"Take My Sister... Please !"

I have long fancied that the Book of Genesis was written in part to discourage the Israelites from the practice of ancestor worship.  Although the Patriarchs of the Old Testament are certainly regarded as Heroes of Faith and great men, they had their bad days and Genesis does not always show them at their best.  It’s embarrassing enough when, as in the case of David and Bathsheba, a prophet of the Lord comes along to point out their ethical lapses; it’s even worse when they get called out by a heathen.

One such instance --- or  three, depending on your point of view – is the story of Abraham and Abimelech.  Well, actually Abimelech doesn’t come into it until later.  I just like the saying the name Abimelech.  The story starts out in Egypt.

A severe famine has hit the land of Canaan.  Abraham, still called Abram at this point, has not quite settled down into the land God has promised to him and his descendants, so he takes his family and livestock south to Egypt.  We tend to think of Egypt as all desert and pyramids, but the fertile Nile River valley was an important agricultural center of the region in ancient times.  This will not be the last time that the people of Israel will go to Egypt fleeing famine, war or political problems.  But Abram has a potential problem ahead of himself as well.

As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai [Sarah], “I know what a beautiful woman you are.  When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’  Then they will kill me but will let you live.  Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated will for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.’  (Genesis 12:11-13 NIV)

Is Abram crazy here?  Keep in mind that Sarah would have been in her mid-60s at this point.  But ancient Jewish Tradition assures us that, yes, Sarah really was That Hot; even when she was pushing 70.  She was the original Matriarch I’d Like to… um… Fool around with.

At least Abram thought so; and he wasn’t alone.  The Pharaoh’s flunkies are also impressed by her beauty.  Jewish tradition expands on the story to say that Abraham hid Sarah in a box when he entered Egypt, but she was discovered when he tried smuggling her through Customs.  The border officials were so struck by her beauty that they tried to out-bid each other for who would get her.  Pharaoh hears about her beauty and has Sarai brought to his palace to add to his collection.  After all, single chick and all, she’s fair game, right?  Oh, and Pharaoh gave favor to the Hot Babe’s brother Abe and gifted him with more livestock, but the fact remained that Abram’s wife is now stuck in the Pharaoh’s harem.  I guess he didn’t really think that part of the plan through.

Shortly afterwards, Pharoah’s household is struck by serious diseases.  Obviously this must be Divine Punishment for something, but what?  Pharaoh puts things together pretty quickly.

So Pharaoh summoned Abram.  “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife?  Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to by my wife?  Now then, here is your wife.  Take her and go!”  (Genesis  12:18-19)

Abram gets booted out of Egypt.  He does get to keep all the sheep, cattle, servants and camels that the Pharaoh had given him earlier, but still it departure is not a dignified one and I can’t imagine Sarai was very happy about the whole situation.

Some years pass.  Abram has other adventures.  He receives a covenant with God and changes his name to Abraham, “father of nations;” and his wife takes the name of Sarah.  He lives for a while in the Negev, an arid region south of Canaan and at one point moves to the city of Gerar, just a few miles southeast of the city of Gaza.  And when they get to Gerar, Abraham starts worrying again about Sarah fatal beauty.

Once again he tells people that she’s his sister; and once again the local king, a guy named Abimelech, decides to take her for his own.

In this case, God comes to Abimelech in a dream and spells out the situation:  “You are as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.”  (Genesis 20:3)

Abimelech freaks.  He protests innocence; that he had no idea the chick was already taken.  “Did he not say to me, ‘She is my sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘His is my brother’?  I have done this with a clear conscience and clean hands.”  (v.5)  Well, today we would observe that he could have asked if Sarah actually wanted to become one of his wives, but she didn’t really have that option at the time.  Abraham could have refused to give her to Abimelech if he had more of a spine, but if that were the case he wouldn’t have lied about his wife in the first place.

God is unusually understanding about the whole situation.  In the dream, God tells Abimelech that he knows the king did not intend this transgression and that for that reason God saw to it that Abimelech has not yet had the opportunity to bed her.  But now God is telling him to give Sarah back.  “…return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live.  But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die.”  (v. 7)

Abimelech is pretty angry about the deal.  He summons Abraham and asks him what the hell he was thinking of.  “How have I wronged you that you have brought such a great guilt upon me and my kingdom?”  (v.9)

Abraham replies with what has to be one of the lamest excuses in all of Scripture:

Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’  Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife.  And when God had me wander from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother,”’”.  (Genesis 20:11-13)

Oh, so technically, she really is his half-sister; so technically, he was telling the truth.  It all depends on how you define the word “Is”. And the reason Abraham employed this misleading half-truth is because he was sure that Abimelech was immoral.  Abraham, you jerk.

Abimelech turns out to have more class than expected.  He gifts Abraham with cattle and slaves and grants permission for him to stay wherever he likes on his lands.  This is pretty magnanimous of him, but perhaps Abimelech figured that since Abraham was obviously favored by the Divinities, that he ought to be nice to the guy.

Then Abimelech does something really remarkable.  He apologizes, not to Abraham, (who doesn’t deserve it), but to Sarah.

To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels of silver.  This is to cover the offense against you before all who are with you; you are completely vindicated.”  (v. 16)

It is unfortunately rare in Scriptures that we see a woman publicly acknowledged to have been wronged and publicly vindicated.  And the guy who did it was not prophet or a follower of the God of Abraham, but a heathen king, a guy who, Abraham thought, had no respect for the laws of God.  As I said, Abimelech in this story is a much classier guy than Abraham.

As a weird coda, the text mentions that Abraham does pray to God, and the Lord heals Abimelech and his household.  Apparently, the Lord had stricken Abimelech, his wife and his slave girls all with infertility because of the Sarah business, but now he fixed that all up.  Since Sarah hadn’t been in his household all that long, I’m not sure how Abimelech would have known this was a problem, but in any case, God put it all to rights.

You’d think that would be the end of it.  But no.

Many years later, Abraham and Sarah have died, and their son Isaac runs the family business.  Once again, famine strikes the land, and as before, Isaac relocates to Gerar.  The king at this time is also named Abimelech; possibly the grandson of the previous one.  The text describes him as “king of the Philistines”, who ruled the coastal regions of Palestine for much of this period.  Presumably Abimelech père was a Philistine too; the earlier story doesn’t say.

Like father, like son.  When the men on Gerar notice his wife Rebekah and ask who the cute girl is, he panics and says she is his sister.  In Isaac’s behalf, let me say that this does not seem to have been a premeditated fib, as in Abraham’s case, but something Isaac said on the spur of the moment.  And fortunately, the king does not right away say, “Hot puppies!”  And immediately drag her off to his harem as some other randy kings might.

