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The Garden of Eden
A Sermon Given
by The Revs. Leslie
Westbrook and Roger Fritts
on November 10, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
LESLIE: My name is Leslie Westbrook. Like Roger, I am a
Unitarian Universalist minister. Roger asked me to talk with him this
morning about the Adam and Eve story. Roger, do you know why God made
man before woman?
ROGER: Yes. Because God didn’t want any advice on how to make
man.
LESLIE: Wrong.
ROGER: Ok, you tell me. Why did God create man before woman?
LESLIE: God needed to make a rough draft before creating the
final masterpiece.
ROGER: I recall from my "Intro to the Old Testament" class,
Genesis has two conflicting accounts of the creation of human beings.
LESLIE: That’s correct. The second account says, "And the rib,
that God had taken from the man, God made into a woman." But the first
account, which you used as your reading this morning, says, "So God
created humankind . . . male and female God created them." In the words
of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Unitarian by birth, writing in 1895 in her
book The Woman’s Bible,
Here is the sacred historian’s first account of the advent of woman;
a simultaneous creation of both sexes, in the image of God. . . . Thus
Scripture, as well as science and philosophy, declare the eternity and
equality of sex . . . The masculine and feminine elements, exactly equal
and balancing each other are as essential to the maintenance of the
equilibrium of the universe as positive and negative electricity.
ROGER: Still, you must admit, when most people think of the story
of the Garden of Eden, they think of the story of woman being created
after man.
LESLIE: True, but some people believe that God created Eve first.
Roger, you know the story. One day in the Garden of Eden, Eve calls out:
"God, I have a problem!"
ROGER: Yes, and God responds, "What’s the problem, Eve?"
LESLIE: "God, I know you have created me and have provided this
beautiful garden and these wonderful animals, and that hilarious snake,
but I am just not happy."
ROGER: "Why is that, Eve?"
LESLIE: "God, I am lonely."
ROGER: "Well, Eve, I have a solution. I will create a man for
you."
LESLIE: "What’s a ‘man,’ God?"
ROGER: "Man is a big, strong, muscular creature. He will be
really good at gathering food, and occasionally he will be pleasant to
snuggle up with."
LESLIE: "Sounds great."
ROGER: "But, you can have him on one condition."
LESLIE: "What’s that, God?"
ROGER: "You will have to let him believe that I made him first."
LESLIE: Perhaps that is where the story about the rib got
started.
ROGER: You know, Leslie, the story didn’t start with a rib.
Remember, Adam said to God, "I am lonely, I need to have someone around
for company."
LESLIE: And God said "Okay, I am going to give you the perfect
companion, a woman. Beautiful, intelligent and gracious."
ROGER: And Adam said: "Sounds good. But what’s she going to
cost?"
LESLIE: "An arm and a leg."
ROGER: And Adam said: "An arm and a leg! God, that’s pretty
steep, What can I get for just a rib?"
LESLIE: Some women accept the view that God created man first.
After careful study they have come up with the five top reasons God
created Eve after Adam. Counting down:
Reason Five: God was worried that man would become lost in the
garden because Adam would not ask for directions.
Reason Four. God knew Adam would never go out and buy himself a
new fig leaf when his wore out and would therefore need Eve to buy
one for him.
Reason Three. God knew Adam would never remember which night to
put the garbage on the curb.
Reason Two. As the Bible says, it is not good for man to be
alone!
And the Number One Reason why God created Eve: When God finished
the creation of Adam, God stepped back and said, "I can do better
than that!"
ROGER: I think we use humor to release tension. In these jokes
about Adam and Eve, we are expressing the anxiety we feel when we
reflect on the relationship between men and women.
LESLIE: Yes, they reflect the many emotions we feel when we are
trying to relate to a member of the opposite sex. Let’s see . . . they
express feelings of competition, envy, resentment. Some touch on our
fear of dependency and on our need for control over ourselves. Others
address our desire, on occasion, to control others. They express the
feelings of vulnerability and helplessness we sometimes experience when
we are relating to members of the opposite sex. In fact, embedded in all
that humor are lots of very serious feelings and dynamics.
ROGER: No wonder we had to blame it all on the snake! God created
woman and man and gave them a paradise in which they could live forever.
Everything was perfect. And then the snake came along, and sure messed
things up.
LESLIE: Of course, that is a Jewish, Christian and Islamic myth.
Archeological research suggests that before the patriarchal religion
described in Genesis, the ancient world had matriarchal religions. Men
and women worshiped goddesses, and these female gods were often
associated with snakes. So the negative words about snakes in the story
are really an attack on matriarchal religion.
ROGER: That sounds like a theory developed by a feminist
theologian. Do you have any evidence to support it?
LESLIE: In the Sumerian religion the Goddess of writing was at
times portrayed as part snake and called the "Divine Serpent Lady." In
several Sumerian tablets the writer called the Agricultural Goddess
"Great Mother Serpent of Heaven." Another tablet describes a Sumerian
serpent goddess as "the interpreter of dreams of the unrevealed future."
A seal discovered in the ruins of ancient Babylon, shows the Goddess
Ishtar sitting on the royal throne of heaven holding a staff around
which coiled two snakes. It is inscribed with the words "Lady of Vision
. . ." Another inscription described Ishtar as "She who Directs the
Oracles."
On the island of Crete the snake appears in the worship of the female
deity more repeatedly than anywhere else in the Mediterranean area. All
over the island archeologists have unearthed artifacts that portray the
Goddess holding snakes in her hands, or with them coiled about her body.
