What do the First Three Chapters of Genesis Really Mean? — Introduction
I’ve addressed this question before in Medium articles, and have some further interesting material which I haven’t yet got round to writing about. I’ll begin that in the next article, so this one is just a prelude.
I’ve been prompted to write again about the Garden of Eden story by a conversation I’ve been having recently with Bruce McGraw, a professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies. I’ll begin with an outline of that background, so that readers can see where we’re coming from.
He interprets the story of Adam and Eve in the context of the evolution of human consciousness, which is therefore a psychological interpretation. He says here: “I view the Adam and Eve story as an evolutionary one. I think god planted the tree because he wanted them to eat it, so they could individuate in order to grow and be the persons they were meant to be. I see the story as a step up for humanity, as did Jung by the way”.
He presumably made the last comment because he knows I’m a big fan of Jung. I responded, asking whether he had any references to substantiate what he said about Jung. He responded by referring me to this article. The two most relevant points I found there were that the author said that Joseph Campbell concluded that “this story yields its meaning only to a psychological interpretation”, and that Carl Jung had written that “cosmogonic myths are, at bottom, symbols for the coming of consciousness”. These statements obviously supported McGraw’s point of view (although when I checked the source for the Jung quote, I found that he does not elaborate or clarify what he means, but merely refers readers to another book).
I therefore pursued the conversation further, saying that all this depends upon which version of the Bible they are reading. Modern versions, especially those by Christian scholars, contain mistranslations which can easily lead to misinterpretations. If, for example, Adam and Eve are considered to be the first humans, then it is hard to see how anything other than a psychological interpretation is possible. Is that what the text says, however?
McGraw replied, agreeing that there can be multiple interpretations of any myth, which might even contradict each other; that seeing the Adam and Eve story as an evolutionary story has “the most practical benefits”. He also wondered “if the intended meaning of the author of any particular theory is always the best interpretation”.
I did find the last comment somewhat strange, since I assume that the author’s intended meaning is at least the most relevant, especially if any alternative interpretations are based on misunderstandings.
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Here are my thoughts on the above. I’ll begin with some brief extracts from an earlier article (for the full argument please see that).
This is why I find the psychological interpretation unsatisfactory: “If we say that Adam and Eve symbolically represent early humanity, then we are inevitably led to interpret the myth psychologically as an emergence of self-reflecting consciousness from some kind of unconscious absorption in nature. This leads to an unsolvable problem, because the myth clearly states that Adam and Eve freely chose to disobey God’s command. How could such beings, without self-consciousness and presumably controlled by instincts, freely choose anything?”
In Genesis 1, God says “Let us make humankind in our image”. This is a mistranslation because, as the NRSV edition of the Bible points out, the original Hebrew word translated as ‘humankind’ was actually ‘Adam’. That humankind was what was intended by the author is therefore merely an assumption, perhaps unwarranted. It is not what the original text said.
We get a much better idea of what was intended if we turn to the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, which according to the late Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, “is the inner teaching of Judaism”, thus a deeper, esoteric understanding. He says that there are four levels of Adam, none of which should be equated with the first humans. The first is Adam Kadmon, which “contains in principle the whole of the manifest Reality”, thus the equivalent of the original Oneness. In Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 a second and third Adam come into existence. Neither of these are physical, rather spiritual ‘beings’, what we might call emanations from higher levels. Even the later fourth Adam is not physical, not that is until he descended with Eve into the material world we live in, where he became human¹.
It is quite possible therefore that Genesis 1–3 are misunderstood texts. Is it any surprise that commentators are led to psychological interpretations if they believe, quite reasonably because of the mistranslations, that Adam and Eve were the first humans?
To conclude, here is something along the same lines as Halevi’s viewpoint from a different tradition. This is June Singer, a Jungian analyst and commentator on Gnosticism, discussing the Garden of Eden story according to the ‘Anonymous Treatise’ On the Origin of the World²: “In the primal history of Adam and Eve, emanations of the Ineffable Light in the highest heaven move through successive stages, with the light becoming more dense with each transformation. The Tree of Knowledge in the garden is the Tree of Gnosis. There is a heavenly God-man or Urmench or Anthropos, a Primal Man who is, or emanates from, or has a close relationship with the Highest God. This is Anthropos, the ‘first Adam’. He is earlier and superior to the Demiurge (creator-god). The Heavenly Eve is an emanation of the Sophia. The first Eve is Mother, Wife, and Virgin in one person, and thus represents the female aspect of the kingdom of light. A drop of light passes from the Sophia to the Heavenly Eve, from which the ‘Instructor of Life’ is born. Later he is the serpent in Paradise, the wise one who instructs Adam.
“The creator-god creates a man, the second Adam, after the image of the first Adam who is the God-man, or the Man of Light. But the second Adam has no real life in him until he is imbued with the Divine Spirit, which is the pneuma substance. This comes about either through the intervention of the Highest God or of the Heavenly Eve, who is the prototype for the earthly Eve. So this places the second Adam above the creator-god in the Gnostic hierarchy”.
Her account of the text continues, but that is enough for my purpose here, where we see a clear parallel, if not actual identity, between what Singer calls the Anthropos, and Halevi’s Adam Kadmon. We see that in neither system is Adam considered to be the first human, and that in both accounts there is more than one level or emanation of Adam, none of whom are the first human man. Also, the serpent episode takes place in Paradise (heaven, the spiritual level), not in any garden on Earth.
All this leads to some interesting questions. Was Genesis originally a Kabbalistic or Gnostic document, no longer properly understood in modern times, since it has passed through the hands of uncomprehending editors and translators? Are Kabbalah and Gnosticism related? Are they different versions of the same tradition? Or have they come up with this related material independently? If the latter, should that make us take such ideas more seriously? Does that make them more true?
In any case, it is a reasonable conclusion, based on these two accounts, that this interpretation or something similar was the original intention of the author of Genesis, before the obfuscations of the English translations took place. There is no reason to believe therefore that Adam and Eve were, or even symbolise, the first humans. Doesn’t that make the psychological, evolutionary interpretations irrelevant, no matter how convincing they seem, or what “practical benefits” they offer, as Bruce McGraw puts it?
In the next few articles I’ll discuss another extremely interesting source for a reinterpretation of Genesis 1–3. Here’s a link to the next article.
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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, politics and astrology. 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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Footnotes:
- The Halevi material is taken from Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree, Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1974
- in an essay entitled ‘Jung’s Gnosticism and Contemporary Gnosis’, in Jung’s Challenge to Contemporary Religion, edited by Murray Stein and Robert L. Moore, Chiron Publications, 1987, p82
