An overlooked message: the critique of kings and affirmation of equality in the primeval history

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Winter, 2006 by Robert K. Gnuse

This theme is furthered in Genesis 2, where the man and the woman are placed into the garden. The creation of garden was another prerogative of Mesopotamian kings who brought plants and animals from all over their empires and placed them into special royal gardens. The metaphor of the king's garden is applied also to the king's rule over his empire, for the king turns the entire land into his garden by wise rule. In Genesis 2 Yahweh is clearly the king who creates such a garden for divine pleasure, but then Genesis 2 also attributes some ruling function to the man and the woman as representatives of all humanity (Brueggemann; Wyatt: 10-21).

The man names the animals and thus engages in an important creative function, even though scholars debate as to the degree to which this makes the man a co-creator with God (Vawter:. 74). His naming of the animals, however, at least signifies his importance in ordering the garden, which makes him appear to perform a function similar to the role of kings as gardeners for the gods. If we take the image from Mesopotamian political mythology, we may metaphor Yahweh as the king, or we may view Yahweh as the high god and the man (and woman) as representing the king on earth.

Critical scholarship assumes that the account in Genesis 2 is older than that of Genesis 1. In its original form Genesis 2 may have had the idea of portraying the man, not as a king, but rather as a being who lives in harmonious relationship to Yahweh and works with Yahweh. However, when the later text in Genesis 1 was added by Priestly writers in the Babylonian Exile or beyond, the democratizing of royal epithets in Genesis 1 makes the reader more likely to see the image of the garden in Genesis 2 as a royal park, Yahweh as the king who creates the garden, and the man (and woman) as sharing in those royal attributes of creation and rule, especially in the animal naming process. If the suggestion in the previous paragraph is correct, then Genesis I may lead the reader to view the Scene in Genesis 2 as follows: Eden is the royal garden or the world, Yahweh represents the pantheon of Mesopotamian gods, and the man and the women rule the garden on Yahweh's behalf, functioning like the Mesopotamian king.

These are all powerful statements to make in the ancient world where the assumption of the great cultures is that the king (or pharaoh) is either divine, as in Egypt where pharaoh was Horus and the son of Osiris, or a representative of the gods who could be adopted as divine, as in Mesopotamia. Now the biblical text declares that everyman and everywoman are equal to the king, and obviously equal to each other.

Genesis 4-11

In Genesis 4 Cain goes to the land of Nod, in the east, after killing his brother and receives the mark of protection from God. Often commentators assume that Cain went to the east, that is, the land of the Transjordan, which is east of Israel. But the biblical author may be pointing even further east, to the land of Mesopotamia, where the ancients lived (including those who built the tower of Babel). Mesopotamia would be a good candidate, because there were indeed cities there in the river valley, and the text later speaks of how Cain founded a city. Our biblical author elsewhere hints that the earliest cities were in Mesopotamia or Shinar.