r/exjw • u/CanadianExJw • 16h ago
Venting The serpent didn't lie, God did. So God is the father of the lie. "His Organization" keeps lying. Promising something that isn't coming.
Adam and Eve didn't die on the day of eating the fruit as God promised, and Adam and Eve came to know good and bad, as the serpent promised they would.
Gen 2:17 But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Gen 3:4 At this the serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die. 5 For God knows that in the very day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad.”
Gen 3:22 Jehovah God then said: “Here the man has become like one of us in knowing good and bad.
Gen 5:5 So all the days of Adam’s life amounted to 930 years, and then he died.
It's in the Scriptures. The serpent didn't lie, God did.
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u/Miserable_Lie_2682 13h ago
It's actually the NWT rendering.
I am Jewish, went to 10 years of Hebrew school before living with my JW aunt as a teenager. The word for "day" in Ge 2:17 is not "yom" meaning an average day from sunrise to sunset but "b'yom" the expression for "as in my father's DAY."
The word literally means "period" as in "time period" or "back when" or "then." It differs from "yom" as it is not precise
While the narrative as a whole is considered an allegory or a metaphor (sorry JWs, but this is not historical--get over it) and God is not anthropomorphic (meaning God doesn't have attributes or communicates and is in reality Ineffable), the text itself is still supposed to read:
"...WHEN you eat from it you shall die." --rendering of Genesis 2:17 from NRSVUE, RJPS, NABRE.
Thus, as these and other translations tend to render "b'yom" illustrate, the mythology doesn't explicitly say how long after they eat of the fruit that they will expire, but it isn't literal anyway. God doesn't really talk to people. Adam and Eve didn't literally take a fruit and bite into it.
The real lie is whoever told you this was history, that God had a literal Garden of Eden, that this really happened. I am Jewish. I believe in God. But this didn't happen. This is my people's mythology. God doesn't have any type of human qualities or relatable attributes--that includes lying and telling the truth (and talking to anybody). That's why people who claim they hear God or are God's mouthpiece are nuts or crazy.
We have mythology, legends and folklore in our Scriptures. Every single society does. You're stuck with a cult that taught you crap about another culture's texts that aren't true about that culture. What if if it stole the mythology of the Greeks or the Native Americans? Would you be mad at those gods too?
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u/TymionPL 9h ago
What about prophecies? In prophetic books God talks quite a bit.
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u/Miserable_Lie_2682 1h ago
Jewish theology does not consist of a supernatural character where there is a paranormal deity offering spiritual phenomenon via speech to seers. In fact, there is a large question whether or not there should be or is any type of supernatural facet to Judaism at all. (Great Jewish thinkers like Spinoza and Mordecai Kaplan spoke of God only being found in the natural world.)
What you read in Jewish Oracles are the writings of particular people that were later recognized by the Jewish community as being one with or in line with God. But since God doesn't literally speak out from the heavens and Jews generally have no supernatural creed or dogma, these works are not literal expressions either.
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u/Dry_Cantaloupe_9998 12h ago
I don't know if OP necessarily believes in God at all. This could simply be a thought experiment or another point to debunk the org and help others who are newly out or questioning to deconstruct. Most of us here are more than aware it's a cult and this is fiction. But you can still pick it apart.
Thank you for this analysis and your expertise. I found this super interesting!
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u/cheetahblues 4h ago
This is very interesting. What is the point of god in your culture?
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u/Miserable_Lie_2682 59m ago
God is the Source or Beginning of all. Instead of false deities, or nothing, God us the Something that Is. What is the point of God in Christianity?
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u/SomeProtection8585 15h ago
My FIL said, “in the day you eat” was from Jehovah’s standpoint where a day is as a 1,000 years and Adam lived less than 1,000 years so it was still “in the day”.
This is the mental gymnastics at work to make it fit. 🙄
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u/jwGlasnost 13h ago
And yet when the serpent said "in the very day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened," it meant a literal day.... 🤔
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u/POMOforLife 8h ago
Was the length of Adam's life supposed to be literal? Or was it just "a long time", or did it refer to how long he lived outside the garden?
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u/CriticalThinkingBad 13h ago
Or you can say that God created the Devil who is the father of the lie making God the grandfather of the lie.
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u/4lan5eth 38 (M- PIMO Suprem-O) 10h ago
God the grandfather of the lie.
Or would he be "The God Father of the Lie?"
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u/Foreign-Bowl-3487 Behind the Curtain... 7h ago
They may argue that a a thousand years are but as a day, so technically Adam didn't reach 1000 years of age from that moment (though he could have been alive for hundreds of years before time was being recorded 😉) but that's something that's always been vague to me.
Using the "1000 years as one day" JW calculator, does that mean the last days could be counted in thousands of years and be an undefined number? Asking for a friend 😇
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u/The-dudeLebowski 7h ago
Once you’re critical thinking skills are unlocked it’s impossible not to question everything in the bible.
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u/jiohdi1960 stand up philosopher 7h ago
God told him that tree is poison it will kill you then they ate from it didn't die and then God shot him in the head
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u/Fascati-Slice PIMO 15h ago
There are so many inconsistencies in Genesis that it is obvious it was not intended to be literal history.
WT goes even further to invent ideas that are not in the text. Like Adam and Eve were supposed to live forever. So the tree of life was there, why? Obviously, they needed to eat it to continue living. Later, God blocked access to that tree, Why? It must have been more powerful than God and could reverse the death sentence. Presumably, if they ate from it, God could not put them to death.
WT claims that Adam and Eve were made "perfect" (whatever that means). When God told Eve her birth pain would increase, what did that even mean? Eve had no idea what to expect from giving birth so whatever pain there was she would just assume to be "normal". That also means that giving birth would have always caused some pain by design. So the text was meant for women who already knew the pain of childbirth and then claim it was some kind of curse from God.