Re: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

 Hi Dick,

I disagree -- it seems that Adapa actually was a god (or demi-god, maybe) although not an immortal one -- it says so in the 8th line.  It says he was one of the Anunnaki.  This can't be referring to Ea because the lines both before and after are referring to Adapa and there is no break in the sentence following.  He was also one of the Seven Sages, and hence he wasn't a nobody on that account, either.  You can see his demi-god status in that he didn't need a rudder or steering pole to take his boat out to sea (apparently controlling the wind?  Those lines are lost), and when tossed into the ocean by Ea's storm he lived under water for 7 days ("send him to live in the fishes home."  The Seven Sages had their home underwater with Ea, so this is not unusual), and in anger he broke the wings of the wind with his mere voice.  These are all god-like qualities.  Yet he is also connected to mankind because Anu says at the end, "Didn't you want to live forever?  Alas for downtrodden people."  Hence, I think he was a demi-god, a being made by Ea to be one of the Anunnaki and Seven Sages, a "protecting spirit among mankind" (note "among" not "of" mankind), yet in a way connected to us, serving in the temple and fishing for the temple, and in that sense connected to the "downtrodden people."

The irony is that Ea made him to have many wonderful qualities but did not give him immortality.  (If he were a mere man the=2
0text would not need to explain that detail, because no humans have immortality anyhow.  It mentioned his lack of immortality because  that is unusual for a god).  The whole tale turns on his lack of immortality.  It is a tale about how even a demi-god fails to achieve immortality, and thus it may be a comment on the human condition.

 
But having said all that, I'm not denying that there were one or more literal Adam's, Adamu's, Adapa's in Mesopotamia, who were quite famous and related to the Adapa and Genesis stories.  I do think Adam at the beginning of Seth's geneology (Gen.4) was a literal person, the father of Seth and grandfather of Enosh, and that he lived in the neolithic era.  The mundane details about his birth and death dates indicate that this is intended as history, not allegory.  This Adam of Genesis 4 may indeed have been famous and the father of kings, maybe even the same person who spawned the Adapa tale in Mesopotamia.  I don't deny any of that.  My only disagreement is that the tale of Genesis 3 (the garden) bears no resemblance to life in Akkadia for a temple priest, and hence, while the author of the Genesis account might have based it loosely on an actual person Adapa, or more likely on the tales that were themselves based very loosely on such a person, the tale in Genesis is a completely re-written story bearing no resemblance to the literal Adam or Adapa, intended to teach theology, not literal history.  It is not set=2
0in a busy seaport city with the hustle and bustle of temple duties, but in a pastoral garden.  There are no bakers or other priests, as in the Adapa story, but Adam and Eve are presented as if they are alone (before Eve, there were none but animals who could have been Adam's companion).  There is no temple and no service in baking or fishing, but just gardening and discovering who he is as the beginner of mankind:  naming animals and discovering the value of relationship between the sexes are the sort of primal discovery that elegantly describe the origins of mankind, but are irrelevant to a demi-god priest in a big city.  Plus, every culture has its story on the creation of man to understand how we relate to God (or the gods) and the rest of nature.  Shucks, the Genesis story even says there were no crops because there were no men to cultivate the ground, and so He made Adam to solve that problem.  This is clearly talking about the origin of mankind in Genesis 2, not the origin of the Semites.  By the time Moses wrote it down, it wasn't his anscestor's Adapa story any more.

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Fischer <dickfischer@verizon.net>
To: philtill@aol.com
Cc: ASA <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:22 am
Subject: RE: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

Hi Phil:

Scribes in Mesopotamia had to make a living. 
They recorded historical stories and concocted
 encounters with gods and kings drawing
on elements of interest.  The more popular stories were copied and
recopied and sold for money.  Eleven of the twelve tablets of Gilgamesh
are written in Sumerian as he was a famous Sumerian king.  An ingenious Akkadian
scribe incorporated the legend of Noah (Utnapishtim) and made a hit with the
eleventh tablet.  Naturally he would include a host of gods to make the
story appealing to all, but no copies of the eleventh tablet have been found
transcribed into Sumerian.  What that tells me is that the flood story was
concocted by and circulated only among the Akkadians as Utnapishtim/Noah was their
most famous king and forefather.

