I have read the creation story in the Bible numerous times throughout my life, but have never read it from a literary standpoint until this class. Doing this, and paying even closer attention to how the environment plays a role on the story and towards the characters, I found that the story had more meaning and symbolism than I had ever realized. The story also incorporates a direct relationship that the environment has with Adam and Eve. The role of power in this story changes throughout the two chapters. In this story, God created the world and everything in it and saw that it was perfect. He then gave humans the power over the environment, “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on earth” (Genesis 1:26). To me, this means that God created the world and everything in it for humans. Later in the story, God also gives Adam the power of naming all living things, “So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Genesis 2:20). To me this led me to believe that God wanted humans to hold the power on earth over the animals, until he created the Garden of Eden.
When creating the Garden of Eden, God made sure there was plenty of food for Adam and Eve but he created a “tree of knowledge and good and evil” (Genesis, 2:17). To me this showed that God was putting power in the opposite source than before. While earlier in the story, Adam was naming the animals and had control over them, the power was shifted to the environment holding the power. People were now going to the earth for food and a source of life. Specifically, there was power in the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but God told them not to touch that tree, as the power would not help them. This then led a serpent to come up to Eve and tempt her into eating from the tree against God’s wishes. I thought that this was interesting because the power roles in the environment were changing throughout the story. At the beginning the power was in the hands of the people but by the end God had put the power in the tree. There was also some power that the serpent had because he was able to tempt Eve into disobeying God.
Your post offers the beginnings of an interesting discussion of the shifting power relations in the story of Genesis! Another way to think of these ideas is through the concept of agency. Who has agency (same root as the word “genesis”) in the story or stories? Who is denied agency? Through what mechanisms is agency transferred (i.e. through the mechanism of language–of naming, of calling, etc.)? These are questions that we could apply to most any text, and particularly environmental texts. Also how would you define the power relations, or who has the agency, at the very end of the genesis stories that we read? And in comparison to the Pima creation story?