God creates the earth and all its treasures from a dark void without any sort of pre-conception, simply on a whim. He makes the sky and the sea and the land, and all the bounty in and upon them. Then he creates man, " Let us create humankind in our image, according to our likeness". Uh-oh. Not only to question the foresight in this decision but also to be the question who is "us", who does God have to seek confirmation from? God then performs the jobs of anaesthesiologist, surgeon, and once again creator. He makes woman out of man, ensuring the, by the very virtue of her creation she displays and the best traits of domesticity. Even after going the all this trouble to make her a dependant, she becomes a home wrecker of life in the Garden. They gain the knowledge of the lord, which questions what we strive so hard for, and are forever banished from the good life. They must leave the garden, ashamed at their crime and their nakedness, to go out and live with all the other people. Those people who Genesis never really addresses.I would really like to talk about what happens in chapter 4 of Genesis, just after Adam and eve leave Eden. Their two sons, Cain and Abel, are both hard-working, equally righteous men of differing occupations. Cain gets in his head to make an offering to God, the best of his labors in the fields. Abel matches his brother's offering with the fattest lamb from his pasture. God praises Abel for his good work and says nothing of Cain, granted it was silly of Cain to assume that god was a vegetarian, but this is an entirely unfair and arbitrary decision for the God of Righteousness to make. Cain is shunned for working equally as hard as his brother and in his frustration, kills him. Maybe he was just trying to give God something to eat.
No comments:
Post a Comment