Hacker News Reader

Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

The transition from being unashamed to ashamed is a big part of the Garden story.

First: "Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame."

Then, later: "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths."

I don't know, or care to focus on, how literal or figurative the story is. Perhaps it's describing a change that occurred during evolution to (or within) homo sapiens, a change that caused us to be more self-aware (in a bad way?), self-reliant, conscious of good and evil. Just speculation here.

View on HN

Adam fell into the duality of the subject object relationship when he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, this much is implied in the very name of the tree which relates two opposing and irreconcilable terms. After eating from this tree, Adam began to see himself as seperate from God. This led to the absursity of his shame, since putting on clothes is not going to hide what's underneath from the all knowing being. For man, it is absurd that he sees himself as seperate from God, whose existence man depends on for his own being. Seeing his nakedness after having not seen it previously also speaks to man's mode of being shifting from the inward to the outward, with the surface of the body being the limit of outward development and the preoccupation with it being exposed pointing to this shift and fall. The two eyes of the two individuals, again signifying duality, being opened also attests to this shift since the eyes that see the nakedness can only see outwardly. And finally, recall that this shift from the inward to the outward is precisely the fall of man, since the "Kingdom of God is within you."

> Perhaps it's describing a change that occurred during evolution to (or within) homo sapiens, a change that caused us to be more self-aware (in a bad way?), self-reliant, conscious of good and evil. Just speculation here.

This is something I think about sometimes. We now know that anatomically modern humans shared a timeline and even bred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, probably others. So there was a period when anatomically modern humans, probably cognitively modern (thus capable of language) or close to it, were interacting with these other archaic homo sapiens and probably became aware of their cognitive differences. Maybe these ancient stories reflect an early rationalisation of how human-neanderthal or human-denisovan physical and cultural practices differed. Of course the stories would have to be transmitted for thousands of generations...

Bonus armchair biblical hermeneutics: the Nephilim [1] are the biblical reflex of older stories about one or more archaic homo sapiens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim

That could certainly explain how Cain, son of allegedly the first man and woman, was afraid of what other people might do to him when he was exiled. Clearly his family wasn't the only people on Earth.

Though I don't think that's really about Denisovans and Neanderthals. It's just a transition from creation myth to other kinds of myth, and not reflective of any real events. I'm a Christian, and I'm firmly convinced that the first half of Genesis (possibly all of it, but definitely the first part) is just a collection of older mythological stories shaped into a somewhat cohesive whole, with some mention of God shoehorned in, whether it makes sense or not. It's certainly not meant to be taken literally in any way. There might be a kernel of truth to some of them (there probably was a big flood where someone saved a lot of animals), but that kernel is small. From Abraham onward, it starts to look more like it might be based on real events.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com