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Forward to Genesis 20-50
Genesis 1 by verse:
General References
Madison Smartt Bell, “The Story of the Days of Creation,” Genesis: As it is written, p. 23-34
Wendell Berry, “The Hidden Singer,” Collected Poems, p. 207 f.
“The Hidden Singer”
The Gods are less
for their love of praise
Above and below them all
is a spirit that needs
nothing but its own
wholeness,
its health and ours.
It has made all things
by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come
together—the seer
and the seen, the eater
and the eaten, the lover
and the loved
In our joining it knows
itself.
Wendell Berry, “The Journey’s End,” Words from the Land, p. 236
“The Journey’s End”
There is a thought repeating itself in my mind: This is a great Work, this is a great Work. It occurs to me that my head has gone to talking religion, that it is going ahead more or less on its own, assenting to the Creation, finding it good in the spirit of the first chapters of Genesis. For no matter the age or the hour, I am celebrating the morning of the seventh day. I assent to my mind’s assent. It is a great Work. It is a GREAT Work—begun in the beginning, carried on not by such processes as men make or understand, but by “the kind of intelligence that enables grass seed to grow grass; the cherry stone to make cherries.”
R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Vol. 2, p. 635
Haiku
Ellen Davis, “The Art of Being Creatures,” On Being (June 10, 2010)
"The Art of Being Creatures"
Paul Goodman, “The Face of Adam,” The Enduring Legacy, p. 12
Stephen Jay Gould, “The Narthex of San Marco and the Pangenetic Paradigm,” I Have Landed, p. 271-284
“The Narthex of San Marco and the Pangenetic Paradigm”
Under this analysis, we should not be surprised that Genesis 1, despite our usual and unconsidered readings, tells a tale of differentiation rather than addition. After all, if God proceeded with the usual care and thought conventionally attributed to his might, he probably had a pretty accurate idea about the finished product even before he began the work. Biological evolution, on the other hand, at least as viewed under the limits of our eminently fallible mental machinery, seems to wander along a wondrously erratic set of specific pathways within its broad predictabilities. (p. 283)
Nikolai Gumilyov, “Words,” Divine Inspiration, p. 3
“Words”
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, p. 10
The Sabbath
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.
James Weldon Johnson, “The Creation (A Sermon),” The Enduring Legacy, p. 10
“The Creation (A Sermon)”
And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
“I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world.”
And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke?
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, “That’s good!”
Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,
And God rolled the light around in His hands,
Until He made the sun;
And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered up in a shining ball
And flung against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and the stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world:
And God said, “That’s good!”
Then God himself stepped down—
And the sun was on His right hand,
And the moon was on His left;
The stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.
Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.
Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine-tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms;
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.
Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said, “Bring forth! Bring forth!”
And quicker than God could drop His hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings,
And God said, “That’s good!”
Then God walked around
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, “I’m lonely still.”
Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, “I’ll make me a man!”
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty,
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand—
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.
W. S. Merwin, “Just This,” The New Yorker (June 6, 2005), p. 98
“Just This”
When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven
Pattiann Rogers, “In My Time,” Song of the World Becoming, p. 380 f. [note]
“In My Time”
Grace Schulman, “The Story of the Creation Poet,” Genesis: As it is written, p. 15-22
Gary Snyder, “The Rediscovery of Turtle Island,” A Place in Space, p. 249
“The Rediscovery of Turtle Island”
William Stafford, “Hearing the Tide,” A Scripture of Leaves, p. 13
“Hearing the Tide”
Many tomorrows ago, when the world
leaned a certain way, one pearl morning
came, so still that the ocean stopped—
and then came a single smooth wave,
a single smooth wave evenly spread
in gray light horizonward.
I’m sorry for that, and for everything—
nothing could hold back for long that
wave that came, and the wave that came
after that, beginning tomorrows to here.
I’m afraid. Listen—one distant sound
made all this, they say.
One distant sound, a faraway wave.
and you and me, and a wave.
M. C. Escher, “Verbum,” Imaging the Word, Vol. 3, p. 232
Imaging the Word, Vol. 1, p. 39
Helmut Thielicke, “The Light of the World,” How the World Began, p. 26
Helmut Thielicke, “God’s Autograph,” How the World Began, p. 41
1 John 1:1
3 2 Corinthians 4:6
6-8 2 Peter 3:5
11-12 Psalm 1:2-3; 1 Corinthians 15:38
1-10 Frederick Buechner, “In the Beginning,” The Magnificent Defeat, p. 19-26
1-10 Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 13-15
1-5 John Hollander, “A Draft of Light,” Ploughshares (Winter 2006-07), p. 76
1-5 Robert F. Morneau, “The Gift of Creativity,” Gift, Mystery, Calling, p. 19-24
1-3 John Donne, “The Grace of Repentance,” Classics of Western Spirituality, p. 220
“The Grace of Repentance”
1-2 Timothy Beal, When Time is Short, p. 81
When Time is Short
The Hebrew text, however, conjures a very different image, not of creation from nothing but emergence from chaos. … “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Full stop. What follows, “And the earth was without form, and void,” then describes the unformed chaotic (tohu vabohu) earth that God just created from nothing. Taken this way we imagine an absolute beginning …
… “When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth,” which was already there when God began creating, “was formless void. Taken this way, we have a story that begins not as some absolute metaphysical beginning, with nothing, but in the midst of things, with God creating, or rather giving shape and form to, things that are already there in some sort of primordial formlessness. This offers an image of God as a co-creative participant with the material universe, interacting with each element of creation as it emerges and integrates within a larger ecosystem. This is not creation from nothing but emergence from chaos, with a creator God who is in relationship both with the material world and with the primordial deep from which it surfaces. God and matter are not categorically separate. On the contrary they are intimately connected.
1-2 Wendell Berry, This Day, p. 259
This Day
1-2 Gary Snyder, “No Matter Never Mind” & “On Vulture Peak,” No Nature, p. 212, 329
“No Matter Never Mind” & "On Vulture Peak"
The Father is the Void
The Wife Waves
Their child is matter.
Matter makes it with his mother
And their child is Life,
a daughter.
The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who with her father/brother Matter as her lover
Gives birth to the mind. (p. 212)
from “On Vulture Peak”
Tracing all the causes back
To Nothing which is not the start
(Now we love but here we part)
And not a one can answer why
To the simple garden in my eye. (p. 329)
1-2 Helmut Thielicke, “The Primeval Witness,” How the World Began, p. 12
1-2 Paul Valéry, quoted in Sabbath, p. 52
1 Charlene Spretnak, “Epochal Rumblings of the 1990’s,” The Resurgence of the Real, p. 22
“Epochal Rumblings of the 1990’s”
1 Theophilus, The Holy Spirit (Burns & Fagan), p. 30
The Holy Spirit
3-5 Henry Adams, from “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres,” The Book of Uncommon Prayer, p. 7
“Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres”
3 Ursula Le Guin, “Hymn to Time,” Late in the Day, p. 19
“Hymn to Time”
Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.
And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.
Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.
Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.
4 Mary Oliver, “Yes! No!” White Pine, p. 8
“Yes! No!”
10 Wendell Berry, Entries, p. 78
Entries
11-12 Pattiann Rogers, “Her Delight,” Song of the World Becoming, p. 167
“Her Delight”
12-25 Dante, “Canto 1,” Paradiso, p. 130
“Canto 1”
20-21 Dan Damon, “Give Thanks for the Wolf and Bird,” The Sound of Welcome, p. 2
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
Wendell Berry, What Are People For?, p. 138
What Are People For?
… it is natural to wonder if there may not be such phenomena as net pleasures, pleasures that are free or without a permanent cost. And we know that there are. These are the pleasures that we take in our own lives, our own wakefulness in this world and in the company of other people and other creatures— pleasure innate in the Creation and in our own good work. It is in these pleasures that we possess the likeness to God that is spoken of in Genesis.
