Man, " image of god " or " sinner from the beginning " ?

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The question of origins preoccupies religions, philosophical systems and, of course, science. In the Near East, there are a number of creation stories that combine the question of the origin of the world with that of man, while other texts focus more on man and his relationship with the gods and with animals.

There are several models for describing origins. In Egypt, we often find the idea that the gods give birth to the world, which is also the case in Psalm 90: "Yhwh, from age to age you have been our shelter. Before the mountains were brought forth (ודלי) and you gave birth^[1] to the earth and the world, from ever and for ever you have been god" (v. 1-2). In this psalm, Yhwh is described in the manner of Atum, a pre-existent god, who gives birth to the earth, but in the manner of a woman, by giving birth to it.

The idea that the universe is the result of victory over chaos is widespread in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Levant. In the Bible, we find a number of psalms in which the god of Israel battles the Sea and then sets up the created world (Ps 74; 89). In the Enuma-Elish and Athra-Hasis epics, men are created by mixing clay with the blood of a god who has been put to death. Emphasis is placed on a close link between humans and the world of the gods, with men possessing something of the "divine essence" within them. What about the Hebrew Bible?

We find two quite different ideas in the narratives of Gen 1:1-2:3 (a "P" text) and Gen 2:4-3:25. The story of Genesis 1 presents the creative work in a very orderly and harmonious way. The language, worldview and concerns expressed by the text of Genesis 1 indicate that it originated with Judean priests exiled to Babylon following the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC, or returned from Babylon, probably towards the end of the ^6th or beginning of the^5th century BC. During their stay in Babylon, these priests became acquainted with Babylonian cosmogonies and their mathematical and astrological reflections. They thus took over the knowledge and concepts of Babylonian civilization, adapting them to the theology of nascent Judaism. Like Enuma Elish, Gen 1 relates creation as a "victory" of the creator god over watery chaos. But unlike the Babylonian myth, there is no trace of combat in Gen 1. When the first human couple is created, God (Elohim) says: "Let us make man in our image". Why the plural? It has sometimes been postulated that this is a plural of majesty, but such a figure of speech is implausible. It has therefore been thought that we have here a residue of the idea of a heavenly court in the midst of which God is enthroned surrounded by his counselors.

Perhaps we can go one step further: how does God create human beings "in his image": male and female. So, it may be a residue of the divine couple (the creator god with his consort) who create the human couple in their own image, as Enuma Elish also says: "he will be on earth as in heaven". The idea that every human being is an "image of God" can be understood as a democratization of royal ideology.

Chapters 2-3 of Genesis present a very different version of the creation of man and his separation from God. The story opens with a lack: there is no rain yet, and no man to cultivate the soil. To remedy this lack, Yhwh creates man in the manner of a potter (like Belet-îli in Mesopotamian texts). Yhwh forms Adam from earth (in Hebrew 'adamah), but for him to become alive, he also needs, as in Mesopotamian myths, a divine element. However, Genesis avoids the idea of divine blood in man; blood is replaced in Genesis by the divine breath that Yahweh breathes into man's nostrils, bringing him to life. The allusion to blood is perhaps not entirely absent, due to the play on words between blood(dam) and man ('adam) taken from the reddish earth ('adamah).

Gen 2:18 makes an anthropological observation: man needs a counterpart, someone who can help him, but in whom he can also find or reflect himself. The same observation underlies the epic of Gilgamesh. Yhwh curiously creates animals. This is a way of underlining the great kinship between man and animal, a kinship that is evident in a rural context of the first millennium BC, where men and animals are in constant contact. Apparently, Yhwh is experimenting to find the right counterpart for man. As in the first account of creation in Focus on 1, there is the idea of a peaceful cohabitation between man and beast, which comes to an end when the order of the garden is disrupted by the transgression of woman and man. The woman who is then created by a kind of doubling of the primordial man thus represents a real counterpart for man, but their relationship nevertheless remains unequal, since it is man who names the woman, as he named the animals.

Their first state in the garden resembles that of Enkidu after his creation: they are naked, have no experience of sexuality (in Gen 2-3, there is no order to procreate), and are not yet fully differentiated from the animals (although man has given them names).

The idea of expulsion from the garden found in Gen 3 picks up on the motif of expulsion of a primordial being that left a trace in the BH in Ezekiel 28. This text applies to the king of Tyre the myth of a primordial man or being [2] installed in a garden which, as in Genesis 2-3, is called Eden. In Gen 3, the agent of transgression is the serpent, an animal that plays an important role in mythology in general. In the Genesis account, the serpent has no autonomy, being one of God's creatures, but it plays the role of agent provocateur, with a Promethean aspect. Through the sanctions that Yhwh inflicts on the serpent, the woman and man, the text explains how suffering and death came to be part of creation, while insisting that, despite the divine sanction, life remains possible. It is only after the transgression that man gives a name to woman, that there is individualization. The name Hawwa (Eve) explains that despite death, which is now the fate of all men, life remains possible, via descent, as the woman can give birth, give life, and thus face death. The expulsion from the garden is a reflection on man's autonomy in relation to the world of the gods. Man has a certain freedom from the gods, but he must also accept the consequences. At the same time, this freedom is somewhat limited, for if the serpent is an agent of provocation, we may well wonder whether it is not Yhwh himself who pushes man to transgression, so that he can occupy his own space.

References

[1] The Hebrew verb ללוח evokes the pain of a woman in labor.

[2] What is especially interesting is the fact that, in the Masoretic text, the first being is a kerub, unlike the Greek version, which has understood: " With the kerub I have placed you (i.e. the primordial man)...", thus bringing Ezekiel 28 closer to the story of Genesis 2-3; in the Greek version, the kerub is indeed the tool by which the primordial man is driven from the Garden.