Author’s Note: Sorry I’ve been away for some time. Life has been tumultuous. I hope to be back to regular posting soon. Thank you for staying with me.
“And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” Bible, Genesis 3:21
Adam and Eve fell when they partook of the fruit of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As I discussed here, Good and Evil did not originally have the strong moralistic overtones that they carry today. Good was closer to being a synonym for “strong” that it was for “right” or “moral”, and likewise Evil meant, more or less, to be weak. In the beginning man lived in total faith and union with the Divine, a state the Bible describes as “walking with God.” He had no knowledge of good or evil because the idea that he could be “weak” had not yet occurred to him. The idea that he might be "hurt”, or “in pain”, or “sad”… all of these things were alien concepts that had never entered his mind. Rightly so, for when one is walking with God, all such things are impossible.
We see this still in the animals. Not that they are walking with God per se, but they are innocent. They have little or no knowledge of good or evil. Of strength and weakness. The idea that they may one day be hurt or that they will one day die does not seem to ever enter their minds. It’s impossible to say, of course, what exactly goes on in the head of an armadillo or an elk, but from my own interactions with such creatures they do not appear to be cognizant of their own mortality. There is a lightness to them. A lack of tension caused by fear or anxiety. Certainly they sense the need to run from a wolf or a lion, should one appear, but they have no fear of things which are not immediately present. They don’t worry that a wolf might come tomorrow like we worry about a cancer that might appear next year or a job we might lose next month. Unless the wolf is standing before them in that instant there is no fear. They do not appear to regard an end to their own lives as inevitable and certain. Even when death happens they seem at most confused by it. The smarter animals, elephants and so on, do appear to show some degree of mourning, but most animals seem simply bewildered. “Gary is not moving,” thinks the deer over the carcass of his brother. “How strange. Well, I shall go eat grass until he gets up.”\
Children possess this too. The innocence of Eden remains in them, even if they are no longer fully walking with God. As anyone who has ever had a toddler can attest, the feats of daring that small children perform on a playground or a park can be somewhat astounding. Without a second thought they will venture out onto a ledge or a beam or some other precarious position if they are unsupervised for too long. Such behavior illicits many terrified screams from Mothers but, paradoxically, for the child’s part is it precisely because they do not fear that the falls so often do not happen. Much as a mountain climber can only scale the cliff if he is unafraid. Fear produces that from which it seeks to flee. Fear makes pain certain.
In like fashion, primordial Man, Adam, the man in paradise, likewise did not think about himself being hurt, or getting sick, or dying. Indeed, he couldn’t have done so even if he’d tried. And, like the toddler above, because he didn’t think about it, he didn’t fear it. Because he didn’t fear it, it didn’t happen.
Perhaps that seems a strange assertion to make. That if you had no fear of pain, pain would never come upon you. Nonetheless, that is the broad takeaway of the message of Jesus, far as I can understand it. He claimed that if you have faith the grain of a mustard seed then even death itself could be undone. Physical ailments healed instantly. Mouths of lions shut tight. IF.
If only you have faith.
Fear is the polar opposite of faith you see. The opposite of walking with God. So, when Adam and Eve fell out of communion with God, fear, and therefore pain, was the only natural consequence. All of a sudden the forests and jungles through which they had freely frolicked were strange and scary and foreboding. Bushes scratched at them. They discovered the existence of thorns. They noticed then that the evenings were cold, and suddenly there was the threat of sunstroke in the day. In an instant their eyes were opened, and it occurred to them suddenly that their hairless bodies might be punctured, might get torn. They were afraid. They hid.
Thus begins technology.
All technology, dear reader, is band-aid for the consequences of sin.
The garments of skin with which God clothes the fearful couple after their fall are the first technological innovation and all further innovation since has served the same purpose. The garments are a covering. A shield. They offered the man and the woman some protection from all that they had recently learned to fear. Faith in God was no longer possible, too afraid, but they could alternatively have faith in something else. Something tangible. Something right at hand. They could not longer believe that God would protect them, but the rough leather of an animal skin? Okay. They could believe that.
It’s all been downhill since.
The city you live in. The walls of your house. The internet. Email. The shoes you wear to go outside and guns and knives. The birth control pill. Lysol. N95 masks. The oven in your kitchen which helps assure you that the internal temperature of you food has reached at least 165 degrees.
All of these are coverings. Garments of skin. Shields against nature and the natural world. All the infrastructure, the chemicals, the weapons, all the social conventions we believe we are forced to live by… all of these serve as substitute protectors. Stand-ins for God. In a very real sense these things are our gods, for that which you trust to care for you is your deity. And so Man, being the creature most aware of Good and Evil, of strength and health or weakness and pain, is also the creature that sees everything around him as a potential threat. That’s why he can’t live outside like an antelope. Man can’t be at peace there. Not enough coverings. He’s too fallen. Too separated from God. Too afraid.
