I’ve been thinking about the mythology of Genesis for a few years now.
I’m old as dirt and I was saying the same thing decades ago, let me warn you, it doesn’t stop, if you’re anything like me you’ll still be saying that decades from now. But hey, finally somebody who can have an intelligent conversation about Genesis, it’s about my favorite subject, especially late at night after a couple gummies, so I’ll apologize now for my verbosity.
For a while I was totally fixated on this part in particular:
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
It’s bizarre how in a way that is exactly what happened…if you compare the lifestyle of an animal at the top of the food chain (what human hunter gatherers basically were) to life in settled society. Especially the horrible, grinding, Malthusian, agricultural civilizations that dominated for millennia after that verse was written…yeah it really does seem like the price of knowledge is toil. Did Neolithic people view farming and agriculture as an irreversible mistake?
The Genesis 2 narrative is about the genesis of human consciousness, the fundamental change in the inner life of an animal that literally transform it into the first human being, Adam was not a proper name, it was the ancient Hebrew word for mankind. In the natural world, it was the birth of something new, it was a new beginning that represents a new life, with new potential and new opportunities to move beyond all previous limitations and constraints, and along with that new life came the deepest truths of human essence, and mankind was born. It is therefore a necessary preface to the Bible that introduces the birth of “free will” and sets an explanatory stage for exploring its attendant consequences and associated moral responsibility. It describes that event explicitly.
Animals know, but humans are a unique animal because we don’t just know, we know that we know, we possess self-reflective knowledge, and how that occurred, and the effect it had, is the story Genesis 2 is telling.
The fact of "knowledge" would be unaccountable without a distinction between subject and object, knowledge requires a distinction between the knowing subject and the reality known and our access to self-reflective consciousness achieved that, but when we ate from the fruit of that tree, we necessarily separated ourselves from perfection , we were no longer perfectly attuned to, and One with nature, we were "cast out of the garden of perfection", so to speak. The first humans were the first animals to image reality in a detached and symbolic manner, and everything that is distinctively human, language, culture, science, technology, it all followed from that "break" with the true reality we were once part of. We are separated from reality by this bifurcation of things into “us” and “not us”, by this “illusion” that reality is not an unbroken whole, the illusion that the whole is not greater than the parts, and the illusion that we can somehow stand outside of and apart from reality and face it. Genesis tells us that we stand apart from it and look upon the universe "as if we were Gods", seeing a “reflection”, an inverted and artificial image of ourselves as beings that are separate from reality. This made us detached who represent reality to ourselves symbolically, from this foundational change came a new world that would evolve into, morality, science, technology, art, philosophy, and religion, in short, produced the world of human culture.
Interestingly, evolutionary theory tells us that this “change of state” caused an unprecedented explosion in brain growth which resulted in something believed to be unique to humans. Because the brain explosively grew faster than the evolution allowed the female’s body to accommodate that growth in brain size, we alone have painful childbirth, and as a consequence “we conceive in sorrow”, so to speak.
Genesis is the oldest and deepest thing we have. These stories are so old, they were clearly passed around for a long time before being written down.
Good point, most people can’t understand Genesis because they don’t understand what it is, it is indeed a myth, a rich repository of wisdom that was an oral tradition handed down through the ages through narrative story telling. To understand it, we must recognize that Genesis was not originally linguistic in its true nature and it was never meant to be read in a linear, analytical fashion, as story telling it was fundamentally meant to convey images that take place in the inner world.
Our neural ability to process new ideas is dependent upon first being able to process new imagery, new ways of seeing precede new ways of thinking.
By viewing it through its imagery, with both hemispheres of thought involved in processing the narrative, we engage more of our brain’s interpretive mechanisms and learn to see in new ways. Consequently, the myth is activating generative forces at work in the brain and psyche to expand our awareness and enlarge our perception, which is what gives it the ability to promote personal growth and spiritual awakening.
Imo Genesis is not ripping of Mesopotamian folklore like Gilgamesh but rather they both have a common ancestor that’s much older
Genesis was never intended to be a literal description of events, it is a myth that symbolically expresses mankind's codified memory of events that occurred in our distant past. It is not literally true; it's more profound than that, rather it is the mythical embodiment of a deeper truth, an expression of an ultimate reality that just couldn't be expressed in any other way, especially 3500 years ago. Fundamental truths that resonated with every civilization as the stories evolved in time and space.
also the worldwide flood myths are pretty probably about the post ice age sea level rise imo. Most of the places humans lived would’ve gone underwater
No doubt, the historical sources were clearly the catastrophic floods at the end of the last ice age, to civilizations around the Black Sea, and especially Doggerland, they would surely be seen as global, whole Earth type events that persisted in our psyche for ages.
I suspect the ancient Greek myth of Atlantis is also based on these events.
Night.