But some time later, Abimelech happens to look outside his palace window and spot Isaac and Rebekah canoodling, and he figures out the truth.  (My NIV translation notes that the word in Hebrew, which the NIV renders as “caressing” and the KJV as “sporting” is a form of the verb “to laugh” or “to mock”, from which Isaac’s own name was derived; so the text is essentially making a pun).

As before, Abimelech rebukes Isaac for misleading him.  “One of the men might well have slept with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.”  (Genesis 26:10)

What are we to make of these three narratives?  I’ve always had the suspicion that the writer who compiled the Book of Genesis found himself with three different versions from different sources of the same story, and didn’t know which ones to throw out, so he included them all.  The fact that two of the stories include guys named Abimelech and are set in the town of Gerar, suggests that they are the same story.  And after all, you would think that after the first incident in Egypt that Abraham would have known better than to pull the same bonehead stunt a second time.

Or would he?  Remember, in the lame-o excuse he gave to Abimelech, Abraham claimed that “… when God had me wander from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother,”’”.  (Genesis 20:13)  This suggests that Abraham was passing his wife off as his sister all the time and that in these two instances it came back to bite him.  And if Isaac grew up in a family where Dad was always telling strangers that Mom was his sister, maybe it’s not that surprising that he would do the same.

Nevertheless, whether it’s three stories or just one told three times, the Man of God winds up looking pretty cowardly and the Foreign King with the Harem by comparison looking virtuous and moral.

Funny how that works out.

All Agog

The French President was frankly puzzled.  He had received a call from the American President who hoped to enlist his country’s aid in America’s Global War on Terrorism.  The American appealed to their common Christian faith, and then added:

“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East.... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

The French President made polite diplomatic noises to the American, but as soon as he got off the phone he had his staff contact one of the top Biblical scholars at the University of Lausanne with an urgent question:

Who the heck are Gog and Magog?

The answer he got probably didn’t help him much, because I remember wondering the same thing when I first encountered those mysterious names and was frustrated by the lack of useful information.  This is one of those annoying places in the Bible where the text makes a throwaway reference to something the original readers were probably very familiar with, but then later readers spend the next couple thousand years speculating on what it meant.

Depending on who you ask, Gog and Magog could be giants, or demons, or chieftains, or symbolic personifications, or harbingers of the Apocalypse.  Or all of them at once.  Take your pick.

They first turn up in the Book of Genesis in one of the many genealogical lists that pop up in the first few chapters.  This particular genealogy lists the descendants of the sons of Noah, and is sometimes called “The Table of Nations”, because it purports to show how all the nations of the region known at the time descended from Noah’s sons.  Broadly speaking, the Sons of Japheth settled in Europe and the North; the sons of Ham moved South to Africa, and the sons of Shem, the Semetic people, got the Middle East and Asia.  A lot of the assumptions classifying humanity into three “races”, (Black, White and Asian) owe their own genealogy to the Sons of Noah.

But back to the list:

The sons of Japheth:  Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras.  (Genesis 10:2 NIV)

Yes, this passage is where Gomer Pyle got his name from.  We aren’t told if Gomer ever settled in Mayberry, NC, or joined the Marine Corps.  We are told even less about Magog; we’re just given his name.

Some ancient Greek text associate Magog with the kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.  The First Century Jewish historian Josephus said that Magog was the ancestor of the Scythians.  A later medieval writer said that Magog moved to Scandinavia and became the first King of Sweden, (which the Swedes thought was actually kind of cool).  Irish chroniclers also claimed descent from Japheth through Magog’s Scythian children.  Other writers blamed Magog for begetting the Goths, the Finns, the Huns and the Slavs.  Still later, others equated the descendants of Magog with the Mongols and identified Gog and Magog as provinces in the legendary Kingdom of Prester John.

Note that these are all northern tribes; (Japheth’s descendants were thought to have spread out north, remember); and that all of them were considered barbaric, and in most cases unusually war-like.

Gog does not turn up in the Table of Nations, but there is a guy named Gog mentioned in 1 Chronicles chapter 5 as one of the descendants of Reuben, one of the twelve sons of Jacob.  He has no connection to the Son of Japheth as far as I can tell.

Magog might have just remained just a name on the Table of Nations and a source for 1960s sitcom characters but for the wacky prophet Ezekiel.

The word of the LORD came to me:  “Son of man, set your face against Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal; prophesy against him and say:  ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.’” (Ezekiel 38:1-3 NIV)

It could be that this “Gog” is a descendant of the tribe of Magog; but the prefix “ma-“ in Hebrew can also mean “place of”; so perhaps Ezekiel is talking about “Gog, from the Land of Gog.”  Which would be redundant, but since Ezekiel is using the names as code words for an otherwise unnamed enemy and other names from the descendants of Japheth as its allies, I suppose it really doesn’t matter.

The prophecy goes on to describe Gog as commanding vast armies and predicting that he will sweep down from the north with his hordes to conquer all the lands to the south.  Barbarian hordes from the north, remember?  This is why later readers liked to associate Gog and Magog with Scythians and Huns and Visigoths and Swedes and such. Then, in his pride, Gog will attack the land of Israel; at which point God will say, “enough is enough, butt-head!”

“I will summon a sword against Gog on all my mountains, declares the Sovereign LORD.  Every man’s sword will be against his brother.  I will execute judgment upon him with plague and bloodshed; I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur on him and on his troops and on the many nations with him.  And so I will show my greatness and my holiness , and I will make myself known in the sight of many nations.  Then they will know that I am the LORD.”  (Ezekiel 38:21-23)

Hoo-hah!  Real apocalyptic stuff.  And that’s just a sample; chapters 28 and 29 of Ezekiel are full of stuff like that.  At the time he was writing, Ezekiel was one of the exiles carried off to Babylon when King Nebuchadnezzar  conquered the Kingdom of Judah.  Shortly before this particular prophecy, he and his fellow exiles had learned that the city of Jerusalem and its Temple had finally been destroyed.  So in this section, Ezekiel is anticipating a day when the people of Israel have returned to their land; and when “the Nations”, future enemies of Israel, will again try to attack it.

Not surprisingly, this and related passages of Ezekiel have been regarded as prophecies of the End Times.  Nor is it surprising that John, in writing his Book of Revelation, evoked Ezekiel in his own psychedelic imagining of the End of the Ages:

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth – Gog and Magog – to gather them for battle.  In number they are like the sand on the seashore.  They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the comp of God’s people, the city he loves.  But fire came down from heaven and devoured them.  (Revelation 20:7-9)

Here Gog and Magog have been split into two different guys, but John is essentially summarizing the prophecy in Ezekiel, except where the earlier prophet has Gog representing a foreign nation or group of nations arrayed against Israel, John seems to have Gog and Magog symbolizing spiritual and moral evil assaulting God’s people from within as well as from without.

