The Garden Of Double Message

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Scholarly Journal In the essay, “The Garden of Double Messages: Deconstructing Hierarchical Oppositions in the Garden Story”, Dmitri M. Slivniak discusses the four oppositions in the Garden of Eden story. The four oppositions covered are ‘good-bad’ (‘Good-‘Evil’), ‘male-female’, ‘human-animal’ (culture-nature’), ‘life-death’ (‘cosmos-chaos’). Slivniak talks about the numerous different ways the Creation story can be translated. Slivniak says, “One hardly finds another relatively short text than can generate so numerous and diverse readings.” (440). One of the reasons that Dmitri Slivniak is knowledgeable about the translations of the bible is that he studied the Hebrew language, among others, through his college career. He works as an editor, proofreader, and translator for the English, French, Hebrew, Russian, and German languages. Slivniak received his MA in French language with specialization in translation from Yerevan University in Armenia, Soviet Union. He also received his Ph D in Biblical Studies from Tel Aviv University in Israel. The essay “The Garden of Double Messages: Deconstructing Hierarchical Oppositions in the Garden Story”, was on of Slivniak’s most well-known publication. After reading the essay, I see how it could be easy to have numerous interpretations of the Creation story especially with the Hebrew-English translation differences. As stated in Genesis 22:2 woman was made from man’s rib but the word in Hebrew means “side”. The use of the word ‘side’ instead of ‘rib’ could indicate that woman is more of an equal to man than in some translations. Slivniak also brought to my attention that the period after Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, also known as transgression, can be considered both as punishment and as God’s fulfillment of the very destination of the human. This establishes a point that many of the Creation events
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