E01 Forbidden Fruit

Is Eve responsible for tempting Adam with the apple? Why has she taken the blame? In this episode we take a trip back in time with Dr. Tammi Schneider, professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University, to ask why this ancient story is so important today.

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1: In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth, and the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, let there be light.

Genie: Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Okay, hold on a second. I already know what you’re thinking. That’s the old way of telling this story, and I agree with you 100%. But let me just fast forward a little bit.

Speaker 1: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. An innocent love spoiled by sin.

Genie: Okay, so maybe that’s one way you’ve heard this story before, but maybe, just maybe there’s another.

Genie: The reason I started this podcast is because I think the Bible is the most misunderstood book ever. I mean, really understanding it would entail expertise in ancient civilizations, different languages, archeology.

Genie: Without knowing all that, maybe there’s things we miss along the way. Think about it. What if we didn’t fully understand the things we thought we did?

Genie: Well, buckle up. This ride might take you places you’ve never been. And to some, that could be considered forbidden fruit.

Genie: My name is Genie and this is Scripture Unearthed.

Genie: The goal of this podcast is to excavate some of the lost stories in the scripture. Today, we’re talking about Eve. But, in order to understand her better, we need some context, lots of context.

Genie: If only I knew an archeologist, an expert in ancient history, a Hebrew Bible expert, or even a professor… Oh wait, I do. And she’s all those things combined into one person. She’s like the real Indiana Jones, if you will. Here’s Dr. Tammi Schneider.

Tammi: Okay. I love Eve because so many people have talked about her for so long, and yet no one’s really engaged with what’s going on there. It was interesting because a few years ago… I’m allowed to go down any rabbit hole I want, right?

Genie: Yeah, this is a podcast..

Tammi: We’re just this podcast, okay.

Genie: Absolutely.

Tammi: A few years ago I had to look at Eve, I can’t remember why. It was clear that when Eve was responsible for everything that was bad in the world, scholars were like, “Oh, yeah, let’s talk about Eve.”

Tammi: Then all of a sudden, they couldn’t quite do that anymore because even they could figure out that maybe it wasn’t quite that clear cut. Then they just stopped talking about her. Because if Eve isn’t bad, then we really don’t want to talk about her.

Tammi: She’s not named until way at the end. If you separate the woman in the garden from Eve, then what Eve does is just like what every other mother does. She bears children. She names her children. She refers to how she gets pregnant with one of her children by saying, “I acquired him with,” and she uses the Israelite deity’s name, kind of bypassing Adam. Oops, I hate it when that happens, and yet, there it was.

Tammi: Then the other thing that I really love about her is when she has Seth, she references her lost son. We talk about Cain and Abel, and it’s the first fratricide and blah, blah, blah. But she’s also, not only is she the first mother and the first woman, the first mother, but she’s also the first mother to lose her son. She loses a child.

Tammi: When she names Seth, she actually references back, maybe this will take the place of my other one or something like that. And yet, she doesn’t accuse her son.

Tammi: It’s this whole thing of, her kid’s the first murderer. And yet you never get the sense that she stops loving either of her children, even though one of them killed somebody. Right?

Genie: How would a mother feel today?

Tammi: That’s exactly, when they do studies about who visits people in prison, fathers stop going, wives stop going, children stop going. Mothers don’t stop going.

Genie: Wow.

Tammi: Eve would still go. Even though he killed her other kid, she’s got to move on. She hasn’t forgotten her kid, but she also never says anything bad about the, you know. How can that not speak to today?

Genie: Absolutely.

Tammi: When you only talk about her when she is responsible for everything that’s bad in the world, you lose that whole thing. So that’s why I love Eve.

Tammi: The other thing that really speaks, I think, to all of us in every age, which is why this is such a good book, is that life is hard, right? It never goes quite how we think it’s going to go. It doesn’t matter how well you plan it, stuff’s going to happen.

Tammi: Then the big question is, how do you deal with that? Do you go this way, or do you go that way? These characters are going all sorts of places.

Tammi: We talk about this a lot as well, is the whole notion of the way that the women have to act is because they don’t have access to power. They don’t have access to the same people.

