The fall
1 Now the serpent was the most crafty of all the wild creatures that Yahweh God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say: You must not eat from any tree in the garden?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden,
3 but of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden God said: You must not eat, and you must not touch it or you will die.”
4 The serpent said to the woman, “You will not die,
5 but God knows that the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
6 The woman saw that the fruit was good to eat, and pleasant to the eyes, and ideal for gaining knowledge. She took its fruit and ate it and gave some to her husband who was with her. He ate it.
7 Then their eyes were opened and both of them knew they were naked. So they sewed leaves of a fig tree together and made themselves loincloths.
8 They heard the voice of Yahweh God walking in the garden, in the cool of the day, and they, the man and his wife, hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden.
9 Yahweh God called the man saying to him, “Where are you?”
10 He said, “I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”
11 God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree I ordered you not to eat?”
12 The man answered, “The woman you put with me gave me fruit from the tree and I ate it.”
13 God said to the woman, “What have you done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me and I ate.”
The judgment of God
14 Yahweh God said to the serpent, “Since you have done that, be cursed among all the cattle and wild beasts! You will crawl on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life.
15 I will make you enemies, you and the woman, your offspring and her offspring. He will crush your head and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman, God said, “I will increase your suffering in child bearing, and you will give birth to your child ren in pain. You will be dependent on your husband and he will lord it over you.”
17 To the man, He said, “Because you have listened to your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I forbade you to eat, cursed be the soil because of you! In suffering you will provide food for yourself from it, all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorn and thistle for you and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 With sweat on your face you will eat your bread, until you return to clay, since it was from clay that you were taken, for you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
20 The man called his wife by the name of Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.
21 Yahweh God made garments of skin for the man and his wife, and with these he clothed them.
22 Then Yahweh God said, “Man has now become like one of us, making himself judge of good and evil. Let him not stretch out his hand to take and eat from the tree of Life as well, and live forever.”
23 So God cast him from the garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been made.
24 And after having driven the man out, God posted cherubim and a flaming sword that kept turning at the east of the garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of Life.
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Comments Genesis, Chapter 3
• 3.1 The second part of the Eden story shows us the second aspect of human destiny. After chapter 2 which presented God’s plan, what he wants for us, chapter 3 gives the reality, the actual human condition, and it asks the question: whose fault is it?
The serpent was the most crafty. In the literature of the Middle East, a snake was an evil creature but also endowed with divine powers. Evil does not come from God, nor from another God rival of the first, but from an important character of the higher world, like Satan in the book of Job (Wis 2:24; Jn 8:44).
Temptation will hide itself in the conquest of wisdom. Let us recall that at the time the verb to eat was used to indicate learning by heart, through repetition, some words from the wise: we eat the fruits of wisdom (Pro 9:5; Sir 24:26). The tree of knowledge is the art of living and wealth (see 1 K 3:11) and freedom is seen as the open gate to good and evil, life and death (Dt 30:15). Thus God placed human beings in a conflictive situation when he set wisdom within their reach while telling them: You are not to touch it. They will first have to forgo trying to seize it.
The account distinguishes three moments: temptation, sin and judgment.
Temptation. The serpent repeats to humans what is true: nothing is too great for them. At the same time he leads them to doubt God.
Then comes sin. How strange this conversation of three! It is the woman’s wish, and it is man who commits the real sin. The woman temptress – isn’t this the reality, especially in a world where she is relegated to an inferior state? Perhaps the author in this remote age witnessed the exploitation of women and the art of exploited people to manage their masters. Seeing that suffering was unevenly shared he concluded that the woman was the first to be unfaithful. God will not accept man’s excuses.
Two details ironically express the sinner’s disappointment. Your eyes will be opened: and they knew they were naked. You will know good and evil: and they did not go beyond evil.
They hid… from God. The fear of God appears as a consequence of the sin.
Other biblical texts dealing with these themes:
The ancient serpent: Wis 2:24; Jn 8:44; 2 Cor 11:3; Rev 12:17.
The false concept of an envious God: Mic 6:7; Job 10:13; Mt 25:24.
Rebellion against God: Is 14:14; Ezk 28:2; Dn 11:36; Lk 15:11; 2 Thes 2:4.
Temptation: Mt 4; 6:13; Sir 15:11; Rom 7:8; 1 Cor 10:13; James 1:13.
ADAM AND THE PRODIGAL SON
This sin of Adam opening up sacred history must be re-examined in the light of the Gospel, and more specifically, in the story of the prodigal son (Lk 15:11). This parable is much more than a reminder of God’s infinite mercy for the sinner who turns to him: it tells us what the human adventure is in the eyes of God, that of a prodigal son. While in Genesis, Adam stays with the discovery of his sin, in the parable he discovers he is a son.
Jesus is the Son and he makes us sons and daughters: he frees us in this way.
• 14. God’s judgment is a way of saying what our condition is… Adam lives his life away from God in suffering and contradiction. His disgrace will defile the better part of his existence:
– giving birth and educating children;
– the relationship between husband and wife, with the stronger one dominating the other;
– work becomes a burden.
Be cursed… God curses the serpent but not humankind. God’s original plan cannot fail: happiness and peace are at the end, but we will only reach this through a history that is disconcerting and often seems a failure (1 Cor 1:21): that will be redemption with Jesus and by Jesus.
He will crush your head. The biblical author was thinking of the slow victory of God’s people over evil: the woman’s descendants always wound ed but led by God to new hope. The hope of a definitive victory over evil gives life to all biblical history and it is that which keeps us alert in today’s world where all is programmed to drug us until the day death adjusts everything.