In the Qur’an, Gog and Magog are referred to as Yajuj and Majuj; and there is a story of how a righteous king named Dhul-Qarnayn built a huge wall to hold back their hordes from attacking. The name Dhul-Qarnayn means “possessor of two horns”, and some scholars have identified him with Alexander the Great, who portrayed himself on his coinage wearing ram’s horns.  The story of the Great Wall holding the barbarians back is doubtless what led some scholars to think of the Mongols and the Great Wall of China.  Regardless of who built the wall and who was behind it, the Qur’an states that eventually that wall will crumble and the imprisoned hordes unleashed to bring destruction on the earth.

In British tradition, however, Gog and Magog are neither nations nor kings; they are giants.  Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain tells a story about a hero named Corinus who wrestles a giant named Gogmagog and chucks him off a cliff.  There is a group of hills just south of Cambridge called the Gog Magog Downs, said to be the transformed body of a giant who had been rejected by a river nymph.  I guess rejection will do that to a guy.

But the giants Gog and Magog also appear in British legend as downright benign characters in London, where an old tradition names them as guardians of the city.  Images of them are carried in the annual Lord Mayor’s show.

But for the most part, Gog and Magog are associated with destruction and battle, which is why George W. Bush invoked them in his conversation with Jacques Chirac.

Interestingly enough, though, when Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, was in college, his nickname in Yale’s Skull and Bones club was “Magog”.

Just sayin’, is all.

The Sons of Cain Invent Technology

(Originally posted on Daily Kos for the D'var Torah series on Oct 12, 2012)

Like the Book of Genesis, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey begins with The Dawn of Man.  The two have little else in common.  One has Monoliths, the other has Monotheism.  Both show the First Man experiencing something which opens his eyes and gives him an understanding he didn't have before.  In the case of Adam, it's: "Holy crap!  I'm not wearing any pants!!!"  In the case of the caveman from 2001, it's:  "Hey!  I can use this bone to bash things!!!"  Then he flings the bone into the air and it becomes a Pan-Am space plane on its way to the Moon.  Which is less doofy than it sounds because the caveman's bone club is The First Tool, you see, and by inventing it, he has set mankind on the path to developing technology, which will cumulate in that spaceship.

You get that in a lot of stories about Early Man, like the opening sequence of 2001; the movie The Quest for Fire; the Clan of the Cave Bear novels; Ringo Starr's Caveman.  They usually seem to focus on the discovery of the Important Seminal Inventions of Civilization, like Fire, the Wheel, Animal Husbandry, the Missionary Position, etc.  Perhaps we like these types of stories because we live in a technological society and so technology is important.  Or perhaps because these stories tend to be written by Science Fiction writers, who have an interest in tech stuff.

But the Bible has very little to say about technology.  The Discovery of Fire was of less interest to the writers of Genesis than the Discovery of Sin.  We know that Adam and Eve invented Clothing and Blaming the Woman; we can infer that they also invented Sex, although Genesis is not terribly specific about that either.  They probably invented lots of other stuff too; but Scriptures say very little about these things.

Until we get to the Sons of Cain.

We left Cain taking his unnamed wife and leaving the surviving members of his family to live in the land of Nod, east of Eden.  There he built a city, which he named after his son Enoch. And then we get the first of many genealogies of the book of Genesis.

When I read the Bible, I tend to skip over the long lists of "begats".  I'm sure many people do the same.  And there are a lot of them in Genesis; in fact, you could look at the book as one long genealogy with narrative interruptions.  But every now and then we get a odd little factoid about one of these ancestors, just enough to whet our curiosity.   Enoch, (the other one, not the son of Cain), who "walked with God" and whose passing was a mystery is one of them.  But in the listing of the descendants of Cain we get this passage:

Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah.  Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the fatehr of those who live in tents and raise livestock.  His brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play the harp and flute.  Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron.  Tubal-Cain's sister was Naamah.  (Genesis 4:19-22 NIV)

Okay, first a couple of minor points.  The Lamech in this passage is a different guy from the Lamech mentioned in the next chapter as the father of Noah; just as the Enoch mentioned earlier is different from the one who was the father of Methuselah.  And as far as I know, no Biblical scholars have ever suggested a connection between Lamech's second wife and Japanese giant monsters.

But look at the three sons of Lamech:

* Jabel, "the father of all who live in tents and raise livestock"

* Jubal, "the father of all who play the harp and flute 

* Tubal-Cain, "who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron

In those three sons, the writer of Genesis cites the birth of nomadic herding, musical instruments and metallurgy.  (Their sister Naamah isn't credited with anything specific, but the fact that she is mentioned at all in the genealogy is something noteworthy).

And these innovators come from the cursed line of Cain.  The Bible doesn't mention anyone in the line of Seth building anything interesting until Noah.

Perhaps the reason why Scriptures says so little about invention and technical innovation is that the compilers of Genesis associated that sort of thing with the wicked Sons of Cain.  Their father certainly was no winner.  The passage goes on to say:

Lamech said to his wives, 

"Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words; 

I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. 

If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times." 

(Genesis 4:23-24)

In other words, Cain killed his brother because Cain hated him; Lamech killed some guy just to be a jerk.  And he went on to boast about it.  

Then again, the writers of Genesis probably omitted mentioning technology because they were trying to outline a history of God's relation to His People, not a history of invention.  There are a lot of details which Scripture ignores simply because they are irrelevant to the message the writers wished to convey, such as where Cain got his wife, or what exactly did happen to Enoch, or did Adam and Eve have bellybuttons.  Yeah, people have been speculating about these lacunae for millenia, but the Bible just doesn't say.

So Scriptures isn't necessarily saying here that Technology is by nature Evil.

Then again, the First Tool invented by the caveman in 2001 was an instrument of murder...

Mrs. Cain

“You’re a Pastor’s Kid,” a friend once said to me; “Maybe you can answer this one.  Where did Cain get his wife?  I’ve never gotten a straight answer.”

“The Bible doesn’t say,” I replied.  “Anyone who gives you a straight answer is Making It Up.” 

I’m not sure if it was the answer she wanted to hear, but I think she appreciated my honesty.  Often when Christians are arguing with skeptics we feel a need to have an answer for everything.  We forget that “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer if we truly don’t know something.  There are a lot of places in the Bible where information is left out; presumably because the writer of that part felt it was unimportant; or perhaps just overlooked it because it was less important than something else, or perhaps most likely, because the writer didn‘t know either.  Cain’s Wife is one of these.

Of course, that doesn’t stop us from speculating.

There are two possible explanations I can think of for where Cain got his wife.  One is that she was specially created for him, as Eve was for Adam.  This, to me, seems overly complicated.  The other is that Adam and Eve had other children besides the ones specifically mentioned in the Bible and that Cain married one of his sisters.

