An Anthropologist Looks at Genesis 2

 

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

God created the first parents.

Stories about first parents abound in Africa. The first parents of the Mbiti Pygmy are called Tole and Ngolobanzo.

The first father of the Maasai is known as Maasinta. He had a special relationship with the Sky God who gave the Maasai their first cattle.

Gikuyu and Mumbi are said to be the first ancestors of the Gikuyu of East Africa. Here is a portion of their story:

Now you know that at the beginning of things there was only one man (Gikuyu) and one woman (Mumbi). It was under this Mukuyu that He first put them. And immediately the sun rose and the dark night melted away. The sun shone with a warmth that gave life and activity to all things. The wind and the lightning and thunder stopped. The animals stopped moaning and moved, giving homage to the Creator and to Gikuyu and Mumbi. And the Creator, who is also called Murungu, took Gikuyu and Mumbi from his holy mountain to the country of the ridges near Siriana and there stood them on a big ridge. He took them to Mukuruwe wa Gathanga about which you have heard so much. But He had shown them all the land - yes, children, God showed Gikuyu and Mumbi all the land and told them: "This land I hand over to you, O Man and Woman. It is yours to rule and to till in serenity, sacrificing only to me, your God, under my sacred tree.

 

The historical Adam and Eve are the first parents of the early Hebrew. Some of their descendants appear to have inherited Adam’s red skin tone. It is noted that Esau a Horite ruler in Edom had a red or ruddy skin tone (as did David, the son of Jesse). Jeff A. Benner, an expert on ancient Hebrew, explains:

We are all familiar with the name "Adam" as found in the book of Genesis, but what does it really mean? Let us begin by looking at its roots. This word/name is a child root derived from the parent דם meaning, "blood". By placing the letter א in front of the parent root, the child root אדם is formed and is related in meaning to דם (blood).

By examining a few other words derived from the child root אדם we can see a common meaning in them all. The Hebrew word אדמה (adamah) is the feminine form of אדם meaning "ground" (see Genesis 2:7). The word/name אדום (Edom) means "red". Each of these words have the common meaning of "red". Dam is the "red" blood, adamah is the "red" ground, edom is the color "red" and adam is the "red" man. There is one other connection between "adam" and "adamah" as seen in Genesis 2:7 which states that "the adam" was formed out of the "adamah".

In the ancient Hebrew world, a person’s name was not simply an identifier but descriptive of one's character. As Adam was formed out of the ground, his name identifies his origins.

 

Adam's name refers to blood (dam) and the color red. His descendants are remembered as red people. One of those descendants is Abraham who ruled in the territory of Edom. The Greeks called Edom Idumea, which means "land of red people." Some of the red peoples are listed in Genesis 10. They are identified by the DD biradical, which refers to the color red. In ancient Egyptian didi refers to red fruit. In Yoruba, red is diden, a variant of the biblical word Dedan (Gen. 10).

A common belief among many pre-literate peoples is that skin tone comes from the soil where their first parents were created. This is called “autochthonous origin” and the belief is expressed in the Shilluk creation story. The Shilluk of Sudan call the Creator Jouk. Jouk made white people out of white sand and the Shilluk out of black soil. When the Creator came to Egypt, he made the people there out of the red silt of the Nile.

 

God places the first parents in Eden.

The term Eden is not originally Hebrew. "Eden" derives from the Akkadian term edinu, which refers to a fertile plain or a well-watered territory. Akkadian is the oldest known Semitic language and predates Hebrew by nearly 2000 years.

Eden was a vast well-watered region that extended from the sources of the Nile in Uganda and Ethiopia to the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia (Gen. 2:10-14). The Pishon flowed through Ha-vila (place of waters parting). The Gihon flowed around the whole land of Kush. The southern region of Eden was rich in gold, onyx, and bdellium. Bdellium is a semi-transparent oleo-gum resin extracted from Commiphora wightii and from Commiphora africana. These trees grow in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Humans become estranged from God.