Tammi: For example, in the case of Eve, the Israelite deity speaks to the man in the garden before the woman is separated from the man in the garden. We don’t even know what instructions she got.

Tammi: And let’s just be clear, men are really bad about conveying all the information that the women in Genesis need.

Genie: Now you’re stepping on toes. Now here we go. That’s why we’re doing this. We’re coming down people’s aisle colloquially as they say. I’m coming down your aisle, I’m stepping on some toes.

Tammi: Well, and this is Lot, right? Because you did Lot’s women, right?

Genie: Is that the theme, is that one of the themes of the Old Testament? It’s like, these guys can’t get it right, even with the deity.

Tammi: Well, I actually argue that that is one of the themes of the Hebrew Bible in general, is the deity creates people. They keep screwing up. He’s like, “Oh no, I didn’t mean you to do that. No. Huh? No. Uh-uh (negative). Okay. You’re out of the garden.” “Oh, got to start over. Okay.” Earth, rainbow, boom, ark. Okay, we’re starting new. Okay. No, no, no, no, no. The deity has to keep changing things.

Tammi: Finally the deity is like, “Here. Here’s a book. Here are the instructions. Follow the book.” And they still can’t follow the book. He’s like, “Okay, you can’t follow the book. You have to blah,” right? And then they don’t, right? And then the deity is like, “Oh, I feel bad. Okay. I’ll give you another chance,” right?

Tammi: Then today, people can’t even agree on what the book says. How are we supposed to figure out what we’re supposed to do when the book is sort of variously interpreted?

Genie: That question pretty much hits the nail on the head.

Tammi: How are we supposed to figure out what we’re supposed to do when the book is sort of variously interpreted?

Genie: The goal of this podcast is to sit down and figure out how and when these various interpretations happen. You ready?

Genie: In your class, we’ve got the Hebrew, and usually we read that, and then we translate it into English. That’s where stuff happens. That’s where things kind of-

Tammi: That’s why we can only get past like one sentence.

Genie: Absolutely, which is why we have so much to cover in this podcast, but it’s just impossible. To cover even Genesis chapter one in 45 minutes, that’s hard.

Genie: But the process in your class is, let’s read it in Hebrew, and then let’s all hear it out loud and try to put an English together. Why is that process important to you? How did you even come up with it?

Tammi: I actually think that’s probably how I was trained, truth be told. I don’t feel that it’s particularly original. But I can’t remember doing it in any class, truth be told. I just feel that that’s how it’s supposed to be done.

Tammi: The reason I have students read it out loud in Hebrew, is for the students who read Hebrew, they need to get a handle of the cadence and how to read.

Tammi: I remember when I was young, a rabbi of mine said, “Don’t fight the Hebrew. You know it. It’s in your bones. Read it correctly.” And there’s something, there’s a flow to it, there’s a cadence.

Tammi: That’s why the King James cadence is different, right? I think maybe that’s why. But it also has its own. I love it that it was, it was meant to be read out loud, so it was meant to be heard.

Tammi: And the Hebrew was meant to be heard, right? That’s why you have all these diacritical marks surrounding the original Hebrew that I also want students to pay attention to, is that there is a flow to it. There’s a cadence. There are places where you’re supposed to stop and pause for a long time, right?

Tammi: I want students to try and learn that. Especially students who Hebrew is more recent than others, right? I don’t want them to fight the Hebrew. I want them to get a handle on it.

Tammi: When you get that flow then the things that stand out and aren’t part of that flow, they stand out more. Then you see where there’s a juxtaposition or something simply in the order-

Genie: These moments of impact, these one liners and hard hitters that kind of…

Tammi: Exactly. Exactly. That’s why I want them to read it out loud. I want the students in the class to hear what the Hebrew sounds like, right? This wasn’t originally written in English. What is there about the Hebrew and its flow?

Tammi: Hebrew is a gendered language, so everything is either masculine or feminine. There’s no gender neutral. How does that impact how you hear things?

Tammi: That’s why we read it out loud in Hebrew. Then I have students translate it as close to the original Hebrew as possible because we’ve had a whole bunch of people for the last 2000 years trying to translate it in a way that makes it sound pretty.

