Tag: Adam

2015-09-23

When God Commanded the Worship of Adam

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Biblical Studies
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jesusMonotheismThe Judaism prior to the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and that was the Judaism known to those responsible for the birth of Christianity was not the rabbinic Judaism that emerged in ensuing centuries. In recent years scholars Hurtado and Bauckham have attempted to defend the historical roots of contemporary Christian orthodoxy in relation to monotheism by focusing on evidence that suggests Second Temple Judaism (i.e. the Judaism prior to 70 CE) did not know of cultic worship of any figure other than The One God. Other scholars have criticized Hurtado and Bauckham for being too restricted in their selection of the evidence and for being too pedantically narrow in their question framing. One of these critics, and the latest one whose work has been added to my “to read” shelf, is Crispin Fletcher-Jones. His 2015 work is Jesus Monotheism: Volume 1. Christological Origins: the Emerging Consensus and Beyond.

While it is too early for me to outline his arguments in this post, both those contrary to Bauckham’s and Hurtado’s theses and his own interpretations and broader implications for our understanding of Second Temple Judaism, I can at least for now quote the critical section of a Latin manuscript of the Life of Adam and Eve. (I’ll save the reasons for dating this text to the pre-70 CE era and other discussions of the various language manuscript lines till later.)

What is fascinating in this text is the reason God commands all the angels to worship Adam at the time of his creation — that is, before his “Fall”. The text throws us the first time we read it if we have always assumed that the Jews had as strict and narrow a conception of monotheism as we do and as we believe they have had ever since Moses.

The account of the command to worship Adam (Fletcher-Louis points out this analogy) reads remarkably like the challenge presented to Daniel and his friends by Nebuchadnezzar:

King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold . . . 

Then the herald loudly proclaimed, “Nations and peoples of every language, this is what you are commanded to do: As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. Whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.”

Therefore, as soon as they heard the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp and all kinds of music, all the nations and peoples of every language fell down and worshiped the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.

. . . 

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, “King Nebuchadnezzar . . . we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”  (Daniel 3, NIV)

Setting up an image and commanding worship at its feet is a no-no — we all know that’s the rule of the God of the Bible. But think a moment about the creation of Adam who was made “in the image and likeness” of God.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness. . . “ (Gen 1:26)

Adam is the image made by God. God made him in “his” image and in “his” likeness. The angels were commanded to worship the image of God. Continue reading “When God Commanded the Worship of Adam”

2012-02-10

Explaining (?) the Contradictory Genesis Accounts of the Creation of Adam and Eve

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Old Testament
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The Genesis
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What does one make of the two opposing accounts of the creation of humans in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2?

In Genesis 1 God manages to fit in the making of the first man and woman — “in his own image”! — just at the close of the last day of creation. Gary Greenberg suggests that this concept of a male and female being made in the image of a single God is borrowed from Egypt’s hermaphroditic deities.

But the very next chapter (i.e. 2!) presents a quite different view of the creation of our species. Dr McGrath has posted a quite nice chart highlighting both the similarities and the contrasts of the two creations. But let me draw attention to a point that is not so immediately clear in this quite nice chart. In Genesis 1 all the animals are created before the man and the man (and woman) is created as an afterthought at the end of the day. In Genesis 2 Adam is created before all other animals.

What is going on here? I would like to go on beyond Dr McGrath’s interests in these conflicting accounts, however, and ask how we might account for them appearing as they do as the first two chapters of our Bible. (Dr McGrath in his blog post only addresses grist for his anti-creationist mill. But creationists can come and go and it is nothing notable to expose the flaws of one who has never learned to question his or her faith. I am more interested in explaining what we do have as our religious and cultural heritage.)

I’ll introduce my post by pasting here the comment I left on Dr McGrath’s blog (slightly edited).

Jan-Wim Wesselius’s “The Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus’s Histories as Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible” discusses such adjacent accounts that give variant explanations for events from the perspective of comparison with “Histories” by Herodotus. The most obvious difference between the two works (Histories and Primary History –  i.e. Genesis to 2 Kings) is that the Greek work is structured around an intrusive narrator (who is himself a character in the work, and not the real author — I have discussed some of the scholarship about this on my own blog over the years) while the Primary History of the Hebrews is an exercise in studied anonymity. Bernard Levinson in “Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation” offers us a plausible explanation for this contrasting anonymity.

But the point is that two contrasting accounts are often found side by side in the Primary History and that this is consistent with Hellenistic historiographical practices — with the only difference being the intrusion/absence of a narrator’s voice.

In this case, given the parallelisms, we are also faced with the strong likelihood that we are not looking at independent traditions that somehow were forced together, but at a single authorial creator behind them both. This is consistent with more recent studies (albeit admittedly minority ones at this point) that do argue that Primary History is, after all and just as Spinoza himself originally opined, the work of a single author. That it is also the product of Hellenistic times is the solutions Mr Ockham would like best, too.

Let’s look at Dr Wesselius’s treatment of the conflicting creation-of-humans accounts: Continue reading “Explaining (?) the Contradictory Genesis Accounts of the Creation of Adam and Eve”

2010-10-30

Two Adams – and never the twain did meet

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
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Continuing from my post Divine human-like figures in Hellenistic Judaism . . . .

During the period that saw the early evolution of Christianity (or Christianities — a range of beliefs that eventually coalesced into what we would recognize as Christianity today) there was a rich diversity of Jewish sectarian beliefs. Most of these vanished as rabbinic Judaism extended its influence throughout the first few centuries of the Christian era. But some of these early Jewish beliefs offer tantalizing clues to the matrix of Christianity in its formative years. Alan F. Segal notes that

Adam traditions are especially important in this regard. . . . Philo identifies the heavenly man with the logos, which is identified with God’s archangel and principal helper in creation. There is an extraordinary amount of Adam speculation in apocalyptic and pseudepigraphical writings, often including descriptions of Adam’s heavenly enthronement and glorification. The traditions can be dated to the first century, if an early dating of enthronement of Adam in the Testament of Abraham ch. 11 can be maintained. Adam legends are certainly well ramified later in Jewish, Christian, gnostic, Mandaean and other documents, and even appear at several important junctures in the ascent texts of the magical papyri. . . . (p. 189 of Two Powers in Heaven)

Philo justified his view that there were two Adams in the Garden of Eden by interpreting Genesis 1:26 to refer to two separate creations:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; Continue reading “Two Adams – and never the twain did meet”

2007-10-09

Comparing the myths of Adapa and Adam, prototypes of priest and humankind

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Literature, Biblical Studies, Old Testament
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I found Liverani’s comparative analysis of the Babylonian and Hebrew myths interesting enough to share here. He dismisses earlier attempts to force relationships between the former with the Genesis account as failures because they attempt to impute themes and meanings where they do not really exist.

Liverani does see a structural relationship between the two myths, however, and when that structure is understood then not only points of comparison stand out, but also an explanation for their differences becomes apparent. Continue reading “Comparing the myths of Adapa and Adam, prototypes of priest and humankind”