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Was there a ‘Fall’?
Christians say the world is bad. Bible scholars don’t.
Have you noticed that impressions of the Bible’s Creation story tend to be weirdly unrelated to the text? Two white people eating an apple by a tree? Nope. Blaming the woman? Didn’t happen. Men told to dominate women? Sorry. And is there a ‘Fall’? Christians like to say so, but in Genesis 1, God says the world is good! He never changes his mind.
“For everything God created is good,” as Paul affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4. No fundamental change of status occurs. The “Fall” is a myth.
Growing up Evangelical, I heard it so many times, I didn’t even know how to think of “religion” without that concept. Checking in with Bible scholars, I found cues to a different reading.
Warning: You won’t get to blame women!
In Genesis 1, God says the earth is “good,” then “very good” — but what does that mean? For Christianity, it meant earthly life used to be a perfect paradise, with no suffering, pain, or problems. It isn’t that way now, therefore, the “Fall” must’ve happened.
Is that really what the Hebrew word tov means? There is no divine dictionary, so we’d look around for context. The scholar John Day, in From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1–11, points to Judges 15:2, where we find the same ‘good’ as in…
