The Torah does not conceal the allegorical nature of its early stories. Indeed, there are features of these stories that strongly suggest that they were not intended to be read as straightforward historical narratives. Consider the biblical description of the Garden of Eden:

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​A river issues forth from Eden to water the garden and from there it is divided and becomes four headwaters. The name of the first is Pishon, the one that encircles the whole land of Chavilah, where the gold is. The gold of that land is good; bdellium is there and the shohar stone. The name of the second river is Gichon, the one that encircles the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Chidekel, the one that flows towards the east of Ashur; and the fourth one is the Euphrates (Genesis 2:10-14).

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The identification of these rivers is problematic. The Tigris (Chidekel) and Euphrates are clearly associated with Mesopotamia, but the locations of Pishon and Gichon are uncertain, and the four rivers cannot readily be understood as four rivers flowing together from a single geographical source. It is also very likely that someone living at the time the Bible was written would have been familiar with the location of these four great rivers and would have been aware that they do not all join up in Mesopotamia. This topic Is discussed further in the chapter “Are there One or Two Creation Accounts?”

 

​The villainous walking-talking snake in the Garden of Eden story is difficult to accept other than allegorically. A snake with recognizable speech, apparently possessing limbs that enable it to walk, and that could at a moment’s notice be transformed into the crawling snake we recognize today is difficult to understand as a straightforward zoological account. It is much more naturally read as an allegorical or symbolic representation.

 

According to Jewish tradition, Adam is regarded as “adam harishon,” the first man. The expression “adam harishon,” however, is a later rabbinic designation rather than the Torah’s own terminology. Cain after killing Abel complains to God that “whoever meets me will kill me” (Genesis 4:14). But who in the world can kill him? According to the Bible as so far presented, there are only four people on earth — Adam, Eve, Cain himself, and the recently murdered Abel. It must be that these four people are four representative figures in a much larger human population and at a stage when humanity had moved beyond the earliest gatherer-hunter existence and was well into the Agricultural Revolution and the beginnings of settled civilization.

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Moreover, many of the names of the characters in these early stories seem symbolic. The name Adam is related to the word “adama,” meaning “ground” or “earth,” and the Torah itself makes this connection explicit in Genesis 2:7. The word “adama” may also be related to adom, “red,” in that the earth often has a tinge of red in it. The Hebrew for Eve is Chava. The Torah explains that this is because she is “the mother of all living (chy in Hebrew)” (Genesis 3:20). Cain, or Kayin in Hebrew, is connected by the Torah with the verb “kaniti,” (“I have acquired/created”) in Eve’s statement: “I have acquired a man with YHWH (Genesis 4:1). Abel comes from the word hevel, which means “breath,” “vapor,” or “vanity” (Genesis 4:2). The name Noah (Noach) is connected by the Torah to the verb yenachem (comfort) in Genesis 5:29, where his father Lamech says that Noah will “comfort us” from our labor. Shem means a name or reputation. The Bible later develops the significance of “name” in connection with Abraham and his descendants, who will promote the name of God.

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Noah’s flood is difficult to accept literally. Flood deposits have been identified in Mesopotamian archeological sites, including in the Tigris-Euphrates region, but these are local or regional flood deposits rather than evidence of a flood covering the entire earth. A flood that reached as high as the peaks of the mountains of Armenia would have flooded the entire Near East. Of such a flood there is no archeological evidence.

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Noah’s ark as a functional boat also stretches the imagination. It cannot be that all living entities would fit into an ark measuring 470 feet in length, 78 feet in width, and 47 feet in height (300 x 50 x 30 cubits) (Genesis 6:15), which is about the size of one and half football fields. Most zoos in the world are much bigger than this and contain only a miniscule sampling of the earth’s animal population. The ark would also have had to contain enormous amounts of food and water for all these animals. However, people in the ancient world were familiar with this type of flood narrative. The popular Gilgamesh myth also describes an ark and a flood, and its similarities to the biblical account suggests that the biblical story belongs to a broader ancient Near Eastern literary tradition, and was never intended to be taken literally.

 

​It also follows that if there are two different creation stories and two accounts of the flood that contain differences in detail, then one or both must be incorrect if they are being presented as two independent and exhaustive chronological accounts of the exactly the same events. Alternatively, they can be understood as allegorical accounts that present the same fundamental events from different perspectives.

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Having said all this, the sages of the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods generally recognized the major events within Genesis and all the biblical figures as reflecting an historical reality, and they used Midrash to resolve apparent contradictions and to extract additional meanings from the text.1 This meant that textual contradictions between the same stories needed to be harmonized.

