Is the Genesis story meant to cause reflections and lamentations on the world as it was, in the “good old days”, and nothing more? We often tend to read these stories as reflections on human history, stories to listen to in church or Sunday school, maybe memorize some characters from them for treats at the end of the lesson, then move on to Monday. My general experience in American church is that these stories are reviewed briefly, but almost all focus of teaching is on the New Testament. Maybe that is not ubiquitous in the USA, but I have noticed that. Subsequently, I had fallen into that mindset as well, not really thinking much relevance of the Torah. I would read it as part of a pursuit from the first to last page of the Bible, mostly without thinking of what it may be trying to say.
As Spencer points out, the idea of an era that is void of conflict and violence is common to religion, and that this is suggestive of an era of veganism or vegetarianism, in which life does not have to kill other life in order to ensure its survival. He shares an opinion that this thread comes from a historical memory buried within the make-ups of early humans, who perhaps unknowingly inherited such a history. These legends are meant as a reflection back toward that period of peace and tranquility, and the roles of them in religion are to allow us to have self-soothing visions of such a time and place in the middle of a bloody, aggressive world geared toward taking out animals for food.
I would venture to say that some people brought up in religion might see the texts of Genesis similarly, as a reflection to a better time. It is how we are taught to read stories written in the past, as narratives that happened then, separated from us in our present context. It is how I read the Bible for years, which caused me to feel pretty disengaged. But is this the correct way to read it? Might it have something to say in our current day situation, more than just a memory of old?
Perhaps we should view the creation account as a prospective possibility rather than a retrospective history. There is some idea that the myths of the Ideal Age in many cultures are stories of a paradise never realized rather than a description of a past that is lost. As I stated earlier, God puts people in the Garden to work it, to create something from what already exists there into a better state. We may think that Eden was perfect and complete as it was made, but this isn’t the idea behind it. The mission of God was to rule with humans to progress toward something bigger and better than what they started with. In the intended progression of time, this theme would have continued into the future had humans not fallen.
We take for granted our ability to perceive information as infinite and beyond face value, evidenced in that we see situations, assess them, and inflict an external force into that situation to bring about a new, desired reality. We constantly receive and process data, then we come up with a response that may totally change what we found, often through experimentation. We do not accept our knowledge base as intrinsically bounded. If we did, when we came upon some unexplained phenomenon, we would simply accept it without thought. This likely describes Homo erectus, as the evidence suggests they themselves didn’t change much in their million-year existence. By accepting the world at face value and taking what they could to survive, they remained essentially a stagnant species.
Interpreting knowledge as beyond the immediately observable, something to be discovered with a little forethought, is a big step in the evolution of Homo sapiens. The production of better tools enabled humans to experiment with and exert control over their environment, thus allowing for the acquisition of new knowledge from experimentation. This ability to manipulate the environment, to coerce it to do what one wants it to do, is a game changer in the evolution and extinction of species. Humans now would have been able to cultivate the earth, providing a more reliable food source than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle would have provided. Hence Homo sapiens was moving toward becoming the dominant species, and Homo erectus was moving toward extinction.
That’s not to say that the only thing humans did with technology was cultivate the earth. Obviously, early bands of humans used tools to kill and eat larger animals that they would never have been able to take down on their own physical abilities. What is interesting is the manner in which many groups approached the hunting and killing of animals for their consumption. Growing up in the USA, we learn about Native Americans in school. Most of us may remember that they always used every bit of the animal that they killed (bison is the typical example) for food, clothing, and shelter. They never killed (or gathered) more than they needed to live. Many people have romantic memories of Native Americans and thoughts about that kind of kinship with the ecosystem, using only what you need and leaving the rest to flourish.
With the various crises in our ecological world today, we often question whether the earth can sustain life as we know it, whether the world holds the resources to house all of us. Life has mechanisms of controlling a level of homeostasis, whether it is in sustainable populations and ratios of species, the food chain, or intermittent epidemics or natural disasters. With our ever-progressing technologies beyond simple hunter-gatherer tools, humans have intervened in the stabilizing life cycle, i.e. vaccinations, protective measures against certain natural disasters, best efforts to prevent wars, etc. It appears that the pessimistic answer is the most accurate, that the earth cannot sustain us all. That is probably true if we feel we own the right to ravage it of all resources, above and beyond what we need to survive and thrive. In our current world of overabundance and materialism, it is easy to subscribe to this attitude of “having it all”. If we were to follow a similar wisdom of some of these ancients, taking only what we need, our answer to the question may change. We may find ourselves in a more generous world that can sustain us. Eden represents an abundant world that is enough, but only if we decide that we won’t pursue wisdom on our terms, and rather opt for the Tree of Life.
Some of that sounds like the takeaways from Sunday school, that the world used to be such a great place, and now it isn’t. Like with the Genesis narrative, we can look at Native American history, ruminate over it, and return to our original worldview. In line with the anthropologic purpose of legend, we can take these images and soothe ourselves with them, have a break in our otherwise mundane existence. But, rather than treat these stories passively, what if we approached them as another tool to use toward our evolution? What if they represented what could be in our world today? And now we have the other “nuts and bolts”, both physical and digital tools, to more effectively make that happen. I would hope that our desire is that we as humans are progressing toward something better that what we were. We all have periods of regression, individually and societally. We can choose, in various circumstances, whether we will exert the Genesis 3 human idea of our wisdom in our lives, and dwell in the desert to scrounge out a living, thus finding that our earth, despite all its generosity, is in fact a desert in our eyes. Or we can use our developed brains and tools to mold our world in the reflection of the wisdom superior to our own and maybe begin to realize what was initially intended for us: an abundant world that becomes evermore abundant.
Another established relationship in this story is that between animals and humans. In Genesis 1:28, we are told to rule over the animals and subdue the earth. On initial reading, to us this seems like a green light to utilize all of creation as we see fit. Several critics have cited this as the reason the Western world has made a habit of using and abusing our planet: it is both permitted and demanded by our religious tradition. We seem to have a knack for, with the aid of modern technology, manipulating the earth to accommodate us and our desires, to the point of wreckage. The same may be said for the animals. If we need them to meet our nutritional needs by being a direct source of calories, so be it. That is why they are here.