But wouldn’t this technically be considered incest?  Yes, that’s probably a big reason why people don’t like to talk about Cain’s wife, and why Bible skeptics like to bring it up.  The explanation I’ve read is that the prohibition against brother and sister marrying had not yet been established.  Besides, what the hell else were they supposed to do?

But what about inbreeding?  Wouldn’t family members intermarrying that close together result in all sorts of genetic problems?  The Author of Genesis is as silent on the subject of genetics as he is on the name of Cain’s wife.  My own idea is that the first couple generations after Creation still possessed a greater measure of the Divine Creative Force, resulting in a kind of innate biodiversity which made it possible for them to interbreed without the problems of inbreeding.  And if this sounds like the purest moonshine, yes it is.  Like the Author of Genesis, I know little about genetics either; probably even less, since Moses used to herd sheep and would have had some idea of practical animal husbandry.  This is just a piece of whimsy on my part, and I don’t expect anyone to take it seriously.

But did Cain have a sister?  The Bible doesn’t mention one.  If you think about it, though, Adam and Eve lived together, according to Genesis, for something like 900 years.  And although the Bible doesn’t go into details about it, you have to assume they invented sex.  Do you really think they would have stopped at two kids?

The Jewish Midrashic tradition says that Cain and Abel each had twin sisters and that these were the women they were going to marry.  The Midrash is a tradition of biblical commentary which explores the text to plumb deeper meanings.  In some cases the midrashim  are interpretations of the Law or applications of Mosaic Law to situations Moses never dreamed of.  Sometimes they take the form of parables illuminating some aspect of the text.  And, as in this case, some Midrash are stories that expand upon existing Biblical narratives.

The sister Abel was promised, Aclima, was the more beautiful of the two and Cain wanted her.  Their father Adam suggested they both offer sacrifices as a means of letting the Lord decide.  When God favored Abel over him, Cain’s jealousy deepened into murder.

The apocryphal Book of Jubilees, thought to be written around the 2^nd Century BC, tells a similar story.  Here, the girl the two quarrel over isn’t a twin but their younger sister, named Awen.

Another midrashic version says that Abel had two sisters – that they were triplets –- but that Cain only had one.  Abel felt that he should get both, but Cain argued that, being the older brother, he should get the spare.  How the sisters felt about this doesn’t seem to be mentioned.  However many sisters Cain and Abel had, the one Cain married is the only one who gets mention in the text; what might have happened to the others is unknown.

Cain took his wife and went out into the Land of Nod, which means “Wandering”, so it doesn’t necessarily mean a geographic designation.  Referring to sleep as the “Land of Nod” is an unrelated pun.

According to Genesis, Cain eventually settled down long enough to build a city so that his son, Enoch could have a home.  Presumably, that’s where his wife ended up.  Legend, however, insists that Cain himself was doomed to wander the earth, and wanders still.

If you look up at night and look at the full moon, the shadows on its face might resemble a man with a bundle of sticks on his back.  Or it might look like a rabbit; but in medieval folklore it’s a guy with some sticks, and this burdened traveler is Cain, cursed to wander through all eternity.

The Mark of Cain

In his comic book SANDMAN, writer Neil Gaiman sometimes used a couple of characters who had earlier appeared in a couple of the horror anthology books published by DC Comics in the ‘70s.  Their names were Cain and Abel, and like their Biblical namesakes, they pursued a rather dysfunctional sibling relationship (when not introducing ghastly horror stories with ironic comments filled with ghastlier puns).

In Gaiman’s re-working of the characters, they really were the Cain and Abel of the Book of Genesis… after a fashion.  They were personifications of the First Villain and the First Victim; the central characters of the First Story, which gave them a special role in The Dreaming, the land ruled by Morpheus where Dream and Reality are largely interchangeable, as the keepers, and as the tellers, of stories.

Perhaps the story of Cain and Abel was not the very first one ever told, but it is certainly one of the familiar ones.  Adam and Eve had two sons:  the firstborn was Cain and the second Abel.  Cain was a farmer who tilled the soil; Abel raised livestock.  Some scholars look on this story as a metaphoric account of the rivalry between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers.

But when each brought some of their produce to the Lord as a sacrifice, the Lord looked with favor upon Abel’s sacrifice, but not on Cain’s.  And this bugged Cain.

Why didn’t God like Cain’s sacrifice?  The text doesn’t specifically say.  The explanation I’ve always heard is that Cain just brought some “fruits of the earth” he had grown while Able brought “fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock.”  In other words, Abel brought the nicer offering, suggesting that his gift was more sincere.  That’s the only clue the text gives us.  It also could be that Cain had a grudge against his brother that went further back and the deal with the sacrifices just brought it all into the open.

Whatever the cause, Cain let the resentment fester; he gnawed on his grudge and incubated his hatred until it drove him to an act of violence.  He lured Abel to a remote, lonely place and killed him.

Later on, when God confronted him, Cain tried to pretend he knew nothing about it.  You’d think that his parents would have told him that never works.

The LORD said “What have you done”  Listen!  Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.  Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brothers blood from your hand.  When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you.  You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”  (Gen 4:10-12 NIV)

There are two ways of looking at this curse, (as there are with most curses mentioned in the Bible):  the obvious interpretation is that God is punishing Cain by laying down divine vengeance on his head.  This is the “God is a Vindictive Jerk” theory, and there are passages in Scripture which seem to support this point of view.  But you can also interpret the passage as saying, “Your action has tainted the earth, and so as a result, it will no longer be as productive.”  Just as they tell us Virtue is its Own Reward, so does Evil also carry its own reward and the consequences of our actions come back to bite us in the butt.  Cain found that Karma is a pain.

And here an interesting shift occurs in the story.  Up to this point, the story of Cain and Abel has been the story of a family; (because at this point the population of the Human Race can be counted on the fingers of one hand).  But with this next part, we see things in the setting of a greater society.  Cain complains that his punishment is too much to bear, because everyone who sees him from now on is going to want to kill him, out of vengeance for what he did to Abel.  We’re now looking ahead, to a time where humanity has grown beyond Cain’s own generation; and to one of the big problems a society faces:  how to break the cycle of revenge.  The Lord decrees that anyone who kills Cain shall suffer a seven-fold retribution.

God places a mark on Cain, to identify him,  so people will know not to kill him.  We don’t know what kind of a mark this was.  It’s been interpreted as a scar on his brow; or a brand, the way some cultures would brand criminals to identify them.  Other traditions hold that Cain was marked with bright red hair.

For centuries there was a widespread belief that God marked Cain by turning his skin dark, and that Africans are the descendants of Cain.  This was sometimes used as a justification of slavery in America.  (That, and the Curse of Ham, which is another story for another day).

