Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Melinda Quivik
Reading the Genesis 3 text in light of Jesus' confrontations with people who thought he was
"out of his mind," focuses our attention on expectations about the relationships between
God and humans, and humans and creation.
From the beginning of this scene -- before we arrive at the articulated differences between God and
the humans -- we hear an astonishing aspect of their relationship. The first sentence tells us that
the Lord God walks in the garden. God has come to the place where people are living. It is a
pleasant scene in which God walks in the evening breeze without a hint of what seems a bitter
denunciation to come. God seeking-out-creation governs the action.
The story then gives us a number of pithy theological questions to ponder. Since God seems not to
know where the humans are, does this mean God is not omniscient? When the human explains he
was afraid because of his nakedness, does he not know that God will find this strange? How did the
human even know there is something to fear in being naked?
God asks the sensible question: How did you know you should hide? Not waiting for an answer,
God drives immediately to the suspicion that the knowledge of good and evil has come into the
human: "Have you eaten from the tree...?"
This story is hard to hear without centuries of built-up prejudices ruling the interpretation. In order to
let the gospel rise to the surface, we have to expunge the ideas that this story tells us the woman is
inferior and the snake is despicable. How can we do that?
Rather than seeing this story as depicting necessary dualism between human and divine, human
and nature, good and evil, knowledge (bad) and ignorance (bliss), we might notice the harm that
comes from such simplistic readings. Seeing the story only through the structures of oppositions
leads to divisive and untrue views of creation.
1) Pointedly, the story does not say the woman is a vixen for suggesting that the fruit should be
eaten nor is she inferior to the man. If we see the woman in Genesis 3 through the view of her
creation as the "helper" (Genesis 2:18), and we define "helper" as a subordinate creature (i.e., he
initiates; she obeys or follows), we ignore the more generous interpretation offered by the word
"helper" when it is used to refer to God.1
2) We might note that this story shows us the possibility that truth does not come only from the
divine but from what God has created: the snake, the tree, and the initiative -- the daring -- of the
Cf. Hosea 13:9; Exod. 18:4; Deut 33:26; Pss. 146:5; 33:20; 115:9-11; 70:5.
Robert Saler, "The Transformation of Reason in Genesis 2-3," in Currents in Theology and Mission
in Ex Auditu 24 (2008), 5.
Arthur Walker-Jones, "Eden for Cyborgs: Ecocriticism and Genesis 2-3," in Biblical