Understanding Sin and Evil #1: The Origin of Sin that Wasn’t Understanding Sin and Evil

I am re-posting this episode with a FULL transcript, thanks to the efforts of the wonderful Mariana Gil Hammer.

Welcome to my new podcast series: Understanding Sin and Evil.

In this series, I will be discussing ideas of sin and evil in the Bible and in the ancient world, in particular Jewish texts of the Second Temple period. For each idea, I will begin with the biblical source texts and then move on to the interpretation of these biblical texts of the Second Temple period (for the purposes of this series, about 400 BCE to 100 CE shortly after the destruction).

In my first podcast, I introduce the series and then discuss the story of Adam and Eve in its biblical context, and explain why it explains something quite different from we remember. What is this story actually telling us?

If you would like to follow along, all you need is a Bible opened to Bereishit / Genesis 2:15-3:24. The translation I read in this podcast is the NJPS version.

— TRANSCRIPT, COURTESY OF MARIANA GIL HAMMER —

You’re listening to Understanding Sin and Evil, Dr. Miryam Brand on the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Ancient World. Learn more at UnderstandingSin.com.

Hi! This is Dr. Miryam Brand, and I’d like to introduce my new podcast series. In this podcast series I’m going to be talking about ideas of sin and evil in the Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls and the Ancient World. This is really my expertise; I once wrote a book about how the source of sin was perceived in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the ancient world in general, really the Jewish ancient world. That is my book called Evil Within and Without. It was what my dissertation was about. 

A little bit about myself. I did my PhD at New York University, I have taught courses at Brown University, New York University and Stern College. I have spoken at Cambridge University, Kiel University, and Hebrew University among others. But the important thing is that this is a topic that I’m really interested in and I would love to share with you.

 A little bit about this podcast, just as an introduction. In this podcast, what I’ll be doing is, I want to take ideas starting with the biblical passages, that are kind of the key texts for these ideas, and then trace them through early interpretation. By early interpretation, I mean interpretation during the Second Temple period, when the Second Temple was standing, and really concentrating on the years of about 300 BCE, or BC, to about 100 CE, or AD. The temple was destroyed around 70 of the Common Era. However, there are a couple of very important books that react to that destruction that I will also be discussing. 

So, our first part of this series is going to start with simply looking at the Adam and Eve story in the Bible, looking at the plain meaning of the text, saying what is this actually telling us. Then I’m going to go to the next podcast that will be the Cain and Abel story, after doing a review of those stories in terms of the plain text of the Bible, keeping later interpretation to a minimum, then I’m going to start looking at how these texts are interpreted in terms of talking about sin during the Second Temple period and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some later works, even some earlier works, and then each time we can go back to the Bible text that started all. 

So, after we talk about Adam and Eve and how that story becomes an approved text about sin and evil, we’re going to be talking about texts that were actually considered much more important in the Second Temple period, if you can believe that, which are the stories of the Watchers, that is Genesis 6, so we’re going to be talking about that story in detail, and that is going to explain some of the demonic explanations of sin, where sin comes as somehow caused by demons or demonic entities. And we’re going to be looking at the Noah story,