The Book of Genesis

[Parashu]

Hello,

I'm not a native speaker, so, well, pardon my french

I'm not putting this thread in "religion" because I would rather call my perspective (speculative) history. It hasn't got much to do with beliefs IMO... but if the moderator considers that it doesn't fit the category, sorry for making you work 

I've spent many years discovering ancient mythology from all over the world after opening the book of Genesis for the first time in my life, almost ten years ago (I'm now 35) and I think I've dug into something.

In the first pages of the book of Genesis, you'll find the "Seven Days", then the "Garden of Eden" and then the tale of Caïn and Abel - tiller and shepperd - and then comes the Flood.

To understand this part, I think you have to raise a question : "What did we have to understand before we could develop agriculture and animal breeding?"

The answer is simple : we had to understand the link between sexuality and reproduction. In other words, we had to understand the principle of fecondation.

From there, we can understand the core of the story... The word "Eden" in hebrew means "pleasure"... and there we have our "suspect"...   

The idea is that our ancestors ignored the link between sexuality and reproduction because of our sexual behaviour. Most animals and plants, including all females, have a cyclic sexuality. There are very few exceptions to this rule. Chimpanzees, Bonobos and Human males have a permanent sexuality : they are active all year long for most of their life. 

Because of this particularity of human males, we developped sexuality for 1) appeasment, just like the Bonobos (the "quickie") 2) prostitution, just like the Chimpanzees 3) for pleasure.

Humans are the only species having sex for pleasure. By sex for pleasure, I mean sexual activity in which pleasure is sought for both. Sexual activity aimed at joined orgasm would have been a good stimulus to become more intuitive and self-aware... 

This sexual trait would have caused our ancestors to ignore the principle of fecondation : they established no link in between a daily-routine (sex) and a specific event (birth)... which is perfectly understandable. 

Seing things from this perspective makes the symbols of the myth a bit more clear. In the Garden of Eden - i.e. the cultural garden in which humanity lived before undestanding the principle of fecondation - the woman is named "Eve" and this name in hebrew means "Life/to live"

The word "Life" appears earlier in the text : there's a "Tree of Life" in the middle of the garden and a "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil"...

The Tree of Life is actually the Tree of Eve or Eve-as-a-Tree or Life-as-a-Tree : if you don't know trees have a sexual life, they may appear as self-reproductive. And before we understood the role of sex and males in procreation, we had a different explanation... Women were thought to have babies "on their own" by some sort of supernatural phenomenon. So, trees were used to symbolise this perspective. The chunk of the Tree were the mothers. The branches of the Tree were men (and women without children?) : from branches, you make spears. The animals, being noisy, might have been associated with the foliage. Vegetals were considered self-reproductive, including the Tree itself. The Tree would produce flowers (vaginas) which turned into Fruits, falling into the Earth-Mother to give birth to other trees.

This would have been the perspective of our ancestors on procreation, more or less. That's why the "Tree of Life" is mentionned in many mythologies : the Tree of Life was the sum of all beings and the Human Mother was above everybody else because of her specificity.

In nature, we can observe animals having a cyclic sexuality and therefore a cyclic reproduction. Humans are different and women have babies all year long. So, our ancestors would have considered that the woman was indeed very magical. Females were seen as capable of generating life ex-nihilo and the woman was the only one capable of that all year long... She was what she still often claims to be : a godess, the first divine figure of mankind, probably... The Tree of Life was the Universal Mother or Perpetual Mother, the Mother of all beings, as the Bible puts it. And she was at the center of the Garden. And because all children were suposedly born from her godly presence, she was the one deciding of "good" and "evil" until it were discovered males had a role in procreation, which lead to the sharing of the Fruit.

The Fruit was shared : the children were shared. The autority on children was split amongst parents through the institution of mariage. Humanity was split into families, then different ethnicities. Nature was divided into categories by the upcoming of the concept of species.

This first page of human history, which would have lasted for tens of thousands of years - while our ancestors were already speaking, but not yet farming - was then "Flooded". 

The Flood comes after the tale of Caïn and Abel and it could represent the multiplication of people and tales which resulted from the development of agriculture and animal breeding. The number of languages, stories,... about the past was multiplied very quickly and it flooded the real story of "prehistory". There was a world before we understood the principle of fecondation and this world is no more because it's impossible to forget (again) how children are born...

[ignoramus]

Welcome, by the way.
Interesting usage of metaphors to shine a new light on an old story.

This is even more reason why the bible isn't the word of God. God would have already known how the world works without having or needing to add spirituality and other metaphors concerning the creation of life. Is it possible that the original Adam and Eve story was the longest running word of mouth explanation of how "people" are made? The story survived many eons and found its way to the goat herders of the middle east?

[robvalue]

Hello, welcome. Interesting points

I think it is indeed likely the story is meant to have at least some symbolism in it. It also contains overly simplistic explanations to questions they couldn't answer at the time; it's harder to know which of these are meant to be read literally.

[bennyboy]

My take on Adam and Eve is that it's a myth about puberty. That's why Eve discovers it BEFORE Adam, and then tempts him to take it: a girl matures sexually before a boy her age does.

[robvalue]

"But I believe it literally happened."

"Why?"

"It's written down."

"Oh. Cool."

"Also, I don't know anything about science. I can demonstrate if you want?"

"No, that's fine."

[brewer]

Welcome.

[bennyboy]

This first page of human history, which would have lasted for tens of thousands of years - while our ancestors were already speaking, but not yet farming - was then "Flooded". 

