Dr. Dylan Johnson

And again, I'm trying to generalize about 2,000 years of interpretive history in the Jewish community.

But definitely they don't follow that line of analysis of original sin and the fall.

Wow, okay.

And so I think that's a major difference between how different religious communities approach this particular narrative, this shared text.

And I don't know enough about how some scholars interpret it.

I know it appears in the Quran as well.

Yeah.

That'd be another place I'd like to go and see differences of opinion.

But definitely modern biblical scholars, I think the Augustinian interpretation has kind of fallen by the wayside, which it had since the Protestant Reformation, really.

So the word, exactly as you just described, Adam is created from the dust of the ground and the breath of divine life animates him.

This is standard ancient Near Eastern creation myth has it written all over it.

They use clay, biblical writers use dust.

The sticking point is a very specific noun, salah in Hebrew, which just means side.

So it's from the side of a man.

Whatever we imagine that to be, biblical text gives us no further indication.

It is rather unique in terms of creation narratives to have one creature created out of the body of another.

But like I told you, in Mesopotamia, we have humanity created out of the bodies of gods all the time.

And there are points in the narrative where the man's identity kind of merges into that of the divine.

He starts to partake in creation as well.

So maybe there's a reverberation of that.