Noah’s Ark: Time, Chronology and the Fall

The story of the flood may at first seem irrelevant for a book that focuses on the garden of Eden. For Barr, however, the flood story is integral to the discussion for two reasons. First, the flood story, as it appears in ancient Near Eastern literature, concerns immortality, what Barr argues the story of the Garden of Eden is all about. While the story as it exists may have less to do with immortality than its mesopotamian parallels, even Christian writers will use the flood story to reflect on resurrection (1 Peter 3:18-20). Second, “the world in which we live is a world that had its beginning with Noah and his times” (75). As a second creation story, the flood is helpful in addressing questions about the nature of humanity, for all humanity descend from Noah in the biblical narrative.

While Barr spends a brief amount of space discussion the chronology of the early chapters of Genesis with particular emphasis on the (gradually declining) life spans of the antediluvian patriarchs, the emphasis of this chapter falls on neither time or chronology, but with the (various) concept(s) of the Fall. While Christian interpretation, fueled by its reading of Paul, has typically turned to Genesis 3 as the answer for questions concerning the entrance of sin and death into an otherwise good world (understood as perfect), Barr sees Genesis 6 as the text which explains how a good world (understood with potential for greater or lesser goodness) was tainted by violence that made death (a natural aspect of life in the world God created) occur untimely and under improper circumstances. Barr reflects on how the gospels reflect on this aspect of Jesus’ death much more than on any other aspect of his life. Barr is critical of those who make death in abstract the enemy of God. As Barr understands it, “a death by violence, and in particular by enormous injustice, [is] exactly the conditions under which the Old Testament did see death as something like an ‘enmity to God’” (86).

Barr concludes by this chapter by reflecting on the concept of the/a Fall. He uses the debate between Ludwig Köhler and Emil Brunner as a launching point for addressing how the text of Genesis 3 should be approached. Köhler saw the text as an aetiological myth, “its purpose was to explain a series of contemporary phenomena” (87). Brunner (and Barr) found Köhler’s aetiologies unpersuasive. Brunner, because this led to the conclusion that Paul was “no better than a novice in biblical interpretation” (88). Barr goes on to explain, however, what he understands of Paul in this regard: “Paul was not interpreting the story in and for itself; he was really interpreting Christ through the uses of images from this story.” And this is where Barr differs significantly from Brunner, as he continues:

If the Old Testament text is to count as having some sort of authority in and for itself, then it must be free and able to utter a message of its own which may, at least in principle, be substantially different from the use which Paul made of certain selected and very limited elements within it, read through the perceptions and assumptions of a later and very different culture. It is useless to talk of the ‘authority’ of the Old Testament if in fact it is not allowed to say anything different from what Paul, or any other particular later interpreter, supposed it to be saying. (89)

Barr is unpersuaded by Köhler’s aetiologies because he see’s something more significant at work in the text; namely, immortality. “Immortality was the issue, and humanity ended up being (or remaining) mortal: Wisdom, followed by Paul, and later followed by the main theological traditions, rephrased this so as to say that the humans had been immortal but had lost this immortality. As I have put it, they never had it, but they had the chance of it, and lost that chance” (91). Thus, Barr concludes that man was never perfect or immortal, but was much like we are today.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

Chapter Three: Knowledge, Sexuality and Immortality

Barr begins this chapter by returning to an evaluation of the narrative of Genesis 2 and 3. His first object of discussion is the tree of life which fades into the background of the story following its introduction in Gen 2:9, only to resurface in 3:22. For Barr, the tree of life belongs to a separate story that was added later to the Garden narrative. However, its inclusion into the Garden narrative has “altere[d] very substantially the total general direction for the story,” making it “the sole express motivation for for the expulsion from the garden” (59). This means that Barr is “taking a ‘canonical’ approach, giving full value to the ‘final text’” (59). Based on God’s comments regarding its removal, Barr feels confident from a grammatical perspective that the couple had not yet previously eaten from it.

As for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Barr finds none of the current scholarly explanations regarding its significance very satisfying. “To me, it seems most likely that the power of rational and especially ethical discrimination is meant. This is something that belongs pre-eminently to deity, and particularly so in Israel. Before their disobedience the humans had no need for any such power. Their disobedience gives to them that power, but with it the perception of their own weakness and limitations” (62). Thus, Barr transitions from knowledge to sexuality.

