HTCG 02c

Chapter 2 continues.

Section C: The Impression of Things

When a Hebrew text does address any sensory experience of smell, taste or color, we can usually pick up on the meaning. If we can make adjustments inside our minds about the moral meaning of various symbols, we are in a better position to estimate how such descriptions impacted the Hebrew reader.

Part 1: Images of Weakness, Transitoriness and of Reliability

Some are more obvious: flesh symbolizes weakness and flowers are ephemeral. Stone features of the landscape are somewhat more variable. For the Sumerians it typically symbolized a deity, but other cultures of the ANE were not so consistent. For Hebrews, mountains could be easily crushed by God, but quite often, a solid prominence of stone symbolized the safety and reliability of God.

Part 2: The Image-bearing Quality of Things in the J Narrative of Creation

I’m going to ignore Boman’s blather about the Documentary Hypothesis and stay with the main point.

It’s quite very easy for translators to forget that a great many natural features were mentioned symbolically in the narrative, and we often find a reading that seems odd because it was translated literally. Specific phrases “dust and ashes” or “dust of the earth” signify human mortality and insignificance against heavenly affairs. This was commonly understood across the ANE.

The difference between creation by word and creation by making, for example, as a potter, is of no consequence in Hebrew as it would be in Greek. For the Hebrew, and much of the ANE, the deity is the maker and the product is not of the same quality as He. The whole point is the purpose of the thing made, not some abstract idea regarding its form. Boman takes us back to the disagreement between Greek and Hebrew thinking on this issue. To the Greeks, a cooking pot is the basic idea, the material is a separate matter. To the Hebrew, the material defines how the cooking pot can be used, so that each pot of different materials is a different idea. There is no abstract concept of cooking pot; they need to know what the material was or it has no useful meaning.

Coming back to the Creation narrative, it’s not so simple as the Egyptian deity Chnum making man like pottery (it’s not likely literal for Egyptians, either). For the Hebrew, it’s rarely stated that way. It’s not so much that man and animals were made from dirt, but that dirt is where they belong. They are part of the same underlying fabric as the rest of the earth.

However, in the case of the woman, the material is critical to the image. She still participates in the fabric of mortality, but being made from part of the man indicates a relationship with him that is altogether different from how either of them relates to the rest of the world. Our problem is that the writer’s choice of the rib clearly holds special meaning that isn’t obvious to everyone. (I take the position that it relates to how the Hebrew word for “rib” is also a beam in a house. She is an essential member of his life as a whole.)

Boman does note that when the man names all the creatures, it signifies that they belong under his authority. They are in his domain, as is the woman. Instead of commenting further on that implication, he spends some words protesting the common western cultural vibe about sex as one thing, but marriage another. In Hebrew, the only way they could be separate is to violate the moral fabric of Creation.