I have yet to post a "Genesis review" blog. Sure, I have covered aspects of Genesis in my previous, scarce entries, but never an overview or personal reflection of Genesis. At this juncture, however, I feel such a generic post would be fruitless. Time to move on. Then again, the monumental nature of Genesis entices me to another post. Of all the books in the Bible, Genesis seems the most titanic in the scope of both its external socio-cultural influence and its internal influence weaved throughout later scriptures. While one may develop a better-than-average understanding of the Bible without picking through through Ezra and Nehemiah, no such knowledge can be gained without a thorough reading of Genesis.
What interests me is the vast variety of Genesis interpretations, many unaware or ignorant of the documentary hypothesis - from evangelical literalists to Plotz. Within academic circles, the likes of Bloom and Frye present various avenues to dissecting or understanding Genesis in new and poignant lights.
In
Craig Stephenson's blog entry, "Predeluvian commentary," he engages in a speculative exercise of reconciling the early events of Genesis with modern science. Were Frye to read his blog, he may deem such speculation as a "problem of illusion and reality" central in the "third-phase language" of today (14), arguing that "the interest of myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community, not to inquire into the operations of nature" (37). However, Craig does warn the reader not to consider his speculations seriously unless "seeking literal Biblical foundations for belief," many of which simply being "fun ways to see things in the Bible." As a former Catholic turned non-theist, I personally do not agree with the direction of Craig's commentary, but nevertheless find it interesting as yet another interpretation of Genesis.
Upon coming to the story of Cain and Abel, Craig briefly brings up an interpretation of Cain and Abel as metaphorical "eponymous ancestors" in
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. Whether you agree with Quinn's assertions or not,
Ishmael is far more than "that novel about the gorilla who teaches the man about the Bible." While the Bible, revealed religions, and human history in general figure prominently into Quinn's novel (i.e. the sentient gorilla's name is "Ishmael"), they serve as dialectic frameworks through which the author expounds on his beliefs concerning the fallacious nature of "totalitarian agriculture", our resulting disharmonic society, and the catastrophic consequences of human overpopulation.
In
Ishmael, Quinn interprets Genesis and "The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" in a convincingly unique manner. Separating humanity into two meta-cultures, "Takers" (agricultural expansionists, of which we are a part) and "Leavers" (homeostatic tribes, those who live in accordance with the laws of nature and community of life), Quinn interprets the story of Adam and Eve's eating of the forbidden fruit through the context of such separation. Admittedly, it has been a long while since I've read
Ishmael, so I turned to the web for help and found some excellent synopses of Quinn's account of the Fall of Man:
Ishmael proposes that the story of Genesis was written by the Semites, and later adapted to work within Hebrew and Christian belief structures. Ishmael proposes that Abel and his extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites and their losing conflict with agriculturalists. As they were driven further into the Arabian peninsula, the Semites became isolated from other herding cultures and, according to Ishmael, illustrated their plight through oral history, which was later adopted into the Hebrew book of Genesis.
Ishmael denies that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden of humans simply to test human's self-control. Instead, Ishmael proposes that the Tree represents the choice to bear the burden of responsibility of deciding which species may live and which should die. This is a necessary decision agricultural peoples must make when deciding which organisms to cultivate, which to displace, and which to kill in protection of the first.
The Tree is actually a metaphor for the knowledge of what should live and what should die (Quinn 160). The arrogance of man to assume that by eating the fruit he would obtain this knowledge is faulty, as only the Gods could possess this knowledge, regardless of whether man ate the fruit or not. This explains why they were thrown out of the Garden. By assuming that humans now had the means to rule the Earth themselves, they followed suit and have been “conquering” the world ever since. A plethora of examples exist in popular culture everyday: man is “conquering” space; man is trying to “conquer” earthquakes, etc. You hear phrases similar to these almost daily and think nothing of them. Perhaps now you will think differently the next time you hear a phrase that contains “man”, “conquer”, and a natural phenomena. That behavior is exactly what got humans thrown out of the Garden in the first place…
Quinn continues to expand and further explain the themes and ideas stemming from his theory of human population growth being a function of food production in later novels, such as
The Story of B. From the outset,
The Story of B utilizes religious overtones and metaphors, as its protagonist is a Catholic Laurentian priest sent to Europe to investigate a preacher (named "B") denounced by some as the "Antichrist". Eventually, the priest befriends B and realizes the paramount importance of his teachings, turning his own belief system upside down.
Fortunately,
The Story of B is a little more fresh in my memory, as I read it last spring. Quinn, through the teachings of the character
B, identifies "what religionists call the Fall with the birth of our culture," citing that "the similarity between these two events has long been noted," but identifying them as a single event has been difficult due to the Fall's perception "as a spiritual event" and the "birth of our culture ... as a technological event" (256). At one point in the novel, a
bricolage of found objects is used to metaphorically demonstrate B's teachings about the community of life, "the Law of Life", and animism versus revealed religions (133-143).
Flipping through my copy of
The Story of B prior to this blog entry, I found a particularly interesting quote:
The God of revealed religions ... is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can't make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can't seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results.
(134-135)
In this passage, Quinn's character does not literally believe in a sentient, inarticulate God but rather allegorically renders the inability of our culture to come to a consensus with the supposedly sacred writings of previous peoples, who are Takers like ourselves. One could argue that Quinn appropriates the scripture of Abrahamatic faiths too much as a singular whole and not libraries within libraries of writings stretching over millenia, containing a variety of worldviews, but I think the above excerpt actually attempts to reconcile the notion of revealed scripture with the amorphous goals of separate writers from differing time periods. In essence, Quinn reveals that we fail to see ourselves as an inarticulate people looking to the wrong sources for supposed salvation. Throughout the novel, Quinn argues both figuratively and literally that the idea of humanity being in need of salvation (whether through enlightenment or godly devotion) is not inherent, but a man-made condition that has evolved throughout history in response to war, famine, oppression, et cetera - in essence, Taker civilization - a direct result of so-called totalitarian agriculture. Of course, violence and hunger certainly exist amongst Leaver cultures. Quinn goes to lengths to avoid the romanticization of tribal peoples, yet still finds their living within the laws of nature (and, by extension, the gods) to be better for both mankind and the world.
Numerous parallels exist between Quinn and Vico. The writings of each are manifestations of the Myth of Declining Ages. By using entertaining and question-raising narratives as vehicles for his ideas, Quinn avoids an overly demotic discourse or manifesto composed entirely of answers. Mirroring Vico's Age of Chaos, Quinn 's B declares that "We're experiencing cultural collapse" (284). As the cultural mythology of Takers becomes meaningless, things fall apart, "Order and purpose are replaced by chaos and bewilderment," as "We've lost our ability to believe that the world was made for Man and that Man was made to conquer and rule it ... We've lost the ability to believe that God is unequivocally on our side against the rest of creation" (284). Despite seeming to the outsider as overly alarmist, Quinn attempts throughout
The Story of B to deliver a message of hope. If we become "the message" and change, we can affect a sort of
recorso to a pre-Taker version of Vico's Age of Gods, so to speak, by using tribal society as a sort of template upon which to base the future of civilization.
