Commentary on Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

As I write this biblical reflection—more theological and historical, likely—I start with a confession. After years of preaching the lectionary texts, and most often choosing the first reading or the psalm for the week, I approached this text with dread. Not because I don’t find it particularly interesting, but because of the way it is weighted with a history of interpretation and the notion of a “fall,” though neither this word nor anything close to it is in the story. Because it comes at the first of Lent, it also infers that those shaping the liturgical story expect us to reflect on this “fall,” or at least on human disobedience—which, according to historical readings, led to a fall.

You see my dilemma? Of course, scholars on Working Preacher over the years have taken this notion up time and again, and so I don’t feel any need to do so. I hope you’ll visit all that work. Rather, I decided to be in conversation with two Womanist biblical scholars, Dr. Wilda C. Gafney and Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams. What follows is my dialogue with their work, which I hope will help anyone brave enough to preach these texts, as it has helped me.

As a Lenten text, it does seem that we are being asked to “reflect on the nature and limitations of humanity, including the consequences of our actions and inactions and our responsibility in and for this world,” as Gafney notes.¹ Since Lent invites us to this kind of reflection, accompanied by fasting and letting go of worldly habits as we march toward Jerusalem and the Holy Week, preachers have another non-cosmic place to begin with the text.

Humans are prone to push boundaries. It starts early. When my younger son was two, I put the cookie jar up on the refrigerator, out of his reach, and explained to him that he could have a cookie after dinner. When I left the room to vacuum, he dragged a dining room chair to the counter, climbed up on the counter, and pulled the cookie jar between his chubby legs. I came back into the kitchen just as he was reaching into the jar for the cookie that I had delayed but not forbidden. I promised I would pop his hand if he got a cookie. He looked me in my eyes and never left my gaze as he got a cookie and ate it. He had determined in his two-year-old mind that the cookie was worth a pop on the hand.

Was that sin? No, but it was disobedience and pushing the boundary. I had not promised him he would die or suffer alienation or be kicked out of my house—such threats would come much, much later as he grew into teenage years. But my confession is that it was my sense that I had no control over him. Influence, maybe. But not control.

God, it is clear, also has no control over humans. I can hear my son saying, “Why buy cookies if I can’t have them when I want?” I can hear Eve saying, “Why put a tree of the knowledge of good and evil and a tree of life in the garden if we are forbidden to eat from them?” And that is the center of boundary crossing—the question “Why?”

As Gafney notes, the snake plays the role of the questioner and should be seen, not as a tempter, but as a tester of the question “What will humanity do in response to boundaries?” Test them, bend them, break them. The serpent also tests something else—how humans hear, remember, tell, question, and interpret God’s words: ‘Did God say…?’”² This framing of boundaries and boundary crossing will give preachers a lot of fodder for the sermon, from my perspective.

Of course, another angle for the sermon is how to include all humanity in this decision-making process during Lent, and not just woman-bash, as centuries of pre-Christian (see also Sirach 25:24 [“sin began with a woman”]) and Christian interpretation has managed to do. “It’s the woman’s fault” ought to be an insult to men, as it portrays men as weak and feckless and unable to hold their own boundaries or decisions to obey or not obey God. This sentiment is reflected in questions turned onto women when they have been sexually assaulted: in other words, “What were you wearing?”

Fentress-Williams aptly reframes the story of the encounter between the woman and the serpent. She describes it as sensual, with four of the five senses engaged: “She (Eve) hears the voice of the serpent and ‘saw the tree was beautiful with delicious food and the tree would provide wisdom, so she took some of its fruit and ate it’ (touch and taste).”³ Thinking about the sensual nature of the encounter gives preachers an opportunity to think about how we use the Lenten season to discipline our sensual selves—not just our sexual selves.

What would it mean to “guard the gates of our eyes” (see also Proverbs 4:23–27) during Lent and limit what we watch on the internet or on TV? We already limit what we put in our mouths (at least we say we do), but what happens when we use these disciplinary actions not as punishment or flagellating, but as heightening our sense of God and even of what makes our hearts so “prone to wander,”⁴ as the song-writer says?

Fentress-Williams gives us another way to engage this text, and I would say, the preacher who is brave enough to use it will continue to challenge our usual understanding about this woman Eve. In the preaching space, we often don’t talk about what was going on around the telling of our story, but we could. This story is in conversation with the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and the role the woman plays in pulling the man from the world of animals.

In this story, “the woman is associated with sexual knowledge and civilization.”⁵ So, too, is the woman in the biblical tradition associated with knowledge and wisdom (see also Proverbs 1–9). For Fentress-Williams, “the serpent speaks to the woman because women are affiliated with wisdom and civilization—that which separates humans from animals. … Read this way, it makes sense that the serpent addresses the woman. In her role as purveyor of wisdom and knowledge, she would naturally want to know.”⁶

As a literary dialogic Womanist hermeneut, Fentress-Williams also leans into the context and the presumed reason for the text. She says:

To the extent that the stories in the primeval history tell us how things were and are, the account in Genesis 3 tells us that, given the opportunity, we—and all humans—will eventually transgress the boundaries God has laid out for us. No one can remain in Eden or the womb forever. Thus, from a dialogic perspective, the taking of the forbidden fruit in the garden is less a moment in chronology and more an example of chronotope. It is the moment upon which the narrative hangs, and this is not just a moment for Adam and Eve. It is the existential and inevitable moment for all of us, their descendants.⁷

Finally, I want to offer preachers another option. If you want to go down a rabbit hole on how this doctrine of the fall was solidified, and how the serpent/snake becomes “the devil” in other Abrahamic traditions, see the link in the footnotes.⁸ But every religious tradition has tried to answer the question of human failings, violence, and frailty, with some version of a “fall” from a time when humans were not frail and violent in our imagination, which readers can find on the same site. What seems true to me is that we want a perfect human and, I believe, a path back to that perfection. Lent suggests that we have no path back to some mythic perfection, only repentance and starting over again and again.

Notes

1. Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: A Multi-Gospel Single-Year Lectionary, Year W (Church Publishing, 2021), 80.
2. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, 80.
3. Judy Fentress-Williams, Holy Imagination: A Literary and Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Abingdon, 2021), 9.
4. Robert Robinson, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” 1758, https://hymnary.org/text/come_thou_fount_of_every_blessing.
5. Fentress-Williams, Holy Imagination, 10.
6. Fentress-Williams, Holy Imagination, 10.
7. Fentress-Williams, Holy Imagination, 11.
8. “Human Fall,” The New World Encyclopedia, accessed January 6, 2026, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Human_Fall.