Now, it’s not all downside mind you. The coverings give you a kind of power. A kind of strength. A gun for example, or the pill. Each allows you, if you’d like to use them as such, to act in ways you otherwise wouldn’t get away with. You can foil nature’s attempt to send a lion to eat you with a gun or nature’s attempt to put a baby in your belly with the pill. They are both the same thing, at base. Coverings. Shields which allow you to act without fear of consequences. You may not trust God to protect you on the African Savanna, but you can trust Smith and Wesson to. You may not trust God to provide for your baby, but Johnson and Johnson makes sex with that stranger at the bar okay anyway.
See, technology is always a kind of deal with the devil.
It’s power bought with a cost.
The gun protects you, sure, but in another’s hands it might do the opposite. It’s like shoes. They allow you to walk where you otherwise couldn’t, but… they also make your feet soft.
See, you become dependent on the garments of skin that you wear. Eventually so much so that you can’t imagine living without them. They’ve got their hooks in you. You’re an addict. Dependent. And every dependency makes you a little more a slave. This is why The Bible describes us as being “slaves to sin.” Because we’ve become dependent on the coverings we wear and can no longer return to our natural state. We can’t walk with God. Indeed, some of us have grown so dependent on technology that we cannot walk at all. Cars and mobility scooters.
But… that’s the way of it.
The Devil offers you Power. Perhaps even up unto the power of the atom bomb.
At a cost.
The cost of growing soft beneath those coverings. The cost of your dependency. The cost of your alienation from the natural world, your fellow man, and God.
That’s the story of Genesis.
Well… the backstory anyway.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, you only get hints of this history in the Bible but the fullness of it is fleshed out in Tradition and the apocrypha, most notably in The Book of Enoch, which the Ethiopian Church has always included in their cannon.
After the fall, God concedes a little and gives men a bit in the way of coverings, in the way of technology. But, only a bit. He gives them garments of made from animal skin and it is vaguely implied that he perhaps also instructs Adam in the rudimentary basics of growing food. All of it very minimalistic you understand. Remember, this was never supposed to happen. Man wasn’t supposed to need to work for his living, nor ever be in fear of danger nor disease. God grants Man technology after the fall, but only just enough. The bare minimum to help them get along in their newly fallen state. He doesn’t want them to get comfortable or to become reliant on the coverings he has made. He wants them to repent. He wants them to return to Eden and live in paradise. The early fathers of the Church, most of them anyway, believed that if Adam and Eve had simply said they were sorry, all the sad history of Man since would never needed to have happened. They could have gone back to the Garden, and the spirits guarding it would have put aside their flaming swords. That was God’s plan.
The angels had another one.
Well, the fallen angels at any rate. The demons wanted humanity to take a different path. They just needed an avatar. Someone to work through. Someone to do their bidding.
“Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”
Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.” — Bible, Genesis 4: 1-8
So the demons of jealousy and wrath found their golden child, Cain. And all manner of evils would thenceforth be worked through him.
Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.” — Bible, Genesis 4:16-17
Tradition holds that after his exile and the founding of Enoch, Cain went on to commit a multitude of other sins. Sins like inventing money, property rights, and establishing a government.
Perhaps you are surprised?
Such things are so ubiquitous in our age that we would not even register them as wrong. Certainly not “sinful.” But, they are all coverings you see. Additional technologies. Social technologies, sure, but technologies all the same. Laws, rules, regulations, government, currency, all of these are but the technologies that fallen man has invented to live amongst his brothers without murdering them again as he did in the beginning. They are means of mediation amongst the sinful. Only bad people need rules. Angels? The ones in Heaven? Angels don’t need such things. There is no IRS in the sky. No need for a celestial police department or heavenly zoning committee. God made trees. Satan and Man cut those trees down and made dollars.
The story doesn’t stop there though. For in those days there were giants.
When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” — Bible, Genesis 6:1-4
As we discussed in part 3, “The Nephilim” has traditionally been translated in English as “The Giants.” Gilgamesh was one such Giant. As was Hercules. As were most of the heroes of antiquity whose names still reverberate through the ages. Through the process of telling and retelling the story over the eons, such characters have been reduced to a much more manageable, more human size. But, in the earliest forms of these epics it was not so. The “demi-gods” were giants. Gilgamesh , for example, was around seventeen feet tall (eleven cubits) and possessing otherworldly strength of body and fire of soul. They were children born from a union between the gods (in the bible, “the songs of god”, i.e., the angels) and mortal women. An unholy and extremely sexual union. Often, if you care to know, of the most debased and debauched sort.
