It’s all fun and games until someone invents a snake with bad intentions. (Oh, my, we are already at the noisy intersection of the unsolvable problem about God. But I digress.)
Gen. 3:1 “Now the serpent was more cunning (arum, meaning, crafty, shrewd, sensible) than any beast of the field which Yahweh Elohim had made.” And we know what happens next. The snake says to the woman, “Didn’t Elohim1 say you shall not eat of any tree of the garden?”
The ishah answered they could eat anything except the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that one was off-limits. They weren’t even supposed to touch it, or they’d die.
The snake counters by basically saying, that’s not true, Elohim knows if you eat that fruit, you will be like Elohim, knowing good and evil. You won’t die. You’ll be fine.”
The woman (ishah) sees the tree is good for food, the fruit is pleasing to the eye and “desirable to make one wise,” from the root word sakal meaning prudent, and she ate some and gave some to “her husband” (ish). They see they’re naked and make coverings out of fig leaves (you work with what you’ve got).
I know the focus is usually on that part of the story of eating the fruit of the forbidden tree.2 But it’s the next part that I’m most curious about.
Gen. 3:8 “They heard the sound of Yahweh Elohim walking…” (Hold up. God has feet, wut?) “…in the garden in the breeze of the day…” (usually translated “in the cool of the day,” but the word here is ruah) “…and they hid themselves from the presence of Yahweh Elohim…” (translated as presence but from the word for face, paneh — uhhh, God has a face?) “…among the trees.”
Yahweh Elohim called to ha-adam and said, “Where are you?”
Where are you? Does Yahweh Elohim not know?
Two things are possible here. Either Yahweh Elohim doesn’t know, which calls into question the idea of an omniscient God,3 or Yahweh Elohim does know but asks anyway.
As I consider the second option, I’m struck by one thing — the invitation. “Where are you?”
Here the snake and the ishah refer to Elohim, not Yahweh Elohim. File that away.
In my 7 years working at a domestic violence and rape crisis agency, I heard stories of some of the vilest mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse imaginable perpetrated on women, and listened to what too many of their male pastors told them, in an effort to justify some doctrine of submission to their husbands. I sat with devastated survivors of sexual violence where everyone knew there was going to be no justice. I’ve witnessed the ongoing and constant devaluing of females in this society because of the baked-in misogyny that the twisting of this Genesis story has been used to do, and frankly I think that’s what evil looks like, so I’m not even going to dignify these verses with any kind of argument about who did what first. Go here to read thoughts from Fr. Richard Rohr, though.
And do we even have an omniscient God in this story yet?
I love the slow, careful way you're laying this out. It's exciting to feel the tension of "and THEN what happened?" for a story I thought I knew. Very cool! Can't wait for the next one!
Ditto, Eileen!