This is why the early American black poet Phillis Wheatley, in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, alludes to Cain in her plea for acceptance:

Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negro's, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

The Mark of Cain has been popularly regarded as part of God’s curse on him, but the text suggests that rather it was a mercy, a mark of protection.  In a sense, it was both:  Although the Mark, whatever it was, served to protect Cain by warning others not to kill him, it also set him apart from society.  No matter how numerous mankind would become, no matter how far he should wander, he could never take refuge in anonymity.  His crime was written on his face; everyone would know who he was and what he did.

And so Cain leaves his parents, taking his wife with him, which brings us to another question:  Where did Cain get that wife of his, anyway?

That’s coming up next time.

Who the Heck's Melchizadek?

Every once in a while in the Bible, a righteous, God-fearing person will pop up out of the blue, with no connection to the rest of the Biblical narrative.  They are not descended from the Holy Line and received no instruction from the Established Patriarchs.  Nevertheless, they know and believe in the One True God and are honored by Scriptures as righteous men.

Melchizidek is one such person.  His name means “Righteous King” or “King of Righteousness” and the text calls him “king of Salem”, which is presumed to be an older name for Jerusalem, and is related to the Hebrew word for “Peace.”  In addition to being a king, the text also says he was a priest of the God Most High.  He brings out bread and wine to refresh Abram and pronounces a blessing on him.

Blessed be Abram by God Most HighCreator of heaven and earthAnd blessed be God Most HighWho delivered your enemies into our hand.(Gen 14: 19-20 NIV)

Abram gives Melchizadek a tenth of the spoils.  How this works out, since a couple verses later Abram rejects the King of Sodom’s offer of a share of his own, the text doesn't explain.

That is the last we hear of Melchizadek, at least in Genesis.  Psalm 110 makes an interesting reference to him, though.  The psalmist, in this case identified as King David, speaks of one to come, who will be exalted to the LORD’s right hand and who will rule from Zion, (the mountain on which Jerusalem was built).  In the midst of his description of glory and might and his military imagery, the psalmist adds:

 “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind.  “You are a priest forever, in the Order of Melchizadek.”  (Psalm 110:4)

Granted, the Psalmist might not be referring to a proper name here; a more recent Jewish translation renders this verse as “... You are a priest forever, a rightful king by My decree.”

Either way, Christians have interpreted this psalm as speaking of the Messiah.  In fact, the author of the Book of Hebrews cites this passage in his lengthy meditation on Christ the Great High Priest; (Hebrews chapter 7, and heck, most of the rest of the epistle as well).  But what does it mean to be a priest in the Order of Melchizadek?

The priests of the Old Testament, who served in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple in Jerusalem, were all descendants on Aaron, the brother of Moses, and so can be considered the Order of Aaron.  Melchizadek predated Aaron and Moses and even, one might argue, Abraham.  So if there is a priestly tradition of Melchizadek, then it lies outside of and independent from the Abrahamic tradition; yet also parallel to it, in that it grows out of the same Semetic culture that Abraham did, and also worships the One True God.

Unlike the priests of David’s day, Melchizadek was both a priest and a king.  It actually wasn’t all that uncommon in ancient times for kings to participate in religious duties; we get a glimpse of this much later in the Roman Empire, where one of the Emperor’s titles was Pontifex Maximus, and performed public sacred rituals on important holy days.  Moses, however, decreed a kind of separation of church and State.  The priesthood was a hereditary vocation with rigidly defined duties and qualifications; and secular leadership was something else.  In the book of 1 Samuel we see King Saul getting in trouble for presuming to perform a sacrifice himself, (1 Sam. 13) and later on King David’s desire to move the Ark of the Covenant to his political capitol caused problems as well.

Martin Luther speculated that Melchizadek might have been Shem, one of the sons of Noah.  If you want to play the game of trying to reconcile the various genealogies listed in Genesis, you can work out a fair argument that Shem could have been alive at the time of Abraham, and therefore he could plausibly have been the King of Salem around then.  Maybe.

Another idea is that Melchizadek was the pre-incarnate Christ, on the theory that the Second Person of the Trinity must of been doing something while he was hanging around waiting for The Fullness of Time and so he’d pop into the Biblical narrative every now and then and do cameos.

Put that way, it does sound kind of silly, and I don’t think I buy it.  It gains a little support when we remember that the name “Melchizadek” means “Righteous King” and that as ruler of “Salem” he was in a sense the “Prince of Peace”; but I still think it works better to regard him as a pre-figuring of Christ rather than a ret-conned previous appearance.

I prefer to think of Melchizadek as a reminder that although the Old Testament is mostly concerned with the Line of Abraham and with telling the story of the Children of Israel, that God was interested in other people too; and that other people sought him and worshiped him in their own ways.

The Patriarch's Posse

We don’t really think of the Patriarchs as butt-kickers.  The Patriarchs are more... well... Patriarchal.  They wear long beards; they do a lot of begetting; and they administer the complex soap opera of their extended families.  It’s hard to imagine someone like Abraham leading warriors into battle.  And yet this is just what he did.

When Abraham, then known as Abram, left the land of Ur at God’s command and journeyed to the Promised Land, his nephew Lot accompanied him.  Both men possessed considerable herds of livestock, and they found that there wasn't enough water and grazing land where they had camped to support the both of them.  Their herdsmen kept fighting with each other and Abram saw that this could not go on.

So Abram said to Lot, “Let‘s not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers.  Is not the whole land before you?  Let‘s part company.  If you go to the left, I‘ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I‘ll go to the left.” (Gen. 13:8-9)

Lot chose the rich verdant lands surrounding the Cities of the Plain of Jordan, and pitched his tent near the city of Sodom.  Abram moved west to Hebron and set up camp near the great trees of Mamre.

Unfortunately, Lot wasn't the only one who liked the rich, verdant plains of the Jordan.  The five Cities of the Plain had been subject to  Kedorlaomer, the King of Elam, a land east of Mesopotamia on the Persian Gulf, for about twelve years, but had recently rebelled.  A year following the rebellion, Kedorlaomer and three of his neighboring kings embarked on a campaign to subdue several of the tribes in the region.

(In case you were interested, his allies were Amraphel, the king of Shinar, Arioch king of Ellasar, and Tidal king of Goiim.  Shinar is a region in Mesopotamia, and Amraphel was once mistakenly identified as Hammurapi, the great lawgiver of Babylon.  He probably wasn't, though.  The word “goiim” in Hebrew means “foreign nations,” so it’s unclear if it’s meant to be a name for a specific nation here.  Ellesar is the elvish name for King Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, but he has even less to do with the story than Hammurapi.)