What strikes me about the legend of Adapa/Adamu
is that he doesn’t fit the mold.  He was neither god nor king. 
How are you going to sell a story about a nobody?  You can’t.  Adapa
had to be someone known to everyone.  Finding copies of the story all over
the region in various Semitic languages is confirmation that he was known to
all.  Then finding the name Adamu in graveyards and as an Assyrian king
and a Canaanite governor shows me that Adamu was in their chain of ancestry. 
The parallels between the biblical Adam and the legendary Adapa confirm who he
was.

Dick Fischer, GPA president

Genesis Proclaimed Association

"Finding Harmony in Bible, Science
and History"

www.genesisproclaimed.org

----
-Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
[mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf
Of philtill@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009
1:02 AM
To: dickfischer@verizon.net
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Nakedness and
the Fall of Man
 
Hi Dick,
the info is very intersting but it really doesn't strike me as fitting the
Genesis text reasonably.  I do believe that there are parallels in the
Adapa account, though.  After our last discussion I spent more some time
studying Adapa.  I'm impressed by several parallels including the swapping
of cloths.  As you know, Adapa was told by Ea to report to Anu in heaven
wearing dirty clothes (pretending to be mourning for the two missing gods), and
then was given a change of clothes in heaven (which Ea had advised him to put
on).  By itself this doesn't say much, but there is also the parallel
about eating or not eating the food of life or death and failing to live
forever, and making the wrong decision because of being decieved by a
supernatural being.  All together it seems quite a bit more than
coincidental.  My take on it is probably different than yours.  I
think it's plausible that one of Abraham's forebears wrote the Adam story (which
then was passed down eventually to Moses, who incorporated it into the Hebrew
bible).  That original mesopotamian author could have intentionally
re-used themes borrowed from the well-known Adapa story, re-interpreting them
in order to tell a corrected theo
logy to his audience.  So while
Adapa's story is a funky tale or tricks and counter-tricks, perhaps reflecting
on the plight of man, the Adam story is a true theodicy that reflects not just
on man's plight but on his free moral agency and promise of future re
demption.  The differences are far greater than the parallels, so I can't
see anything more than a faint literary relationship; a borrowing of imagery,
but changing the images all around to tell a more important story.
Phil
-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Fischer <dickfischer@verizon.net>
To: philtill@aol.com
Cc: ASA <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:18 am
Subject: RE: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man
Not to step on George’s toes but
you might take a look at this web page and the picture of the naked men taking
their offerings to their gods.  By the dress (or undress) of the men
bearing baskets, they would be Sumerian priests.  The onlookers are in
Akkadian dress.  Adam as a priest should be naked before God, but lost his
rights as a priest through sin and was clothed.  That’s one possible
interpretation.
 
http://www.bibleorigins.net/UrukNakedMenOfferingHarvest.html
 
Dick Fischer, GPA president
Genesis Proclaimed Association
"Finding Harmony in Bible, Science
and History"
www.genesisproclaimed.org
 
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of philtill@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009
1:31 AM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: [asa] Nakedness and=2
0the Fall of Man
 
George, this is especially for you becaue I'd like to know
if you (or anyone else) has seen much theology written about this topic of
Nakedness in the Fall of Man, and what it means to the theology of the
Fall.  
I've been re-thinking the Fall of Man, and I've concluded that the author
intentionally does not introduce the category of "sin" in the story,
and we've been mistakenly inserting it there.  Instead, the author's
principle categories for the Fall of Man are "nakedness" and
"knowing good from evil."  IMO, this distinction (nakedness, not
sin, as the essence of the Fall) has profound theological and Christological
importance, including our understanding of man's origins and its relationship
to science.  Here's the idea:
1.  The imagery of Nakedness speaks of being not clothed with Christ
(i.e., not having God's life in us mediated by Christ)
 
It indicates our inadequacy to live as moral agents
     apart from God.  As long as Adam had not gained the "knowledge
     of good & evil", then he had no moral inadequacy and so no sense of moral inadequacy (not
     "ashamed" of nakedness)..  As soon as he gained moral
     knowledge, he recognized his nakedness and was ashamed.  That is, he
     realized something was missing from himself which made him "not
     right."  He needed something to be added to himself to be
     completed.  What he needed was Christ.
 
