I had an email with a biblical reference. Not having read the passage to which he referred in any depth for as long as I can remember, but knowing the story as we pretty much all do, I picked up the Bible and started to read Genesis. I was looking for the particular verses to which the email referred, but read, with growing amazement, the details of a story I had never truly seen. And I have read the Bible cover to cover… skipping the genealogies I must add… as well as referring to it frequently in the course of my own studies and research.
It was what, in modern parlance, I can only call one of those WTF moments…
Don’t misunderstand here…I am not picking at the Bible or Christianity, but at something entirely different in the way we choose to see the world. Bear with me…
We all know the story of how the devil in the form of a serpent tempts Eve with the forbidden fruit. She takes it, shares it with Adam, they realise they are naked and go for the fig leaves. God finds out and ejects them from Eden. That is probably pretty much the story as many of us will know it. It is certainly how I was taught it in Sunday School. I knew there was more to it than that… I’d read the book after all.
I was initially just scanning through looking for the references. Then realised I would have to go back to the start and read it properly… with attention. For a start, I could find no mention of the devil, just the serpent, ‘more subtle’ than any of the other beasts. No mention of evil at all in fact, except in that the serpent ‘beguiled’ Eve… or so she tells God when questioned, after Adam has cast the blame on her. It seems responsibility wasn’t a strong trait in Eden. But even before that, a phrase had caught my eye in Genesis 2:7 that stopped me in my tracks. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” I had never noticed that before… a living soul… It made me think… it is a very evocative choice of words.
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
Now I’ll have to go read…
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It is interesting… 😉
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What about that choice of words “caught” you in this reading?
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The ‘us’ made me think, for a start… but it was the whole story and how very different the written reality is from the tale I remembered being taught. That made me question my perceptions and how I apply them.
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Understood, what we are taught is rarely the whole of the picture. sometimes we see what we have been taught to see and until something makes us take another look we don’t see.
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Absolutely… and then things can get surprising 🙂
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Yes..
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Intense!
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Reblogged this on Blog Pad 2017.
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No so much what we remember as what the eye takes in,💜
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And what blinkers that imposes on the mind.
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Yes I think we choose to see and ingest what suit us best. 💜
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Or what we are ready for at the time 🙂
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Yes you are right there🌹💜
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❤
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