The five Kings of the Plain, (Bera, king of Sodom; Birsha, king of Gomorrah; Shinab, king of Admah, Shemeber, king of Zebolim; and the king of Zoar who isn't named; remember, there‘ll be a test) prepared to meet the Four Kings in the Valley of Siddim, near the Dead Sea.  They were overwhelmed by Kedorlaomer’s forces.  Many of their men perished in the tar pits of the valley and the rest fled into the hills.

The army of the Four Kings sacked the Cities of the Plain, carrying off everything that wasn't nailed down.  This included Lot, who as you'll recall had moved his tents to the neighborhood of Sodom.  The text suggests that he had actually moved into the city by this time; although I have to wonder if the attack by the Four Kings were what convinced him to settle down someplace with walls.

This raid by Kedolaomer and his cohorts presents something of a problem.  We’d like to see Kedoraomer as the bad guy, for coming in with an army and carrying off Abram’s nephew.  Except that Sodom and Gomorrah are bad guys too.  Some commentators have been so uncomfortable about presenting Sodom in a sympathetic light, that they insist that the Cities of the Plain were wrong to rebel against Kedolaomer, and that the raid by the Elamites was God’s just vengeance against the disobedient cities.  I don’t think I’d go that far.  But whether their rebellion was justified or not, Lot found himself caught up in the Elamites’s retaliation.

One of the survivors of the battle came to Abram, who at that time was swelling near Hebron, near the great trees of Mamre, an Amorite chieftain who along with his brothers were allies of Abram.  We don’t don’t think of the Holy Land in conjunction with big trees, but the rocky landscape of today is the result of centuries of deforestation.  These huge trees on Mamre’s lands were apparently local landmarks.  We also don’t think of Abraham schmoozing with Canaanite chieftains, but Abram and his neighbor Mamre seem to have been on good terms.

Wen Abram heard of Lot’s predicament, he gathered up his own men, “318 trained men, born in his household”  (Gen. 14:14).  The word in Hebrew is obscure; in other ancient sources it means “armed retainers.”  These men seem to have been Abram’s private security force, a cadre of fighters who protected his herds and flocks from wild animals and marauders.  That’s my guess anyway.

Abram led his men in pursuit of he army of the Four Kings all the way to Dan, near the headwaters of the Jordan River.  He split his forces into two groups and defeated Kedorlaomer’s army, recovering the plundered loot and rescuing Lot and the other captives.

And this brings up a puzzle the text does not address.  How did Abram manage to defeat the army of the Four Kings with only 318 men?  Kedorlaomer and his allies had just conquered several other tribes in the area as well as defeating the armies of the Kings of the Plain.  You’d think they’d have more soldiers than a guy in a tent with some livestock, no matter how affluent that guy was.  The text doesn't say.

Perhaps the 318 men the text mentions are just Abram’s own men and that his buddies Mamre and his brothers, who accompanied Abram, contributed men of their own.  Perhaps  he might have gathered additional troops from the survivors who escaped the battle of the tar pits, as Gandalf gathered the scattered troops of Rohan to relieve Helm‘s Deep.  It’s also possible that Kedorlaomer’s forces were burdened by all the prisoners and plunder and so fought under a disadvantage.  Or perhaps the text is exaggerating Kedorlaomer’s importance; maybe Kedorlaomer was never that big a king after all and Lot was simply carried off by a desert warlord and his large band of brigands.  In the 19th Century, Biblical scholars thought they had identified some of the kings named in Babylonian sources, but later scholarship disagrees.

The text says that Abram divided his forces into two groups.  Possibly he caught the enemy in a narrow valley where they’d be pinned between the two flanks.  Perhaps Abram caught them by surprised as Gideon did to the Midianites (Judges ch. 7), and that is how he was able to defeat a superior force.  Once again, the text is annoyingly vague.

What it does say is that Abram returned with all the captives and plunder.  They are met by the King of Sodom, who was among the refugees from the previous battle.  The King of Sodom offers Abram a generous share of the recovered loot to repay him, but Abram refuses.  He allows Mamre and his brothers to take a share, but he won’t take anything for himself, “so that you will never be able to say ‘I made Abram rich.’” (Gen. 14:23)

Another guy shows up at this time accompanying the King of Sodom.  His name is Melchizadek, and he’s another of the the Bible’s mysteries.  We’ll get to him next time.

They Might Be Giants

The pious Iowa revivalist found himself in a discussion with a skeptic.  “You don’t really believe all those stories in the Bible about giants and such, do you?” the fellow scoffed.  The minister vehemently asserted that he did, and pointed to a verse in Genesis to support him:  “There were giants in the earth in those days.”

Some of the most tantalizing stories in the Bible are the untold ones; the passages that make a passing reference to something but never tells us any more.  Of these untold stories, perhaps the most intriguing is the introduction we get to the story of Noah:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.  ... There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.  (Genesis 6:1-2, 4 King James Version)

This passage presents us with two mysteries:  Who are these “sons of God” and who are the giants they begat?

Well, if you grew up in the ‘70s as I did, the first question has only one answer.  They were space aliens obviously.  At least that’s what Erich von Däniken used to say.

The phrase translated as “sons of God” literally means “sons of the powers”, and in some places, such as Job 1:6 and Jude 6-7, it refers to angels.  In this particular context it certainly sounds like the text is referring to some kind of demigods or semi-divine beings, especially since the offspring of these beings are described as giants.  This interpretation doesn't fit so well with the traditional Jewish and Christian views of God.  Perhaps this passage, like a few others in Genesis, might be cultural relics of a time before the Hebrews adopted monotheism which the writer who compiled the Book of Genesis neglected to fix.  If that’s the case, the Holy Spirit could have used a better copy editor.

Orthodox Judaism interprets the phrase differently; as “sons of nobles“.  Similarly, an ancient Christian tradition holds that “sons of God” refers to the godly descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, those who had a Covenant Relationship with God; and that the “daughters of men” belonged to the line of Cain.  This seems possible, but doesn't capture the imagination quite like the notion of angelic space aliens getting it on with sexy earth girls.

The apocryphal Books of Enoch, written between the 3rd and 1st Centuries BC, expands considerably on the Genesis 6 passage.  Ostensibly written by the patriarch Enoch before the Flood, it identifies the “sons of God” with angels called Watchers, whose job was to watch over humanity. Uatu the Watcher from Marvel Comics is probably related to them.

Some of these Watchers were the ones who began fooling around with human women and who also taught humans forbidden knowledge like astrology, weapon-making, and cartooning; (well, “the art of writing with ink and paper“). The movie Noah plays around with this idea and represents the Watchers as huge creatures whose angelic forms are encased in rock and earth, embodying their fallen state.

Which brings us to the children of the sons of God and the daughters of men.  King James follows many ancient translations and calls them “giants”, but the Hebrew word used in the passage is “nephilim”, which means, depending on your point of view, either “fallen ones” or “those causing others to fall.”  (Or, it could be related to the Aramaic word “Nephila” for the constellation of Orion, which brings us back to space aliens.)

