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).
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.
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.
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.
Read Genesis 5:1–32.
What about those extended ages listed in Genesis 5? Anthropologists don’t point to any evidence that human beings ever lived 969 years (Methuselah). In fact, evidence points to human life in the past being much shorter. Is something else going on here?
• Were they following a lunar calendar that explains the higher numbers?
• Are the numbers symbolic for certain ideas that the storytellers conveyed?
• A higher age suggests more respect, is that what is being exaggerated?
Enoch, mentioned in the genealogy, is described as one who “did not die” but was taken away by God. He is one of two named in the Hebrew Bible who did so. The other is Elijah, who we will read about in later chapters.
Now look at Genesis 6:1–4:
When the number of people started to increase throughout the fertile land, daughters were born to them. The divine beings saw how beautiful these human women were, so they married the ones they chose. The Lord said, “My breath will not remain in humans forever, because they are flesh. They will live one hundred twenty years.” In those days, giants lived on the earth and also afterward, when divine beings and human daughters had sexual relations and gave birth to children. These were the ancient heroes, famous men.
This is a peculiar passage that is describing something that cannot be clearly identified. “Divine Beings” in the Common English Bible (CEB) are translated as “Sons of God” in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). These names could mean a variety of things, but it has generally been interpreted as a kind of angelic being. We have read about cherubim and seraphim, and now they mention Nephilim. It seems in this case that angelic beings had children with human women, and their offspring were these super-human creatures. Over time, the ancient Hebrew culture wondered if people with extraordinary abilities, or those who were unusually tall, could be the descendants of the Nephilim. We will read about these descendants in the book of Numbers, chapter 13.
But God seems unhappy with all of this and the story pivots toward Noah and the Great Flood. Read the story in its entirety, Genesis 6–9. If you have never read the actual account, you may be surprised by a few things.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. What about these long ages?
2. Do you think people lived that long back then or that the numbers have a hidden meaning?
Read the entire story of Noah and the ark in one sitting. It is four chapters, or as I like to say, four pages. Don’t read what follows here until you have done that first. It is Genesis chapters 6–9:17.
How is it that children are