Paul picks up on the same imagery in Rom. 13:14,
     "clothe yourselves in Christ", and in Gal.3:27, "all
     of you who were baptized into
     Christ have clothed
     yourselves with Christ."  Surely Paul had the garden of Eden in
     mind when he thought being naked and being clothed was an important way to
     describe Christ.
 
I think the case for this interpretation is made very
     strongly, below
2.  God
contrasts vegetation with animal sacrifice in both the account of the Fall and
in the Abel & Cain account.  This parallelism between Gen. 3 &
Gen.4 is striking and should not be missed.  
 
Adam & Eve clothed themselves in vegetation, but
     God rejected that.  Cain brought a sacrifice of vegetation, but God
     rejected that.
 
God replaced Adam & Eve's vegetaion covering with a
     sacrificed animal's skin, which He accepted.  Abel brought a
     sacrifice of an animal, which God accepted.
 
The parallelism of rejecting vegetation versus
     accepting a killed animal indicates that the symbols have he s
ame meaning
     in both accounts
3.  The symbolism of vegetation (the fig leaf to cover
nakedness and also Cain's crop offering) represents our "works", our
reliance on our own efforts to span the gap between us & God
 
Adam & family were gardeners, charged with growing
     plants.  This appears in Gen.2:15 and again in the curse Gen.3:17-19
     which is focused on the growth of crops as mankind's occupation, his
     "work", his "sweat".  It appears again in the
     curse of Cain's work.  Throughout this context, Adam's and Cain's
     "works" were the leaves they produced as farmers/gardeners.<
     /FONT>
 
Using a fig leaf to cover your nakedness represents
     trying to save yourself by works, trying to make up with is missing from
     ourselves by something that we can find conveniently at hand.
3.  In contrast, the symbol of animal sacrifice pictures
Christ.  It demonstrates faith in God's grace that He will provide a
substitute so that we don't need to rely on our inadequate works.  This is
consistent with the theology of atonement and symbolism of blood sacrifice
throughout the OT.
4.  Since God solved our nakedness by clothing us with Christ (pictured by
the sacrificed animal), then obviously the problem was that we needed Christ
and didn't yet have him.  I.e., if
Christ was the solution, then being without Christ was the problem.
 