Barr rejects the traditional Christian reading of this story whereby the nakedness is made to express the true feeling of guilt for the commission of a serious rebellious act against God. The knowledge gained by eating from the tree of knowledge brought about it the awareness of nakedness, and as a matter of propriety they hid themselves from God. Barr goes on, much as he did with the subject of death in chapter two, to evaluate nakedness in the Hebrew Bible. Among other things, he outlines the social impropriety of nakedness outside of a few exceptional contexts (marriage, prophecy) concluding that Adam and Eve were motivated to hide due to “a coming of consciousness of lines that must not be crossed, of rules that must be obeyed, and in this sense a discernment of ‘good and evil’” (64-5).

Before transitioning from nakedness to actual sexual activity, Barr entertains a tangential and speculative explanation of the origin of Eve, relating her name to Aramaic and Arabic cognates for ‘snake, suggesting that Eve herself might have, in an earlier strata of the text, been some sort of “‘serpent goddess’ who was perhaps, the goddess of life.” He admits that this is “perhaps incapable of proof,” but he does find it very attractive (65).

Barr spends a relatively large amount of space exploring the question of sexual activity, since many have interpreted this text as a story about the “achievement of awareness of sexuality” (66). Barr argues that the cultural assumptions of sexuality provide the most natural reading of the text. “Just as the natural cultural assumption was that humans were innately mortal, so it was the cultural assumption that they were sexually aware and active” (66). Among other considerations, Barr reflects on the exhortation for a man to “stick like glue” to his wife and to become “one flesh” earlier in the narrative, calling it “anticlima[ctic]” should they not actually become sexually involved until much later (69). Tying this in with the larger concerns of the narrative, Barr relates the knowledge offered by the cunning (ערום) snake with the new-found knowledge of their own nakedness (עירם), a knowledge that “reacts unpleasantly upon one’s own self-understanding” (69-70)

Barr also discusses technogony, but sees it differently than the text of Genesis 4. “Unlike the descendants of Cain later on, Adam and Eve do not learn anything technological. Covering themselves with leaves indicated the absence of technological improvement. Clothes, indeed, are now necessary for the humans, but it is God who makes them, not they themselves. . . . Civilization, if it means anything, means the making of distinctions, especially of ethical distinctions, and the consequent burden of differences, limitations and regulations” (70).

Finally, Barr briefly addresses the concept of the image of God (rejecting those who argue that this image was somehow defaced by a “fall”) before concluding this chapter:

The power of knowledge endows humans with a transcendence over the absolute limitations of their physical existence. The same knowledge, however, brings with it self-knowledge, and in particular self-consciousness plus the possible awareness of fault and shame. Moreover, the fact that man fails to add immortality to his knowledge only reinstates on another level his weaknesses and limitations. Knowledge may involve contact with the eternal, but sickness, mortality and other aspects of the human condition bring about another set of tragic weaknesses.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

Barr’s second chapter addresses the two topics highlighted in his chapter title. He summarizes his own chapter well:

I do not suppose that in this chapter I have proved the immortality of the soul; it was not my purpose to do so. Nor has it been my purpose to argue that the immortality of the soul is a good thing, or a bad thing, for people to believe in. What I think I have shown is that, for much of the Hebrew Bible, death, so long as it was in proper time and in good circumstances, was both natural and proper in God’s eyes; that the Old Testament provides thoughts and aspects out of which ideas of the immortality of the soul could naturally and easily develop; and that the world on the basis of which much of the New Testament was written was a world in which the belief in that immortality was lively and strongly represented. (56)

Having argued in his previous chapter that Paul’s interpretation of Genesis 3 shares the concerns of Hellenistic thought rather than the concerns expressed in the actual text, he moves forward with his argument that death is portrayed throughout the Bible as something that is natural, not as something unnatural and opposed to God which Adam introduced when he sinned. His first line of argument is to survey a number of passages which implicitly assume or explicitly state that God is the author of both life and death, paying careful attention to those passages which might suggest otherwise. Building off this line of thinking he discusses the circumstances in which death is viewed as natural, namely when it bring about completion and fulfillment to a life well (or even poorly) lived, when it is followed by a proper burial, and when it is followed by a good name and offspring.

