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Dichotomy Of Human Beings In Genesis Essay

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The Dichotomy of the Human Beings in Genesis
The creation of the world and humankind by God was far from a straightforward process in the Book of Genesis. The first chapter chronicles the six days of creation, starting with light on day one and ending with man on the sixth day. Through Chapter 2, there is plenty of ambiguity in the verses, but the world is still free from most explicit problems and conflict. Man had been given a wife as a suitable helpmate, and they seemed destined to innocently and ignorantly maintain the Garden of Eden. However, in Chapter 3, the man and woman were convinced by the serpent to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Through this, they disobeyed God, but also became more self-reliant. These three …show more content…

Specifically, Genesis 1:26 states, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and they shall rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the heaven and over the animals and over all the earth.’” Immediately, man is given dominion over the other creatures on earth. Dominion is godlike because he has the responsibility for their well-being and the power to make decisions for them. This also marks the beginning of the covenant between God and man to serve as partners in the task of creation. Through this covenant, God and man strive to achieve together what neither can achieve alone. For example, God can create all the other creatures, but man names them and cares for them on earth. On the other side of the problem, man is referred to as a ‘they’ for the first time in verse 26. This implies that man is not destined to be a singular, god-like being. According to Zornberg (1995: 15), “The association of aloneness with power, greatness, is clear here.” It is godlike to be alone and have no equal, but this pronoun foreshadows that man will not be alone forever. Although he may have power and greatness over earth’s creatures, he will not have the singularity of a god. This demonstrates the initial problems of human beings in Genesis

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They only learned of good and evil after disobeying god due to the serpent’s temptation (Genesis Citation). The serpent is a symbol of evil as depicted here, and he is very similar to the evil twin in the Iroquois story in the sense that he is trying to undo the creator’s work. His trickery leads to another direct comparison that is different between both stories. When Adam and Eve listened to the serpent, they committed the original sin, which branded all humans as innately evil (Genesis Citation). In the Iroquois story, however, good and equal existed in equality from the beginning of the story to the end (Iroquois Citation).

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