After their disobedience Adam and Eve experienced fear and they hide from the Creator. Their distance from the Divine Presence grew greater when they were driven from Paradise. 

Many African narratives explain the distance between God and humans. Some speak of a time at the beginning when the sky was low. It was necessary for people to be careful while cultivating or pounding grain to avoid striking God's resting place with their hoes or pestles. The Akan of Ghana tell the story of how God once lived on earth, but an old woman kept striking Him with her pestle. Then one day, God withdrew to the sky.

Another African story tells how "in the beginning death had not yet entered the world. There was plenty to eat, but a woman became greedy and tried to pound more grain that she was allotted. This required using a longer pestle. When she raised it to pound the grain, it struck the sky and God became angry and withdrew far into the heavens. Since then, people must toil the earth, death and disease trouble the people and it is no longer easy to reach God." (Richard Bush, ed. The Religious World, MacMillan Publishers,1982, p. 38).

Consider the following story related to anthropologist Charles Kraft while he was studying tribal peoples in northern Nigeria. Kraft asked, "What did your people believe about God before the missionaries came?" In response, an old chief told this story:

"Once God and his son lived close to us. They walked, talked, ate, and slept among us. All was well then. There was no thievery or fighting or running off with another man's wife like there is now. But one day God's son ate in the home of a careless woman. She had not cleaned her dishes properly. God's son ate from a dirty dish, got sick, and died. This, of course, made God very angry. He left in a huff and hasn't been heard from since." (Charles Kraft, Christianity in Culture, Orbis Books, 1990, p. 153)

Related reading: An Anthropologist Looks at Genesis One; The Father of Adam and Eve; Three Portraits of Adam

Rabbi Michael L. Samuel's Book on Gen. 1-3

Here is a review of Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel's book Birth and Rebirth Through Genesis: A Timeless Theological Conversation Vol. 1: Genesis 1-3.  Read other reviews here. 


The reviews do not mention anything about the historical-cultural context of Genesis 1, 2 and 3 so I suspect that Rabbi Samuel does not delve into the Kushite context of Abraham's ancestors.  Nor does he appear to address the origins of messianic expectation beginning in Genesis 3:15.


A theological conversation that is not grounded in historical-cultural realities is too speculative for my taste. This is my argument with Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen.  I prefer the thought of Rabbi Kadura and Rabbi Simon Altaf.

Victory of God's Order Over Chaos

Dr. Zahi Hawass with statues, one of which is an image of Horus as a child wearing a sidelock.

Alice C. Linsley


I recently received an email from a Japanese friend in which she details some of the horrors and hardships endured by many Japanese in the aftermath of natural disasters.  She wrote: "In my country, fear of earthquakes always haunts us. We don't know when it gonna hit us and kill us. As a small child, I remember nights I could not sleep because of the fear of death by earthquake. I grew up with fear. However, because I encountered with Christ, I am no longer haunted by fear of death anymore. It is the unchanging truth, but it is quite scary when it happens. I lost words when I saw cars and houses carried away by water and drown in it as weapons to steal so many lives. I thought hell would be a place like this."

Hell is probably very like this, a chaotic state without hope of the victorious order that comes with God's Presence. According to Genesis 1, such chaos was overcome by God's Word in the beginning. The Genesis 1 and 2 accounts speak of water in a chaotic state and water that sustains life.

In the Genesis 1 creation account, the earth was chaotic. Darkness was on "deep" until the Spirit moved over waters (1:1-2).

Similarly, in Genesis 2, we read "In the day when the Lord-God made the earth and the heavens . . ." (2:4) there was nothing on earth (2:5) until a mist or water rose from the ground and watered all the surface of the ground.

In Genesis 1 we have an account similar to the ancient Nilotic belief of Tehom (Hebrew: תְּהוֹם‎), a watery and disordered deep which God put in order by His Word (Egyptian word "hu" or hut). The Tehom is subdued by the divine Tehut.

In the early Nilotic account of creation (before Egypt emerged as a political entity) the creation began when a mound or pillar of dry land emerged from the primordial sea. Here the first life form was seen as a lily, growing on the peak of the mound. The mound was called Tatjenen, meaning "the emerging land".