This is a compelling argument that nakedness represents being without Christ.
5.  But the text makes it clear that being without Christ was OK for Adam
before he became a moral agent.  Nakedness is not sin!!!  It is OK
for an animal that doesn't know good from evil to not be clothed with
Christ.  However, it is never OK for any moral being to not be clothed
with Christ.  Even un-fallen beings like angels, if they are moral agents,
need Christ.  It is a category mistake to think that any being can produce
a moral life apart from Christ.  God is the source of all goodness, so the
category "being good" is undefinable apart from relationship with
Christ who lives in us.  So that is why God told Adam and Eve that they
must not become moral agents (as they were, naked -- not clothed in Christ),
lest they die.  In this account, death is not a judicial pronouncement God
w ould render for their disobedience; No!  -- it is the natural outcome of
becoming moral agents who do not yet have Christ.
6.  As I read the text I see how it is all about nakedness rather than
about sin.  They were naked and unashamed.  Then they ate of the tree
and knew they were naked.  (The text immediately goes to their
nakedness as the all-important category at the moment they ate of that
tree).  Then they clothed their nakedness.  They were ashamed of
nakedness and that is why they hid.  "I was afraid because I was
naked." 20Then God discusses their nakedness.  Then God
un-clothes them and re-clothes them His own way.  Then the symbols of the
two kinds of clothing (vegetation and animal sacrifice) are repeated in the
Cain/Abel story.  So the Fall of Man is ALL about their nakedness. 
Nakedness is not a quaint little illustration of man becoming ashamed after he
falls into sin.  NO!  Instead, it is the very essence of t he fall
ing.  (The other part of that essence is becoming one who knows good from
evil.)  Note also that it doesn't say Adam and Eve hid from God because
they were ashamed because they had disobeyed and were feeling guilty, or they
were ashamed because they sinned and knew they actually were
guilty.  No!  None of these categories (sin, guilt, guilty feelings
for sin) have been introduced by the author into the text. These are things
that we wrongly read into the text because we are trying to jump ahead too
quickly.  Instead, Adam and Eve were ashamed simply because they were naked. 
That's they said, and that's the only thing the author considered to be
important enough to tell us about their hiding.  It really is a story
about their nakedness, their inadequacy apart from Christ.  Being without
Christ (naked) is vastly more important than having guilty feelings for
disobedience.  We've been majoring on categories (gui l t & sin) that
the author has not even introduced into the text, and we've been missing the
importance of the one category (nakedness
) that the author has been harping on
over and over again all through the text.
7.  This interpretation helps to make sense of the rest of the
story.  Why did the author think it was important to have Adam name
animals and Eve be made subsequent to Adam?  Surely there are multiple
reasons, but one reason that I think unifies the main them es of the text is
that it is about human inadequacy and the need for relationships.  Man is
inadequate and so he is told to find a helper, and so he examines and names the
animals but finds no helper.  Animals are incapable of answering man's
inadequacy.  God then provides for man's inadeqacy by making him a
helper.  To be adequate in this world, man and woman need each
other.  Relationship solves inadequacy.  But the author finds it
important to say in the very next sentence that both man and woman are naked --
so the sexes "complete" one another in an important sense, but we do
not "clothe" one another in the (symbolic) sense that we need
relationship with God, too.  Th e chapter is all about the relationships
we need to be adequate.
8.  The first time God introduces the category of sin is not in the Fall,
but in the Abel/Cain account.  Abel rightly continues trusting God to
cover his nakedness (so to speak) as pictured by his offering of animal
sacrifices.  Cain represents the human tendency to slip back to trusting
ourselves rather than God, trying to cover our nakedness (so to spea
k) by
vegetation offerings (our works).  His offering is rejected, and he is
angry.  Now for the very first time in the Bible God mentions sin, that it
is crouching at Cain's door (a picture of a lion about to pounce) and it's
desire is for him (the lion wants to eat him).  So the category of sin is
introduced not as the quintessence of the F all, but as merely a consequence of
the Fall.  The Fall was about our lack of relationship with Christ. 
Sin is the outcome of not having that relationship.  This puts Christology
at the center where it should be, and hamartiology in the second ary
position.  This is the importance of the Cain/Abel story and why the
author included it in the Scriptures (something that was always a mystery to me
until now).  The author, having dealt with Christology in the Fall, now
proceeds to hamartiology in the Cain/Abel account.
9.  This puts the theology of Genesis 3 at a very highly developed level,
as high as what we find in the NT. It is identical to Paul's discussion of Law
and grace.  Paul says that a Law has not been given capable of
communicating life to us.  Instead, the law communicates death because it
leaves us inadequate to keep its demands at the same time it makes them. 
It only shows us how we fall short.  Life is found not in our efforts to
keep the law, but as a gracous gift in Christ, through the indwelling
Spirit.  We need to be clothed in Christ.  The author of Gen
esis was
no theological slouch.  He anticipated all this (inspired as he was) and
told a story of early man becoming a free moral agent while not yet clothed in
Christ.  The law (the knowledge of good & evil) did not communicate
the ability to keep its demands.  It only allowed them to recognized their
inadequacy as moral agents who were missing s omething important ( Christ). 
Man was ashamed at his inadequacy and relied on his own efforts to try to make
up for it.  But naked and not trusting God as he was, sin was crouching at
his door and it consumed him.  As Paul said, the law brought death, and
spiritually dead people sin.  The law stirred up in us all manner of
covetousness.
This is freeing because I see no conflict with what we know from science with
this kind of an understanding of the Fall of Man. We know that at some point
man became different than other primates because he became a moral agent. 
We know that in this process he did not end up being clothed in Christ, a
spiritual being whose every generation comes out of the womb singing
Hosannah.  Instead, he comes out relying on his own works to make up for
his sense of moral and spiritual inadequacy.  The inspired author of
Genesis interprets this for us theologically.  He connects the dots
between these two common-sense observations about man's original state by
explaining the causal relationships between them.  He says that our
becoming moral agents while yet naked (inadequa
te to the task of moral agency
apart from Christ) made us inherently spiritually dead.  
We also know as a common-sense observation that man ended up being consumed by
sin.  The author of Genesis connects this dot for us, too.  He tells
how the moral agent man (Cain), relying on his own works rather than Christ,
fell short in his behavior20and so mankind was consumed by sin.  The
causal relationships are:
 
