Canter Bridge

In the midst of one of its less inspiring genealogies, the Bible offers us a brief glimpse at the remote fringe of what must have been a remarkable story. As it is wont to do, rabbinical tradition would fill in the absence of detail regarding a certain Enoch. The biblical text presents this man in its most sparing voice:

When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him. When Methuselah had lived one hundred eighty-seven years, he became the father of Lamech.

The comment about Enoch ‘walking with God’ and about God taking him—whatever these things might mean—stands out against a strictly patterned genealogy that merely names biological antecedents, successors, and their respective life spans. Continue Reading »

The serpent figures in the paradigmatic story of human origins as the Bible’s first cynic. He has strong ideas about the arbitrary nature of God’s decrees and the selfish motive that lies behind them:

But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

The serpent has some convenient data with which to work. God in fact does not give a reason for his unexpected ring-fencing of just one tree when he has already given the whole ranch over to the first couple. It seems so unreasonable and, certainly, asymmetrical. It is the kind of thing that raises suspicions. Continue Reading »