The Flood comes after the tale of Caïn and Abel and it could represent the multiplication of people and tales which resulted from the development of agriculture and animal breeding. The number of languages, stories,... about the past was multiplied very quickly and it flooded the real story of "prehistory". There was a world before we understood the principle of fecondation and this world is no more because it's impossible to forget (again) how children are born...

Or, and I'm just floating this as an idea, there was in fact a huge freaking flood, and they knew about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_...hypothesis

(there are others going farther back, and a little less theoretical)

[Parashu]

Hello,

I didn't take the time to introduce myself before posting, but I wanted to check the temperature first. I've spent several years studying this text of the book of Genesis before the Flood. I opened the book for the first time in my life in 2008 and it took me five years to understand the first pages. A couple times, I tried to discuss some ideas on religious and atheist forums and the attitude of people was disapointing. "Believers" tend to be close-minded and allergic to science and "atheist" are often people who just say "no" to everything the creationists say... 

I can now state Uranus is fine, people! Glad to see some curiosity, welcomes and questions!

Bennyboy : maybe there was a global "flood". Maybe the (end of the) icy period was the flood. Maybe there was a flood in Egypt, where the ancestors of all non-african have been since it's the only way out of Africa by foot... Maybe there's a concrete meaning to the myth, but if we imagine this scenario, it would have lead to the same result : population dropped, then multiplied again and old stories were lost... And that's the symbolic of the Flood. Noakh represents the "first and last", the one who brings from one world to another. From this character comes the messianic perspective... He's the last child of a world and the father of the next one. He's the last witness and the one who told the story of the Garden of Eden. He's a key character, passing through the loss of the ancient world.

Ignoramus : the story has indeed found its way to the goat herders of the middle east. Actually, the clues that I found in the book of Genesis lead me to check various other mythology and I found the same story everywhere, told differently. I'll develop that later...

So, first, from a broad perspective, one can notice there are two (normal...) fruits mentionned in the beginning of the Bible : figs (Adam and Eve make a belt with fig tree leaves) and olives (the dove brings back some to Noakh). 

"Black" people are not black. Their hair is black, but their skin is more like the color of the fig


And this fruit, when cut in half, just like on this picture, can be associated with the genitals of a woman (the outside, because the inside is more like the brain of a shark btw). This fruit symbolizes our african grand-mother. 

The olives are a bit more like testicles, which would represent the patriarcal world that followed the matriarcal world. Also, olives can be dark-skinned or pale-skinned, just like mankind today. 

These two fruits presented consecutively would represent the matriarcal to patriarcal transition as well as the transition from a world populated by fig-skinned people and then a world populated by olive-skinned people.

Then, the text itself gives other clues on the whereabouts of this tale...  

2.7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

"To breath a breath of life into the nostrils" was an egyptian expression. It were common to do that to dead people in odrer to help their soul leave the body or something like that. It would give a completely different perspective on the "creation of man" to see Adam as a dead guy... It could mean that humans became "living souls" when they became self-aware and began paying attention to the dead, who became "living souls" as they were no more in flesh, but were kept "alive" in traditions...

Anyway, this clue points towards Egypt, which is in Africa and has always been!

A few verses further, we find this : 

2.10-14 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

Hiddekel is the Tigris and it joins the Euphrates before arriving to a delta pointing northwards. These are easily identified. 

Before that comes the "Gihon" in Ethiopia. The hebrew word is "Cush", which means "Ethiopia" or "Nubia" (from latin : land of the black people). The Blue Nile runs across former Nubia and compasses Ethiopia. The Blue Nile is probably the Gihon.

Then since Egypt was evocated earlier (2.7), the name of Havila can be found. Egyptians were used to send expeditions on the Nile to bring back gold and other precious metals. This is how the neighbour of Egypt were capable of emitting coins : they were buying the metals brought back by the Egyptians. And those Egyptian knew there was gold in the lands where the Nile was coming from because that's where their ancestors came from. Ra, the central deity, was told to have descended the Nile... They remembered the tribal mine, so to say... 
Egypt was also used to bring bdellium from these expeditions, as they themselve don't have much wood... And they were carrying precious stones on the return also. And one might notice the precious stones mentionned in the bible are black stones, which I think is another clue on the color of the skin of people in those days...

Tigris and Euphrate join before reaching a delta that points northwards and the Blue Nile and White Nile also join, before reaching a delta that points southwards. The Blue Nile compasses former Nubia, while the White Nile leads to Kongo, which is compassed by the Kongo river. In Kongo, you can find the Balubas, who are Bantou who went to Egypt and then returned later when it became more dry... They were the founders of Egypt, the first Egypt (10000 BC or even earlier)

The end- the deltas - of those four rivers form an image that makes it all clear.

[img][/img]

The first two rivers are a reference to Africa and feminine : Egypt can be seen a woman's lower half seen from the front, the river being the space between the legs or a reference to menstruations. The sea close to the delta where the two other rivers end can be seen as a penis with testicles seen from the side.

Maybe all of this is far-fetched, but it seems to converge... and this part of the bible is full of rich details like that. I've recently tried to read the rest of the Bible and I stopped because it clearly comes from a different source and inspiration... but the beginning is quite interesting when you dig a little.

So, Ignoramus, the story would have given birth to Egypt, through the myth of Isis, Osiris and Horus which has a lot in common with the book of Genesis... and the bible mentions the jewish goat herders have been in Egypt. The story would simply have follown the people... 

[Parashu]

Damn, second time I loose my whole answer... and now it's too late over here... 

Guess I was not meant to answer today

[Jackalope]

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