Jerlands:
Maybe the best way to understand if you don't read Hebrew is to listen to a Rabbi speak to the lesson.
I have, in fact, done both, although it has been many years since I learned to read classical Hebrew and I have forgotten much of it. I still have my Brown, Driver, Briggs lexicon and can use it. I have read rabbinical commentaries. I have also read, talked, and thought a good deal about interpretation or hermeneutics.
We can question the accuracy of the Torah used today but that's a lengthy discussion.
The point of the story was that the question of accuracy was there from the beginning, from God to Adam to Eve. It was Robert Sack’s commentary on Genesis “The Lion and the Ass” that first brought this to my attention.
If you listen to different Jewish teachers discuss specifically Genesis 2 you probably will get a very different impression of the story of Adam and Eve.
I would say you get very different impressions from one to the next and the same can be said about any text that is sufficiently complex.
If you go further and listen to Kabbalah then the insights change.
Been there, done that.
The story of Adam and Eve isn't one that can be removed from context. The reason is that meaning isn't easily conveyed in any form of expression known to man. If you consider God created man in his image then man basically has a like purpose. The statement God created man in his likeness comes before the story of Adam and Eve and therefore a pretext is established.
In my opinion, the context of the story of Adam and Eve was originally separate from the context of what Genesis 1. Two different and in some ways diametrically opposed stories. The first a story of a world that came to be out of the separation of the waters, the second, a world that came to be out of a dry world in which nothing could happen or grow until the rains. Genesis 2 says nothing about being made in God’s image. Man was made from the dust of the earth and given the breath of life. Eve come from Adam. Genesis 1 plays on the singularity and duality of both men and gods, both male and female. In Genesis 2 man’s original wholeness is destroyed and man and woman strive to attain unity or wholeness together. Like Adam and Eve the two opposite stories of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 together form a unity. Both motion and rest, change and stasis, are necessary for life.
I frankly don't see the problem.
There is the old joke that Jews love to tell: ask two Jews get three different opinions. The problem is you will find many different and often conflicting opinions. What you will not find is the purpose as if it were a single agreed upon thing.
Greek knowledge is not Greek. It has its roots in Egypt as does most all sources of western thought.
As with any culture that is not isolated there is influence. Whatever the Greeks may have learned from elsewhere it is the works of Plato and Aristotle that are most important for the development of the west.
You want to question mysticism without the basis.
It was not called messianic age for nothing. The coming of a messiah was a widespread belief, not something the average person learned from mystical experience or hermeticism or introduction in cult mysticism. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus has been described by some as a mystical experience, but it is what he told his followers and how they understood and believed what he said that formed Christianity.
It really doesn't make a beans worth of difference to me in this lifetime is in fact there was a historical Jesus or if this is merely a teaching. It just doesn't matter to me.
The teaching attributed to and about Christ cannot be separated from the figure of Jesus, whether that figure was historical or mythical. Central to that teaching is the notion of the messiah. What Paul taught about the messiah seems to have had some unique elements, although it is possible that what he taught did not originate with him. I am, however, not aware of any evidence of this. What is clear is that within a few generations what the Christians taught differed significantly from what Paul taught.
There is what's known as the symbol and symbolic and those are things used in ancient thought and expression.
This type of esotericism, secret knowledge, and initiation into the mysteries, just doesn’t matter to me. It did hold some interest for me a long ago when I was a teenager but after a while none of it rang true.