Tammi: But when you do that, you miss all the complications, and you miss the places where it’s not pretty. And you miss the places where sometimes the problem isn’t Hebrew, the problem’s English, because we don’t speak like that in English, or you can’t say that in English, or that’s a word construction that is clumsy in English and we would never say it.

Tammi: So they have to think of creative ways to articulate that so that the students in the class who don’t know Hebrew can go, “Oh, that’s why blah, blah, blah,” whatever weirdness it is.

Tammi: Then it also means when they’re translating it on the fly like that, the students who have read it and at least two different translations, and this semester we only have students doing in English, but I’ve had students reading Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Luther’s German.

Genie: See, I can’t imagine it, because I’m in class, the… I’m trying to think… Not air. The inconsistencies. What term do you use? What would you say?

Tammi: Of the translation or the Hebrew?

Genie: Yeah, with the resulting discrepancy.

Tammi: Right, the discrepancies.

Genie: Anyway, what I’m saying is, the discrepancies in English are a ton. So I can’t imagine a class with Spanish and Korean and Chinese and every other language.

Tammi: Well, what’s really interesting about that is there are certain concepts that we don’t really have in English anymore.

Tammi: So the C word. I don’t use the word concubine, right? Because concubine in English, one of the definitions I read is a woman who sleeps with a man who is not her husband. Which covers a lot more people than I think they would self identify as concubines, let’s just say, in the 21st century. So it doesn’t mean anything in English.

Tammi: I’ve seen Raise the Red Lantern, right, where you have concubines and wives. Then there’s also various other cultures that have a clear cut case of, this is a concubine.

Tammi: When it’s translated into one of those languages like Korean or Chinese, which has, it’s a real word and it means something and it has people who know what that means. It actually is often times a closer translation than anything we could come up with in English.

Tammi: There’s other things like that with, because the West has been monogamous legally for so long, what do we do with plural wives, and then the children who descend… it’s just really complicated and it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around.

Tammi: But there’s a bunch of places where you still have that and you can still do that and you can have these various children and various stages of relationship to each other where their mothers are more or less not equal, blah, blah, blah.

Tammi: So some of those languages actually can capture that, especially kinship terms. Hebrew’s got a limited range of kinship terms, more limited than English. English has an okay range but not great. Nobody understands what’s like a second removed.

Genie: I was about to say, what about the third removed, twice-

Tammi: I don’t know. My mom knows what all that is. So some of these other languages actually can capture that in a way that English can’t and sometimes even Hebrew can’t. That’s why it’s really fun to have it into some of these other languages.

Tammi: Again, as soon as you translate, you’re interpreting, but some of those languages have more flare than English does on especially kinship and relationships.

Genie: I honestly think that’ll be a watershed for some listeners of this podcast, is wait, this English version isn’t what it says?

Tammi: It was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me. Except that it wasn’t.

Genie: Right. Absolutely.

Tammi: Yeah. As we learned from certain movies.

Genie: Right, and that’s another argument, is Jesus didn’t read this in English.

Tammi: No. Uh-uh (negative). No.

Genie: Well, let’s dive in somewhere.

Tammi: Okay. Let’s go. Where do you want to start?

Genie: I would love to get to 3:6, but we skipped so much, so maybe we can paraphrase real quick. Because she’s not, and I’m not going to say her name because she’s not named at this point, she is not “tempted” until chapter three.

Genie: But we’ve got chapter one, which is an account of creation. And then you got chapter two, which is maybe another account of creation. Where do you stand with that?

Tammi: Okay. This whole notion that the biblical text is “history” or “fact,” and that everybody thought that I don’t buy into, A. The notion that there can be only one telling of something from that far back I don’t buy into.

Tammi: If you look at the ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamia, and even other, you know, Greeks and Egyptians, there were multiple myths that are sort of in conflict with each other. The fact that they don’t line up perfectly is our problem. It’s not their problem.