The victory of Tehut over Tehom relates to the annual inundation of the Nile and helps us to understand the Egyptian concept of creation. As rains fell in the Ethiopian headlands the Nile River rose above its banks, flooding the Nile Valley between June and October. The flooding lasted for 40 days. As the waters receded, only the highest mounds of earth would been seen at first. Even after the waters crested and began to recede, families did not return to their homes for another 40 nights. This is the origin of the biblical phrase "forty days and forty nights", and the context is Nilotic.

One of the oldest creation myths of the ancient Egyptians envisioned the first place in the world as a mound emerging from the waters of a universal ocean. In Hindu and Buddhist mythology the mound that emerged is called Mount Meru. It emerges from the center of the Cosmic Ocean, and the Sun and 7 visible planets circle the mountain. Mount Meru in Hinduism is a mythological mountain. 

The name meru is meri in Egyptian and is related to the ancient Egyptian word for love - mer.  The name Mary or Miriam is related to that same root - MR. The Virgin Mary, whose womb swelled with the Son of God, is portrayed in some icons as the mountain of God. The Prophet Daniel saw a mountain, from which a stone was cut by the hand of God (Dan. 2:34, 45). Doubtless this is what Malachi alluded to when he wrote, “But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise [swell/be magnified] with healing in its wings.” 

This conception of Earth emerging from a universal ocean likely originated in the Nile Valley where stone pillars called benben were erected. The term is from the root, bn, meaning to "swell forth". The Egyptian word for the rising sun is wbn, which comes from the same root as benben. The benben were a solar symbol. In his book, Mountains of the Pharaohs, Dr. Zahi Hawass states that the benben was the "solar symbol par excellence, thought to have existed in reality as an object, perhaps a stone with a rounded top..." (p. 34)

Hawass believes that this artifact was kept in the main temple at Heliopolis (biblical On) where the sun was the symbol of the High God Ra. Ra's son was called HR, meaning Most High One. The Greeks called Ra's son Horus. The Horite Hebrew priests who served at the main temple in Heliopolis were devotees of Ra, Horus, and Hathor. Heliopolis is mentioned multiple times in the Old Testament. Isaiah 19:18 says that Heliopolis was one of the five cities in Egypt that swore allegiance to the Lord of Hosts.

Recently discovered tombs of officials from the 4th Dynasty were surmounted by conical mounds that represent the benben. These tombs, along with the royal tombs at Giza, indicate that the ancient rulers hoped to rise from the place of death just as the sun rises daily in the east and sets in the west. The solar arc and the hope of resurrection were linked in ancient Nilotic thought.


Related reading: The Prestige of Biblical On; Early Resurrection Texts; The Nilotic Substrata of Genesis 1; Funerary Rites and the Hope of Resurrection; Righteous Rulers and the Resurrection; Solar Symbolism of the Proto-Gospel

Rightly Reading Genesis 1 - 3

Alice C. Linsley

Question number six of the Nine Meaty Questions is: "I don't read Genesis 1 and 2 as two separate creation stories, but rather chapter 2 as an expansion on the outline laid out in chapter 1.... what do you think?"

Answer: A right reading of Genesis does not require reading the first two chapters as one continuous narrative. These chapters are not a chronological account of historical events. In fact, the narrative flow of chapters 1-3 requires that Genesis 2 be read with Genesis 3, but not Genesis 1 with Genesis 2.

Further, text criticism and number symbolism suggests that Genesis 2 is older than Genesis 1. Looking at the larger picture, it becomes evident that the Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 creation and origin accounts represent different traditions among Abraham's Afro-Asiatic people.

One reader of Just Genesis has suggested that "The second description tells it from a different point of view: God's, while the first tells it from man's view." This is certainly the case, but as no humans were present when God created the Heavens and the Earth, Genesis 1 clearly is not to be read as an historical account.

