A Different Take on the Garden of Eden Story
This is a sort of response to, more accurately an alternative take on, a recent article by Religion and Politics at The Dinner Table, in which he outlined four different interpretations of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis. I found this interesting because, in my opinion, none of these four interpretations gets to the bottom of what the story is really about. The problem is that they all consider Adam and Eve to be symbolic of early humanity. I think this is a mistake.
Part of my evidence for believing this is that, although translations often refer to ‘humankind’ at Genesis 1.26, the original Hebrew word was ‘Adam’, as the NRSV version says in its footnotes. It’s therefore just an assumption that the original writer meant humankind.
I believe that ‘Adam’ refers to some kind of spiritual being which Christians might call the soul. This has the potential to be split into masculine and feminine aspects, which is what happens in chapter 2. The Garden of Eden represents the spiritual realm, loosely speaking what Christians call heaven. The original sin was the descent into the material world (i.e. the level of good and evil) which, according to the text, was against the will of God who forbade it. The serpent symbolizes the desire or temptation to do this, given that Adam has free will. God says that the consequence of this choice will be death, which suggests that the spiritual Adam will lose its immortality if it inhabits a physical body, where death is inevitable. (Buddhists would say that consciousness has entered the cycle of death and rebirth.)
This ‘Original Sin’ is commonly called the ‘Fall’, which only makes sense in this interpretation. None of the interpretations that Religion and Politics at the Dinner Table offers need be called a fall. The common psychological interpretations refer to some kind of emergence or development from an earlier state.
I came to this viewpoint even before I discovered the work of the French scholar Fabre d’Olivet and his modern Sufi follower Shabaz Britten Best. They are in line with this alternative interpretation and explore it in detail. (I wrote about their ideas in a long series of articles entitled ‘What Do the First Three Chapters of Genesis Really Mean?’) This was also the viewpoint of Raynor C. Johnson, someone I consider an authority on spiritual matters, in his book The Spiritual Path.
This interpretation is further confirmed by the parable of the Prodigal Son, found only in Luke’s Gospel (beginning at 15.11), where one son takes his inheritance and leaves the Father (thus giving up his spiritual nature), and goes off to a far country (the material world), a decision which he eventually bitterly regrets, and then seeks to return, saying “I have sinned against heaven and before you”, which may be a reference to the eating of the apple in Genesis 3. Upon his return (regaining his immortal nature), the Father (God) says “this son of mine was dead and is alive again”, another apparent reference to the Genesis text.
A complication has now arisen, because Evan LeBlanc has since published an article on the theme of what it means for humans to be created in the image of God, thus also referring to Genesis 1.26. I replied, pointing out the humankind/Adam translation issue mentioned above. He responded here, saying essentially that the Hebrew word may be Adam, but still means humanity. (He has studied and is knowledgeable about Hebrew.)
The problem remains that the idea of humanity being created in the image of God is still very difficult to understand, hence the various attempts LeBlanc describes to elucidate its meaning, in the same way that the whole Garden of Eden story has various interpretations, as described by Religion and Politics at the Dinner Table. I believe that a better understanding would be that the soul is created with the same nature as God, i.e. immortal spirit, not in God’s image. I therefore remain unconvinced that my interpretation, which at the very least is coherent and resolves all the complications, is mistaken.
I invite any meaningful and knowledgeable contributions to this debate.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, and politics. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
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