Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Reading Genesis
I admit that it's difficult not to hold a text accountable for the way it's been interpreted down through the millennia. Nevertheless we'll miss what's wierd and interesting about the creation story if we don't try to separate the history of interpretation (and use) of the text from what's on the page. Some of the questions that were raised in today's discussion that are worth revisiting are what is the serpent doing in the garden? What is so dangerous about knowledge of good and evil that man and woman shouldn't have it? There would be no narrative point to the expulsion from Eden if life was the same before and after. What is the image of the ideal life from which human beings were so quickly excluded? Eve thinks the fruit of the forbidden tree will make her wise. She eats it. Is she now wise? What is wisdom in this context? What did Adam and Eve do wrong? Is it right to punish them? Saeid and Tressa thought of several ways that the Lord God differed from the gods of Gilgamesh and the Iliad. It would be interesting to hear more about that.
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2 comments:
The history of interpretation and the text itself cannot be seperated because the text is the compilation of a history of translation after translation. I think it is necessary to understand the words we read now not as representative of an ancient utterance but as the result of centuries of cultural sedimentation--as the sight of an archeological dig that encounters many vastly different cultural understandings, all superimposed over one another on this one retrofitted foundation.
http://www.powells.com/review/2007_07_14
That being said, by keeping all this intentionality in mind, we do probably end up seperating the historical interpretation of the text and the "original" text itself when we look at those two phenomena in relation to eachother and thus see them, at least momentarilly, as individual. For example, we see that Eve does not entice or beguile adam into sin from the same text that suggests how such an interpretation could have prevailed for so long a time.
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