – I don’t really understand the exile, partly because, well, who else is he going to meet? Where did all these other people suddenly come from? And the strange punishment of becoming an outcast, but one protected from harm, seems an odd mix. But it does give us the concept of the Mark of Cain, although since this tends to get co-opted by every other tin-pot Sexy Vampire mythology perhaps we shouldn’t be too grateful. I’m intrigued by the Land of Nod as well, since I can always remember this being a euphemism for sleepytime – “nodding off”, I guess. Equating a child’s bedtime with exile to a harsh biblical land seems a bit dark.

One area I’m not going to touch – where did Cain and Abel’s wives come from?

Genesis 5

“And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters”

Ugh. A whole chapter of begetting. Even Tolkien had the decency to draw diagrams and put them in the appendices. The main gist of this chapter is that Adam has a third son, Seth, whose lineage ultimately leads to Noah. Beyond that I can’t see anything of much note, other than the enormous lifespans of these antediluvean figures. I wonder why this is, perhaps supposedly evidence of the gradual diminution of the lifespan of humanity over the years? “There were giants in those days”, as it says next chapter. You’d think, though, that the lifespans would get gradually shorter as the line goes on, but this isn’t the case. Proverbially long-lived Methuselah comes right near the end of the chapter, for example. I invoked Tolkien above, but actually he does nick this idea pretty much whole cloth, with the long-lived Numenoreans gradually diminishing after their land is destroyed by a flood. 

And on that note, we leave it there. The world has been created and humanity has already cocked things up. It’s what we do!