Another reader, Mairnéalach, takes this view: "The two narratives may be reconciled, but any attempt to do so in a consistent manner will also fatally damage the remaining modernistic/journalistic interpretation of Genesis. This is proper and to be desired. If one attempts to maintain the modernistic/journalistic hermeneutic, their rules of interpretation are much like Calvin ball. (This is the game that Calvin and Hobbes played together, where Calvin gets to change the rules on the fly as he wishes, so that he can win the game no matter what happens.)

I appreciate Mairnéalach's criticism of what he calls the "modernistic/journalistic" approach to reading Genesis, something quite foreign to the text itself. Genesis 1 represents an ancient religious worldview that sees the order of creation as having seven parts. Emphasis on the number seven as the achievement of Shalom/Sabbath reflects a well-developed theological understanding of Messiah's inevitable ascent (as we will see later).

The number seven is a reference to union or completion in the first creation story which says that God's creative work lasted six days and God rested on the seventh day. The number seven in association with God at rest (sabbath) portrays the concept of completion or perfection of a relationship between Master and Servant, or between Creator and Creation, or between Husband and Bride.

The seven-part order of Genesis 1 suggests the more recent (eastern Afro-Asiatic) or Babylonian influence, which attaches seven to weddings as attested by Esther 1:5-11: "And when these days were expired, the king made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the court of the garden of the king's palace. On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, and Abagtha, Zethar, and Carcas, the seven chamberlains that served in the presence of Ahasuerus the king, to bring Vashti the queen before the king with the crown royal, to shew the people and the princes her beauty..."

But the seven-part structure is not characteristic of the older (western Afro-Asiatic) view of the order of creation. The older system, reflected in Genesis 2 and 3, is binary. It upholds the binary distinctions of God-Man, Heaven-Earth, Male-Female, and Life-Death. These distinctions are found in Genesis 1 also, but the structure of Genesis 1 is seven-fold, not binary.

The number symbolism of Abraham's people (which has been re-interpreted in Kabbalah) points to the Triune God (1) whose Son, Jesus Christ, is the Logos (2) who by the Spirit (3) became incarnate of the Virgin Mary (5), lived on earth as a man who died (6) but, as God, rose from the dead, showing great mercy to all the world (4) and ascended as the Royal Son of God (7) who becomes the Royal Bridegroom (8) who enters the bridal chamber to consummate the marriage to his pure and spotless Bride, the Church (9) and from that union will be born a new reality, a new world (10).

Genesis 2-3 addresses the relationship of God (1) and Logos (2), a common theme among the western Afro-Asiatics. The bards of the Bambara of Uganda recite this praise of the generative power of the Logos:

The Word is total:
it cuts, excoriates
forms, modulates
perturbs, maddens
cures or directly kills
amplifies or reduces
According to intention
It excites or calms souls.

The idea of the Logos in Genesis seems strange to many because they don't think of Genesis as being about the Son of God. However, as the kinship pattern of Abraham's people reveals, they were motivated to preserve the bloodline through the mothers by an expectation that a Ruler-Priest-Savior would be born from them whose radiance would be a light to the nations. And they were right!

As linguistics, climatology, anthropology and archaeology collaboratively suggest, this expectation was spread by Afro-Asiatic ruler-priests who controlled the large water systems from west central Africa to the Indus River Valley aound 12,000 years ago. They believed that God, who desires Sabbath communion with us, accomplishes this through the Blood of His Son and eternal Priest. The expectation of this Salvation is first found in Genesis 3:15: Thus the Lord God said to the serpent... 'I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall strike at his heel.'

For Jews the Exodus is the central event of their corporate consciousness whereby God delivered them and established a special relationship with them as His own holy possession. For Christians the central event is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whereby atonement is made through the shedding of His Blood. We might argue that these events are at odds, the first locating atonement through obedience to the Law and the second locating atonement through Jesus' obedience to the Father. But in both events God is working with a specific line of Afro-Asiatic ruler-priests. It is from this line that Jesus enters the world to bring salvation to sinners according to the ancient expectation.