But were they giants?  A more prosaic interpretation suggests that the Nephilim of Genesis were giants in a metaphorical way rather than a literal one; that they were simply “mighty men of renown”, the same way we might call a corporate CEO a Titan of Industry, or a mathematical genius a Colossus of Intellect, or a college football star the Big Man on Campus.

I suspect that the identification of the Nephilim with giants comes from the only other place in the Bible where they are mentioned.  In the Book of Numbers there is a story in which Moses sends twelve spies into the land of Canaan to do reconnaissance.  Their initial report was not promising:

But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes and we looked the same to them.” (Numbers 13: 31-33 NIV)

Are these the same Nephilim from Genesis? The reference to Anak, who was one of the Canaanite kings, would suggest that they were, or at least were descended from them.  Then how did these ancestors of Anak survive the Deluge that wiped out the rest of humanity?  I don’t know.

But another strong possibility is that the spies were exaggerating.  “These guys were huge, man!  They were like freakin’ King Kong!”  It’s not all that implausible to suppose that the Canaanites, living as they did in a Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, had a better overall diet than the nomadic Israelites and were on average taller; but all that stuff about looking like grasshoppers?  I don’t think so.

That’s the last mention we get in Scriptures of the Nephilim.  Maybe the writer who compiled Genesis didn't know any more about them than a name passed down in oral tradition.  Or maybe the writer was more interested in recording the history of Abraham and his ancestry, and that he regarded these half-mythical beings as peripheral to his story.

Either way, the giants of those days stuck in people’s minds.  In 1869, when a farmer in upstate New York digging a well uncovered what seemed to be the petrified remains of one of these giants, it seemed vindication at last for the Genesis account.  The “Cardiff Giant”, of course, was a hoax, perpetrated by the same scoffer who had argued with the Iowa revivalist, and who decided that if people wanted to believe in such things, he would give it to them.

And so, for a time at least, there really were giants in the earth.

Adam's Ex

I have to admit:  I’m cheating.

Having said I was going to blog about obscure stories in the Bible, my first week I wrote about the Creation -- not exactly unknown here -- and this week I’m writing about a character who isn't even in the Bible.  Well, not technically.

Although Lilith is never exactly named in the Bible, she does have an association with Adam. She‘s part of the pop theology which has accumulated around Creation these past few millenia.  Some people think she was in the Bible, and some others think she should have been.

The name Lilith is thought to derive from Lilitu, a type of female spirit or demon from Babylonian and Assyrian mythology associated with the night wind. An ancient Mesopotamian tablet depicting a nude goddess with bird’s feet and wings has been thought by some to represent Lilitu, although other scholars identify her with Ishtar or other goddesses of the region.  There’s also an incident in the Epic of Gilgamesh in which the hero rids a goddess’s huluppu tree of a snake, a zu bird and another garden pest which some translators have identified as a Lilith.

It  seems likely that Lilith entered Hebrew folklore during the Babylonian Captivity, where she was seen as a demonic spirit who preyed on women and young children.  She was frequently portrayed as a beautiful woman, sexually preying on men as they slept giving them wet dreams and enticing them to grow hair on their palms.  I made up the last part.

The only place in the Bible that comes close to mentioning Lilith is a passage in Isaiah describing the destruction of Edom.  It describes the land becoming a desolate place, inhabited by unclean beasts and supernatural terrors.  This is how a modern Jewish translation puts it:

“Wildcats shall meet hyenas, / Goat-demons shall greet each other; / There too the lilith shall repose / And find herself a resting place” (Isaiah 34:14)

The King James Verison renders the word “liylith” in the original Hebrew as “screech owl”; which is perhaps appropriate given Lilith’s associations with the night and with birds of prey.  Other translations translate it as “night creature”, “night hag” or “vampire”.

Over time, Lilith developed two aspects: the slayer of newborns, and the seducer of men. The latter can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls,  which contain a reference identifying  Lilith with the warnings in the Book of Proverbs against seductive women.

The former is reflected by a Hebrew tradition that an amulet bearing the names of three angels, (Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, which would make a great name for a law firm), would protect a newborn boy in the crucial eight days before his circumcision, , when he was vulnerable to evil influences.

But what does any of this have to do with Adam?

As we've seen, the Creation account in Genesis 1 suggests that Man and Woman were created at the same time, but the account in Genesis 2 states that Adam was created first and that Eve came later.  The Genesis Rabbah, a Jewish commentary on the Book of Genesis written some time after the Babylonian Talmud, explains this apparent discrepancy by postulating a First Wife for Adam, created with him on the Sixth Day.

(Personally I don’t have a problem with assuming that the “male and female” from chapter one refers to Adam and Eve from chapter two; but these learned rabbis did; and this is how they reconciled the two texts).

In the Middle Ages, sometime between the 8th and 10th Centuries, a book titled The Alphabet of ben Sirach identified this hypothetical First Wife as Lilith.  The book was a series of acrostic proverbs modeled after those in the Apocryphal book Wisdom of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus; along with commentary.  Many scholars consider the work to be satirical due to the number of fart jokes in it.

According to the Alphabet, Lilith was Adam’s first wife; but because they had both been created from the earth, Lilith refused to take a subordinate role to her husband.  Specifically, She Wanted To Be On Top during sex, and Adam insisted that she could only be Underneath.

Lilith’s demand for equality has made her popular with modern day feminists, although I doubt that the author of The Alphabet intended her as a role-model.  She left Adam and took up a new career devouring children.  And things for Lilith kind of went downhill from there.

In Medieval Jewish and Christian folklore, Lilith became known as the mother of all manner of supernatural creatures, some demonic and monstrous, like giants and trolls; some just otherworldly, like elves and fairies. C.S. Lewis alludes to this idea in his Narnia books, when he has a character comment that although the White Witch claims to be a Daughter of Eve, she is actually descended from Adam’s first wife, Lilith.  The Victorian fantasy writer George MacDonald, who was one of Lewis’s inspirations, wrote a novel called Lilith in which she is portrayed both as a seducer of men and as an enemy of children, but who nevertheless receives a chance for redemption.

But back to the legend.  God had to try again making a new mate for Adam, and this time he created the woman out of Adam’s flesh so that there would be no question as to who had seniority and who was in charge.  This fits in with the way a lot of people interpret the story of the Creation of Eve; that being formed out of Adam’s rib is supposed to symbolize Eve’s inferiority to Adam.