“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” Henry David Thoreau …
(See further, Rev. 4:11)
Wendell Berry, Standing by Words, p. 55 ff.
Standing by Words
Denise Levertov, “Tragic Error,” Evening Train, p. 69
“Tragic Error”
Miswritten, misread, that charge:
subdue was the false, the misplaced word in the story.
Surely we were to have been
earth’s mind, mirror, reflective source.
Surely our task
was to have been
to love the earth
to dress and keep it like Eden’s garden.
That would have been our dominion:
to be those cells of earth’s body that could
perceive and imagine, could bring the planet
into the haven it is to be known,
(as the eye blesses the hand, perceiving
its form and the work it can do).
Mary Oliver, “A Few Words,” Blue Pastures, p. 92
“A Few Words”
Thus we manage to put ourselves in the masterly way—if nature is full of a hundred thousand things adorable and charming, diminutive and powerless, then who is in the position of power? We are! We are the parents, and the governors. The notion facilitates a view of the world as playground and laboratory, which is a meager view surely. And it is disingenuous, for it seems so harmless, so responsible. But it is neither.
Rainer Maria Rilke, “I,59,” Book of Hours, p. 88
“I,59”
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then he walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 16
Helmut Thielicke, “Man: The Risk of God,” How the World Began, p. 59
Helmut Thielicke, “The Meaning and Order of the Sexes,” How the World Began, p. 87
26-28 John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer, p. 50
The Greatest Prayer
26-27 Dan Damon, “Shadow and Substance,” The Sound of Welcome, p. 13
26 Mary Oliver, “Yes! No!” White Pine, p. 8
“Yes! No!”
26 Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, p. ?
27 Wendell Berry, “Duality,” Entries, p. 46-50
“Duality”
27 Walter J. Burghardt, S.J. “I and Thou, Not Mine and Thine,” Lovely in Eyes Not His, p. 143-148
27 Dom Helder Camara, “Prodigal son who art in heaven:” A Thousand Reasons for Living, p. 27
“Prodigal son who art in heaven:”
Son, who saved yourself by trusting
serving since as an example
to millions of prodigals
son, who knew the horror of absence,
the emptiness of sin
and yearning for his father’s house,
help me to pray this agonizing night
for prodigal parents
whose sin consists
in turning Christ’s parable upside down
by erasing the Father’s image in themselves.
27 Abraham Joseph Heschel, “The Other, the Others, and You,” Best Sermons I, p. 192 f.
“The Other, the Others, and You”
“The human is a disclosure of the divine, and all men are one in God’s care for man. Many things on earth are precious, some are holy, humanity is holy of holies.
“To meet a human being is an opportunity to sense the image of God, the presence of God. According to a rabbinical interpretation, the Lord said to Moses: ‘Wherever you see the trace of man there I stand before you ….’”
The Image of God, the presence of God, in each woman and man—a thrilling thought. The Other comes alive in the other.
27 Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season, p. 137
The Irrational Season
27 Michael Lerner, Jewish Renewal, p. xx
Jewish Renewal
A major premise of this book is that human beings become more fully themselves through a process of mutual recognition, and when that process is stymied it provokes angry and sometimes oppressive behavior. God is the Force in the universe that makes possible this process of recognition, and part of what is recognized is the God within each of us (namely, the way that we are created in the image of God and hence equally worthy of respect and love). The fears, the accumulated angers and pains, the legacy of cruelty that combine to make it difficult for human beings to recognize one another have been a major source of evil throughout history. Much of twentieth-century psychoanalytic thought has been dedicated to understanding the unconscious forces that sustain this tendency to pass on the pain and cruelty from generation to generation.
27 Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
A Return to Love
Our deepest fear is, not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light and not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I, to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
27 Jacob Milgrom, Bible Review (August 1995), p. 17
Bible Review
Suppose you don’t love yourself, asks Ben Azzai—how can you love someone else? A person may think his life is a failure … What then should this person do? Let him remind himself, says Ben Azzai, that because he bears the likeness of God, he is of ultimate worth, that regardless of his present condition, he has the divinely endowed potential for joy and fulfillment and only then, having learned to love himself, he will recover his self-esteem and be capable of loving others.
28 Wendell Berry, Standing by Words, p. 128-129
Standing by Words
… the Oxford English Dictionary gives as one of the definitions of “subdue”: “To bring (land) under cultivation.” And in illustration of this meaning it cites the Cloverdale translation of Genesis1:28. That this is the correct reading should be suggested immediately by its consonance with “replenish”.
28 Ellen Davis, “The Art of Being Creatures,” On Being (June 10, 2010)
"The Art of Being Creatures"
28 David Mas Masumoto, Four Seasons in Five Senses, p. 72
Four Seasons in Five Senses
28 David H. C. Read, “Adam and the Astronaut,” I Am Persuaded, p. 75-83
31 John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected, p. 68
The Hour of the Unexpected
31 Imaging the Word, Vol. 2, p. 214-217
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
Wendell Berry, Sex Economy Freedom & Community, p. 97
Sex Economy Freedom & Community
Stephen Mitchell, “Introduction,” The Book of Job, p. xxi
“Introduction”
What the Voice means is that paradise isn’t situated in the past or future, and doesn’t require a world tamed or edited by the moral sense. It is our world, when we perceive it clearly, without eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is an experience of the Sabbath vision: looking at reality, the world of starving children and nuclear menace, and recognizing that it is very good.
Brad Roberts (Crash Test Dummies), “God Shuffled His Feet,” God Shuffled His Feet
“God Shuffled His Feet”
“Let there be a day
Just for picnics, with wine and bread”
He gathered up some people he had made
Created blankets and laid back in the shade
The people sipped their wine
And what with God there, the asked him questions
Like: …
If your eye got poked out in this life
Would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?
C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison, Slow Church, p. 146
HelmutThielicke, “The Great Sabbath,” How the World Began, p. 103
1-3 Exodus 20:11
2 Hebrews 4:4,10
2 Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, p. 2
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation. 4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
Genesis 2:4-25 by verse:
General References
Timothy Beal, When Time is Short, p. 87
When Time is Short
Frederick Buechner, “Adam,” Peculiar Treasures, p. 6-7
John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 267
The Historical Jesus
Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, p. 121, 125
Julia Hartwig, “Everything to Measure,” Poetry Daily (March 12, 2008)
“Everything to Measure”
Oh no—paradise is not disheveled nature
bearded unkempt pines shrubbery branches
blue-black colonies of berries
looking out with the eyes of hunted deer
Paradise is a garden
where everything is to measure
joy but not wildness
not despair but melancholy
It is the victory of order
So what if on gravel paths
you sometimes hear approaching steps
above which a body had no time to take shape
Ann Lauterbach, “Genesis (Eden),” Communion, p. 451-466
Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them,” Out of the Garden, p. 331-333
Jacob Milgrom, “Sex and Wisdom: What the Garden of Eden Story Is Saying,” Bible Review (December 1994), p. 21 f.
“Sex and Wisdom: What the Garden of Eden Story Is Saying”
Thus the “original sin” is sex—if we keep in mind that sex means power to create. And the biblical story of its acquisition is not really one of sin and curse but rather of choice and consequence. God, so to speak, tells the first human couple that they would be better off in Eden. But he gives them the choice—and its consequence. The serpent clued them in as to the real effect of the fruit: It would make them like God (Genesis 3:5).