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Rashi, for example, explains the contradiction between Genesis I, where birds are created from the waters, and Genesis II, where they are formed from the ground, as follows:

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One who hears [this] is under the impression that [the second account of the creation of man] is a different incident [from the earlier mention of his creation], yet it is nothing but a detailed account of the first [mention]. Similarly, regarding the animals [the Torah] came back and wrote: “And YHWH Elohim formed etc., out of the ground every beast of the field [after having mentioned the creation of animals in 1:25] in order to explain in detail “and He brought them to the man to name [them] and to teach us about the birds that they were created out of the mud.2

 

Rashi’s approach is significant because he does not resolve apparent contradiction by rejecting either account. Rather, he treats Genesis 2 as a detailed continuation and elaboration of events already described in Genesis I. Nevertheless, many modern readers will find his explanation difficult to accept.

 

Medieval Jewish commentators have in the main been bound to a literal understanding of the Garden of Eden story, although some commentators gave particular elements a symbolic or philosophical interpretation. The serpent, for example, was sometimes understood as representing the evil inclination rather than simply as an ordinary animal.

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​Given all the evidence in favor of a non-literal or allegorical reading of at least some aspects of these early stories, why did the sages of Mishnaic and Talmudic times, as well as many Jewish medieval commentators, feel compelled to interpret these stories as referring to very real events? 

 

A major issue is that once one adopts an allegorical approach to the early stories of Genesis, the boundary between allegory and history for later stories becomes very blurred. In other words, where does allegory stop and history take over?

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Was there an historic Abraham, for example, or was he an invented character? And if he was a made-up person, what are we to make of the promises made to him by God and to his son Isaac and grandson Jacob?  Is there any validity to promises made to imaginary people? And what about Moses? Is he also fictitious? If so, is there any historical basis to the Exodus and the subsequent settling of the Land of Canaan? 

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I, for one, cannot accept allegorical forefathers and an allegorical Moses. I take it as a matter of faith that the promises made to our forefathers were real, and that the Exodus happened as the Bible says it happened. For me, there is a dividing line. By the time of Abraham, history had taken over from allegory. Which is not to say that Cain, Abel and Noah were entirely fictitious people, but the events surrounding them were highly idealized. Similarly, there is no reason why the individuals mentioned in the Torah’s genealogy lists should not have been real people. Nevertheless, by the time we reach Abraham we are definitely in the realm of history.3 

 

​References

1.  The term Midrash refers to a body of Jewish literature and method of interpretation used to explain, expand upon, and draw lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures. It is a central component of rabbinic tradition and serves both to explore the deeper meaning of the text and to address contemporary questions and issues of that time. The approach taken in this book is different and I quote Midrash only sparingly. When I do quote Midrash, it is often through the lens of Rashi, either as a direct quote or as a reference and frequently for purposes of comparison. Rashi is a medieval Jewish commentator whose classic commentary draws extensively upon earlier midrashic literature.

2.   Rashi to Genesis 2:8, drawing on the rabbinic discussion on TB Chullin 27b.

3.   For the sake of completeness, it is worth mentioning the view of Joshua Berman who points out that the writing of factual history is a recent phenomenon and he suggests that the typical history written at the time of the Torah would have been idealized history. See Chapter 2, “But is it history? The historical accuracy of the Tanakh” in Ani Maamin. Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith” by Joshua Berman, pp13-42. Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers Ltd, Jerusalem, 2020, pages. This touches on a subject raised by Nachmanides, although the issue raised by Joshua Berman would have been far from his mind. Nachmanides suggests that the lives of the forefathers portend that of their descendants. In his commentary to Genesis 12:10 he explains that Abraham's journey to Egypt due to a famine and his subsequent experiences there portend the future descent of his descendants to Egypt, namely the descent of the Israelites and their subsequent enslavement. Regarding Genesis 26:1, he discusses how Isaac's encounter with a famine and his interactions with Abimelech mirror similar events in the lives of his descendants. With respect to Genesis 32:4-13, he interprets Jacob's preparations and prayers before meeting Esau as prefiguring the future struggles and strategies of the Israelites when confronting hostile nations. In Genesis 37:15-17, he views Joseph's journey to find his brothers as indicative of the future journeys of the Israelites in search of their destiny and their encountering various challenges. For Genesis 47:28, he sees Jacob's insistence on being buried in Canaan as a sign of the future importance of the Land of Israel to his descendants and their eventual return from exile. In Exodus 1:1-7, Nachmanides interprets the multiplication and prosperity of the Israelites in Egypt, despite their hardships, as a precursor to future periods of growth and flourishing of the Jewish people under challenging conditions. Although not an answer that Nachmanides would have approved of, this could suggest that aspects of their lives were not entirely historical. A more conventional answer is that God was active in the forefather’s lives and engineered certain situations in their lives that would have later importance.