Barr then goes on to discuss the rather undefined concept of Sheol in the Old Testament. While the implicit assumption is that all the dead end up in Sheol, he observes that none of the most hallowed characters in the biblical narrative are said to end up there (but what of Samuel?). Sheol may be perceived as an undesirable destination for the dead, similar in ways to the New Testament conception of Hell. While Sheol is not strictly considered life after death, it does suggest a continuance of the person, and some headed to Sheol expressed their conviction that “the God of Israel has, potentially, presence in Sheol, power to control the destiny of his own ones who are there, but, must important, ability to hear their prayers and to have some sort of communion with them” (33). And if all this is true, might he not also have the “power to keep them out of Sheol and, if need be, to remove them thence” (33)? While Barr moves forward tentatively at this point, he expresses concern between the intersection of the meaning behind the word death as it is used by these authors and death as we mean it. Those familiar with his Semantics of Biblical Language will recognize Barr’s honed ability to criticize the meaning of a word in light of its various contexts.

If it is true that this correctly represents the language of the Bible (and I am still not sure that it does), all it seems to prove is that biblical materials framed in this language are not suitable for helping us with problems of what we call death. ‘Death’ in this poetic biblical sense may be a curse, may be opposition to God, may be a force that challenges him and opposes him, but that only proves that we are talking about something other than death. (34)

Barr then moves on to discuss the topic of the soul. He discusses the view that Hebrew thought conceived of the body and soul as a singular totality (living being, nephesh, נפשׂ), much like much modern thought considers man to be, body and mind, a psychosomatic unity. Wielding his semantic lightsaber, Barr penetrates the semantic differences occurring between body and soul in Hebrew thought. 1) People speak to their soul, “which is something like a superior companion or accompaniment to that totality” (39). 2) Body and soul are sometimes cast as oppositional terms. 3) The soul is mobile, sometimes leaving the body (and even returning on occasion). Thus, Barr concludes:

I submit, then, that it seems probably that in certain contexts the nephesh is not, as much present opinion favours, a unity of body and soul, a totality of personality comprising all these elements: it is rather, in these contexts, a superior controlling centre which accompanies, expresses and directs the existence of that totality, and one which, especially, provides the life to the whole. Because it is the life giving element, it is difficult to conceive that it itself will die. . . . With the recognition of this fact the gate to immortality lies open.” (42-3)

Barr goes on to discuss a few other topics–Later Hebrew thinking, The impact of ‘sceptical’ Wisdom, Variety of thought on our subject, Martyrdom, and The Wisdom of Solomon–before concluding.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

Chapter One

James Barr’s The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality is based on five lectures he presented in 1990 at the Reed-Tuckwell Lectures, a lectureship dedicated to discussing “human immortality and subjects thereto related” (1). He begins with a brief review of the development of the understanding of immortality in the twentieth century, concluding “that while some traditions of theology . . . have continued to be very interested in the theme of immortality, others, and especially important trends in the use of the Bible within theology, have tended to become hostile to the entire idea of it and to disregard it as an element in biblical thought” (3).

Barr clearly disagrees with such a conclusion. Focusing on the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, he contends that “taken in itself and for itself, this narrative is not, as it has commonly been understood in our tradition, basically a story of the origins of sin and evil, still less a depiction of absolute evil or total depravity; it is a story of how human immortality was almost gained, but in fact was lost” (4). Barr’s focus on the text “taken in itself and for itself” allows him to reject the influence of Paul’s typological reading of Adam in his theological examination of the stories in Genesis. Whatever Paul was doing, “it was not an essential structure of the earliest Christian faith but was a part of the typology which one particular person or tradition found helpful for the expressing of an understanding of Christ” (5).

He takes particular pains in the first chapter to deconstruct this traditional Christian reading, illustrating how such a reading is rarely (if ever) propped up by the narrative itself. This reading, he identifies, is born from “later strata of the Old Testament, including the books that are outside the present Hebrew canon” (18). The absence of the term ‘sin,’ the unwillingness of other Hebrew Bible authors to appeal to this story as the origin of sin and evil, and the lack of any true rebellious motivation on the part of Adam or Eve constitute some of the observations that lead Barr to focus on a different trajectory for the story.