Arthur Miller, “The Story of Adam and Eve,” Genesis: As it is written, p. 35-41
Stephen Mitchell, “Naming the Animals,” Parables and Portraits, p. 32
Joyce Carol Oates, “Genesis (Eden) and John,” Communion, p. 253-270
Parker Palmer, “Promised Land,” Weavings (September/October 1992), p. 26
“Promised Land”
We and this green and supple land
Created by caress
From darkness drawn by Lover’s hand
In chaos stroked with tenderness
Evoked from naught the sensual line
And loving bodied forth
These human-torsoed turns of earth
That curl here naked, unashamed,
Echoing the earthly shapes
Of our own sculpted frame
Karl Shapiro, “Adam and Eve,” Contemporary Religious Poetry, p. 108 f.
Johe Shea, “A Prayer to the Mad Dollmaker,” The Hour of the Unexpected, p. 37
“A Prayer to the Mad Dollmaker”
But it was folly
to fall upon unsuspecting earth
knead a body of clay
and laying on it
feet to feet, hands to hands
breathe passion down its mouth
and wake the eyes to wonder
with tears.
Some say
you never guessed
til your love-child came to you
in the beauty of the garden and asked
When you die, will all this be mine?
Elie Wiesel, “Adam or The Mystery of the Beginning,” Messengers of God, p. 3-36
The Enduring Legacy, p. 18-35
The Enduring Legacy
Zora Neale Hurston, “Behold de Rib!”, p. 18
Karl Shapiro, “The Recognition of Eve”, p. 21
Louis Untermeyer, “Eve Speaks”, p. 23
Archibald MacLeish, “What Adam Said”, p. 26
D. H. Lawrence, “Only Man”, p. 26
Langston Hughes, “Temptation,” p. 27
Thomas Traherne, “From Everlasting to Everlasting”, p. 31
Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock,” p. 32
Eugene Zamiatin, “A Little Paradise Poem,” p. 34
John Frederick Nims, “A. D. 2267,” p. 35
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall/Temptation, p. 42-48 f.
Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 17-18
Helmut Thielicke, “Creation and Evolution Faith and Science,” How the World Began, p. 72
4-7 Timothy Beal, When Time is Short, p. 89-92
When Time is Short
As is the case in English, where the words “human” and “humility” derive from the same root as “humus,” so here ha’adam, “the human,” is literally connected to ha’adamah, “the ground” or “humus.” For this reason, we might better translate this Hebrew word as “groundling” or, as feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Tribe proposed, “earth creature.” The human comes from the humus. It is literally humble, that is, close to the ground, grounded. And it will eventually return to the ground, as the creator God will later explain: “By the sweat of your nose you will eat bread until your return to the ground [ha’adamah], for from it you were taken. For you are soil [‘afar], and to soil you will return (3:19).
The ground, moreover, is not some passive mass of dirt but an active character in the story. It is imagined as alive with agency and subjectivity. The subterranean wellspring quenches its “face (panah), or more literally, “makes the ground’s face drink.” And it awaits the arrival of the human to … “till” it? The word is ‘avad, which elsewhere most commonly means “serve” (as in serving God, other gods, or another superior). … A little later, moreover, this same ground will “open its mouth” to consume the blood of Abel, whom Cain murdered, and will refuse to let Cain “serve” it (Genesis 4:10-11). This ground has personality and agency. It eats and drinks. It is served by humans and sometimes refuses to be served by them. (p. 88 f.)
Nefeš is closely related.to its verb form, nafaš, “breathe” or “gasp,” which refers to life-giving breath and can also refer to the throat or windpipe that takes it in. So we might translate nefeš hayah as something like “breathing aliveness” or “breathing life.” (p. 90)
The human groundling is divinely inspired soil, spiritual dirt, intimately connected to the ground and as close to God as breath.
…
… when we read Biblical Hebrew less figuratively and more literally (e.g., “breath instead of “spirit,” “face” instead of “surface” or “presence,” “drink” instead of “water), we can better see how deeply rooted it is in the body and bodily experiences in the natural world. … Our propensity to translate less literally and more figuratively alienates us from this body language. We lose its earthy fleshiness, attuned as it is to this-worldly embodiment.
Earth creatureliness: dirty spirituality … (p. 91)
4-7 Imaging the Word, Vol. 1, p. 40-41
7 Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, p. 15
For the Time Being
7 Robert Morris, “Reclaiming the Body’s Soul,” Weavings (September/October 2007), p. 32-34
7 Mary Oliver, “Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End,” Why I Wake Early, p. 33
7 Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, p. 251
9 Michael Lerner, Jewish Renewal, p. 204
Jewish Renewal
15 Carlo Carretto, Love is for Living, p. 74-77
15 Joan Chittister, O.S.B. Weavings (January/February 1993), p. 10
Weavings
17 Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, p. 75
The Gospel According to Jesus
17 Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p. 113
The Botany of Desire
The forbidden plant and its temptations are older than Eden, go back further than we do. So too the promise, or threat, that forbidden plants have always made to the creature who would taste them—the promise, that is, of knowledge and the threat of mortality. It if sounds as if I’m speaking metaphorically about forbidden plants and knowledge, I don’t mean to. In fact, I’m no longer so sure the author of Genesis was, either.
In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; 6 but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground7 then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. 8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11 The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12 and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Cush. 14 And the name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
Wendell Berry, “2014 — VIII,” A Small Porch, p. 33
“2014 — VIII”
But are these beautiful because
we think them so, or because they are
beautiful in the mind of Nature
or the mind of God, beautiful
by intention inborn in a world beloved?
Beauty is the crisis of our knowing,
the signature of love indwelling
in all created things, called from nothing
by love, recognized and answered
by love in the human heart, not reducible
by any analysis to any fact.
The sufficient fact is unavailable.
The creatures came, as love imagines,
answering the loneliness of God
who needed them for company, as we
in our loneliness have needed them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall/Temptation, p. 57
Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, p. 339
Bully for Brontosaurus
There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms— … The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us—the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.
Walter J. Burghardt, S.J. “This Is My Commandment” and “Without Love I Am Nothing,” Lovely in Eyes Not His, p. 173-181
Helmut Thielicke, “The Meaning and Order of the Sexes,” How the World Began, p. 87
Hans Walter Wolff, Old Testament and Christian Preaching, p. 11-18
18-20 William Matthews, “Names,” Poetry Comes Up Where It Can, p. 77 f.
18-20 Richard Wilbur, “Lying” and “The Fourth of July,” New and Collected Poems, p. 11, 70
“Lying” and “The Fourth of July”
“Lying”
Or of the garden where we first mislaid
Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting
Out of what cognate splendor all things came
To take their scattering names; … (p. 11)
“The Fourth of July”
Nevertheless, no kindly swoon befell
Tree-named Linnaeus when the bald unknown
Encroached upon his memory, cell by cell,
And he, whose love of all things made had brought
Bird, beast, fish, plant, and stone
Into the reaches of his branchy thought,
Lost bitterly to mind
Their names’ sweet Latin and his own as well. (p. 70)
20 Eugenia Gamble, “Nurturing Spiritual Energy,” Churchwide Redevelopment Conference (January 12, 2002)
“Nurturing Spiritual Energy”
21-25 Robert Burns, “Green Grow the Rashes, O!” The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, p. 344
“Green Grow the Rashes, O!”
21-22 Carlo Carretto, Love is for Living, p. 59-63
21-22 Pattiann Rogers, “Born of a Rib,” The Best Spiritual Writing, 2002”, p. 175-176
18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; 22 and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
Genesis 3 by verse:
General References
Virginia Hamilton Adair, “God to the Serpent,” The New Yorker (December 11, 1995), p. 46
“God to the Serpent”
Beloved Snake, berhaps my finest blueprint,
How can I not take pride in your deisgn?
…
Men try to emulate your forked tougue,
Their prideful prick dwarfed by your lordly length
Two arms for blows or hugging loosely hung
Are mocked by Boa Constrictor’s single strength.
