We Who Wrestle with God summary

In Genesis 2, God establishes the paradisal garden of Eden. Humanity is granted dominion over this world: Adam and Eve are free to explore and use everything it offers, with two conditions. They must maintain the garden and they must not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God’s warning to Adam is stark: “the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” 

There are two central trees in Eden: the tree of life, which grants eternal life, and this second tree, which brings death. Both are symbols of God’s order. Access to one is intertwined with the prohibition on the other: the fruit from the tree of life may only be taken by those who forsake the fruits of the tree of knowledge. 

Adam and Eve do eat the forbidden tree’s fruit. God casts them out of the garden. He curses the ground beneath their feet. “Thorns and thistles” will grow in abundance and it will require “painful toil” to make it yield the plants upon which mortal man and woman now depend. 

After the Fall, it is work that defines the human condition. Toil is God’s punishment for humanity’s disobedience, but it serves a divine plan: it is His way of cultivating virtue in us. 

After their escape from Egypt, the Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years. During this time, Moses ascends Mount Sinai, where he receives the Ten Commandments – the laws that establish the covenant between God and His people. 

But the Book of Exodus, which tells this story, centers around a disaster.

Our final story comes from the Book of Jonah, one of twelve books in the Old Testament covering the lives and deeds of twelve “minor prophets.” Jonah, one of these prophets, is commanded by God to travel to Nineveh, a city of 120,000 souls in today’s Iraq. The inhabitants of this city have fallen into wicked ways. Jonah is tasked with delivering God’s warning: if they do not repent, they will be destroyed. 

Jonah, however, is reluctant. Instead of going to Nineveh, he boards a ship for Tarshish, a port city on the other side of the Mediterranean. But God sends a violent storm. Realizing that this is no ordinary storm, the sailors reason that someone aboard the vessel has displeased God. Jonah confesses and is thrown overboard. The ship is saved, but Jonah is swallowed by a huge fish. For three days and nights, he remains in the belly of this beast praying to God. At last, God commands the fish to vomit the reluctant prophet out.