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Oct. 16th, 2007 12:44 pmKugel is annoying me. On Adam and Eve:
A. He dismisses the rather highlighted point that God might have been lying about killing Adam and Eve if they ate the fruit. They do, and he doesn't, after all. Kugel's concern is what early Jewish and Christian interpreters did with these problems--their deciding a day was 1000 years, their various weird casuistic takes on the justice of God's verdict--but surely a textual overview of the passage would help first? Either the story is about God sucking (see his subsequent alarm that they might eat of the tree of life, hence his exiling them--tellingly absent from Kugel's abstract of the story), or it is about knowledge of the world creating death--by creating knowledge of death. Why is he going out of his way to avoid critiquing early religionist logic? Is there some set of relativist anthropological writing principles I'm ignorant of?
(Anyway, doesn't the very presence of a tree of life imply Adam and Eve aren't initially immortal? Either: 1. they've been eating of the life tree, and God wants them to stop now that they're Knowers, because otherwise they'll rival him; 2. they've been mortal, and he didn't have to worry about their eating the life-fruit before because they were too dumb to even know about it (was the serpent, too?), but as Knowers are a threat.
Because if they are initially immortal without fruit help, and become mortal only when they fall, it's odd for God to have put a life tree in the garden anyway, since it's only of use to the God-cursed and/or knowledge-cursed, who he wants to die. So, unless the garden was there before God...)
B. He then blames the NOTION, rather than term, of 'original sin' on Christians right after quoting 2 Esdras/4 Ezra (surely BCE): O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants.
And this is across, like, three pages.
Is it just me or is Bible scholarship that doesn't point out that God is a dick, at least in the many places where he is a blatant dick, pretty useless? Reminds me of Kafka's dog's interpretive blind spot, and the maze-wilderness it makes of his world.
A. He dismisses the rather highlighted point that God might have been lying about killing Adam and Eve if they ate the fruit. They do, and he doesn't, after all. Kugel's concern is what early Jewish and Christian interpreters did with these problems--their deciding a day was 1000 years, their various weird casuistic takes on the justice of God's verdict--but surely a textual overview of the passage would help first? Either the story is about God sucking (see his subsequent alarm that they might eat of the tree of life, hence his exiling them--tellingly absent from Kugel's abstract of the story), or it is about knowledge of the world creating death--by creating knowledge of death. Why is he going out of his way to avoid critiquing early religionist logic? Is there some set of relativist anthropological writing principles I'm ignorant of?
(Anyway, doesn't the very presence of a tree of life imply Adam and Eve aren't initially immortal? Either: 1. they've been eating of the life tree, and God wants them to stop now that they're Knowers, because otherwise they'll rival him; 2. they've been mortal, and he didn't have to worry about their eating the life-fruit before because they were too dumb to even know about it (was the serpent, too?), but as Knowers are a threat.
Because if they are initially immortal without fruit help, and become mortal only when they fall, it's odd for God to have put a life tree in the garden anyway, since it's only of use to the God-cursed and/or knowledge-cursed, who he wants to die. So, unless the garden was there before God...)
B. He then blames the NOTION, rather than term, of 'original sin' on Christians right after quoting 2 Esdras/4 Ezra (surely BCE): O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants.
And this is across, like, three pages.
Is it just me or is Bible scholarship that doesn't point out that God is a dick, at least in the many places where he is a blatant dick, pretty useless? Reminds me of Kafka's dog's interpretive blind spot, and the maze-wilderness it makes of his world.