Tammi: There’s no text from the ancient world that says, “Oh, I am so confused. There’s a flood story in here, and a flood story in there, and they are in conflict with,” nobody says that. There’s not a single example of anybody having trouble accepting that, right?

Tammi: Part of that is in a polytheistic worldview, there are multiple realities. You can do “everything,” right and Ishtar is in a bad mood and you’re going to have a bad day as a result. Polytheism can address why bad things happen to good people in a way that monotheism can’t.

Tammi: Supposedly in monotheism, if you do everything right, things will be good for you. And then there’s poor Job, right, and his kids die, and he gets new ones, but he still doesn’t have the old ones.

Tammi: This notion that there can only be one Truth, capital T, is not happening in the Hebrew Bible from my perspective. I just don’t get too bent out of shape about it. You could argue there are multiple ways of talking about some of this.

Tammi: Then when we get to the creation of humans, so the first human that is created is created as masculine and feminine. People forget that.

Genie: Right. And you’re in one right now.

Tammi: I’m in one.

Genie: You’re right at the top-

Tammi: Yeah. So you have… Where am I? This is where I-

Genie: 27, 1:27.

Tammi: Yeah. I may need my reading glasses at this point.

Genie: And they are some cool reading glasses.

Tammi: Right? The deity creates this entity, male and female, [Hebrew 00:16:58] and [Hebrew 00:16:58]. It’s got both of them. So one could easily argue that when the deity creates the woman from man’s side beam-

Genie: And we’ll get there.

Tammi: We’re going to get there. That it’s not separating and creating some whole new entity that hadn’t even been thought out, but is actually sort of embedded in the whole notion of what was first created.

Tammi: The other problem is that the deity blesses them, but doesn’t say that it was good.

Genie: Right. It’s the first time he doesn’t say that.

Tammi: Yeah. It’s like, huh, this is okay. I think all the other ones are really good, but I think this one might a little bit more work.

Genie: That’s interesting. You’ve got the creation at the end of chapter one, and the deity does not say it is good. Then in chapter two it seems to be more specific about the process.

Tammi: Of creating a female?

Genie: Yeah.

Tammi: That one is kind of funny too. This notion that everything is perfect in the garden actually isn’t really true either. Because in verse 18, the deity says it’s lo tov, i.e. it’s not good for the human to be alone.

Genie: What is human in Hebrew?

Tammi: I want to get it absolutely 100% correct in this one, so that I don’t put the wrong… It’s Ha’adam.

Genie: So Adam’s not named either?

Tammi: No. Adam actually isn’t named. Here’s the problem. Adam, Adam is man, human. In this verse, in verse 18 it’s Ha’adam, i.e. The Man, it’s definite, it’s got the definite article, or the human. The word for Adam is the same as blood, earth, man. They’re all interconnected. It’s the same root. It’s the same word.

Tammi: You have this inner connection between the Earth and blood and humanity. There’s no way to say it in English. So The Man is the human and it’s bigger than just that.

Tammi: And in this verse 18, there’s not goodness in the garden. It’s not good that this guy is by himself. Which could be both a statement about the garden, and/or it can also be a statement about humans.

Tammi: The notion that humans, especially now in the 21st century, we all need our space and we all need to be alone, but the deity actually doesn’t seem to think that’s a good idea. The deity wants people to be together. Of course, as soon as people are together, then you have to legislate interpersonal relations, because we’re not really… You’ve got to manage us. We aren’t not going to manage.

Tammi: But the fact that there’s a text that demands that we negotiate interpersonal relations is at least recognition that these guys need help.

Genie: Right, right. And a lot it seems like. It never gets better.

Genie: Speaking of verse 18-

Tammi: Okay, yeah. We’re still there.

Genie: It’s not good people are alone.

Tammi: Correct.

Genie: The deity says, “I’m going to make something.” Now, the something it makes in English might not be the something in Hebrew. I’m going off the Oxford annotated Bible, which I really like by the way.

Tammi: Yeah. Good, good. It’s new.

Genie: I like King James and I like this one quite a bit. But, “I will help make him a helper as his partner.”

Tammi: Yeah. This is a difficult term. An ezer is a helper, [K’ 00:21:15] is like, and [negdo 00:21:18] is against.

