God’s presence is seemingly imperceptible to the human mind in Genesis. Both Adam and Cain commit their respective sins in God’s absence, though He is innately aware of their wrongdoing before they even confess it. God arrives at the Garden of Eden after Eve and Adam have consumed the fruit from the Tree of Death, “to find out what his children might be doing;” (Genesis A 852). Upon his arrival,…
Though the fall of Adam and Eve is the most well known story of descent in Genesis, both biblical Genesis and the Old English interpretation are full of backend stories about the biblical forefathers making a couple mistakes and seeming much less likable or heroic than who they were when they were first introduced. Lot turns from a favored nephew to a confused old man manipulated by his daughters, and…
In Genesis in the Old Testament Narratives, Eve, deceived by the messenger of Satan, ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of death. The “Fall” of the sinned Adam and Eve carried out by the furious God is, on the appearance, due to the disloyalty of his chosen servants. However, a close reading of the “Fall” entails an inherent contradiction in the nature of Eve’s sacrilege. Note that the story…
The human life is a mediated experience: we do not encounter an unfiltered world, but rather we process every input through our senses. Among our five senses, sight often reigns supreme; this article is not one of Professor Saltzmann’s podcasts, and I assume you aren’t understanding it via tactile telepathy. However, in the Old English poem Daniel, visuality is typically portrayed as an incomplete phenomenon through which one cannot fully…
Daniel Anlezark’s Old Testament Narratives explores the tale of Adam and Eve, but it allows for an inspection between the relationship of God and humans through the interesting dynamic of the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge. At the beginning of Genesis B, God commands Adam and Eve to “renounce that tree, guard yourselves against the fruit. For you two there will be no unsatisfied desire” (19). And Adam and Eve continued…
One of the most fascinating aspects of Genesis B is its numerous departures from the Vulgate Bible, most notably in the depiction of Eve. The poem’s recounting of the first Biblical story, the fall of humanity from Eden, calls into question notions of culpability and agency in the Bible. Did Adam and Eve have agency, and by extension, do their descendants, humans, have agency in the Judeo-Christian universe? When…
On a chaotic battlefield in some unknown place, good and evil are fighting to the death in an ecstatic battle for the soul. Chastity slices through lust causing fountains of blood to erupt into the air. Good works has greed held in a chokehold watching her face turn blue and then purple as the last vestiges of air slip away. Faith strikes the head of worship of the Old Gods…
Medieval Allegory and Classical Structures in Psychomachia Though biblical figures, stories, and sentiments form the backbone of Prudentius’ Psychomachia, echoes of classical structures weave their way into the allegory. Prudentius utilizes few explicit callbacks to Greek or Roman mythology. While Boethius calls upon the Muses and regularly references gods such as Boreas or Bacchus, Prudentius relies upon biblical stories for background, including the tale of Holofernes and Judith or the…
Prudentius’ Psychomachia is known as one of the first examples of the literary and artistic form known as allegory, in which abstract concepts are illustrated through the use of an extended metaphor . In the case of the Psychomachia, Prudentius explains how Christians should live a virtuous life by illustrating a violent battle between personified virtues and vices. (For example: “Faith first takes the field to face the doubtful chances…
I find the act of transformation as punishment interesting, because within the Genesis retellings of the Old Testament Narratives, God seems to punish all those who betray him by severely distorting or wholly changing their humanity and physical body. This then presents the idea of sin and being able to avoid it as the definition of being human while sinning in general is, on the other hand, the definition of…
