How To Tell An Everlasting Story

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

I teach fiction to teenagers.  When I teach it, I give them examples of the elements of fiction:  character, setting, conflict, plot, and theme.  

All those elements appear in all stories.  Rarely, as in some short stories, is there one of each element.  In stories, there can be a multiplicity of characters, settings, etc.

Every time I teach these elements we talk about what makes a story sparkle, what makes readers turn the pages or go back to the story over and over.  The elements, combined with tone, mood, and point of view, appeal to everyone, but only one in the short list gives stories their dynamite.  

You can create ho-hum characters, an exchangeable setting, a clunky plot, and hackneyed themes, but throw an interesting conflict into a story and watch it ignite.  Conflict is why lousy movies make so much money.

The story of Adam and Eve is allegorical from the get-go.  Anytime anyone reads a narrative with obvious symbols, a bell should go off in their heads that lets them know they are not reading history as it happened.  That bell, by the way, is only for people who are incapable of detecting lore before they step through its portal.

Look at this story of Adam and Eve.  The Hebrew name Adam means "mankind" (bell ringing softly here).  We have a garden (bell ringing a little louder) with a talking snake (ringing like Scrooge's now) and trees with long names (clanging everlastingly).  

Adam is shown all the creatures of the world, having named every single every single every single one (except the microbial creepy crawlers and raccoons).  We must assume Yahweh created them in pairs, but maybe not since Adam was the only one of Adam's kind.  So goes the logic of the story.

Yahweh figures out that Adam has no suitable mate.  That one cow, elephant, roach, kangaroo, kangaroo, the really funny one called an armadillo, and let's not forget the toucans-- none were great chums.  
Adam must have named the snake.  He could talk at least, but the things he said must have made him unsuitable too.  

Of course, the list of animals goes on and on.  We cannot be certain that the animals Adam named boarded Noah's ark.  

We can shorten the list if we imagine only species indigenous to Mesopotamia, but then we would have to take out the armadillo and the kangaroo.

It's funny to imagine Adam, if you follow the logic of the story, having the intellectual command of language and experience of reality to come up with all those names, in Hebrew, of course. 

What is the Hebrew word for kangaroo, armadillo, and raccoon? 

The story is as much about women as it is about men.  

All those animals are not doing it for Adam so Yahweh puts him to sleep, takes out one of his ribs (and we must imagine it growing back immediately since men and women really do have the same number of ribs), and Yahweh then grows Eve, the first test tube fully grown non-baby.

Now, this story that began so bizarrely suddenly takes an interesting turn as an incipient conflict emerges from that one rib.

Blessings...