Born to Die, part fourteen

I am mortal. I am going to die. This truth is the foundation of Hebrew and Christian scripture. Following on the heels of Genesis’ two creation stories, the Garden of Eden account offers an explanation for why humans are not immortal but goes into no detail about what happens when they die. The Bible is not a history book per se. The Bible is not (contrary to what I’ve heard some fundamentalists preach) an operator’s manual. The Bible is a collection of sacred thought regarding the relationship between Creator and creature, and this inevitably involves the issue of death. Given that death is the common human destiny, scripture attempts to take this truth and use it to determine whether there is any purpose or meaning to the process of human life. Do we just appear and then disappear, or is there more significance to our existence than that? It is indeed foolhardy of me to attempt to summarize the whole of Judeo-Christian scripture in one paragraph, but the bottom line is that the Bible acknowledges human mortality and then proceeds to explain what that may mean.