Bible Observations: Genesis 3-5

Someone close to me once revealed a few years ago that the experience of attempting to read the Bible and derive some inspiration from it was an exercise in frustration, because it seemed (to this person) to describe God as being incredibly bloodthirsty and vindictive. And “facts” kept being brought forth that simply did not make any sense. I’m hoping that the reading gets better later, because I’m getting the same “vibes” with the beginning of Genesis. God places Adam and Eve in a garden and places a forbidden tree right in the middle of it, within easy access for them! Upon their transgression of eating its fruits, God banishes them from the garden and states that, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (New International Version). One of US?! Adam and Eve’s first two sons were Cain and Abel. It was not explained why, but both of them felt compelled to make sacrifices to God. The Lord apparently preferred the dead flesh of a formerly living creation of His. After murdering his brother Abel because God preferred Abel’s flesh sacrifice to his own agricultural one, Cain, the third human in existence, was driven out and did things such as finding a woman somewhere to have more offspring as well as founding a city (where did these people come from?)! Some of Cain’s descendants are then named: one of them, Jubal, is described as the father of all who play the harp and flute (since the later-occurring Flood supposedly wiped out all humans except Noah and his family, I guess that means that those harp and flute players we see around us are hallucinations). In Chapter Five, the descendants from Adam, up to Noah, are described with their life spans. I’ve reconstructed the time scale of their lives (with Adam created in the arbitrarily-numbered year “zero”:

Adam 0-930
Seth 130-1042
Enosh 235-1140
Kenan 325-1235
Mahalalel 395-1290
Jared 460-1422
Enoch 622-987
Methuselah 687-1656
Lamech 874-1651
Noah 1056—2006

This means that for a 56 year period (874-930), all nine generations of Noah's ancestors, including Adam, were alive! The flood, according to this dating scheme, occurred in 1656. Do I believe in the veracity of these time scales? No, but I’m trying to report things in the context of the narrative here.

Now I know that, to a “true believer”, my previous commentary on Genesis 3-5 may seem quite harsh and critical. But try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes (if that’s how you see yourself). Many adherents to different faiths are expected to admit the infallibility of their holy scriptures even before they’ve had an opportunity to read them. Once they’ve begun reading their particular scripture, they are inevitably going to come across “trouble spots” that may conflict with their knowledge of reality or of their conception of the benevolent nature of their deity. If a believer addresses the textual problem directly, then his or her level of faith may be questioned. So, the “problem-text” is either passed-over (ignored) or rationalized as meaning something quite different from what it seems. Thus, for example, there are verses in Genesis 1 which would indicate that the creation of day and night was completely independent of that of the sun, something that no one has ever felt any motivation to explain to me (maybe one of you readers can be the first). And God’s reference of “one of us” is often “interpreted” in Christian circles as meaning the “Trinity” of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But it’s almost as if one has to go to special classes in order to learn to read the Bible (or another religion’s scripture) “correctly”.

That all being said, I believe in honestly reading this stuff head-on. I have some reasons that I believe are behind some of the discrepancies that I’ve brought out so far, but I’m waiting for a future “Bible observations” entry to reveal them. I don’t think that other parts of the Bible will be as problematic as its beginning, although I anticipate some “bumps” in the road.

Genesis 3-5, in sum, relates the fall of man, his expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the story of Cain and Abel, Cain’s descendants, and Seth (Adam and Eve’s third son) and his descendants (up to Noah’s time). Coming up: the flood that covered the world.