How dare men claim their image as my own,
With all those limbs and features sticking out?
…
Men fear the force of your hypnotic eyes,
Make myths to damn your being wise and deft,
You, Snake, not men, deserve my cosmic prize.
I’m glad you stayed in Eden when they left.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber, The Mummies of Ürümchi, p. 154 f.
The Mummies of Ürümchi
Bruce Beasley, “From Grace,” Spirituals, p. 29-30
“From Grace”
Adam found his wife
Standing absently beside a dark tree
Where a bright fruit they’d never seen
Bulged, ripening, on a low limb.
They didn’t think anything about it:
They were alone in the world with God,
And He slithered up,
Disguised, they thought, as a snake,
Since snakes had never spoken to them before
As this one did, with its tongue split up the middle,
And a golden pattern of diamonds down its back.
Wrapping his body tight around their thighs,
Whispering, He asked them to taste an aphrodisiac.
Eve Took the first bite, then handed the dripping fruit
To Adam, who ate, and gave her a long, close kiss …
Then the snake’s tongue darted over the bitten fruit,
And with that the communion ended:
A new, ghostly voice
Spoke from the sky in thunder, a language
They didn’t know. The wind of His voice made all the leaves
Turn slowly away. Adam and Eve
Felt ashamed, though they didn’t remember why,
And God disappeared down His long hole in the Earth
The sky, where the harsh voice had spoken,
Purpled; the fig trees withered to the ground,
And their stems stood like dark, uneven arrows.
Adam and Eve understood
They were all alone in the world.
Things were harder then: the two of them
Learned how to kill for their food, and keep out of the cold.
They built fires and huts from the underbrush,
And scattered drops of blood around their camps.
They raised children, who killed each other,
Or just died.
Older, and tired of their work,
They started to feel nostalgic for the garden,
And talked about things in the old, half-finished language,
Renaming the birds, recalling the smell of each bush,
And looking for snakes among the stones.
They sacrificed beasts, and tried to remember how they used to pray.
And when nothing came of it,
They figured it was simply
Too late:
They thought God must have been
A strange old man by then,
And they tried to grow the old flowers for themselves.
Sometimes, years later, when they felt
Closest to each other,
They’d still talk it over until they both
Remembered all the details
And they’d wonder to each other just
What might have happened
And who it was reaching for them
Out of the sky that day, and why
All the gardens they planted had to die.
Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle, p. 76 f.
Life is a Miracle
A good many people, presumably, would have chosen to “stay out of the nuclei,” but that was a choice they did not have. When a few scientists decided to go in, they decided for everybody. This “freedom of scientific inquiry” was immediately transformed into the freedom of corporate and / or governmental exploitation. And so the freedom of the originators and exploiters has become, in effect, the abduction and imprisonment of all the rest of us. Adam was the first, but not the last, to choose for the whole human race.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall/Temptation, p. 64-89 & 101
Frederick Buechner, “Adam” and “Eve,” Peculiar Treasures, p. 6-7 and 35
Dante, “Canto 26,” Paradiso, p. 175
“Canto 26”
Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, p. 121, 125
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “A Meditation on Eve,” Out of the Garden, p. 1-2
“A Meditation on Eve”
Ann Herbert, “Snake,” Pushcart Prize III, p. 281 f.
“Snake”
In the beginning God didn’t make just one or two people, he made a bunch of us. Because he wanted us to have a lot of fun and he said you can’t really have fun unless there’s a whole gang of you. So he put us all in this sort of playground park place called Eden and told us to enjoy.
At first we did have fun just like he expected. We played all the time. We rolled down the hills, waded in the streams, climbed the trees, swung on the vines, ran in the meadows, frolicked in the woods, hid in the forest, and acted silly. We laughed a lot.
Then one day this snake told us that we weren’t having real fun because we weren’t keeping score. Back then, we didn’t know what score was. When he explained it, we still couldn’t see the fun. But he said that we should give an apple to the person who was best at playing and we’d never know who was best unless we kept score. We could all see the fun of that. We were all sure we were best.
It was different after that. We yelled a lot. We had to make up new scoring rules for most of the games we played. Other games, like frolicking, we stopped playing because they were too hard to score. By the time God found out about our new fun, we were spending about forty-five minutes a day in actual playing and the rest of the time working out the score. God was wroth about that—very, very wroth. He said we couldn’t use his garden anymore because we weren’t having any fun. We said we were having lots of fun and we were. He shouldn’t have got upset just because it wasn’t exactly the kind of fun he had in mind.
He wouldn’t listen. He kicked us out and said we couldn’t come back until we stopped keeping score. To rub it in (to get our attention, he said), he told us we were all going to die anyway and our scores wouldn’t mean anything.
He was wrong. My cumulative all-game score is now 16,548 and that means a lot to me. If I can raise it to 20,000 before I die I’ll know I’ve accomplished something. Even if I can’t my life has a great deal of meaning because I’ve taught my children to score high and they’ll all be able to reach 20,000 or even 30,000 I know.
Really, it was life in Eden that didn’t mean anything. Fun is great in its place, but without scoring there’s no reason for it. God has a very super&al view of life and I’m glad my children are being raised away from his influence. We were lucky to get out. We’re all very grateful to the snake.
Mark Jarman, “Good God,” Poetry Daily (January 4, 2010), from New Ohio Review (Fall 2009)
“Good God”
Instead of casting them out of paradise,
Instead of making them labor in pain and sweat,
Instead of instilling tristesse after coitus,
Instead of giving them fire to burn their house down
And light their way into the outer world,
He could have split them, each with a memory of the other,
And put them each into a separate world.
Donald Justice, Contemporary Religious Poetry, p. 52
Contemporary Religious Poetry
Ann Lauterbach, “Genesis (Eden),” Communion, p. 451-466
Jacob Milgrom, “Sex and Wisdom: What the Garden of Eden Story Is Saying,” Bible Review (December 1994), p. 21 f.
“Sex and Wisdom: What the Garden of Eden Story Is Saying,”
Thus the “original sin” is sex—if we keep in mind that sex means power to create. And the biblical story of its acquisition is not really one of sin and curse but rather of choice and consequence. God, so to speak, tells the first human couple that they would be better off in Eden. But he gives them the choice—and its consequence. The serpent clued them in as to the real effect of the fruit: It would make them like God (Genesis 3:5).
Arthur Miller, “The Story of Adam and Eve,” Genesis: As it is written, p. 35-41
Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, p. 96 [Me]
The Gospel According to Jesus
Stephen Mitchell, “In the Garden” and “Faust,” Parables and Portraits, p. 10 and 12
“Faust”
Joyce Carol Oates, “Genesis (Eden) and John,” Communion, p. 253-270
Katha Pollitt, “The Expulsion,” The New Yorker (November 12, 2001), p. 78
“The Expulsion”
Adam was happy—now he had someone to blame
for everything—shipwrecks, Troy,
the gray face in the mirror.
Eve was happy; now he would always need her.
She walked on boldly, swaying her beautiful hips.
The serpent admired his emerald coat,
the Angel burst into flames
(he’d never approved of them, and he was right).
Even God was secretly pleased: Let
History Begin!
The dog had no regrets, trotting by Adam’s side
self-importantly, glad to be rid
of the lion, the toad, the basilisk, the white-footed mouse,
who were also happy and forgot their names immediately.
Only the Tree of Knowledge stood forlorn,
its small hard bitter crab apples
glinting high up, in a twilight of black leaves:
how pleasant it had been, how unexpected
to have been, however briefly,
the center of attention.
