Correspondence: On Teaching Genesis
Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 10:40PM | by Otter Someone bored with the off-the-shelf Bible studies was lamenting her disconnection from church and any challenging, deepening Bible study. What follows is my response, admittedly basic to people who study the Bible in depth, but I'm finding a huge hunger for it in laypeople who want to keep their faith but are tired of being handed their hat by Answers in Genesis on the one hand and science on the other. More often they just feel that the conversation quickly becomes ingrown and unprofitable, taking place in a spiritual world that has little bearing on the current one. Here are just a couple of reflections from that conversation.
What would you say you're looking for in a Bible study?
For instance, if I started a Bible study on Genesis by saying, "Read Genesis 1-3. Be ready to explain the differences in the two creation accounts and to account for them. Be ready to explain the relationship between the serpent (who symbolizes wisdom, fertility, and immortality) and YHWH" would you think that was tiresomely easy, missing the point, challenging, catnip, or what?
That is an assignment, the very first one my Bible as Lit students get.
The idea there is to get our heads out of the easy spaces ("God is right, the serpent must be wrong, and it's a simple choice") and to see if we can't tap what it is in the story that makes it compelling right down to the present moment, but most of all to the original readers.
This is a habit of mind that serves us well at every level of learning:
For instance:
Easy Assignment (requires only having passed puberty): Read Genesis 2 and 3 as a story about emerging sexuality. What is the Serpent asking the Woman to do or become? What is the result?
Intermediate Assignment (requires some thought, but not a lot of research): Read Genesis 2 and 3 as a story about the relationship of humankind to nature. What does the serpent intend to accomplish? What motivates Yahweh?
Difficult Assignment (requires some Wikipedia work): How do Genesis 2 and 3 "retell" or manipulate Sumerian or Canaanite / Ugaritic creation myths? Why would they do this?
A question comes up:
Is there any additional reading we'd need to do?
Not really.
Most of the time it's not what students don't know that hampers them: their natural curiosity will fill that in.
It's getting rid of the false assumption that they know anything.
Most of them, Christian and otherwise, have heard of Adam and Eve and the Apple, and are a little struck by the fact that the names "Adam" and "Eve" don't crop up in the translation we use, where it's The Man [footnote: or "Humankind"] and The Woman. I break them into a little Hebrew and teach them the difference between "Adam" and "Ish" so they can get the flow of "Ish / Ishah" and some other small but critical keys to the text. And it's critically and most importantly not an apple tree.
The Christians have to forget Jesus.
I want them to wonder, "Before anybody heard of a Messiah, what did this business of the woman's seed mean?"
They have to forget original sin.
I want them to wonder, "If there was no drama of sin and redemption, what did this story really say?"
They have to learn that there was a culture of origin, that the story had sources and analogues in other literature.
But they have to most of all keep their ears pinned back when they recognize tremors of recognizable human experience.
When the man says, "Bone of my bone / flesh of my flesh / she shall be called Ishah for out of Ish she was taken," they have to feel that one in the groin, not the vague dull pedagogical theological node of the brain that lectures them about the sanctity of marriage.
Otherwise, much of what follows remains dark to them.
Reader Comments (2)
So what translation do you use? Honestly, I'd love to find a Bible that had several different translations but the only one I saw was prohibitively expensive (for me).
You say there are no other texts required. What about pre-requisites to your course (former course?)?
I remember that first class. Growing up in Catholic school with a devoutly fundamentalist Protestant father, I had to quickly figure out how to turn my entire way of thinking around 180 degrees. My head was spinning.
But in that brief walk back to my dorm afterward, I was floating in my happy place. (So much so that I had to call my mother to spit some of these ideas back out.)
I love myths. I love religions. I love metaphysics and stories. But it always saddened me that I hated my own religion. I believed that god existed and the Christian god most appealed to my reason, but at the same time, I got nothing out of Christianity, spiritually or intellectually.Our stories were mundane, things I'd heard a thousand times but never found anything interesting in. I hated (most of) my religion classes and I hated talking God.
Your class changed that. And I will be eternally grateful.
On a related note: I love the Gnostic version of Genesis. I'm so glad the Gnostics exist.