Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate

by Michelle Lee-Barnewall

This is the first time God speaks directly in the passage. Robert Tannehill notes the importance of dialogue in narrative: The use of dialogue in a dramatic scene involves the expansion of the amount of space in a writing given to a segment of time in the story, compared to the alternative possibility of presenting an event or series of events in a brief summary. Thus dialogue in a dramatic scene emphasizes, while summary narration of events gives them a subordinate position.32 Only the command not to eat of the tree, and not the command to cultivate the garden, is presented as a spoken command. The centrality of this particular command in the progression of the story is furthermore demonstrated in that throughout the rest of the story, the narrative continually presents it as direct speech either by God himself or as repeated by the other characters.