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, p. 161-197
Ishmael
Then the gods said to themselves, “Certainly the knowledge of good and evil is powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world without becoming criminals.” (p. 170)
“This is indeed the proper knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die.” (p. 171)
“If Adam should eat of our tree … there’s no telling how he might deceive himself.” (p. 173)
“If [the story] had been written from the Taker point of view, the knowledge of good and evil wouldn’t have been forbidden to Adam, it would have been thrust upon him. … [The Takers] have always believed that, like the gods, they know what is right to do and what is wrong to do, and what they’re doing is right.” (p. 178)
One of the clearest indicators that these two stories were not authored by your cultural ancestors is the fact that agriculture is not portrayed as a desirable choice, freely made, but rather as a curse. … agriculture is the lot of the fallen.” (p. 190)
“… saying yes to Life [Eve] and accepting the knowledge of good and evil are merely different aspects of a single act … When Adam accepted the fruit of that tree, he succumbed to the temptation to live without limit. (p. 194)
“Reading the story as if it had been authored by someone with their own point of view, they didn’t stand a chance of understanding it. … Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture. (p.196 f.)
Karl Shapiro, “Adam and Eve,” Contemporary Religious Poetry, p. 108 f.
John Shea, “A Prayer to the Mad Dollmaker,” The Hour of the Unexpected, p. 37
“A Prayer to the Mad Dollmaker”
But it was folly
to fall upon unsuspecting earth
knead a body of clay
and laying on it
feet to feet, hands to hands
breathe passion down its mouth
and wake the eyes to wonder
with tears.
Some say
you never guessed
til your love-child came to you
in the beauty of the garden and asked
When you die, will all this be mine?
Joel Weishaus, The Healing Spirit of Haiku, p. 51
Elie Wiesel, “Adam or The Mystery of the Beginning,” Messengers of God, p. 3-36
The Enduring Legacy, p. 18-35
The Enduring Legacy
Zora Neale Hurston, “Behold de Rib!”, p. 18
Karl Shapiro, “The Recognition of Eve”, p. 21
Louis Untermeyer, “Eve Speaks”, p. 23
Archibald MacLeish, “What Adam Said”, p. 26
D. H. Lawrence, “Only Man”, p. 26
Langston Hughes, “Temptation,” p. 27
Thomas Traherne, “From Everlasting to Everlasting”, p. 31
Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock,” p. 32
Eugene Zamiatin, “A Little Paradise Poem,” p. 34
John Frederick Nims, “A. D. 2267,” p. 35
Genesis 3:1-13 by verse:
General References
Henry Miller, “Creative Death,” The Wisdom of the Heart (The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations)
Stephen Mitchell, “Introduction,” The Book of Job, p. xxi
“Introduction”
Samuel Terrian, “Phil. 2:5-11,” The Elusive Presence, p. 460 f.
“Phil. 2:5-11”
Man is so much like God that he wants to ape the Deity, attempt to force the barriers of his finitude, evade the limitations of his humanity, snatch power, and even use violence to achieve his own brand of what he calls “the Good.” Above all, he desires to acquire the dimensions of eternity and to seize infinity in time. He wants to be exactly like God and therefore to be immortal. He eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of all things, “from good to evil.” The irony of man’s godlikeness is that man is so close to the divine status that he snatches divinity and immediately discovers his alienation, the brokenness of his selfhood, the loss of his own humanity, and a cosmic loneliness.
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, p. 108 f.
Lost in the Cosmos
As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises. One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which tells lies.
Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” The Gift of Good Land, p. 279
“The Gift of Good Land”
In its immediate sense this is a warning against thought that is theoretical or speculative (and therefore abstract), but in its broader sense it is a warning against disobedience— the eating of the forbidden fruit, and act of hubris, which Satan justifies by a compellingly reasonable theory and which Eve undertakes as a speculation.
Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p. 59
The Hidden Wound
The crisis of life in both kinds of society [racist and puritanical] is puberty, when the candor of childhood stands to be invested with sexual power, which would make it a threat both to current assumptions or pretensions, and to the survival of the same in future generations. The sexual man, possessed of a childlike clarity, threatens to propagate in the society the results of an elemental honesty which would be devastating.
Wendell Berry, “Two Economies,” Home Economics, p. 74
“Two Economies”
When the virtues are rightly practiced within the Great Economy, we do not call them virtues; we call them good farming, good forestry, good carpentry, good husbandry, good weaving and sewing, good homemaking, good parenthood, good neighborhood, and so on. The general principles are submerged in the particularities of their engagement with the world. Lao Tzu saw the appearance of the virtues as such, in the abstract, as indicative of their loss:
When people lost sight of the way to live
Came codes of love and honesty …
When differences weakened family ties
Came benevolent fathers and dutiful sons;
And when lands were disrupted and misgoverned
Came ministers commended as loyal.
And these lines might be read as an elaboration of the warning against appearances of goodness at the beginning of the sixth chapter of Matthew.
Wendell Berry, Standing by Words, p. 65, 109-155
Wendell Berry, “Leaving the Future Behind,” The Art of Loading Brush, l. 960
“Leaving the Future Behind”
It is easy (if one has contemplated the third chapter of Genesis) to understand the allure of such an immense and perfect knowledge, bringing an end at last to all the disorder of unpredictability and surprise. But after such success, after the fulfillment of such knowledge, what then? Would we be “as gods” then? Or would we have the ultimate humiliation of knowing ourselves to be the helpless and hopeless parts of an entirely predictable, determined, and determining machine? This looks remarkably like another version of the “religious” longing to be free of problems, which may be another version of the death wish.
Michelle Bitting, “Sacrament,” Poetry Daily (July 1, 2006) (The Southeast Review, Winter 2005-2006)
“Sacrament”
Sometimes when I lift the chalice
to a brother’s tongue,
and tip the gleaming cup so just enough
wine flows in, the sweet red sea parting
two lip-lands like an Exodus in reverse,
my hand might accidentally brush
the other’s cheek, our skins kissing briefly;
and the moment is so raw,
so vulnerable between us, anything rough
or unclean suddenly melts, passes away—
as if we have no skin,
and we are naked and new all over again
and shame is a fruit left dangling on the vine.
Freeman, “Childhood Calls,” quoted by R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Vol. 1, p. 322 f.
“Childhood Calls”
Come over, come over the deepening river,
Come over again the dark torrent of years
Come over, come back where the green leaves quiver,
And lilac still blooms and the grey sky clears.
Come, come back to the enchanting garden
To that green heaven and blue heaven above,
Come back to the time when time brought no burden,
And love was unconscious, not knowing love.
Abba Hyperechius, quoted in Amazing Grace, p. 255
Amazing Grace
Denise Levertov, “Contraband,” Evening Train, p. 112
“Contraband”
Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, p. 78
The Way of Chuang Tzu
With wood from a hundred-year-old tree
They make sacrificial vessels
Covered with green and yellow designs.
The wood that was cut away
Lies unused in the ditch.
If we compare the sacrificial vessels with the wood in the ditch
We find them to differ in appearance:
One is more beautiful than the other
Yet they are equal in this: both have lost their original nature.
So if you compare the robber and the respectable citizen
You find that one is indeed more respectable than the other:
Yet they agree in this: they have both lost
The original simplicity of man.
Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach, p. 62
The Courage to Teach
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p. 113, 120 & 176
The Botany of Desire
The forbidden plant and its temptations are older than Eden, go back further than we do. So too the promise, or threat, that forbidden plants have always made to the creature who would taste them—the promise, that is, of knowledge and the threat of mortality. It if sounds as if I’m speaking metaphorically about forbidden plants and knowledge, I don’t mean to. In fact, I’m no longer so sure the author of Genesis was, either. (p. 113)
Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge. (p. 120)
What then was the knowledge that God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the Garden? Theologians will debate this question without end, but it seems to me the most important answer is hidden in plain sight. The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form—that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature. (p. 176)
John Shea, An Experience Named Spirit, p. 196
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety, p. 140
Crossing to Safety
Nevertheless there is this snake, no bigger than a twig or a flame of movement in the grass. It is not an intruder in Eden, it was born here. It is one of Hawthorne’s bosom serpents, rarely noticed because in the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.
Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 19
Helmut Thielicke, “The Bridgehead of the Tempter” and “How Evil Came into the World,” How the World Began, p.121
Carlos Valles, S.J. “Of This Tree Ye Shall Not Eat,” Tales of the City of God, p. 123-128
“Of This Tree Ye Shall Not Eat”
Richard Wilbur, “Lying,” New and Collected Poems, p. 11
3-7 Martin Buber, quoted by Brent Mitchell, The Harvester (September 1995)
3-6 Barbara J. Essex, “Bad Girls of the Bible,” Earl Lectures (1/28/98)
“Bad Girls of the Bible”
3-5 Imaging the Word, Vol. 2, p. 148-151
5 Blaise Pascal, “# 552,” Pensées , p. 150
“# 552”
6 Jerome M. Segal, Graceful Simplicity , p. 216
Graceful Simplicity
Why should Eve have been moved by the tree being a source of wisdom, and why should she have perceived it thus? The answer is clear. Even in the garden of Eden, from the very first, as part of the inherent motivation of her humanity, Eve, if not Adam, was a seeker of wisdom. Here one may ask whether she had a need for wisdom; certainly she had no instrumental need for it—in the Garden, everything was taken care of. Eve’s motivation toward wisdom must be seen either as a need (or a desire) for wisdom for its own sake. Thus, even in the Garden, in the original mankind of our central myth, we find human beings, or at least Eve, to be more interesting and complex than the truly simple creatures.
1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.
Helmut Thielicke, “Guilt and Destiny” and “The Mystery of Death,” How the World Began, p. 152 and 170
Jean Vanier, “The Cry of the Poor,” We Need Each Other, p. 19-35
"The Cry of the Poor"
The danger lies in letting our fears control us and in not learning to walk with them. (p. 27 f.)
What is my fear? I may fear that you will see who I am in my poverty, that you will see how fragile I am, or that I have a lot of anguish within me. The result will be that I will fall into loneliness and hide. Where will I hide? I will hide behind power, behind possessions, and behind walls of difference. Hidden behind my walls, I will pretend that I am better than you. I am afraid to show you who I am in my vulnerability, so I hide.
“On a Theme by Thomas Merton”
8-10 Denise Levertov, “On a Theme by Thomas Merton,” Evening Train, p. 113
8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” 11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.”
Helmut Thielicke, “Guilt and Destiny” and “The Mystery of Death,” How the World Began, p. 152 and 170
Pinchas Sadeh, “A Journey Through the Land of Israel,” Pushcart Prize III, p. 121
“A Journey Through the Land of Israel”
Rabbi Sinha Bunim of Pszyscha … answered: “Man is condemned to eat bread by the sweat of his brow so that if he wearies of his labor, he will cry out to God. Woman is condemned to bring forth children in hardship so that if her pain proves too great, she will weep before God. Especially in their distress they remain linked to God. But God has given the serpent everything it needs, so that it will never turn to Him again.”
14 Revelation 12:9, 20:2
15 Revelation 12:17
17 Psalm 128:2; Hebrews 6:8
18 Matthew 7:16
19 Ecclesiastes 3:20
14 Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, p. 51
Let Your Life Speak
The God whom I know dwells quietly in the root system of the very nature of things. This is the God who, when asked by Moses for a name, responded, “I Am who I Am” (Exodus 3:14), an answer that has less to do with the moral rules for which Moses made God famous than with elemental “isness” and selfhood. If, as I believe, we are all made in God’s image, we could all give the same answer when asked who we are: “I Am who I Am.” One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality—including one’s own—is divine, to be not defied but honored.
16-19 W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse,” Selected Poems and Plays, p. 28
17-19 Wendell Berry, “Elegy,” Collected Poems, p. 237
“Elegy”
17-19 Wendell Berry, “1991 – VII,” A Timbered Choir, p. 133
“1991 – VII”
Where the great trees were felled
The thorns and thistles grow
From the unshaded ground,
And so the Fall’s renewed
And all the creatures morn,
Groan and travail in pain
Together until now.
And yet their Maker’s here,
Within and over all
Now and forevermore,
Being and yet to be
In columbine, oak tree
Woodthrush, beetle, and worm,
In song of thrush and stream,
Fact, mystery, and dream:
Spirit in love with form,
And loving to inform
Form formed within itself
As thought, fulfilled in flesh,
And made to live by breath
Breathed into it by love.
The violence past for now,
The felling and the falling
Done, as a mourner walks
Restless from room to room,
I cross the stream to find
On a neglected slope
The woods’ floor starred with bloom.
14 The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all cattle,
and above all wild animals;
upon your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
22-23 Mark 1:12
23 Obadiah 11; Revelation 2:7, 22:14,19
21 Robert C. Morris, “New Clothes for the Soul,” Weavings (January/February 1996), p. 34
“New Clothes for the Soul”
A very ancient understanding of clothing imagery in scripture is that clothes are human nature itself, sewn by nothing less than divine craft. By seeing our various inner garments, we are touching human nature in its many facets. Given a chance, the soul speaks in its ancient language of symbol, story, and myth.
22-24 Rita Dove, “All Souls’,” The New Yorker (November 10, 2003), p. 90
“All Souls'”
Starting up behind them,
all the voices of those they had named:
mink, gander, and marmoset,
crow and cockatiel.
Even the duck-billed platypus,
of late so quiet in its bed,
sent out a feeble cry signifying
grief and confusion, et cetera.
Of course the world had changed
for good. As it would from now on
everyday, with every twitch and blink.
Now that change was de rigueur,
man would discover desire, then yearn
for what he would learn to call
distraction. This was the true loss.
And yet in that first
unchanging instant,
the two souls
standing outside the gates
(no more than a break in the hedge;
how had they missed it?) were not
thinking. Already the din was fading.
Before them, a silence
larger than all their ignorance
yawned, and this they walked into
until it was all they knew. In time
they hunkered down to business,
filling the world with sighs—
these anonymous, pompous creatures,
heads tilted as if straining
to make out the words to a song
played long ago, in a foreign land.
22-23 Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 20
20 The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. 21 And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.
22 Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing 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” 23 therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
Elie Wiesel, “Cain and Abel: The First Genocide,” Messengers of God, p. 37-68
Frederick Buechner, “Cain,” Peculiar Treasures, p. 19-20
“Cain”
God let the crime be its own punishment instead of trying to think up anything worse: with no stomach for haying that field any more, Cain took up traveling instead. …
God … ensured him a long life in which to remember that last incredulous bleat, the glazing over of that flat, complacent gaze. The justice and mercy of God have seldom been so artfully combined in a single act.
Robert Frost, “The Flood,” The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 254 f.
“The Flood”
Blood has been harder to dam back than water.
Just when we think we have it impounded safe
Behind new barrier walls (and let it chafe!)
It breaks away in some new kind of slaughter.
We choose to say it is let loose by the devil;
But power of blood itself releases blood.
It goes by might of being such a flood
Held high as so unnatural a level.
It will have outlet, brave and not so brave.
Weapons of war and implements of peace
Are but the points at which it finds release.
And now it is once more the tidal wave
That when it has swept by, leaves summits stained.
Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.
John Brinkerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, p. 190 f.
A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time
Yet the purpose of every road or lane or path is to lead to a destination, and the question itself presupposes a house. So the true function of the road is to serve us by taking us home. Without a specific destination a road has no reason for existing. Left to its own devices, it tends to wander into the wider environment and disappear. … Finally, theology again enters the picture. The first man to hit the road was Cain, the murderer of his brother and cursed to be a fugitive and a vagabond; Cain the first man to build a city.