“Adam and Eve were mortals, as human being normally were, but through disobedience or mischance, perhaps of a relatively minor  nature, they came near to the achieving of eternal life. The importance of this for our subject is great, for it means that in the structure of biblical ideas immortality does not come in a the margin, at the latest point, or through the intrusion of Greek philosophy. It is present, at least as an idea, at the earliest stages, and is a force that thereby has an effect on much of the thought of later times” (14-15).

Barr thus finds immortality in a prominent position in the Hebrew Bible and promises to pursue a more constructive reading of the Garden of Eden narrative in subsequent chapters.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

1. The compositional paradigm, seen in the establishment of authorship, dates, and literary relationships.

2. The positivistic paradigm, which has the interest of tying biblical characters, places, and events to external history. Barr points out that this is clearly related to the above in that compositional data are helpful toward this goal.

3. The archaeological paradigm, more broad in scope, which uses the Bible as only one data point in its reconstruction of the history of Israel. It not only draws on native material culture but on any foreign sources that can illuminate the subject.

4. The history-as-revelation paradigm, namely that God acted in history and is know in that way. Barr: “It distinguishes biblical religion from (all?) other religion.”

5. The “historical reading” paradigm, which has the same interests as any historical criticism but without the concomitant skepticism and source analysis.

To this could be added a sixth, James Barr’s own “story.” Rather than getting caught up in the details of historical criticism or the systematization of a more doctrinal/dogmatic approach, this model seeks to do justice to the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures, drawing from the above in differing proportions. Barr spends this chapter, “Story and Biblical Theology”, elaborating on it.

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James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. London: SCM Press, 1999

The approach is that of tracing traditio-historical trajectories from within the tradition, rather than approaching the material from a history-of-religions perspective which strives for an allegedly objective description of religious phenomena. (108)

Barr then writes:

How does a ‘tradito-historical trajectory’ really differ from a proposal within the history of religion? Why should we suppose that the history of religion ‘falsely compartmentalizes the material’, and if this is true then why is it not also true of the traditio-historical categories which Childs himself embraces on the same page? How does Childs know that ‘religion in general’, i.e. all religion, is a ‘human response seeking to merit God’s favour’? Unless he has studied all religions, which would be a history-of-religion undertaking, he cannot know whether this is the case or not. Is not the idea that religions seek to ‘merit God’s favour’ a mere reflection from one current of Christianity, based on no real study of other religions? Above all, are the ‘trajectories’ really ‘historical’, in the sense that they can be established, verified and falsified through historical methods, or are they really purely theological connections expressed as if they were historical ‘trajectories’? The weakness in these arguments is not untypical of many attempts to dissociate biblical theology from the history of religion. (108, 109)

This is quite typical of what he does in other chapters on, for example, “non-theological study.” There, in showing that biblical theology cannot stand apart from exegesis with its philology and historical criticism, Barr says, “The references to cultural and geographical realia are part of the meaning: without them the text becomes, at relevant points, empty words.” (79)

The point he’s making is that biblical theology cannot theologize out of its own entrails—a purely theological approach only works with philosophical theology. Biblical theology must interact with the text and in so doing cannot avoid these other approaches. He specifically draws on the influence of dialectical theology and its desire to avoid ‘apologetics.’ Barr says it isn’t avoidable. Once you start to exegete, it’s impossible to avoid the question of veracity.

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James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. London: SCM Press, 1999

It was Israel who sang the Psalms to God, not God who addressed them to Israel.

Barr, J. (1980) “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities”, in The Scope and Authority of the Bible. SCM Press. pp. 114

Read it in context here.

The gunman worked from a parking structure just thirty yards away?point-blank range for a trained military sniper like James Barr. His victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But why does Barr want Reacher at his side? There are good reasons why Reacher is the last person Barr would want to see. But when Reacher hears Barr?s own words, he understands. And a slam-dunk case explodes. Soon Reacher is teamed with a young defense lawyer who is working against her D.A. father and dueling with a prosecution team that has an explosive secret of its own. Like most things Reacher has known in life, this case is a complex battlefield. But, as always, in battle, Reacher is at his best.

Moving in the shadows, picking his spots, Reacher gets closer and closer to the unseen enemy who is pulling the strings. And for Reacher, the only way to take him down is to know his ruthlessness and respect his cunning?and then match him shot for shot?.

From the Hardcover edition.

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