Genie: What does that mean?

Tammi: A helper against him. I don’t know. And again, nobody really has a good handle on what it is.

Tammi: Of course, if you want women to be subservient to men, then you want to tell women that this means, oh a helpmate and your role in humanity, and the only reason you were actually developed at all-

Genie: Is as a subordinate.

Tammi: Is a subordinate to help guys. But I actually, that’s, A, not what the words mean, and, B, the next thing that the deity does is parades all the animals.

Genie: That’s even more bizarre. Can I say bizarre?

Tammi: You can say that. It’s the Hebrew Bible. It’s bizarre.

Genie: The human doesn’t have anything. We need something to help against him, to whatever that is.

Tammi: Then the deity’s like, well, maybe we’ll get him a pet. Right? If you wanted to say that woman is created because the man is alone and he needs something to help him, and the deity knows that it’s got to be a woman, then you would do 19 and 20 after. Right?

Genie: Right.

Tammi: But the deity, that’s not when we have that. The deity’s like, “Oh, here. Maybe you can find a pet,” right? That’s what the dog is.

Genie: The deity doesn’t know.

Tammi: The deity is not sure. Instead of man saying, or the human saying, “Oh, I’ll take a dog. I don’t need a wife. I have a dog,” or even a cat, although a cat would never serve that function. Well, against you, it might. But that’s when all the animals are paraded. The humans sort of, “Well, I’ll name them, but they’re not what I want.”

Genie: So somehow along this process, the human is discerning that this isn’t what I…

Tammi: This isn’t what I want.

Genie: Somewhere in this process, whether it’s seeing the animal, touching it, whatever-

Tammi: Smelling, I don’t know.

Genie: Naming it, smelling it, whatever he’s doing to these animals. Because in verse 20, all these animals come by, but there was not found a helper as his partner. How is he qualifying what this helper is? That’s probably a-

Tammi: It’s unclear. We can’t figure out what it was. Now, whether the deity knew that none of these were going to work, or whether it was the human that didn’t know, or whether the deity and the human were working together, and they’re like, “Hmm, maybe that,” no. Uh-uh (negative). No. It’s unclear.

Tammi: But the need for such an entity appears in verse 18, and the deity doesn’t actually create a new thing until verse 21. In between, all the animals are marched out in front.

Tammi: The deity thinks maybe one of those will work. I don’t know how else that can be read.

Genie: Let me ask you this too. What does this reveal about his, I don’t want to say intelligence, but what does this say about Adam? Does he act a certain kind of way? Does he speak a certain kind of way? Does he name them cleverly? Does he actually name them? What’s going on?

Tammi: You know, I wouldn’t call Adam a rocket scientist, let’s just say. After the deity creates woman, he sings his little song, and it’s actually not true. He speaks in bursts. In the apple situation, some texts actually don’t translate it there, but in chapter three, in verse six… in 3:6-

Genie: Right, and that was our goal by the way. We finally got there.

Tammi: There we go, okay?

Genie: But it requires all that.

Tammi: It does.

Genie: People have to understand, it requires all of that to get to these pivotal points.

Tammi: We haven’t covered everything in between, let’s be clear about that. In that verse, the woman sees that [Hebrew 00:25:27], so it is good, it’s the same kind of goodness that all of creation except for humans were. The tree is good for eating, blah, blah, blah.

Tammi: So she takes from the fruit and she eats it and she gives also to her man-

Genie: Important clause coming up-

Tammi: who is with her and he eats. So he’s sitting right there watching her. I mean, it’s not like according to that verse… he’s right there. And he didn’t say, “No! No! Honey! Not the apple,” or whatever the fruit is, and he doesn’t say no. He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’m hungry. I’ll eat it. Whatever.” This whole notion that his hands are clean-

Genie: He’s kind of caught off guard. Well, I can tell you this, in every recreation, cartoon, storybook, I actually have one, maybe I’ll play one for you, but Adam’s off doing something else. He’s off somewhere else, playing with some…

Tammi: And here in this text, I’m reading the JPS translation, when the woman saw the tree, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and she took of its fruit and ate, then they put a period…

Tammi: Let me just check the Hebrew to make sure that there’s a period there. Yeah. There’s a stop there. That’s fair. Yeah.