I don’t read the story quite like that.  As I see it, the Genesis account’s depiction of Eve being created out of Adam’s rib is not a matter of who wears the pants in the family; (which at that point in the story was neither; pants came later); but rather to portray Eve as a part of Adam; “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” as Adam himself puts it.  And the story concludes with a passage later quoted by Jesus and which is frequently used as a wedding text:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.  (Genesis 2:24 NIV)

To me, that verse says nothing about which one is in charge, but rather that both form a partnership.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 provides us with a brief glimpse of the ideal of marriage.  Perhaps the bickering Adam and Lilith of legend is closer to the reality, but it’s a cynical view.

Some have claimed that Lilith was “left out” of the Bible; which is rather like complaining that Rudolph was “left out” of the poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”  Even though the Lilitu of Sumerian myth existed before the writing of Genesis, she did not become associated with Adam until much, much later.

Some feminists have tried to rehabilitate Lilith, claiming that she was originally a goddess of childbirth and fertility, like Ishtar or Isis, who was vilified when patriarchal religions gained ascendancy.  I suppose it’s possible that the name Lilith was once associated with such a deity; but I don’t see that having anything to do with Adam.  And for all Lilith’s assertive independence that we might admire, her portrayal in legend is to my mind more misogynistic than anything in Genesis.

Sadly, we don’t see much of Eve’s character in Genesis.  She gets the spotlight in one story:  the story of her Temptation; and she doesn't come off very well in it.  We don’t really know what she was like apart for her apparent willingness to believe talking snakes, and she quickly recedes into the background. Which is a pity, because I’d like to know more about her.

Brash, ballsy, bad-girl Lilith grabs our attention, but I can’t help but feel that her story diminishes both Eve and Adam.  I guess I prefer to think of Adam and Eve as the First Couple.

And Adam certainly has enough screw-ups to his name without having him be a jerk to his ex on top of everything.

The Two Creations

Sometimes the Bible is dismissed as “Just a Collection of Myths”; an assessment which to my mind shows a shallow understanding of both the Bible and of Myth.  But if we’re going to level the charge of Mythology against any part of Scripture, then surely the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, in which we see God personally shaping the World, are the most Myth-like.  Here we have God forming Order out of Chaos; erecting the Sky; raising the Continents; and bending down to get his hands dirty forming the first man out of the dust of the earth and breathing into him the breath of Life.  Cosmic stuff.

Now wait, you are saying, didn't I say that these were going to be the ones we didn't hear in Sunday School?  Well, yes.  But as Julie Andrews tells us, we should “start at the beginning; A very good place to start.”  And if we’re going to be talking about the Bible, it’s hard to get much earlier than Genesis.  And instead of going into the whole Charles Darwin vs. Bishop Ussher thing, I wanted to just touch a bit on one aspect of the beginning of Genesis that we maybe sometimes overlook.

Most  people have probably heard the passage “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth” and know that according to Genesis God created the world in six days; but they might not know that there are two different Creation accounts in Genesis.  The first is the familiar Six-Day story found in Genesis chapter 1, (plus a couple concluding verses which somehow got put in Chapter 2).  The second, beginning in Genesis 2:4 and continuing through the rest of the chapter, describes the Garden of Eden and describes how God created first Adam and then Eve.

But why are there two Creation accounts?  I can think of a couple explanations.

Tradition holds that the first five books of the Bible; the Pentatuech, or Torah; were written by Moses.  In the 19th Century, Biblical scholars developed the theory that these books were actually compiled at a much later date from several different sources, each with a different agenda and a different point of view.  This has become known as the Documentary Hypothesis or the JEDP Theory after the four sources that are believed to have been used in assembling the Books of Moses as we know them today.  Most biblical scholars accept the Documentary Hypothesis, or some version of it; although some Literalists like to stick with Tradition because that’s what we do.  Others simply shrug and quote 2 Peter 1:21 “For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke form God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”   From that point of view, Scripture is still Scripture no matter who actually wrote it down.

According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the multiple versions of the Creation Account make perfect sense.  The Redactor, (the guy who compiled the disparate sources into the Torah), had two different versions of the same story and wasn't sure which one to throw out; so he included both.

But another possibility occurs to me, not necessarily incompatible with the first.  Scriptures often employ a literary device where something is described, and then described again in a slightly different way.  We see this a lot in the Psalms, most frequently in the form of the first half of a verse making a statement and then the second half restating it; for example: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.“ (Psalm 119:105)  Both statements are saying the same thing, but the rephrasing gives us a slightly different connotation from the first, giving us a sort of stereoptic view of the concept.

So perhaps the Creation accounts in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are doing the same thing:  providing two different views of the same event.  The first looks at the Big Picture, and places it in the context of a Six-Day-plus-Sabbath structure.  The second, focuses on a couple important features of Creation:  the Garden of Eden, and the Origin of Mankind.

Except there’s one fairly big discrepancy there.  The Genesis chapter 1 account strongly suggests that God created the first Man and the first Woman at the same time, on the sixth day:  “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:27 NIV).  Sounds pretty clear to me.

But the Genesis 2 account has God creating Adam first, and then, thinking it over, decided that Adam needed a companion.  To remedy this situation, he created the first woman, Eve.

There are two ways of looking at this passage.  Traditionally, it’s been interpreted to mean that  Man has precedence over Woman because he has seniority.  But I think it’s just as valid to say this story is about how Man needs companionship.  Eve is not just a secondary creation, an afterthought on God’s part; she is actually created out of Adam’s body and therefore, it seems to me, she has a greater claim to equality with Adam than if she had simply been Adam 2.0.  But we’re getting away from the point.

So how do we reconcile this story of Eve created out of Adam’s rib with the Genesis 1 account where Male and Female were created at the same time?

The easiest solution is to say that both stories are myths and we shouldn't expect them to be consistent because they never really happened.  But really, what’s the fun of that?

Another way is to say that the author of the Genesis 1 account fiddled things around in order to get everything to fit neatly into his Week-of-Creation outline.  Raised as I was in a tradition adhering to the Inerrancy of Scripture, I can’t say I’m crazy about that interpretation; but it seems plausible.

Going to the other extreme we have the interpretation that the story in Gen. 2: 7-25 all took place on the same day; the Sixth Day of Creation.  That was what I remember being taught in Sunday School.  But when you look at it, we have (1.) God creating Adam; (2.) God establishing the Garden of Eden for Adam to live in; (3.) God brings all the animals he’s created to Adam, who gives them all names; (4.) God puts Adam into a deep sleep and creates Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs; (5.) Adam and Eve meet, get to know each other, and presumably invent sex.  And keep in mind this all happens after God has already created every animal that creepeth upon the Earth.  That’s a lot to pack into one busy afternoon.  Yeah, God’s good at multi-tasking, but still, it’s enough to make a man consider the theistic notion that the Days of Creation represented geological epochs rather than 24-hour days.

Then there’s the theory that Adam actually had two wives, one created with him on the 6th day, and a second one, Eve, created out of his rib.  But that’s a story we‘ll get to another time.