Genesis Chapters 4 - 5: God Hates Fruit

Adam and Eve settle down and have a couple kids.  Cain, the oldest, grows up to be a farmer.  Abel, the second, grows up to be a shepherd.

Squee!

Cain brings God an offering of fruit that he grew.  God says, “Oh…. A fruit basket.  Um, thanks… I guess…”

Abel brings God the firstborn of the flock.  God says, “OH MY SELF!  How cute is that!  Thank you so much!  You’re the best!”

You can see how Cain might not take this well, especially since he’s the firstborn son (firstborn son is kind of a big deal back then).  God tells him if he would just do well he’d be accepted, but that if he doesn’t do well then he’ll be consumed by sin.  Some interpretations say that Cain didn’t really give his gift with faith or that his gift was sort of a half-hearted afterthought while Abel gave the very best that he had.  But he was a farmer…  Farmers work pretty hard.

Cain isn’t happy with what God has said.  He first talks to his brother, then kills him in a jealous rage. 

Sin now has won over 3 out of the 4 people introduced in this story so far, and the fourth person is dead.  We’re not off to a promising start.

God asks, “Hey… where’s that brother of yours?”

Cain shrugs his shoulders.  “It wasn’t my day to watch him.”

God realizes what’s happened and banishes Cain to a life of a fugitive and a wanderer, cursing him so that the ground will not yield anything up to him any more.  Cain’s a bit worried that whoever finds him will kill him, though at this point the population of the earth is sparse enough that he could probably evade capture.  God reassures him at least that if he gets killed, the person that kills him will get it back seven times worse.  He marks Cain so that everyone who meets him on the road will know not to mess with him and sends him on his way.

Cain, by the way, has a wife.  Who is she?  Cain’s wife was even brought up at the Scopes Trial.  It was probably a sister or some other relation.  This is banned later, but at this point, there’s not a lot of choice.  God did start us off with only two people and told them to go forth and multiply.

Answers in Genesis has a diagram to illustrate:

Just wait til we get to Leviticus.... it's awesome.

Cain and his wife have some kids.  He also builds a city, which is pretty good for someone who was supposedly doomed to be a “wanderer on the earth.”  A few generations go by and his great-great-great grandson Lamech has two wives.  Lamech kills someone for striking him and he tells his two wives that since Cain’s revenge was sevenfold, the revenge for killing Lamech is 77 times worse.  It doesn’t seem like God told him this.  He just claims it.

Adam and Eve have another son named Seth and other sons and daughters.  Lots of them… Adam lives to be 930 years old.  There’s a list of Adam’s descendents all the way up to Noah, and they all live between 365 and 969 years.  Noah descended from Adam’s son Seth, and is Adam’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson.

Genesis Chapters 1 - 3: Let there be light and big tempting apples!

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

How pretty is that? I think that's the part that everyone knows.

Day 1: God makes light, then separates day and night. Awesome.

Day 2: God makes an expanse (or a firmament) and separates the waters under the expanse from the waters above the expanse. He calls this Heaven. This is kind of odd.... it sounds like Heaven is a layer of space between two layers of water. I'm guessing that the top layer of water might be clouds.

Day 3: God makes dry land separated from water, then made plants and fruit trees.

Day 4: God makes some more lights - sun, moon, and stars to separate day and night. We kind of already had this in day 1, but now these lights also help us figure out seasons, days, and years. So let there be more specific light.

Day 5: Fish and birds.

Day 6: Animals, creeping things, and beasts. After he makes the animals, he makes man and woman and tells them to go check out their new digs.

[Chapter 2] Day 7: He is understandably exhausted from all this creating and takes a day off.

After this, Chapter 2 gets a little confusing. It’s like the creation story starts over again, but in a slightly different order. Someone explained to me that the first chapter is just a summary and then the second part is the more detailed telling of the story. But the sequence is still off.

The previous chapter says Day 3 was “plant day.” Now in chapter two it says that before there were bushes or plants, God takes some dust and makes man by blowing into its nostrils. THEN he makes the garden in Eden and pops man down in there. Then a bit later he notices the man is lonely so he makes some animals and birds for him, even though in the previous chapter Day 5 was “bird day” and Day 6 was “beasts/creeping things/man day.”

Regardless, the man is still lonely and needs a helper, so God knocks him out, takes a rib, and makes him a woman and they get to run around naked with the explicit warning not touch that pretty tree in the middle of the garden OR YOU SHALL SURELY DIE!!!

Why have a forbidden death-tree in the middle of the garden? That's like putting a box of donuts in a fat person's kitchen and saying, "Don't eat these! Or you'll get high cholesterol and diabetes and DIE!!!" It's just asking for trouble.

We know how the rest of this goes in Chapter 3. The snake says to Eve, “Stop being all dramatic, you won’t actually die. That fruit will let you guys know good and evil like God, so it’s pretty awesome.” Eve somehow falls for this argument and eats it and passes some along to Adam and he eats it and they realize that they’re naked and make some quick fig leaf clothing.

They hear God walking in the garden and they hide. God finds them out and wants to know why they’re wearing fig leaves and asks if they ate the fruit off the inconveniently placed temptation tree.

"Not MY fault!"

Adam points to Eve. "She gave it to me!"

Eve points to the snake. "The snake tricked me!"

But the snake was right… They don’t die. Not immediately anyway. Maybe they would have been immortal if they hadn't eaten it, but there's nothing that says that specifically.

So, God is understandably annoyed with everyone and doles out some harsh punishments. He makes snakes crawl on their bellies from now on (I’m assuming then that they used to have legs) and makes Eve’s childbirth painful and makes her subservient to her husband. Adam now has to work and farm his own food instead of just romping around without a care in the world eating the things that God provided. They get kicked out of the garden and God puts a guard at the tree so people leave it the heck alone.