MISREADINGS IN GENESIS 1-3: WHY HUMANS DIE(1)

What Fall Story?
The “Fall” is not a biblical term; and, unless qualified, it is not a biblical concept.  The so-called “Fall” story, the narrative of Genesis 3, explains the loss of the opportunity to immortality.  Well before there was such people as Hebrews/Israelites, ancient myths addressed why humans are not immortal.  For example, in the ancient Mesopotamian myth, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” probably going back to the Sumerians, a snake ate the plant of immortal life before Gilgamesh could.  In another Mesopotamian myth, “Adapa,” a god tricks him into not drinking the water of immortality.  The Bible, along with its very different worldview, presents a contrasting account:  God had given Adam and Eve access to immortality through the Tree of Life, but they lost that access when they ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.²  As a consequence, they/humanity face their mortality.

Created Mortal, Not Immortal
The first point to note is that in Genesis, humans are never said to have been created immortal.  That belief came into Christian thinking through the acceptance of Greek dualism.  (In Greek thought, humans were composed of a decomposable body and an eternal soul, the latter possessing the essence of life.  Since this line of Greek thought believed nothing could be lost or gained in an eternal cosmos, the soul had to be immortal; the essence of people is immortal.)  The Old Testament presents a different picture of the nature of humans, a wholistic one.  In the second narrative in Genesis, God takes soil, breathes into it – “breath” being related to “spirit,” and the man becomes a living “soul” (nephesh) (2:7).  The Hebrew concept of nephesh/soul is different from the Greek concept.  The Hebrew term is related to the bodily passages through which the breath flows.  A breathing animal, like a person, is also called a nephesh/soul.  There is no Greek dualism of an eternal soul entering a disposable body.  In the biblical anthropology, people are not alive apart from being embodied.  [For this reason, the first Christians would not have accepted a figurative resurrection.  To be resurrected, Jesus had to be embodied, even if that body was a “spiritual body,” as per Paul’s discussion in 1Cor 15:42-44.]  Moreover, there is nothing in the Gen 1-3 about humans being immortal.  With the cessation of breathing, a person expires (“breathes out”), dies.³  In this biblical revised version of ancient myth, however, the man had free access to the Tree of Life (2:9,16); that is, the man originally possessed the opportunity of immortality.

Facing Mortality
God told the man that if he ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he would die.  Although there are other key consequences to Adam’s disobedience [to be treated in the next blog post], the main one here that parallels the ancient Near Eastern myths is that now Adam and Eve face their mortality.  In the rebellious state of having chosen to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God bans them from the Tree of Life and from the Garden of Eden in which they had closely walked and talked with God (3:22-24).  Now, apart from God, they must die.

Application
Sin results in death.  Pop-level Christianity should take a fresh look at New Testament texts regarding the consequences of sin and take them more literally than figuratively.  When Paul states that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), he means it literally.  When John’s Gospel states that “that whoever believes in him [God’s Son] shall not perish (John 3:16), “perish” is meant literally.  Throughout the NT, the judgement on sin is death, literally.  All have sinned; all face death.  The biblical logic is crystal clear: cut off from the Source of Life (represented by walking and talking with God in the Garden) and being banned from the Tree of Life, leaves humanity facing death.  How could it not?  This is why Paul writes that because death entered the world through sin (Rom 5:12), “death has reigned from the time of Adam” (Rom 5:14).  So, too, the opposite state is clear: to be reconciled by grace back to the Source of Life results in eternal life.  How could it not?⁴  This simple truth is the heart of atonement message of the Good News.  Those who are reconciled to God now have life now.  They do not die, go to heaven, and THEN get eternal life.  They are now members of the Kingdom of God.  As Paul would say, they are now under the reign of the Spirit and life (see Romans 5-6).

Lord, apart from you, I have nothing, I am nothing, I have no hope.  I am dead.  However, I praise and worship you that solely by your grace, you have taken me back into relationship with you, into Life!  Help me to share that message of restored life with others.  Amen.
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1. For an introduction to this short series on Gen 1-3, see Nov. 22, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Background.”
2. The specific temptation and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil will be explained in the next post.
3. The Gospels preserve this view of the nature of man in Greek: When Jesus’ dies on the cross, having made his last cry, he breathes out his spirit (e.g. Matt 27:50); he “expires.”
4. I recognize that it is problematic to introduce this OT concept of the nature of humanity in a “devotional” and not explore the implications further regarding judgement.  In brief, I will note that pop-level Christian readings of eschatological texts about judgement tend to face three problems: 1) not understanding what the figurative and symbolic language used meant in the first century AD, 2) foisting the Greek notion of an eternal soul into the texts, and 3) not recognizing that the Greek terms “Hades” and “Gehenna” had distinct meanings in the first century.  In regard to the last item: our earliest Anglo-Saxon translations (c. 10^th century) translated both Greek terms by the same word (“hell” in English) and, by conflating them, created a foreign construct.  I discuss these issues in a couple of academic articles:  Duke, Rodney, "Eternal Torment or Destruction? Interpreting Final Judgment Texts," Evangelical Quarterly 88.3 (2016/17) 237-58 and "The Idiom of 'Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth' in the Gospels: A Funerary Formula" Perspectives in Religious Studies 47/3 (2020) 283–98.