Adam gives a name to his wife, the promise of a new starting point but also sign of authority. On the other hand, God inaugurates the long series of his “blessings,” to speak as the bible does. And so, God gives Adam and Eve the loincloth now necessary for their dignity. But this is the time to recall that we have to in vert the apparent order of the account: the be ginning of history, paradise, pictured the end for which God created us, and now the mortality of Adam expresses our reality on earth. So Adam’s weakness and his death are part of God’s plan of salvation. Our lives will be an ongoing ascent from Adam’s life—animal and mortal—toward sanctity and the in corrup ti bi lity of another Adam, Christ (1 Cor 15:45).
DO NOT TAKE EVERYTHING LITERALLY
We have already mentioned that the author of these pages took some characters from ancient tales, for example, the serpent. He also preserved some strange expressions, like the following: the man has become like one of us… in which it would seem that God is afraid of human competition. The author did not feel it necessary to clarify these ambiguous expressions which came directly from the pagan legend. The same goes for the cherubim and the flaming sword which referred to certain figures posted at the entrance of cities to keep the evil spirits away. Here, these figures show that humankind is under the wrath of God (Eph 2:3): that is to say that human kind is expecting to be reconciled with God.
ORIGINAL SIN
Adam and his sin will not be mentioned again in any Old Testament book except for a brief reference in Wis 10:1 (Sir 25:24 is some what of a joke). But what this story teaches, is that all of us, some more some less, are unfaithful to God in a thousand ways. We see Israel, chosen by God, making a golden calf for its god (Ex 32); we see Moses, the great Moses, who doubts God and does not respond to him (Num 20); we see David, God’s chosen one, a murderer and an adulterer (2 S 11); we see the kingdom of Israel breaking up after it barely began (1 K 12). And each time we reach the same conclusion: God keeps his promises, but the whole future is to be marked by suffering and death.
So the sin of Adam is not just another sin, older than our own rebellion, to be added—with out our wanting it—to our own offences; it is rather another way of looking at the sin of our race. Here is what the author has understood in pondering the events of Israel’s past: our sins are neither isolated nor individual. Each one of us from birth, and even before birth, has been immersed in a world of violence and ignorance of God (Ps 51:7): our relatives, our culture, our first experiences have taught us to sin. “Adam” is made of all this inter connect ed ness.
Not a word about Adam and his sin in the gospels: just a hint to the evil murderer in Jn 8:44 and nothing in all of the New Testa ment —other than Paul’s letter to the Chris tians of Rome. There, however, this story takes cen ter stage again. See the commentary of Rom 5:12.
This important text of Paul (Rom 5) is at the root of Christian statements on the “sin of the human race” which later would be called “original sin.” The statement is twofold: on one hand, all of us together are involved in a rebellion against God that leaves its imprint from age to age; on the other hand, not one of us is a child of God by nature: we are all in need of reconciliation. God takes the first step and saves us through Christ.
All that goes far beyond what was said in Genesis 3: it is a way of re-reading the text in the eyes of people believing in Christ and faith in the salvation he brings to the world. Even so the intuitions of Genesis have not been abandoned. The author of this story like ourselves is trying to reply to the question: Why is there evil in the world? and why are the children of Adam sinners? He replies by saying that evil comes from disobedience to God, but he also clearly states that evil has come from a very important person in creation. We already meet in the first pages of the Bible an affirmation which today is a subject of ridicule for many Christians: the world is under the control of Sa tan, devil or demon—the one John calls “the governor of this world” (Jn 12:31; 14:30) who is in fact a spiritual super-power associated with God Creator.
Was Paul mistaken when he affirmed that God’s plan with the coming of his Son-made-man—human, earthly, about to be tortured—was a scandal to every creature, beginning with both the occult and luminous powers that govern this world (1 Cor 1:8; Col 2:15)? This gave rise to the ancient catechetical texts, now fairly dusty, after so many years, affirming the “sin of the angels”—a durable affirmation in Jewish tradition. There had been a revolt of the greatest of the spiritual beings knowing that God would circumvent him by coming and establishing himself at the lowest point of the universe and from there to “draw all to himself” (Jn 12:32).
THE WOMAN—THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
In speaking of the woman’s offspring, the author was thinking of people who struggle against evil and are constantly wounded, but are victorious in the end.
But, later biblical writers referred more and more to a conqueror, the Son of Man, the pro ta gonist of the decisive battle.
The Woman is humankind, giving birth to the Savior, to its Savior, and made fruitful through the grace of God (Is 45:8). Revelation 12 will also speak of the Woman. This figure refers to Mary as well as to the Church since both Mary and the Church have entered into the divine marriage: Jesus was born of Mary. In its turn, the Church is the mother of all those who are born of water and of the Spirit, and who become members of the Body of Christ, which gradually extends to all people.
In art Mary is represented as crushing the head of the serpent to express that God preserved her from the evil affecting our race. Even more: in her case, God did not want the lapse of time when human freedom is blind between the first instant of her conception and the first manifestation of God the Father. So, from the beginning he prepared her with the fullness of his grace so that her entire life would be established and develop in a perfect filial spirit. This privilege of Mary is what we call her Immaculate Conception.
Mary is the perfect creature, inseparable from the Son of the Woman, Jesus Christ. God placed her amidst a multitude of sinners whom she was to help. A Woman (Jn 2:4; 19:26) is the model of all those who would be saved. Mary is the new Eve and the Mother of the disciples of Jesus (Jn 19:26).