An Alien Beginning
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. Genesis 2:4 NASB
The account of – The King James renders this verse as “these are the generations of.” This represents the Hebrew tôlēdôt, but it misdirects us in English.
The English word “generation” is now limited almost entirely to two meanings: (1) the act of producing something or the way it is produced; (2) an entire group of people living at the same period of time, or the average length of time that such a group of people live. Neither of these meanings fits the usage of tôlēdôt.
As used in the ot, tôlēdôt refers to what is produced or brought into being by someone, or follows therefrom. In no case in Gen does the word include the birth of the individual whose tôlēdôt it introduces (except in Gen 25:19[1]
But “account” doesn’t fit the bill either. Something seminal is happening here, not just a newspaper recording. God brings the creation into existence. In the story of His action we find the creation of Man (v. 7) and eventually Woman (v. 21), but this doesn’t mean, as pagan religions might describe it, that the “heavens and earth” are the progenitors of humanity. We don’t come from biological progression. We come from a deliberate act of yālad—to beget, to bring forth (the root of tôlēdôt). The language might be formally pagan, but it is functionally different.
And strange.
Once before we mentioned the alien nature of the first man.[2] He wasn’t like us at all. If that sounds strange (or even heretical), consider the characteristics of human development. None of us, not even the Messiah, came into this world finished. We all started in the pre-verbal realm of raw experience without organized structure. We all started with “Mom.”
Every stage in ego and libidinal development involves the infant in a relationship in which he is the object of parental empathy, handling and law. Every infant, therefore, internalizes into the ego those processes in which is is the other’s object, and he continues to do so for a long time. Our handling of our self as an object partly inherits and expresses the history of our experience as the parental object, so that in each adult it is appropriate to say that certain forms of self perception, self facilitation, self handling and self refusal express the internalized parental process still engaged in the activity of handling the self as an object. Through the experience of being the other’s object, which we internalize, we establish a sense of two-ness in our being, and this subject-object paradigm further allows us to address our inherited disposition, or true self, as other. We use the structure of the mother’s imagining and handling of our self to objectify and manage our true self.[3]
We’d like to think that Adam was the first human being, but that doesn’t make much sense when we consider what it means to be human. As Bollas says, “The historical subject arrives on the scene after the rules have been established, and one feature of human conflict is the perpetual struggle and interplay between the historical subject and his ego procedures.”[4] Without mother or father, how is it possible that Adam can be our progenitor? Yes, it had to start someplace, but the first “creature” doesn’t really share much humanity with us, does he? He might look human, but all those things necessary to really be human are missing, unless, of course, we think that all of us are really copies of a defective (fallen) second-tier humanity.
Today we know a lot about human development. None of it fits Adam. What do you suppose that says about the Genesis 2 story?
Topical Index: Adam, human, Bollas, man, tôlēdôt, generations, Genesis 2:7, Genesis 2:4
[1] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 380). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] https://skipmoen.com/2018/11/the-alien/
[3] Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 51.
[4] Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 51.