Jane Kenyon, “Man Sleeping,” Otherwise, p. 7
“Man Sleeping”
Large flakes of snow fall slowly, far
apart, like whales who cannot find mates
in the vast blue latitudes.
Why do I think of the man asleep
on the grassy bank outside the Sackler
Museum in Washington?
It was a chill
afternoon. He lay, no doubt, on everything
he owned, belly-down, his head twisted
awkwardly to the right, mouth open
in abandon.
He looked like a child who has fallen asleep
still dressed on the top of the covers,
or like Abel, broken, at his brother’s feet.
Frank Kermode, “The Old New Age,” New York Review of Books (3/24/94), p. 50
“The Old New Age”
Lois MacNeice, “Bar-Room Matins,” The Enduring Legacy, p. 58
Robert C. Morris, “God’s Wrestling Match with Wrath,” Weavings (September/October 2000), p. 14-16
Howard Nemerov , “Cain”, The Enduring Legacy, p. 38
Daniel Quinn, Ismael, p. 184-188
Ishmael
“What was happening along that border was that Cain was killing Abel. The tillers of the soil were watering their fields with the blood of Semitic herders.” (p. 185)
“If you read it as a story that originated among you own cultural ancestors, it’s incomprehensible. It only begins to make sense when you realize that it originated among the enemies of your cultural ancestors.” (p. 186 f.)
Rainer Maria Rilke, “I,9” & “I,10,” Book of Hours, p. 55, 56
“I,9” & “I,10”
But before the first death came murder. (p.55)
(Abel speaks) I am not. The brother did something to me
that my eyes didn’t see.
He veiled the light.
He hid my face with his face.
Now he is alone.
I think he must still exist,
for no one does to him what he did to me.
All have gone the same way:
all are met with his rage,
beside him all are lost.
I sense my older brother lies awake
as if accused.
Night offers itself to me,
not to him. (p. 56)
Geraldine Stahl-Pollat, “Letter to the Editor:,” Bible Review (August 1995), p. 45
“Letter to the Editor:”
Morris West, A View from the Ridge
1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall/Temptation, p. 93
1-8 Helmut Thielicke, “The Cain within Us,” How the World Began, p. 187
8-9 Helmut Thielicke, “Where is Abel your Brother?,” How the World Began, p. 202
9-16 Helmut Thielicke, “Insecure Man,” How the World Began, p. 218
9 Helmut Thielicke, “Where is Abel Your Brother?,” Faith: The Great Adventure, p. 42-44
10 Ross Bills, “Quatre Bras,” The Poetry Cafe, Compuserve (12/19/95)
“Quatre Bras”
10 Denise Levertov, “During the Eichmann Trial,” The Jacob’s Ladder, p. 65
“During the Eichmann Trial”
10 John Shea, The God who Fell from Heaven, p. 11
The God who Fell from Heaven
10 Mark Stevens, “Chief Joseph’s Revenge,” The New Yorker (8/8/94), p. 32
“Chief Joseph’s Revenge”
In 1974, three years before the centennial of the battle, friends from Canada … visited Jim Earthboy and his wife, Edith, and asked to see the sights. The two couples went to the battlefield. … “Jim took him and showed him all the burial places and the markers,” Edith recalls. “And his wife and I, we just sat back on the bench there … and, while we were sitting there she said, ‘Edith do you hear that?’ I said ‘Hear what?’ And she said ‘Listen.’ So I sat there and I listened. I said ‘Somebody’s crying.’ ‘Yes’ she said, ‘Henry and I heard people talking and crying.’”
10 Alice Waters, A Poem Traveled Down My Arm, p. 66
A Poem Traveled Down My Arm
13 John Donne, “The Grace of Forgiveness,” Classics of Western Spirituality, p. 230
1 Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.” 2 And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. 3 In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, 4 and Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, 5 but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. 6 The LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? 7 If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”
8 Cain said to Abel his brother, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” 10 And the LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. 11 And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 12 When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” 13 Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. 14 Behold, thou hast driven me this day away from the ground; and from thy face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me.” 15 Then the LORD said to him, “Not so! If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him. 16 Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
19-22 Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, p. 2
24 Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, p. 272
17 Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. 18 To Enoch was born Irad; and Irad was the father of Mehujael, and Mehujael the father of Methushael, and Methushael the father of Lamech. 19 And Lamech took two wives; the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. 20 Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have cattle. 21 His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. 22 Zillah bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.
23 Lamech said to his wives:
“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
you wives of Lamech, hearken to what I say:
I have slain a man for wounding me,
a young man for striking me.
24 If Cain is avenged sevenfold,
truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”
25 And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth, for she said, “God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel, for Cain slew him.” 26 To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time men began to call upon the name of the LORD.
1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. 2 Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.
3 When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. 4 The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years; and he had other sons and daughters. 5 Thus all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died.
6 When Seth had lived a hundred and five years, he became the father of Enosh. 7 Seth lived after the birth of Enosh eight hundred and seven years, and had other sons and daughters. 8 Thus all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years; and he died.
9 When Enosh had lived ninety years, he became the father of Kenan. 10 Enosh lived after the birth of Kenan eight hundred and fifteen years, and had other sons and daughters. 11 Thus all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years; and he died.
12 When Kenan had lived seventy years, he became the father of Mahalalel. 13 Kenan lived after the birth of Mahalalel eight hundred and forty years, and had other sons and daughters. 14 Thus all the days of Kenan were nine hundred and ten years; and he died.
15 When Mahalalel had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Jared. 16 Mahalalel lived after the birth of Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and had other sons and daughters. 17 Thus all the days of Mahalalel were eight hundred and ninety-five years; and he died.
18 When Jared had lived a hundred and sixty-two years he became the father of Enoch. 19 Jared lived after the birth of Enoch eight hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. 20 Thus all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years; and he died.
21 When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. 22 Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. 23 Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. 24 Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.
25 When Methuselah had lived a hundred and eighty-seven years, he became the father of Lamech. 26 Methuselah lived after the birth of Lamech seven hundred and eighty-two years, and had other sons and daughters. 27 Thus all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years; and he died.
28 When Lamech had lived a hundred and eighty-two years, he became the father of a son, 29 and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground which the LORD has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.” 30 Lamech lived after the birth of Noah five hundred and ninety-five years, and had other sons and daughters. 31 Thus all the days of Lamech were seven hundred and seventy-seven years; and he died.
32 After Noah was five hundred years old, Noah became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
By chapter:
General References
Frederick Buechner, “A Sprig of Hope,” The Hungering Dark, p. 34-44
Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures, p. 123-125
Katie Ford, “Ark,” Poetry Daily (Colosseum), May 28, 2008
“Ark”
David Mamet, “The Story of Noach,” Genesis: As it is written, p. 59-62
John L. McKenzie, How Relevant is the Bible?, p. 151-164
Elie Wiesel, Sages and Dreamers, p. 19-34
Richard Wilbur, “Still, Citizen Sparrow,” New and Collected Poems, p. 318
Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, p. 3,29,66, & 67
The Enduring Legacy, p. 63-73
1-4 Job 1:6, 2:1
4 Numbers 13:33
5-8 Matthew 24:37; Luke 17:26; 1 Peter 3:20
9 2 Peter 2:5
22 Hebrews 11:7
5 John Wesley, “Original Sin,” Fifty-Three Sermons, p. 554-566
9-22 Helmut Thielicke, “Floods and Fires,” How the World Began, p. 235
1 When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.
5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. 13 And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I will destroy them with the earth. 14 Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. 15 This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. 16 Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. 17 For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19 And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you, to keep them alive. 21 Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.” 22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.
17-24 Helmut Thielicke, “Floods and Fires,” How the World Began, p. 235
1 Then the LORD said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation. 2 Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; 3 and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth. 4 For in seven days I will send rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.” 5 And Noah did all that the LORD had commanded him.
