Genesis 3 has some interesting challenges for the average modern reader. We have a special garden in the midst of an uninhabited world, two seemingly magical trees… one a source of life the other a source of death. We have two fully developed baby-adults, a talking serpent, and a contest between them that shapes the entire future of life on planet Earth.
What does one even do with such a tale? Is it a fable? Is it fantasy? A Myth? Is it history? If the latter, it certainly doesn’t read like modern history. Indeed, Genesis 2 & 3 are strange even when compared to most of the history in rest of Scripture itself.
This is a more complicated issue than many realize.
Modern readers tend to read literature in terms of Fiction and Non-fiction. It either happened or it didn’t… so it’s either real or fake. Then some fool went and wrote a book labeled, Historical Fiction, and really fouled things up. My father disliked fiction generally. Said it felt like he was reading a lie… “None of this really happened!” he once exclaimed to me when I pressed him to read a novel I enjoyed.
To be honest, fiction and non-fiction are insufficient categories for dealing with any literature. One famous novelist mused that fiction is often truer than non-fiction. Fiction may speak to reality in a far more accurate way than a non-fiction writer does while attempting to tell the story of some historical event or person. And that is the key here.
History itself is a story. It may be about something that is purported to have actually happened, but it is constructed by a person who interprets and presents the cause-effect structures involved in it. The writer believes some evidence, disbelieves others. He or she leaves out some facts and includes others… then organizes it all to spin a tale for his or her own purposes. If you were present for the book’s events, the narrator’s voice would not be there to give meaning to it all for you. There is no telling what one would actually see and perceive about the unfolding of events before his or her eyes if there was no story teller to make all the connections for the observer.
Histories are interpretations of events, not the events themselves. This is a vital distinction, especially when reading Scripture. We are not supposed to use the text of Scripture as a mental window to an historical event, so we can find the inspired message in our own mental and highly imaginative recreations. NO! The story, with all its vocabulary, grammar, literary relationships and context, IS the inspired message. Thus, it is the story itself that needs interpreting and that is dependent on understanding the intentions and methods of the writer in the telling.
Biblical History is an inspired interpretation of events written to preach. When it preaches, it does so in keeping with the expected or adapted practices of the day, just like it uses the langue of the day.
When I was doing my first Master’s degree, our Hermeneutics professor did a mind expanding exercise with us. He read us a story about a car hitting a tree on a country road. It was a pretty artless news piece of facts, devoid of emotional commitments. Then he began to tell the same story again and again, shifting the genre (or literary form) that he used to tell it. A poem, a personal testimony, an apocalyptic vision, a bit of wisdom literature. The imagery morphed from story to story and though the same historical event seemed present in each telling our relationship to the event and the mental cast it left was seriously altered in each telling.
So…. returning to Genesis 3, we have to ask ourselves, “What would we have actually seen if we had been a fly on a tree witnessing the actual events of Genesis 3?”
Answer: I don’t know, and neither do you, even if you are convinced that you do. What I do know is that these stories are told with a decided structure and vocabulary that speaks meaningfully in an Ancient Near Eastern context to people struggling with a pagan worldview. As a Biblical Theologian it is primarily to that message that I turn my attention.
I am not suggesting that it is of no consequence whether this or that element of the story is artless realism, artful symbolism, or fictional creation. The existence of an historical Adam is of great consequence for the theology of sin and redemption, as is the distinction between a personal Satan versus some vague concept of evil or wrong doing. But I am saying that the list of character elements in Genesis 3 are common images in all Ancient Near Eastern literature, and as such take on distinctive meaning through the dynamics of the story. The message they are used to preach touches upon the most important concepts of reality, addressing the most primary questions of human existence, human survival, and ultimate human thriving… in this world and the next.
I once taught a ten week church course entitled, “Reading Genesis Like a Pagan.” In it, I gave the class vital contextual clues for discerning the message of the writer at key points in Genesis 1-11. As a piece of ancient historical writing, Genesis is not Myth. Indeed, it shares few literary features with Ancient Near Eastern Myth. To name just a couple: we might consider the fact that in contrast to all other Ancient Near Eastern myths, Genesis is not poetry. We might also note that Genesis is set within an historical framework, being tied to not to Myth Time, like all other creation stories from the Ancient Near East, but to the linear chronology of human history. Genesis is, rather, an ancestor epic, in which the nature of human struggle to survive and thrive is set within an anti-pagan worldview framework, heralding the loving providence of Yahweh who redeemed Israel to be His chosen instrument in His redemption of creation.
So, were I there, witnessing the events that Genesis 3 discusses, would I have seen a talking serpent in a tree? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t need to know, because what I do know is that the inspired biblical answer to “What’s wrong with the world?” sets the source of world destroying chaos in humanity’s rebellion against God, by yielding to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. I am told this not just in 1 John 2:16, but in Genesis 3:6, where it says, “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 who was with her, and he ate.”
In Genesis 3, I am not reading a children’s story about why we wear clothes or why so many women fear snakes. I am, instead, reading a sophisticated story about the nature of human evil, and the path for human redemption. I am reading an ancient masterpiece that is carefully constructed to expose the corruption of paganism and the pagan worldview, so as to deliver souls from its thrall, and by doing so to create a people for God’s own glory as He allows them to participate in bringing His creation to its intended end.
