Genesis in Geneva

I feel as though I should take it for some sort of significance that the most prize of all my Christmas gifts this year was a facsimile of the 1560 Geneva Bible. The Geneva Bible, which was the first translation of the whole Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek, was the work of expatriate scholars in Calvin's Geneva who had been driven out of England under the reign of Mary. Their translation quickly became the most widely used English version of the Bible, and sustained this position for a century, until the 1660 Restoration jettisoned it for its Calvinist notes and began the process of turning the King James translation, which had dwelt in relative unpopularity since its first publication in 1611, into The Bible. The Geneva Bible was the familiar Bible of Shakespeare, Milton, and the whole litany of great Elizabethan and Jacobean writers; even King James' translators in the very preface of their new translation quote the Geneva version.

In any case, I took some time last night to read through the first few chapters of Genesis in my brand-new old Bible, enjoying especially the notes. For example, observe this sequence in the last few verses of Genesis 2 (The Geneva Bible was also the first English Bible to employ verse divisions, certainly an inheritance of mixed benefit):

Verse 23: "She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man."
Note to 'woman:' "Or, Mannet [little man], because she cometh of man; for in Ebr [Hebrew] Ish is man and Ishah the woman."
You'll find a similar note in any modern Bible.

Verse 24: "Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
Note to 'leave:' "So that marriage requireth a greater duty of us toward our wives than otherwise we are bound to show to our parents."
An interesting thought, once you get past the knee-jerk sexism assumed in "our wives."

Verse 25: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
Note to 'not ashamed:' "For before sin entered all things were honest and comely."
An innocuous comment on the surface, but its placement with this particular verse certainly takes sides on the age old speculative question, "was their sex in Eden?"

The note which particularly caught my attention, however, was this one:

Chapter 3, verse 22: "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever..."
Note to 'behold:' "By this derision he reproacheth Adam's misery, whereinto he was fallen by ambition."

Having always assumed that God was talking to himself in this verse, I have often been troubled by such an apparent proof of the common portrayal of the petty God begrudging his creatures knowledge and life. But this interpretation, besides being more amenable, follows more sensically from the previous verse where God has "made them coats of skins and clothed them." God's words take on the character of a mock presentation, saying sarcastically to Adam and Eve "How impressive this new man and woman are! Now that you have this little bit of knowledge, you're pretty much the same as I am!"

I am reminded of this older post on Chris Heard's blog about the comical and childlike characteristics of Adam and Eve. The tone of the story of the Fall is something that I think modern scholars have increasingly questioned, opting against the solemnity that bears the aura of the received interpretation. I am usually skeptical of modern positions which encourage a satirical or comic reading of texts traditionally considered serious; they seem so often no more than echoes of that careless irreverence which typifies our age. But if the somber scholars of Calvin's Geneva had room for a sarcastic, scolding God, perhaps I ought to be more reserved in my judgment, just as the promoters of such positions ought to accept that they may not be offering much that's radically new.