Tammi: They include it, but I can’t remember, there’s one translation where they just don’t even say it. Oh, no, in here. No, no, no, no, no. Here. They say she also, and he ate, that’s what it was. She also gave some to her husband, and what they don’t translate is with her. He’s there with her.

Genie: Wait a minute. So you’re telling me-

Tammi: They just get rid of the with.

Genie: Which means that they knew it was a problem.

Tammi: Exactly. Because the suggestion is that if you don’t put the with there, then he’s somewhere else, and she’s like, “Oh, honey, look at what I found.” He goes, “Oh, these are really good. Where’d you find them?” Like he doesn’t know.

Genie: Let me ask you something. Was there just no forethought in this situation? Like we weren’t going to figure out that…

Tammi: Yeah. Well, yes. In this situation, there is no forethought, because then when the deity comes looking for them, they’re like, “Uh-oh, we’ll hide.”

Tammi: That’s how the deity knows that they ate from it, because they hear the deity and the deity calls out, and man replies that he was afraid because he was naked. The deity’s like, “How do you know you’re naked? You didn’t know you were naked.” That’s how the deity figures out what they did.

Tammi: Which also means that you don’t have this omnipotent, all-knowing sort of cue from next generation entity that sees and knows everything. The deity in the garden doesn’t know a whole bunch of stuff.

Genie: Right. Didn’t know if the animals would work. Didn’t know they ate the fruit. How you know you’re naked.

Tammi: Didn’t know. And obviously didn’t think… the deity thought that if you told this guy something, that it would happen. Like, “Don’t do that.” “Oh, okay. I won’t do that.” Right?

Genie: Right. So really if we backtrack a little bit, Eve isn’t told.

Tammi: Well, let’s go back. The command not to eat of the fruit of the garden-

Genie: This is way back.

Tammi: Exactly, is back in 2:15. “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat,” I’m reading a new translation, I apologize, “but as for the tree of knowledge, of good and bad, that you must not eat, for as soon as you do, you will die.”

Tammi: And that’s actually not true by the way, because they eat it and they don’t die. Either the deity is lying, or the deity changed his mind after they ate. But they don’t die immediately unless it was a super duper really long day, which kind of doesn’t hold true either.

Tammi: You have that, which if you’re going to reprimand your kids and threaten them, “If you don’t do X,” then you have to be prepared to do whatever you threaten them with.

Genie: It wasn’t a good reprimandation.

Tammi: Right. It wasn’t a good one. Take away their allowance. It doesn’t hurt you.

Genie: Don’t threaten to take the PlayStation and not take the PlayStation.

Tammi: Exactly. Exactly.

Genie: This command is to the man? The deity commanded the man.

Tammi: Well, this is where you have to go back to, is it a man/woman entity that is combined and cognizant of… Two entities combined like Siamese twins with separate brains, right? And therefore the female aspect hears it. But right now it’s the man. The man is being told this and the female entity hasn’t even been formed yet.

Tammi: Now, we’re not privy to all of the conversations that we have from the time that the female is created until the time that she eats the fruit. But, when she talks about when the serpent asks her, “Can you eat everything?” She’s like, “Well, no. Not of the tree in the middle of the garden,” but there’s two trees there.

Tammi: Some of the things that she says about it, it’s like telephone, you know, by the time you get it third-hand it’s wrong. Or if you want to blame women, which have at it. I don’t think eating from the tree was so bad. But, okay, let’s just say it was.

Genie: They’re inherently-

Tammi: Right. Or she intentionally changed the rules and misunderstood what she heard from the man because she did, which, whatever, I don’t buy into.

Genie: Well considering, and we’ll get into this in in a later podcast, but considering the fact that Lot’s wife doesn’t get the message, that game of telephone didn’t happen rightly. That’s a theme of the Old Testament, and you have to kind of read it all together.

