Israel is Adam
Sunday, March 14th, 2010Those who followed my recent links to Peter Enns on Creation and Exodus will recognize the title of this post inverts Enns’ title: Adam is Israel.
In his series of posts, Enns argues (successfully, I think) that the author of Exodus intentionally described the birth of Israel in “creation” language and images drawn directly from the the first chapters of Genesis. The creation of Israel is a kind of “new creation.” So far, so good, in my opinion.
His argument leads him to the parallel stories of Adam and Israel in which Enns finds the following pattern:
Israel’s history as a nation can be broken down as follows:
- Israel is “created” by God at the exodus through a cosmic battle (gods are defeated and the Red Sea is “divided”);
- The Israelites are given Canaan to inhabit, a lush land flowing with milk and honey;
- They remain in the land as long as they obey the Mosaic law;
- They persist in a pattern of disobedience and are exiled to Babylon.
Israel’s history parallels Adam’s drama in Genesis:
From this, Enns concludes:
Adam is the beginning of Israel, not humanity. . . . In other words, the Adam story is really an Israel story placed in primeval time. It is not a story of human origins but of Israel’s origins. . . . We are quite justified in concluding that the Adam story is not about absolute human origins but the beginning of one smaller subset, one particular people. The parallels between Israel and Adam that we see above tell us that the particular people in mind are Israel. Adam is “proto-Israel.”
Writing at Biologos, Enns expends a good bit of effort addressing those who take the first chapters of Genesis as a scientific explanation of human origins, a topic in which I have absolutely no interest. My concern is this: why did the author of Genesis use the pattern of Israel’s history in telling the story of Adam?
This is Enns’ answer to that question:
Some might object that Genesis 1-11 deals with universal matters, not merely one people: the entire cosmos created in Genesis 1, the flood, the disbursement of the nations after the flood. Absolutely. No question there. But the point is this: after the creation of humanity in Genesis 1, Genesis 2 begins to tell the story of “proto-Israel.” In other words, Israel was not a latecomer, coming into existence only in the exodus. Israel was always there as God’s specially chosen people since the beginning.
The parallelism that Enns sees here is intentional, I think, but Enns turns the authors’ intent on its head. Let me suggest an alternative answer: Israel is God’s new creation, but it shares an Adam-like rebelliousness that is characteristic of all humanity. Those who belong to the people of Israel also belong to the larger family of Adam.