Читать книгу Blessed to Bless - Tim Sean Youmans - Страница 15
ОглавлениеRead Genesis 4:1–25.
Is the earth 5,775 years old or is it 4.5 billion years old?
That first date is an approximate dating that backtracks to the time of Adam and Eve. It is an estimate because those stories are often called primeval (which means a “young us”), prehistoric (before written histories), and primordial because they deal with origins. The time is generally estimated at 6,000 years ago.
As you read chapter 4, I was hoping it would raise some questions for you as a modern reader:
1. Who was Cain afraid would come and harm him?
2. Who did Cain marry and have a child with?
3. For what group of people did Cain build a city?
As I said earlier, we’re not trying to play “gotcha” with the Bible. The postscientific questions we might be inclined to ask of these stories were not even on the radar of the people who told these stories around the campfire. In this sense, the stories were mytho-poetic.
Myth? The Bible is a myth? It’s very important to clarify what the prefix mytho means. It does not mean false. Rather, myths are the stories that frame a culture’s sense of themselves and their values. So a mythos can be historically true or not. Veracity really isn’t the point. The point is . . . well . . . the point of the story.
For stories like the Garden of Eden, it is about the role of God as creator and the tendency of human beings to disobey the Creator’s directions. The story of Cain and Abel is about the quality of gifts to God, the attitude in which those gifts are given, and the tendency toward jealousy, anger, and violence. (For a peek of this at work in the New Testament, look at Matthew 5:21–26.)
Mytho-poetic are stories that show what is important to a group of people or a culture. These stories can be fiction, nonfiction, or a mixture of both.
There are three basic ways people tend to interpret these stories. Keep in mind this is a simple version:
1. Literal. The story means exactly what it says. God took six, twenty-four-hour days to create the earth, and all human beings came from two actual people.
2. Symbolic. Elements of the story are pointing to something else. Yes, it is a story about two people in a garden, but those two people represent something larger than just two people. Adam and Eve (soil and life) represent all of civilization and human beings inclination to misuse knowledge and disobey God.
3. A mixture of literal and symbolic. This is the position that I take and the one taken by most Episcopalians.
Darren Aronofsky’s movie Noah did a beautiful sequence that shows the mixing of a literal and symbolic handling of the story.1
The trick is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. People tend to gravitate toward binary thinking, which means something being all one thing or all the other. Sometimes you need to think this way, but sometimes it limits you. Remember the observation about the two creation stories: one is oriented to left brain and the other to the right brain? We need to come to the scriptures with this in mind.
As for Cain and Abel, here are a couple of the more important ideas: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We are responsible for each other in community. Genesis doesn’t say specifically why God chose Abel’s offering over Cain’s, though it does suggest Cain already had a negative attitude. Later, writers in the New Testament suggest Abel had a higher quality of faith (Heb. 11:4).
Am I my brother’s keeper? When God asked Cain where his brother was, he acted as if it wasn’t his responsibility to take care of him. When used, this phrase implies that we are responsible for each other.
There is a more complex interpretation if you want to think about it on a higher level. Able is a rancher and herdsman; Cain, a farmer. Cain’s livelihood requires that animal herds stay out of his crops, so he will need to build a fence. So the story speaks about the conflict that arose from the shift of a hunter-gatherer society to farming society. God prefers the first because it is more closely tied to a daily dependence on God, whereas farming tends toward a self-dependent act and human ownership, thus drawing the farmer away from dependence on God.
What do you think? Welcome to religious interpretation. Isn’t it fun?
What can be seen more clearly is that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden led to an act of jealousy and violence when Cain killed Abel. His blood “crying to me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10), which is definitely symbolic.
Mark of Cain. This was a mark God put on Cain to protect him from others harming him after he was banished for killing Abel. No one knows what the mark looked like.
The mark that protected Cain? No one knows what that was supposed to be. Some racist movements have made a claim that the mark was dark skin, but that is nonsense.2 And even if it were, the “mark” is one of grace and protection.
East of Eden. God punished Cain by sending him “east of Eden.” This is used to refer to someone who has been banished by a group of people or society.
Adam and Eve have a third son named Seth.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. Do you think the earth is around 6,000 years old, tracing back, as best Bible scholars can? Or do you think the earth is 4.5 billion years old based on dating developed by scientific method?
2. Do you think there is a way for both creation stories to have truth in them? Both the Hebrew version and the conclusions of science? What kinds of truth are in each kind of account?
3. Do you feel like you are “your brother’s keeper”? What does this mean to you?
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR5z9zzYt3I.
2. This is an interesting explanation on what the mark of Cain might have been: https://www.gotquestions.org/mark-Cain.html.
