How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation

by John Dominic Crossan

From all of this, I take these four conclusions about “original sin” in the Bible. First, according to the explicit text of the Bible, “sin” occurred originally not in the divine garden of Genesis 2–3 but in the human field of Genesis 4. Second, “sin” in Genesis 4 is not a flaw in creation but in civilization, a fault not in nature but in culture. Third, original sin is not about individuals and sex but about communities and violence. It is about humanity’s penchant for escalatory violence as its drug of choice. Fourth, sin is not inescapable or irresistible: “you will rule over it,” says God in Genesis 4:7, as a divine wager on the human conscience. My next step is to link Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 to Noah and the flood in Genesis 6–9 along that escalating trajectory of human, and now divine, violence. Notice, however, that the violence of divine retributive justice has not been present up to this point in the first half dozen chapters of our Bible. But, as you brace yourself now for the flood story, always remember that Israel adopted and adapted that story from Mesopotamian tradition. It did not imagine it or create it from its own soul.