As stated, the apocryphal books, like The Book of Enoch (no relation to Enoch, son of Cain, for whom the first city is named) flesh out the story further for us than these scant glimpses we get in Genesis. So doing, they make it known to us that this unholy sexual congress was not at all a one-sided affair. Far from it. By all appearances, the descendants of Cain and those of his city, willingly offered their wives and daughters in exchange for knowledge from the “gods.” For power.
For, yes, technology.
Elsewhere in the world this primeval transaction is portrayed as a good thing. Prometheus for example, gave Man fire, and in Greek myth this is painted as an act of love and compassion, a powerful god pitying a weak and feeble race of mortals. An act for which Prometheus unjustly suffers. Egyptian mythology likewise paints a picture of gods coming down from Heaven and making men great by sharing their wisdom. Often at great personal cost to the gods themselves. So common is this motif that it has been said that Mankind really has only one story. One mythology. Star people, or gods, or angels, or some similar such thing, descended, and gave us the gifts of knowledge which set us apart from the animals. The Bible does not disagree about the facts of the matter in this regard. It only disagrees that the gods doing so was good.
Strange as it may sound to our ears now, we who, if we have been raised in Christianity at all, have been raised in a watered-down, castrated version of it, the Promethean story is central to the Biblical world view. “Prometheus” goes by different, Hebraic names, of course, but the story is more or less the same. Wholeheartedly the Bible agrees that Man’s technological knowledge in the beginning came from otherworldly sources. Unlike the rest of the myths from the era however, the Bible sees this primarily as a great evil. The gifts of knowledge made us powerful, yes. But powerful to what end? According to scripture, those gifts mostly increased our power to do evil. To kill. To whore. To conquest over nature. To satisfy our greed. Among the list of technologies given to Man by the fallen ones are things like metallurgy to make weapons of war, the art of making medicines (but also poisons), the knowledge of astrology, how to make dyes for makeup empowering women to weaponize lust. And, of course, the list goes on. And on. Man repeatedly handing over the women of his tribe to the gods in exchange for various forms of knowledge, of power. Eventually this demonic influence takes over most of the world and God feels forced to start over.
Enter, The Flood.
We have been habituated to think of “The Fall” as a one time event, and in a sense it was. But the actual story of The Bible is one of a series of falls. A progressive chain of degradations. Being kicked out of Eden was only the start of our troubles. After we transgressed further with the first murder, our kind was moved further out from Paradise, truly well and good away from Eden into the land of Nod. Then we began cavorting with fallen angels. Ever more fearful that God would not accept us again, that Our Father in Heaven would not provide for us, we ran ever more into the arms of other spirits and other powers who we thought might. In so doing we added layer upon layer of covering upon ourselves, each one an additional barrier between ourselves and God.
Man was naked in the garden. We are not naked now.
The Fall from Grace was not the end but the beginning. The Promethean deal for power in defiance of the will of Heaven was another step. A step that we are still taking.
I mean, look around and tell me that iPhones have been a net good for human souls. Instagram is a narcissism machine. Facebook an automated rage generator. The internet browser itself is a portal to every form of lust. This is why monks exist you see. Ascetics. All over the world, people who embark on a serious spiritual path have felt it necessary to withdraw from society and its powers into a life of utmost simplicity. Asceticism is an attempt to remove the garments of skin we have been born covered in. The man who retreats to a hermitage in the woods is renouncing a great many coverings indeed. He is trying to, like Adam, once more be naked before his creator. To be unclothed before God.
Because, make no mistake, the coverings of technology do give you power.
But it comes at a cost.
And what profit it a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?
Once you notice the pattern of the garments of skin at play, you notice the theme repeating over and over again in Scripture. It’s a recurring problem, one that each of us wrestles with everyday. We are no longer as we were meant to be. We aren’t “natural” men and women. We are augmented. Our truest selves are covered under many layers, profound barriers to Love. This is why purified man is always shown as having new garments. Why the Transfigured Christ had garments “whiter than anyone could bleach them.” Garments of Light. Same reason why characters in the Bible are routinely asked to remove their shoes in the presence of God. It is perhaps even why God seems to have preferred the nomads and the shepherds to the city folk. Men living closer to the land. Men living, if you like, with less clothes.
Conclusion
Thus far in this series we have examined the foundational myths of the Bible. Creation, The Fall, The Flood, the interchange between Man and Angels, and The Garments of Skin. While not exhaustive, this forms enough of a basis for understanding the basic language of the Bible that we can move forward with the hope of understanding many of the later stories. To that end, in the next installment, we will move on from the early stories of Genesis and discuss the man of faith, Abraham, the principles of karma, and the inevitability of human sacrifice.
Glad to see your post. I hope you have been well.
I don't even remember how I found your blog but I'm so glad I did. I'm doing a read-through of the Bible while also reading Orthodox theologians. Your Bible series goes along perfectly with my studies. I was raised in the Protestant tradition and I want to connect with a more ancient form of the faith.