The ancient people of Crete may have copied the Lady of Serpents from
the Cobra Goddess of Egypt. In Egypt the Cobra image was the
hieroglyphic sign for the word Goddess. Ancient Egyptians knew the cobra
as "the eye," a symbol of mystic insight and wisdom.
ROGER: Is this the same eye that we have on top of the pyramid on
the one dollar bill today?
LESLIE: I have no idea. Can we stick to the subject?
ROGER: Sorry.
LESLIE: The ancient Greeks named the city of Athens after Athena,
the Greek Goddess of Wisdom. A snake continually appeared with Athena in
legends, drawings, and sculptures. A special building stood on the
Acropolis near the Parthenon and was the symbolic home of Athena’s
snake. Evidence also suggests that the same association of Goddesses
with snakes was prevalent in ancient Canaan, where Lebanon, Palestine
and Israel are today. Although three thousand years have destroyed many
ancient artifacts, in one place archeologists have unearthed a jug with
snakes and a figure of a Goddess. In Gezer archeologists discovered a
bronze model of a cobra. And there have been other such discoveries. My
point is that people in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Crete, Greece, and
Canaan identified the female goddess with snakes and closely associated
her with wisdom and prophecy.
ROGER: So how does this concern the Garden of Eden story?
LESLIE: Some scholars believe that the story of the alliance
between the first woman and the snake is an attempt by the author of
this part of Genesis to be critical of the Goddess centered matriarchal
religions and replace them with a male God and a patriarchal religion.
ROGER: How does the apple fit into this interpretation?
LESLIE: The writer was probably not thinking of an apple when he
wrote about the fruit of the tree. The Sycamore fig, with reddish
colored fruit that grows in large clumps, something like a cluster of
grapes, was the common sacred tree at the time of the writing of
Genesis. To eat these reddish figs was to symbolically eat of the flesh
and blood of the Goddess. Some Egyptian murals show the Goddess within
the tree, passing out its sacred fruit as the food of immortality.
ROGER: But in Genesis—well let me read the passage, it is short:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD
God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, "You shall not eat
from any tree in the garden?"’ 2The
woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the
garden; 3but God said, "You
shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the
garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die."‘
4But the serpent said to the
woman, ‘You will not die; 5for
God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will
be like God, knowing good and evil.’
6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and
that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired
to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some
to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that
they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths
for themselves.
So the fruit of the tree—I still want to believe it was an apple—did
not give them immortality, it gave them knowledge of good and evil.
LESLIE: Some interpreters of the Biblical story think that the
story of Adam and Eve is a story which metaphorically describes human
beings ‘becoming like God’ when they became self reflective. Then is
when men and women were able to observe themselves and begin to think
about what they felt, what they thought, why they did whatever they did.
With this capacity, they were then able to discern what was good and
evil. Thus they were more like God.
ROGER: I always focus less on the Good and Evil part and more on
the part where they realized they were naked.
LESLIE: Other interpreters say that when they saw themselves in
their nakedness, they became aware of their sexuality, which is a key to
immortality. In the myth of how the world began, they say the writer
described the first woman eating of the tree that gave her the knowledge
so that she could "be like God." She became aware of her sexuality, and
she thus learned the secret of how to create life.
By the way, Roger, did you notice that when they saw that they were
naked they did not sew apple leaves together — they sewed fig
leaves together.
ROGER: To summarize, the story is about how Eve and Adam eat some
fruit and suddenly know that they are naked. From this, Bible scholars
conclude that:
Adam and Eve could reflect on their experience in the world and
discern good from evil;
They realized they were sexual creatures who held the key to
immortality in their knowledge of their fertility.
LESLIE: And for this God sends them out of the Garden.
ROGER:
22 Then the LORD God said, ‘See, the man has
become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach
out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live
forever’— 23therefore the LORD God sent
him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was
taken. 24He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden
of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard
the way to the tree of life.
LESLIE: So they went out of the garden and the first thing they
did was start to raise Cain.
ROGER: Something like that. With all its faults I still think
authors of the book of Genesis were quite perceptive.
Three thousand years before astronomers discovered evidence of
the Big Bang, Genesis said that a single energy or a power
accomplished the creation of the world.
Three thousand years before the modern environmental movement
Genesis said that a human being is dependent upon the gifts of the
earth for its health and survival.
Three thousand years before the decoding of the human genome
Genesis said that all of us are related, all of us have in common
the same ancestors.
The task of each generation is to sort out the good and the bad from
what our parents have handed down to us. Clearly part of the story was
an attempt to justify men having power over women. That was not good.
On the other hand, it is also about human beings becoming free
creatures. God expelled the first humans from the Garden of Eden because
they disobeyed. Adam and Eve start their independent life. Symbolically
the first act of disobedience is the beginning of human history, because
it is the beginning of human freedom.
LESLIE: So the Garden of Eden is a prison.
ROGER: I suspect it is. After a few weeks or months, after our
basic material needs are met, paradise becomes dull. Every day is the
same. But outside the garden are endless opportunities, new vistas, new
horizons, new worlds, all there for Eve and Adam and all those who came
after them to explore. And for me that is the most positive message in
this old story. In spite of its difficulties, life outside the Garden is
a great and wonderful adventure.
*** *** ***
The archeological information is from
"Unraveling the Myth of Adam and Eve" in When God was a Woman by
Merlin Stone, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1976.
Office@CedarLane.org
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