Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Noel O'Riordan" <nor AT iol.ie>]

OK Here's my two cents worth.  A few points some of which I support others
which are a bit tenuous.

1, The interpreting one day of gods being a thousand years cannot stand due
to chapter one of Genesis, 'and there was evening and there was morning the
first day...etc etc'  The first chapter clearly describes a day, created by
god, as being just that-one day.

You can of course rule out chapter one as being from a different author, but
if you do that then you must then also rule out any other parallels with
other non J texts.  Including any texts that support the '1000 years'
hypothesis

2.  The idea that the serpent=Satan is again not supported anywhere in the
text, from a non-prejudicial reading of the text it is clear that the
serpent
did not even lie, and you can reach the conclusion, as Liz has, that God is
the Liar.

3.  Crucially Adam is not told how he will die, you can interpret the text
as meaning this:

Adam is told by God that if he eats from the tree he will die, a very
feasible interpretation of this is that the fruit is poisonous and will kill
him,  Adam seeing Eve eating from the tree sees that she does not die, (Eve
is here playing the food taster role :-) ) hence he will not die, so why not
eat?  You could even argue that what God said to Adam was not a prohibition
but a warning, and maybe Adam thought God was just plain mistaken when he
said that he would die.

4.  If sin was introduced into the world after Adam and Eve ate from the
tree and realized that they had sinned then how did they know they were
sinning by eating from the tree in the first place.  (Stretching it I know!)

5.  The tree of Life seems to me to be a separate tradition and only
inserted into the text alongside the tree of knowledge,  I cant remember the
exact argument for this but I did come to support that conclusion at some
point.


You can argue a lot of the details in some of the above arguments, but it
just shows that there are many different interpretations, however I believe
that it is wrong to interpret the text from any angle apart from the
information presented in the text, forget about Satan, and Christian
doctrine, they have only made it one of the most damaging of all the
biblical passages.

Best regards

Noel O'Riordan