Hello all,
So a lot happens in Chapter 2. God has day of rest, God makes the rivers come up, God creates man, man names animals, really scary tree of life and tree of the knowledge of good and evil talk, and then God creates woman and Adam is like woah. I love the part where it says that God breathed the breath of life into Adams nostrils. I think its a very intimate part of the Chapter because when I imagine it in my head God is actually CPR style cupping his lips of adam and actually breathing into him. P.S If you've ever been woken up by someone doing that, its very uncomfortable.
I actually had verse 9 where its talking about the tree of life underlined. I remember I had underlined it earlier and each time it is mentioned in the bible because it is also mentioned in Revelations 22. "And across the river was the tree of life bearing fruit to all the nations." (I just remembered that I didn't even have to look it up, crazy!) I don't know why I find that so fascinating that it should be mentioned all over the place but it seems very important to me.
Now, Man meets Woman. I also actually really like this part. Some crazy feminists might disagree with me, but I love the idea of how connected man and woman are besides just being from the same species. We're not just alike, we are part of each other. There is nothing more intimate and I love the poetry of "bones of my bones, flesh of my flesh."
I don't really have much else to say, Genesis is pretty straight forward and all poetry. I hope you enjoyed it, sorry if it was stupid. You're next Jack.
love,
Bboo
P.S. how cool is it that the word gene is in genesis? And who says religion and science don't go hand in hand?
2 comments:
The first thing I noticed about this passage was how incredibly exact it is. You're right, boo, that a lot of it is certainly poetic, but there's a whole section here that is practically coordinates. The author gives a good bit of detail about the location of Eden. I had always imagined Eden to be an unreachable place, a metaphor for heaven or for a time before time (a land before time? haha) when we were at home living in the world. Maybe that's true too, but still - there it is. I don't know what most of the lands are...though I've heard of Cush, probably from this...but I'm pretty damn sure that I learned about the Tigris and the Euphrates in 8th grade geography. I'm not sure what that means exactly. Probably just that the author really liked this spot between these four rivers. Or hell, it could mean that life, or at least life as we know it, really did begin there. It's as plausible a place as any. Certainly it was the seat of one of the earliest known civilizations. Maybe the story is a story about the first civilized man as opposed to the barbarians. Which would explain later complications about how Cain, or Seth manage to have kids. Sets up an interesting discussion of the fall too.
My batteries dying I'll finish tomorrow.
I know you were all eagerly awaiting the rest of my comment.
Anyway, I was going to say that I really agreed with Boo on the part about Adam and Eve. There is the one line about Adam needing a servant or a helper or whatever, but the actual scene is very touching. Considering the time in which this was written, this is remarkably progressive. It's not about woman being the servant of man at all - if any part is a throw away it's that. The rest - the "one flesh" is incredibly beautiful. We're so broken as human beings. We're searching all the time - for wholeness. We're looking for home - the tree of life. We're looking for our missing ribs.
Jack found one.
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