Articles under Scripture

hashomer achi anochi?

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The Hebrew word order places a square emphasis on the word ‘I’.  The sense then is, “Is my brother’s keeper supposed to be me?”—with the possible additional implication that God should have prevented the murder of Abel, since He knows everything.  It can’t be stressed enough that the use of questions by God in the early chapters of Genesis should not be understood in a ‘folk’ sense of an anthropomorphized ‘god’ who doesn’t know what is happening and so needs to inquire.  Rather, these question need to be seen as a pedagogical tool that God is using to educate the first human beings.

Cain’s counter-accusation suggests a kind of bitterness.  It is as if Cain were saying, “Abel is Your favorite, after all.  You accepted his sacrifice and not mine.  If You cared about him so much, why didn’t You find a way to protect him from me?”

Indeed, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai makes just this observation: “When God asked Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ Cain answered “Am I my brother’s keeper?  You are God.  You have created man.  It is Your task to watch him, not mine.  If I ought not to have done what I did, You could have prevented me from doing it.”  This reads like the victim mentality so prevalent in our world today.

“So Cain was very angry (vayyichar l’qayin m’od), and his countenance fell.”

More literally, this reads, “Great wrath was to Cain”; or “Cain had great wrath.”  Anger here undergoes a kind of substantiation; it appears as something real and substantial.  The serpent has gone underground and no longer appears directly to human beings, but instead influences at the periphery of consciousness.  God warns Cain about this:  “Sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” [4: 7]  That is to say, we must learn to guard the door of our thoughts and not allow in sinful suggestions.  If we are not vigilant, these thoughts become a part of us and seem insurmountable.  But this is an illusion based on past negligences.

“The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this…”

God does not ask the serpent why he did what he did, as God asked Adam and Eve in turn.  This is an indication that the serpent cannot be taught.  God does not adopt a pedagogical tone toward the serpent as He does toward Adam and Eve.  This is another hint of the ‘proto-evangelion’: God is against the serpent but for humankind.

 

“The woman that You gave me.”

It is remarkable how passive Adam turns out to be.  The one who boldly named all of the animals now finds himself, or at least portrays himself, as a hapless victim:  “You gave me…she gave me…and…I ate.”  Already toil, thorns, and thistles have entered!  “The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion in the road!  There is a lion in the streets!’ (Proverbs 26: 13)  Poor me!

“Who told you that you were naked?”

We perhaps hear God speaking in an angry tone, which is unfortunate, since the text indicates no such thing.  The fact that no one answers the question should be taken, not as an indication of God’s ‘impatience’, but as representing fearful silence on the part of Adam and Eve.

Who told them that they were naked?  No one, of course; they simply became aware of this terrible fact.  They needed no one to tell them; nor does God need to find out.  Again, I suspect that we tend to hear His following question (“Have you eaten…?”) as God piecing together the crime, but this is clearly absurd.  Why, then, does God ask this?

God does all things for the purpose of teaching and forming His creatures toward fullness of life and understanding.  Adam and Eve, pondering this question, would have to answer as we did above:  “No one told us that we were naked.  We discovered it after eating the fruit.”  It is true: they now know good and evil for themselves.

“God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”

This is perhaps evidence of a primordial fall of ‘the gods’ (the serpent would also be evidence), the fall not recounted directly in Scripture, but referred to by Our Lord (Luke 10: 18).  These ‘gods’ (the Hebrew word elohim can mean either ‘gods’ or ‘God’) wanted knowledge of the forbidden, ultimately so as to go beyond good and evil and establish their own rule against the Creator God.  The serpent, speaking of their eyes being opened, knows of what he speaks.  The fact that he seems not to be dead (at least in a literal, bodily sense) also supports his contention that disobedience will not result in (literal) death.

“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone (ləbddo); I will make him a helper fit (kənegdo) for him.’”

Man’s ‘being alone’ is actually related to the important ‘separating’ (root bdl) that God does ‘in the beginning’.  Man has been separated out, but has no complement, as light has darkness and the sea has the land.  Therefore man’s definition is incomplete; he is an anomaly without a creature ‘fit’ for him.  This fundamental incompleteness of the human person is at the root of the characteristic drive of desire to find one fitting for ourselves—one who, in being opposite to us, matches the aching loneliness and fills it.  We discover eventually that this desire is for God, in Whose image we were created and Whose temples we are meant to be.  In the present, the sacrament of marriage produces the best analogy to the union of God and the soul.  At last, Adam rejoices in seeing not merely flesh of flesh and bone of bone, but subject to subject, desire to desire.

vayiytzer (Adonai) elohim et-haadam aphar min-ha’adamah

“And the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground.”

The action of forming, the Hebrew verb yatzar, is related to purpose.  In later Jewish tradition, human beings were understood to incline towards a yetzer ra, an ‘evil purpose’, or towards towards the yetzer tov, the ‘good purpose’.  Our deeds are judged not only by the objective fact of the deed, but by the intention of the one carrying it out.  In some manner, we imprint our deeds with the mark of our intention.

God’s forming of humanity from the dust, then, is not merely about ‘form’ and ‘matter’, but means imparting to dust a new purpose, to be the material aspect of this new creature, the human person.

Today, of course, there is a great temptation to judge actions only by purpose.  “I meant well” does not excuse the performance of an action that is inherently bad.  Nonetheless, the Christian tradition, and especially, I think, the monastic tradition, insists that we take time to inspect our purposes for acting.  Otherwise, we may very slowly be drawn away even from right action.

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’”

When God creates the inanimate objects, He simply speaks a command and matter responds to His wishes.  God speaks ‘impersonally’.  When He speaks to man ‘in the image of God’, He says ‘to them,’ addressing fellow subjects, spiritual beings with the gift of understanding.  The fruitfulness of human existence is not completely ‘natural’ in the sense of impersonal forces obeying laws inscribed in their very essence.  Human beings have the choice of listening, obeying and cooperating with God’s blessing and creativity, or of disregarding the commandment.  From the moment of creation, human beings have been given autonomy, the freedom of taking responsibility for their own responses or failure to respond to God’s offer of friendship.