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him went into the ark, to escape the waters of the flood. 8 Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, 9 two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. 13 On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark, 14 they and every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind, and every bird according to its kind, every bird of every sort. 15 They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. 16 And they that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the LORD shut him in.
17 The flood continued forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. 18 The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. 19 And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; 20 the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. 21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; 22 everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. 23 He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. 24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.
15-20 Helmut Thielicke, “Noah—The Adventure of Faith,” How the World Began, p. 252
1 But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters had abated; 4 and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. 5 And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.
6 At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, 7 and sent forth a raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; 9 but the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put forth his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him. 10 He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; 11 and the dove came back to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. 12 Then he waited another seven days, and sent forth the dove; and she did not return to him any more.
13 In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry. 14 In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. 15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Go forth from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. 17 Bring forth with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth.” 18 So Noah went forth, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him. 19 And every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves upon the earth, went forth by families out of the ark.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
22 While the earth remains,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.”
1-15 Helmut Thielicke, “Outlines of a New World Order,” How the World Began, p. 289
11-13 Imaging the Word, Vol. 3, p. 158
18-27 Frederick Buechner, “Ham,” Peculiar Treasures, p. 46-47
1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 4 Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.
6 Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for God made man
in his own image.
7 And you, be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the earth and multiply in it.”
8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.”
18 The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled.
20 Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; 21 and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. 22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. 23 Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24 When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said,
“Cursed be Canaan;
a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.”
26 He also said,
“Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem;
and let Canaan be his slave.”
27 God enlarge Japheth,
and let him dwell in the tents of Shem;
and let Canaan be his slave.”
28 After the flood Noah lived three hundred and fifty years. 29 All the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died.
1 These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth; sons were born to them after the flood.
2 The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. 3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. 4 The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 5 From these the coastland peoples spread. These are the sons of Japheth in their lands, each with his own language, by their families, in their nations.
6 The sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. 7 The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan. 8 Cush became the father of Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man. 9 He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the LORD.” 10 The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. 11 From that land he went into Assyria, and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and 12 Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city. 13 Egypt became the father of Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, 14 Pathrusim, Casluhim (whence came the Philistines), and Caphtorim.
15 Canaan became the father of Sidon his first-born, and Heth, 16 and the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, 17 the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, 18 the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. Afterward the families of the Canaanites spread abroad. 19 And the territory of the Canaanites extended from Sidon, in the direction of Gerar, as far as Gaza, and in the direction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha. 20 These are the sons of Ham, by their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations.
21 To Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the elder brother of Japheth, children were born. 22 The sons of Shem: Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram. 23 The sons of Aram: Uz, Hul, Gether, and Mash. 24 Arpachshad became the father of Shelah; and Shelah became the father of Eber. 25 To Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided, and his brother’s name was Joktan. 26 Joktan became the father of Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, 27 Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, 28 Obal, Abimael, Sheba, 29 Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab; all these were the sons of Joktan. 30 The territory in which they lived extended from Mesha in the direction of Sephar to the hill country of the east. 31 These are the sons of Shem, by their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations.
32 These are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.
Ivan Steiger, Ivan Steiger Sees the Bible, p. 23-25
1-9 Acts 8:1
1-11 Denise Levertov, “In the Land of Shinar,” Evening Train, p. 85
1-9 Wendell Berry, Standing by Words, p. 39
1-9 Wendell Berry, “Two Minds,” Citizenship Papers, p. 100 f.
“Two Minds”
The Sympathetic Mind knows from experience—not with the brain only, but with the body that danger increases with height, temperature, speed, and power. It knows by common sense and instinct that the way to protect a building from being hit by an airplane is to make it shorter …
…
Like all such gigantic buildings, from Babel onward, the World Trade Center was built without reference to its own landscape or to any other. And the reason in this instance is not far to find. The World Trade Center had no reference to landscape because world trade, as now practiced, has none. World trade now exists to exploit indifferently the landscapes of the world, and to gather the profits to centers whence they may be distributed to the world’s wealthiest people. World trade needs centers precisely to prevent the world’s wealth from being “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
1-9 Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower, p. 258
The Star Thrower
Yet, whether we peer backward into the cloudy mirror of the past or look around us at the moment, it appears that behind every unifying effort in the life of man there is an opposite tendency to disruption as if the force symbolized in the story of the Tower of Babel has been felt by man since the beginning. Eternally, he builds, and across the smooth facade of his institutional structures there runs this ancient crack, this primordial flaw out of old time. We of this age have not escaped it.
1-9 John Hollander, “A Draft of Light,” Interpretation (January 2000), p. 57-60. 258
“A Draft of Light”
Though babble’s tall outrageous tower fell, crumbling under
The weight of its own presumption, Language
Had a different tale to tell of itself: that it once
Contracted to an insignificant
Point which nonetheless contained all the Meaningfulness that
There was to be, and then this being quite
Unbearable, exploded into all the languages,
Chunks flying apart in such different
Directions! And then there were only all the languages.
1-9 Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water, p. 153
Walking on Water
1-9 M. C. Richards, “Nine Easter Letters on the Art of Education,” The Crossing Point, p. 63
“Nine Easter Letters on the Art of Education”
1-9 David Shapiro, “The Story of the Tower of Babel,” Genesis: As it is written, p. 63-70
1-9 Helmut Thielicke, “The Fear of Our Fellows,” How the World Began, p. 273
1-9 John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, p. 189 f.
4 Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, p. 189
The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited
The intention of the people at Babel was to resist the diversification which God had long before ordained and initiated, and to maintain a common discourse by building their own unprecedentedly centralized city. They were the first foundationalists, seeking by purposive focusing of their own cultural power to overcome historically developing diversity.
… It was JHWH who scattered them, for their own good. … It is ‘confusion’ only when measured against the simplicity of imperially enforced uniformity. It is narrated as a gracious and creative intervention of God, reinforcing the process of dispersion and diversification which had already begun and which god intended as a good thing. Thus the ‘confusion of tongues’ is not a punishment or a tragedy, but the gift of new beginnings, liberated from a blind alley. (p. 189)
It was the generations of Jewry living around Babylon who told the Babel story as the immediate background to the call of Abraham. (p. 190)
1 Now the whole earth had one language and few words. 2 And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” 5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. 6 And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
10 These are the descendants of Shem. When Shem was a hundred years old, he became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood; 11 and Shem lived after the birth of Arpachshad five hundred years, and had other sons and daughters.
12 When Arpachshad had lived thirty-five years, he became the father of Shelah; 13 and Arpachshad lived after the birth of Shelah four hundred and three years, and had other sons and daughters.
14 When Shelah had lived thirty years, he became the father of Eber; 15 and Shelah lived after the birth of Eber four hundred and three years, and had other sons and daughters.
16 When Eber had lived thirty-four years, he became the father of Peleg; 17 and Eber lived after the birth of Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and had other sons and daughters.
18 When Peleg had lived thirty years, he became the father of Re’u; 19 and Peleg lived after the birth of Re’u two hundred and nine years, and had other sons and daughters.
20 When Re’u had lived thirty-two years, he became the father of Serug; 21 and Re’u lived after the birth of Serug two hundred and seven years, and had other sons and daughters.
22 When Serug had lived thirty years, he became the father of Nahor; 23 and Serug lived after the birth of Nahor two hundred years, and had other sons and daughters.
24 When Nahor had lived twenty-nine years, he became the father of Terah; 25 and Nahor lived after the birth of Terah a hundred and nineteen years, and had other sons and daughters.
26 When Terah had lived seventy years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
27 Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. 28 Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. 29 And Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sar’ai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. 30 Now Sar’ai was barren; she had no child.
31 Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32 The days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.