Teaching Genesis in a New Century
In Senior English we will, sooner or later, be reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden. His title comes from Genesis when, right after the Fall, and without much ado—Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, God –expels, ejects , yanks, Adam and Eve from the garden and its delights of ease, ignorance and bliss and shoves them “East of Eden, into the Land of Nod”, there to spawn and raise a disastrous couple of boys in the dust— from whence Adam first came—and is now, like the rest of us, and thanks to the perfidy, the curiosity (of a woman who was merely a second thought anyway) doomed to toil and return.
God does this, as he did all things then, with dispatch. The cosmos, the darkness and the light, all the fish and fowl , all the rodents and all the deer, the limes and the apples and the figs, the seas and the land are put together in less than a week.
There is very little argument after Eve takes a bite of one of those apples and shares it with Adam. This god does not negotiate. They go from Tahiti to Salinas and they have nothing to take with them but the understanding that they have made a really big mistake and they are wholly unprepared for what looms so large and weird.
There is nothing in Genesis about their first night. They, more alone than any two people have ever been before or since, naked, shivering in the dark, considering what might be sex, trying to understand hunger. Just beyond the fragile cocoon of their breath there are unimaginable and really big dangerous animals with better eyesight than them and that know all about the gnawing in the belly and the heat of the chase. If they found a cave, what could Adam and Eve know of bats or bears?
They were like tall infants, born too soon to forage or feed or fend, they were big babies bewildered by loss and crippled by what little imagination was beginning to blossom in their only slightly used brains. They were not refined by natural selection or inured by custom, guided by elders or misled by pals. They had to learn everything at once and learn it on their own and what they came up with was flawed, toxic and twisted. There would be four people on Earth and one was a murderer. Envy, greed, ambition, and career choices burbled up from the very deepest wells of what we apparently are. And all this surfaced before, if we read the book anyway, before tenderness, charity, tolerance, love or pity.
It was a less than auspicious debut before what can certainly be called a hostile audience. This god was a cold critic, shifting in his seat, anxious to be part of the action. When anyone (or any township or, later, any race or nation) rose in the billing, got a bigger dressing room with a more resplendent star on the door, Yahweh would let loose with a fury and an indiscriminate, vast, backhand to burn or drown the cast who had dared to look beyond the footlights and wonder about the dark house beyond.
He is an angry desert god, jealous and unrelenting just like where he spent so much of his time- the Sinai Desert which is nothing like the David Lean/Peter O’Toole desert with dunes and flowing burnooses and tawny camels. It is hardscrabble, baked earth, sun blasted and unforgiving. You go there at your peril, like Moses, and get lost for forty or so years or like a group of Christian zealots I happened to be on a bus once with between Jerusalem and Cairo and they were singing the whole way from an English hymnal- cold, sad words written on a cold, wet island - and now there they are in the Holy Land beset by mini plagues of flies and invisible bugs that pursue you like the Furies went for Orestes and Electra as they ran across Sparta looking for some small measure of grace. And, unlike the children of Agamemnon, these polyestered pilgrims, in their trials, thought it was a bonus in fact, to slap and burn and ration their water. They had walked the Via Doloroso and imagined The Passion and now they were in Jehovah’s back yard and they knew that was supposed to hurt.
And then along comes Noah and the desert god’s wrath expressed in water. All over the whole entire wide world the waters rose and drowned everyone and everything except the fish that didn’t need to be corralled and penned in the fetid belly of the gopher wood ark. Noah sailed and bobbed along, often drunk, often delirious with sickness and questions. And on every side of him there was the snorting and the coughing and the bleating and the braying of the lions, the tigers and the bears in the hold, far from the smaller, meeker, fauna higher up or penned in the rain and the Mediterranean air. When in a forty day and forty night blow, I imagine you forget the sun on a ship filled with animals, excrement and despair. And now we had yet another common father for all the humans of the world crawling between heaven and earth, waiting for the next awful shoe to drop. We are the sons and daughters of Noah, who was either a madman or a savant but maybe a huckster with real estate holdings on Mt. Ararat.
My students, never having known hunger, deprivation, banishment, abandonment, terror or great avalanches of divine rage, find all this desert crossing, divine scourging and violations of logic, fantastical and just about impossible to take very seriously. I admonish them with the Coleridgian admonition that reminds them that in order to understand or appreciate a poem, a novel, a play one must “willingly suspend one’s disbelief” and look for meaning and not dwell very long on the empty sockets where the eyes of Oedipus once were, or the two suns on Luke Skywalker’s Tattoine, or the clocks that chime in Julius Caesar in a Rome built long before when time was kept using the sun and a triangle set in stone. You must accept Quidditch or abandon Harry Potter altogether.
“How?” they say “Could Noah get all those animals and insects and amphibians and birds in one ship?” Or, “Snakes don’t talk”. “Who did Cain ‘sleep’ with?” It’s a poor metaphor or a lousy audience that gets lost on the surface and not in the depths. And, there is no app for creation or mystery.
It is a bit easier after Noah lands and the world begins to be a place where tribes emerge, clans clan up and uniforms are born and distinctive hair styles identify whole epochs. There are great advances in technology- largely of a martial sort which, of course, leads to new kids of armor, siege architecture, and battlefield triage. The world becomes recognizable the further Jehovah retreats or, at least steps back, keeping his promise not to “punish all men” again but still he seems a bit tired, saddened by his creation, rueful and resigned to the sad re-runs that the world was set to screen all the way to Anderson Cooper and Glenn Beck.
The Lord saw Time and he sighed.
