Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Why were these verses in Genesis chapters 2 and 3 selected for the Hebrew Scripture lectionary on the First Sunday in Lent?

Many people would answer this question from the perspective of church history and tradition: these verses describe “the Fall;” they describe how “Original Sin” became a part of the human condition. For those of you from traditions that do not emphasize “Original Sin,” it’s the Christian doctrine that describes the state of sinfulness “inherited,” literally and physically, by all humans from Adam and Eve because of their disobedience to God in this very story. This doctrine insists that all people are born with a tendency to sin; we can’t help it any more than we can help the fact that we have blue eyes or curly hair. The connection with Lent is that, in many traditions, Lent is a “penitential season,” a time for renewed focus on our sins and our sinful nature, and therefore our need for remission of those sins through Christ’s death and resurrection. (Don’t get me started on atonement theory.)

Instead, notice that neither the word “fall,” nor the word “sin,” original or otherwise, appears in these verses. What we are dealing with are many layers of interpretation by men (yes, I do mean men) over many centuries, from the Apostle Paul to Tertullian to Augustine to Ambrose and on through the ages to Luther and Calvin; men who recognized their own inability to conform their behavior to God’s will for the world (i.e., love, justice, mercy, fairness, peace, generosity), and needed an explanation for it. Or perhaps an excuse. Certainly, there are snippets of scripture implying that we just can’t help sinning. The psalmist laments, “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). But as Cameron B. R. Howard writes, “The Bible is not the place to go if you want, like Joe Friday in the old TV show ‘Dragnet,’ ‘just the facts, ma’am.’ The Bible is not a collection of facts. It is a collection of stories, poems, songs, prayers, and remembrances.” The poetry of Psalm 51 describes the sorrow and regret of recognizing your faults and limits – which we all have. The etiological story of Adam and Eve helps to explain important questions about certain realities in life – why there is pain in childbirth, why the ground is hard to work, why snakes crawl upon the earth. Neither Psalm 51 nor Genesis 2 was intended to provide us with facts, either historical or biological.

As Marci Glass puts it, “We’ve been telling this story poorly for a long time.” Recent biblical scholarship has reframed the Genesis 2-3 creation story:

• The human has work and responsibility from the very beginning. God places the man in the garden “to till it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Eden wasn’t a work-free vacation.

• The traditional reading of the story assumes the first couple was perfect, without sin. The text doesn’t say that. The creation story in Genesis 1 describes the world as “good,” and an ancient Israelite wouldn’t have assumed that meant either perfect or sinless.

• The scene is usually portrayed with the woman alone as she’s tempted by the serpent, but a careful reading suggests that the man was present. The scene is of one piece: the serpent and the woman engage in conversation, she takes and eats the fruit, and she gives the fruit to “her husband, who was with her” all along! (Genesis 3:6). Why does this matter? Historically, Eve – and through her, all women – have been blamed for bringing sin into the world. This has been used as an excuse to keep women silent and prevent them from leadership in the Christian church (1 Timothy 2 :11-14). Dennis Olson writes, “The man failed to speak up, to speak out, and to join the woman in an alliance against the serpent’s attempt to appeal to the suspicions and yearnings that somehow were already within the humans’ heart” (emphasis added).

• The serpent is a very clever and talkative animal “that the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1). In other words, the serpent is one of God’s own creatures, not a satanic being from outside of creation. At any point, the humans could have told the serpent he was wasting his time, but as Olson noted (supra), there was something already in the human – before the bite of the apple – that was drawn to the alternative explanations the serpent offered them.

• If we decide to read this story as a “Fall,” we must see human curiosity and knowledge as a problem. Frank Yamada writes that the idiom, “good and evil,” which describes the forbidden fruit, means that the tree contains complete knowledge or knowledge from A to Z. Wouldn’t full knowledge be essential for human life? Isn’t curiosity not only desirable, but necessary for human thriving? Feminist biblical scholars have emphasized the theme of maturity in these verses. Even if acquired through disobedience, this exciting, if potentially dangerous, maturity is vital for human flourishing.

Following that line of thought – that what we see in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is not the introduction of sin into the world but a necessary if painful maturing to the realities of the human existence, Marci Glass compares the Adam and Eve story to the recent movie, “Barbie” (2023). After reading Glass’s insightful sermon, I wonder whether filmmaker Greta Gerwig had Adam and Eve in mind.

Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land, although in this tale, the women – the Barbies – run everything. Ken, on the other hand, is a helper, the secondary creation, an accessory to the main creation.

Things begin to sour for Barbie. Besides thoughts of mortality, her feet are no longer permanently curved for those tiny Barbie high heels. She faces a crisis similar to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Does she choose to stay ignorant of complex emotions and the reality of death by staying in Barbie Land? Or does she choose to step into the real world, with all its nuances, pain, beauty, and death? At first, she wants to return to the Eden of ignorance and bliss, but she recognizes that Reality is where she’ll figure out what’s happening to her.

Barbie encounters the person who invented her, played by Rhea Perlman. Glass writes that her creator “doesn’t control Barbie. She’s curious and even surprised to see the choices Barbie is making as she grows up and decides to become fully human, complex emotions and thoughts of death included.” She also warns Barbie of the consequences of the choice to become human: “Being a human can be uncomfortable. Humans only have one ending,” says the creator. Barbie weighs the consequences. Writes Glass, “She’s realized that she wants the complexities, and even the thoughts of death, that come with being fully alive. Because the real world is also where the magic happens. Where humans surprise us with kindness and beauty. Where we find community and love. And Barbie also wants creativity, which is a gift of the complexity of human existence. She wants to be ‘part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.’”

We have indeed been telling the Adam and Eve story poorly for a long time. Perhaps it is less about the origins of sin than the reality of what it means to be human, including our tendencies to rebel, explore, question, and yearn for more than what we currently see and experience, some of which leads to pain and destruction, but some of which leads us to wonder, fulfillment, beauty, and truth. The serpent is simply one of God’s creatures; the yearnings and suspicions of the humans about God’s motivations are somehow already embedded within the human heart from the beginning – from the moment of creation. They simply needed the encouragement of the serpent to bring them out and convert them into action.

Humans continue to rebel against God, to resist the gracious boundaries that God has set for us, often to our own peril or to the peril of others. I’m not arguing there is no such thing as sin. However, I am arguing that this story doesn’t explain how sin entered the world. I don’t believe humans ever existed in a state of perfection. What this means is that Lent is not a path back to some mythic perfection. Rather, it is a reset, yet again. It is starting over, again and again, as we reflect on our relationship and our responsibilities to God’s boundaries, trusting, as Anne Lamott put it, that God loves all of us more than we can possibly imagine, exactly the way we are. And God loves us too much to let us stay like this.

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Valerie Bridgeman, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-7
Justin Michael Reed, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-6
Cameron B.R. Howard, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-3
Dennis Olson, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7
Frank M. Yamada, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-2
Marci Glass, “Leaving the Garden,” September 10, 2023, ttps://marciglass.com/2023/09/10/leaving-the-garden/
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999).