Naked (not in Christ) + Become Moral Agent --> Death
 
Death + Rely on Self (not Christ) --> Sin rules us 
This is different than what I was taught traditionally in
church, as follows:
 
Sin (disobey command to not eat from the tree) -->
     Death
 
Death --> have guilty feelings illustrated by the
     quaint example of Adam not wanting people to see his privates
The traditional view fails because it treats the symbols in
the text as trivial. It ignores the symbol of the tree making us into moral
agents.  It tries to say instead that man was already moral agent in his
original estate, and hence capable of sinning (disobeying the command to not
eat from the tree).  It thus finds it necessary=2 0to make a strained
re-interpretation of the tree as "knowing good and evil in our own way
rather than God's way" rather than simply "knowing good and
evil" as the text has it (and as God affirms in saying "man has
become like one of Us, knowi
ng good and evil).  The traditional view also
trivializes the symbol of nakedness, which is the most important part of the
whole story.  The traditional view also fails because it tries to
psychologize Adam's hiding (a guilt reaction to sin) rather than seeing it as a
deep statement of Man's recogniation of his inadequacy, being as he was apart
from Christ. The traditional view simply makes a muddle out of the text.
The traditional view is also hard to interpret in light of science.  Much
of what we consider our "sinful nature" is the result of evolutionary
inheritance.  If Adam was originally a moral being while yet unfallen,
then at least those parts of his "sinful nature" must have
pre-existed his fall.  He would have been a moral agent with biological
urges to do morally unacceptable things and yet without any sin.  While
this is not a logical contradiction, we have to wonder how Adam pulled that
off, and why he later failed to continue pulling that off when he fell. 
And how does that kind of Fall correlate to the symbols in the text, eating of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  The loss of Adam's (supposed)
ability to perfectly resist biological urges does not correlate with "Man
has become like one of us, knowing good from evil."  Science just
does not correlate with the text, read that way.
But taking the categories the author uses, and steadfastly refusing to read
into the text any categories that the author has not yet introduce
d, produces a
picture that is completely consistent with evolution.  Early man, prior to
the Fall, would have had biological urges that must be resisted if he were to
become a moral agent.  So to avoid spiritual death, before he becomes a
moral being he must put on Christ so that he will be able, through Christ, to
resist those urges.  But sadly, man became a moral being while yet
"naked" and inadequate, being without Christ.  Even without
biological urges, being a moral being without Christ would have produced
death.  The evolutionary biological urges were not in any way causal to
that death, although they help us to understand our need for Christ quite
efficiently.  In fact, we might conclude that God in his economy decided
that man should have biological urges inherited by evolution because after his
Fal l they would show us so well our inadequacy apart from Christ.  
Phil
 
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