Tammi: Correct. It happens often times that instructions are given, the women aren’t given the instruction or they’re not given the complete instruction, and then all of a sudden, low and behold, they’re the one who gets punished for not having been given good information.

Genie: If that is the intention of the text, to just plant this seed of miscommunication early, then it seems like some of these modern notions of blaming the woman are falsely founded. They’re not bolstered in the original text.

Tammi: Either often times women aren’t given all the information, and/or the information that they’re given doesn’t allow them to actually be successful.

Tammi: Because it’s the other piece, is when you don’t have… For example, Eve, or the woman, because she’s still in the garden isn’t, she doesn’t seemingly have direct contact with the Israelite deity yet, or the deity, because there’s no Israelites yet.

Tammi: She doesn’t have direct communication with the deity, so she’s getting everything second hand. She can’t even negotiate anything, because she doesn’t have access to power. She doesn’t have access to power.

Tammi: She can’t call the 1-800 number and say, “I’m sorry, which tree… Can we just be clear about the tree? I’m sorry, if I eat it, what exactly is going to happen?” She can’t check. In this case, it’s actually bad information.

Genie: In the book, Rethinking Scripture, Miriam Levering says that scripture is a relational term. It refers to kinds of relationships that people enter into with these texts.

Genie: Let’s think about that. Scripture is a relationship between a person and their sacred text. Well, there are millions of people in the world, and over time, millions more. So if that’s true, then perhaps scripture is just as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago, and thousands of years into the future, I guess. It seems like Dr. Schneider agrees.

Tammi: I think Genesis teaches us that life is hard. There are a lot of ways that we can respond to that.

Tammi: A bunch of the situations that we have in Genesis ironically are not far off from issues that we’re facing for the first time in the 21st century. Blended families, fertility issues, people having multiple parents that you might not have expected.

Genie: Consent. Issues of race even unfortunately.

Tammi: Right? Who owns land, to who has these rights to this? How do you treat people not like you? How do you form community? How do you have your own community without stepping on other’s toes?

Tammi: All of those things are realities. What do you do when there’s famine? Oh my gosh, there’s drought. How do we respond? I mean, there’s nothing that happens in any of these stories that’s not happening right now.

Tammi: Well, maybe like one or two. Like, there’s not a sword enter and exit sign that it’s not letting us go back into [inaudible 00:34:42]. But aside from that, how do you deal with those things?

Tammi: Human experience, and I say this all the time in class, we haven’t created any new emotions in the 21st century. Which ones are we allowed to express or play out or follow through, and how do we deal with those issues?

Tammi: It’s easy to look at these people and go [inaudible 00:35:06]. But then put yourself there. It isn’t that much of a stretch. Just change the clothes and give them a little bit more technology, and it’s not good to be alone. Get out of your room and stop playing with your, you know, devices and go talk to actually a human being instead of a virtual one.

Tammi: That is what we learned about all the finding an animal. That’s one way that you could argue it. So all of this stuff is old, and all of it is still fresh and new. And communication.

Genie: I heard all of that. I’m glad you brought up earlier, and we’ll get into this in a later podcast, but the fact that this was heard, these stories were heard first. The written text was a technological advancement.

Tammi: Right, so we have cuneiform tablets, and then we have scrolls, and then we have codex, and then we have book, and now we have-

Genie: And now we have podcasts.

Tammi: Now we have podcasts. So we’re going backwards. Now it’s being heard again.

Genie: Right, right, right. We’re returning to the original. Isn’t that something?

Tammi: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. What’s old is new. Yeah.

Genie: All right, doctor, thank you so much.

Tammi: You are welcome.

Genie: I always enjoy chatting with Dr. Schneider. As you probably noticed, we barely scratched the surface. But don’t worry my friends, because there’s a lot more unearthing to do.

Genie: If you enjoy the podcast, please, please, please rate and review, share it with your friends, comment, like, post, all that. We really appreciate it.

Genie: If you have questions, comments or concerns, shoot me an email, genie at geniedeez.tv. The whole idea is to foster conversation, but that includes you, and it includes digging a little bit.

Genie: So from Studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University, my name’s Genie, and meet me next time for some Scripture Unearthed.

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