What did Adam and Eve not know?

MyChainsAreGone said:

There are a lot of things that I could respond to in your post... but let me just challenge the really big points that I don't think are defensible.


First point...

There's no solid basis to assert that the nakedness was only a "metaphor." The account is related as a truthful historical account... not some sort of analogy or metaphor.

And your assertion that "nakedness" and "shame" mean the same thing actually makes no sense... because the very assertion that they were naked without shame is an intentional declaration that they are not the same... and should not be treated as synonymous.



There is zero evidence in all of the bible that God's provision of the "coats of skin" constituted some sort of "sacrifice" for sin, or that God's provision of clothing had anything to do with dealing with their sin.

I had certainly heard that teaching all my life, but when I really studied this passage carefully, it's a doctrine I was forced to reject. Here's why:

• Nowhere in the entire bible is this account referenced as a sacrifice... something that is extremely unlikely if indeed it was THE prototypical sacrifice in all of human history. We aren't even told in the text that an animal died to give its skin! (Some Jewish Hebrew scholars even suggest that the Hebrew text supports the interpretation that God clothed them with human skin... not animal skins!).
• All sacrifices require repentance on the part of the sinner to have any effect at all. The account of the fall records NO repentance on the part of Adam nor Eve. Quite the opposite, actually.
• No sacrifice in all of the scriptures is performed by the hand of God; every sacrifice is always performed by the sinner... literally, the hand that sinned wields the knife!

For these three reasons, I find that I can no longer endorse the teaching that The clothing of Adam and Eve constituted a sin-sacrifice of any sort.

As I pointed out in my first post on this topic, there's a lot in this account that we have traditionally added as a part of our collective understanding... and many of those things crumble when subjected to honest evaluation. So it is with some of your assertions.

Click to expand...

Adam and Eve were in shame from nakedness and tried to fix this incompletely with fig leaves (obviously not complete enough since they still hid from God because they were naked) God makes "coats of skin" to cover their shame. So what are these "coats of skin" . We have to consider the immediate audience they were written for which was the post-exodus Hebrews. How would they interpret "coats of skin" would the think human skin or would they think more along the lines of a garment made from hide? Responsibly I don't know how the former can be defended. Some translations actually say "animal skin" and the Hebrew word itself is most often used for animal hide. It is the same word use for Jacob when he covered his arm with goat's hide (skin) to trick Isaac to get the blessing meant for Esau. Hebrew is a very concrete language and unlike English, it doesn't have 50 words with nuanced meanings. Skin is hide, leather and even body in context. There is no reason to think this was something other than animal hide.

This creates a meaningful impact prospectively based on what we know about the sacrificial system of Christ. Adam and Eve had shame that God covers with animal hide and this is implicit of killing an animal ergo death had to happen in order for restoration. This is a powerful and very meaningfully placed foreshadow of our need for Christ because of sin. It, in fact, has no meaning without Christ, otherwise, it's just a bunch of arbitrary filler details that have no impact. I see these early accounts of Genesis having a far greater message in them than the surface details we so often stop at. Are they literal? perhaps, but their literalness is the most unimportant part of the account and we should stop reading them this way, or put less value on if they are literal or not, because we miss the rich depth that is dominate in these accounts.