Tag: Serpent
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Original Sin goes into the Bin (i)
With regard to the first 11 chapters of Genesis, I’m inclined to agree with Professor John J. Collins of Yale Divinity School, that “more than most stories, these chapters have been overlaid with theological interpretations that have little basis in the Hebrew text”. (*) This certainly applies, in my view, to the concept of “original […]
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Garden, Snake and Tree
Dating from more than 2,000 years before the final version of the Garden of Eden story, we have this seal from the Sumerian civilisation in what is now southern Iraq (the same part of the world from which the ancestors of Abraham, the ‘father’ of Israel, are said to have come from). Beginning from the […]
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Two things Genesis 2/3 doesn’t say …
The 2nd section of Genesis runs from 2:4b to 3:24. The God who appears here is very different from the 1st section’s remote ‘voice’ which utters commands from afar and, after surveying the results from on high, expresses entire satisfaction with what has thus been achieved. The 2nd section’s God comes down into the thick […]