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shall bruise thy head. and thou shalt bruise his heel.
--Genesis 3:1-15
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
(Give 5 points per right answer.)
1. Melville’s Moby Dick begins, “Call me Ishmael.” We say it is told in the first person. In
what person is Genesis told? From whose viewpoint?
2. Who is the “good guy” in this story? Who is the “bad guy”? Can you make a strong case
for reversal of the roles?
3. Traditionally, the apple is considered to be the fruit the serpent offered to Eve. But apples
are not endemic to the Near East. Select one of the following, more logical substitutes, and discuss
how myths come into being and are corrupted over long periods of time: olive, fig, date,
pomegranate.
4. Why is the word LORD always in capitals and the name God always capitalized?
Shouldn’t the serpent’s name be capitalized, as well? If no, why?
5. If God created everything (see Genesis, Chap. I), why did he create problems for himself
by creating a serpent who would lead his creations astray? Why did God create a tree he did not
want Adam and Eve to know about, and then go out of his way to warn them against it?
6. Compare and contrast Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling panel of the Expulsion from
Paradise with Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
7. Was Adam being a gentleman when he placed blame on Eve? Who was Quisling? Discuss
“narking” as a character flaw.
8. God grew angry when he found out he had been defied. If God is omnipotent and
omniscient, didn’t he know? Why couldn’t he find Adam and Eve when they hid?
9. If God had not wanted Adam and Eve to taste the fruit of the forbidden tree, why didn’t he
warn the serpent? Could God have prevented the serpent from tempting Adam and Eve? If yes, why
didn’t he? If no, discuss the possibility the serpent was as powerful as God.
10. Using examples from two different media journals, demonstrate the concept of “slanted
news. “
5
The poison winds howled and tore at the powder covering the land. Nothing lived there. The
winds, green and deadly, dived out of the sky and raked the carcass of the Earth, seeking, seeking:
anything moving, anything still living. But there was nothing. Powder. Talc. Pumice.
And the onyx spire of the mountain toward which Nathan Stack and the shadow thing had
moved, all that first day. When night fell they dug a pit in the tundra and the shadow thing coated it
with a substance thick as glue that had been in Stack’s neck-pouch. Stack had slept the night fitfully,
clutching the warming-stone to his chest and breathing through a filter tube from the pouch.
Once he had awakened, at the sound of great batlike creatures flying overhead; he had seen
them swooping low, coming in flat trajectories across the wasteland toward his pit in the earth. But
they seemed unaware that he--and the shadow thing--lay in the hole. They excreted thin,
phosphorescent strings that fell glowing through the night and were lost on the plains; then the
creatures swooped upward and were whirled away on the winds. Stack resumed sleeping with
difficulty.
In the morning, frosted with an icy light that gave everything a blue tinge, the shadow thing
scrabbled its way out of the choking powder and crawled along the ground, then lay flat, fingers
clawing for purchase in the whiskaway surface. Behind it, from the powder, Stack bore toward the
