Downhill from Here
As a result of Adam and Eve disobeying God, he kicked them out of the garden and instead of simply collecting the food they needed they had to work for it. Seems a bit vindictive? Well the reason given in Genesis is that they could no longer be trusted. They were likely to continue to disobey God and eat the fruit from the ‘tree of life’ This would apparently give them immortality. Whereas much later in the bible it is clear that this is ultimately God’s intention for humanity, they were nowhere near ready for it. Was (is) this a real or a metaphorical tree? There is no way of knowing, but the message is clear – disobeying God has consequences. We can once again use the child analogy; a child might be allowed to play unsupervised in the back garden provided he/she doesn’t try to climb the big tree. If he ignores this and is caught half way up he may no longer be allowed in the garden as he may be tempted to climb even higher next time, not understanding that he could fall and be badly injured.
So Adam and Eve end up working the land outside the protection of the garden. Things get worse! Their first children given the names Cain and Abel have a falling out – Cain is jealous of Abel because his offering to God was accepted and his (Cain’s) wasn’t. We aren’t told why this was the case but from the phraseology employed it seems likely that Abel offered the best he had but Cain offered second rate stuff. (This resonates with a passage we find in the last Book of the Old Testament – Malachi – where the people are castigated for bringing second rate offerings to God). The message couldn’t be clearer – only the best we have is good enough to offer back to God. But this is not the end of it. In a fit of jealousy Cain Murders his brother!
Needless to say, things didn’t go well for Cain. Of course God knew what he had done but despite this Cain tried lying to God – a really bad move – and so God banished him. There follows a plea from Cain that this punishment is too hard and God might as will kill him or someone else will. To prevent this God puts a ‘mark’ on Cain warning others not to harm him. It’s not clear what this mark was nor indeed who these potential killers were.
That brings us to another unanswerable question. Cain got married – who to? Well there are only two options: There were either other human beings on the earth with whom the decedents of Adam (those created in the image of God) mated, or the sons and daughter of Adam and Eve (we’re told that there were ‘many’) intermarried. That might be anathema to us today but in fact in most ancient societies marriage between close family members was not unusual and indeed not forbidden until the time of Moses, way in the future. In reality, either way, it doesn’t change the message – the uniqueness of humanity first created in Adam by God was and is inherited by all future generations.
What follows is a genealogy of Adam and Eve’s decedents. What seems remarkable is the ages to which some of these lived. Can we really believe that life expectancy could stretch to almost 1,000 years? While there are a lot of theories as to why we age, the biggest factor seems to be genetic – put simply certain genes switch off as we get older, so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that ancient civilisations did indeed live much longer lives than modern generations. Many generations later, the King of Egypt (Pharaoh) asked Jacob (the grandson of Abraham, who we meet in later posts) how old he was. he replied that he was 130 years old but that was nothing like as old as the age that his ancestors reached.
Next time we look at a couple of major events which are described later in the Book of Genesis, the flood (Noah’s Ark) and the Tower of Babel.
