The last time I heard this passage read in church following a service, a visitor said, "Oh, why did you have to read that horrible story about women being blamed for the Fall of humanity?

The patriarchal church has used its power to formulate and co-opt scripture to influence our world view and impose its will on others. There is no question that this is the truth, and a truth that we as Christians should be willing to acknowledge, and move beyond. Jesus said, "take the log out of your own eye before you take the speck out of your neighbors."

A horrible truth of the two creation stories we find in Genesis is that we have used them to justify men ruling over women and the Earth, instead of living with them in equality and harmony. I believe this is the opposite of the original intention, and I will try to show this today.

We can respond to this interpretation and use of the Bible in several ways. First, we could assume this interpretation is the only interpretation and therefore decide that the Bible should be either ignored, maligned or thrown out. This black and white position is a convenient response if we want to make an ideological stand. It is a lot harder to hate grey. Thus right wing Christian fundamentalists and left wing humanists often share the same understanding of what the Bible is trying to say.

A second approach to these Creation stories is to point out that actually the text says both male and female were created in God’s image, and that both male and female blow it together. We may also like to point out for the environmentalist in us that God’s intention in giving us dominion over creatures of the earth puts us in the role of good steward. We are empowered by God with our intelligence to care and live responsibly and with love toward all God’s creatures. These are important and good things to point out, but this approach is also issue oriented. That is, our focus is determined by an issue in our time and place, which may or may not have much to do with the purpose and meaning of the story for its original author and audience. Bob Coote, in his book "In the Beginning" writes, "the less known about earlier times, the more talk about those times will be talk about the present."

In addition to feminist critique of patriarchal interpretation, much modern debate between certain branches of Christianity and science has assumed our creation story is concerned with the how and when of Creation. A narrow scientific view would claim we have evolved, unlike the description in Genesis, therefore the story should be dismissed as untrue. A typical Christian response has been a defiant belief claim, saying that God told the author of Genesis how creation occurred. Yet, what if this Creation story is not primarily about how, but why? What purpose did the creation story serve its author and audience?

Traditionally thought to be written by Moses, most scholars today believe Genesis 2: 4b and following is the beginning of the first creation story, the second placed in front later in a second edition of the Bible. Scholars believe this first edition was written by scribes of David sometime between 1250 and 1000 BCE. It was written to legitimate David’s kingdom in Palestine.

Put another way, this was King David’s interpretation of the history of the world. Naturally the history begins with its creation.

Of course there were other interpretations of history and therefore other creation stories. The creation stories of Babylon and Egypt are particularly relevant to the Genesis creation story.

These two "superpowers" used people from the lands they conquered to build their cities and to supply the ruling elite with plenty of goods. Each creation story legitimated this system and the injustice if had created.

To show you how this worked, and how it relates to the Genesis creation story, I would like to talk more specifically about the Creation story of Babylon called the "Enuma Elish." The Enuma Elish predated David’s creation story by about five hundred years. David’s scribes were probably trained in Akkadian cuneiform through copying texts such as these. The Enuma Elish is the story of Marduk, god of old Babylon. In the second half of the creation story, after the heavens have been separated from the chaotic seas, after creating the world, Marduk hears that the worker gods are complaining loudly about all the work they have to do. Marduk then gets together with the other gods and decides to kill Tiamat, the goddess of the sea and the leader of the rebellion. Marduk then makes humans by mixing Tiamat’s blood with the dust of the earth. Henceforth, says Marduk, "humans shall work, so the gods can rest." Marduk created the pounding drum of the heart beat to increase in speed and volume the harder humans worked, to remind them of what happened to those who last decided to rebel against their rulers.

In gratitude for being free from labor, the gods build Babylon as a sanctuary for the head god Marduk. "So what?", you ask. Well, the king of Babylon and the other ruling elite considered themselves representatives of the gods in their creation story. In fact, the king of Babylon took the name Marduk when he was crowned. Thus the rulers hung out in the gardens of Babylon while the peasants of the world slaved for them.

So, what does this have to do with the creation story in Genesis? I’m so glad you asked! Before the Genesis story existed the people in the area of David’s Palestine were led to believe that they existed to be slaves and to serve the gods (insert rulers) of Babylon and Egypt. Then contrary to that viewpoint, David’s scribes acknowledged the reality that the poor slave for the rich, but in their version of the story, it wasn’t supposed to be that way.

In the beginning, Yahwah, not Marduk, created humans from the dirt of the ground. Humans were originally created not to work as slaves while the gods hung out in the beautiful garden, but so that they, that is all humans, could live in harmony with God in the garden paradise that God himself created.

Here I quote Bob Coote in "The Bible’s First History": "There is a word play between Adam and adama (‘ground’) which anticipates humans labor in the tillage of the arable. Yahweh intended this creature to be his worker, the one who would perform anticipated mild tasks of tending…The RSV misses the point in Genesis 2:15 when it renders the Hebrew avad, meaning to ‘work,’ as ‘till.’ This is an entirely different concept from ‘till’ in Genesis 2: 5, which refers to the hard, sweaty labor required to till arable. In Mesopotamian tradition the gardener of the god is the king, and king doesn’t do hard manual labor. The human whom Yahweh placed in his garden did not sweat in his work until the curse was instituted.

"People are sick and enslaved and exploited and suffer and die, not because that is the way the gods want it, but because certain greedy, self-serving people wanted to be gods. Death is introduced to the Genesis creation story by Cain who murders his brother. Cain is known as the first city builder. The kings of Babylon and Egypt descend from Cain. Later in King David’s history of the world we see that God enters history to take his people out of this hard work in slavery. And, the kings do not separate the chaotic seas, but are swallowed up in them as they pursue the escaping of Israel…"

King David is selling it pretty hard. He wants the people under his rule to believe that they do not suffer the evil constraints of the typical royal order. As it was God’s intention that people live a casual life of peace and harmony, so also David wants his people to believe this is David’s goal.

The Knowing in eating the tree of knowledge refers to the knowing of several things, each, in David’s scribes view, leads to the arrogant system of the ruling elite. Part of what is known is sexuality, but sexuality as it serves kinship and political ties. We tend to think of sexuality as something in and of itself, not so for those in ancient Mesopotamia. Coote says. "It is the world-sex-to-kin-to power realm that is in view here." It was characteristic for ruling families to be large. Local sons produced a local ruling network which assisted the ruling family with its territory of dominion. Foreign alliances were solidified through marriages, creating political and economic strongholds. The sin of the fall then is not the enjoyment of the pleasure of sexuality but the use of sexuality toward the misuse of godlike power.

There are many more details to fill in, but I need to finish this sermon sometime before the organ recital this afternoon.

While David’s scribes live within a patriarchal world view, and it is important for us to move forward beyond this, it is not their intention in writing this story to conspire against women. This story is a political/propaganda story for David against Babylon and Egypt. Nor do we need worry about the how and when of this creation story, as if it were somehow threatened by science. David is not perfect, and not everybody he tried to influence bought this version of history, but he does give us something powerful to work with. He asks the rhetorical question, was the universe and the people in it created to worship and serve every need of tyrannical bloodthirsty gods? Or instead, could it be that human beings were created to live in harmony with their creator who is a God of love, compassion, passion and justice?

You could say David’s creation story is like Israel’s "Declaration of Independence;" and for its time and place, it was incredibly progressive and even radical. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all humans were created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator to live in freedom and harmony with creation." I would say this is not an entirely horrible image upon which to unite a people. May we journey toward a future in which we live as we were created to live.