Doug Mangum has shared some random thoughts on Genesis 3. I’ve offered a reply that is at least as random. Here’s the gist of my thoughts that arose after reading his thoughts and some of the comments others left on the post:
I like translating the Hebrew word that describes the serpent with “shrewd”, because it then allows you to make an attempt at rendering the Hebrew pun by using “nude” instead of naked.
I appreciated another commenter’s point about snakes in general being punished for the action of one particular snake – or was there only one snake at this stage? If there was another (presumably talking) snake around, it presumably should have delivered the line “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into”.
In the context of the Hebrew Bible as it now stands, the story in Genesis 3 parallels the story of Israel, being given a paradisical land, commandments that need to be obeyed, disobeying and being exiled. But if we read the story as a mythical exploration of the universal human experience of loss of innocence, coming of age, and all that accompanies it, then perhaps what we find in Eve’s eating the fruit first is simply an awareness of the fact that girls tend to mature slightly earlier than boys.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, there are a number of related posts. Julia M. O’Brien has a post on how challenging the Bible’s factuality (on cosmology) serves the faithful. There’s a post at Science and the Sacred that discusses the strange (not to mention heretical) places some have ended up when trying to treat this story as science and the snake as Satan. John Anderson and Duane Smith are having an interesting interaction about the relationship between religion and science. John Pieret has been tackling the thorny issue of defining science. Chet Raymo has a brief post on science and dualism which ought to provide a “quote of the day” somewhere.
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