Your Cellular Memory as a Luminescent Human in the Days of Darkness
This article includes legends, apocryphal, and pseudepigrapha works, as well as referencing Dead Sea Scroll fragments. Their inclusion is not endorsement that they are the inspired Holy Scripture, however, they provide us with insights, understanding, contrast, and wisdom for the coming days...
Legends passed down throughout the ages indicate that Adam and Eve were created in the image of God (tzelem). Before sin entered into the world they likely wore a garment of light and were immortal beings. As time beings to wane the hunt for immortality and transformation of humanity into beings of light is exponential. Secular scientists and researchers believe they can attain immortality and light-being though biomechanics, quantum computing, and other emerging technologies. In fact, there is a surge at CERN to document luminized particles which then can be assembled from the ground up to engineer 'new' light forms. Pagans believe they can attain godhood through their false religions. But people of the Book, the Bible, know that it takes a relationship with Jesus Christ to enter into immortality and transformation into a light-being because the wages of sin are death.
Garments (Skin) of Light
The Biblical passages found in Genesis 1:26-27 and Genesis 3:21 represent two pivotal starting points for the subsequent Jewish and Christian reflections on the glorious garments of Adam and Eve. Genesis 1:26 describes the creation of human beings in the likeness of the image of God. It must be highlighted that this was the image of God's glory according to which Adam was created. The particular interest in Genesis 1:26 is that Adam's tselem was created after God's own tselem (literally "in our tselem") being, a luminous imitation of the glorious tselem of God. Some scholars argue that the likeness that Adam and God shared was not physicality--in the usual sense of having a body--but rather luminescence.
Ancient texts and Aramaic renderings of the Hebrew Bible attest to the prelapsarian luminosity of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Biblical background for such traditions includes the passage from Gen 3:21, where "the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them." Ancient texts in the Hebraic, Palestinian, and Babylonian read, instead of garments of skin, garments of glory or light (Hebrew 'or). This interpretation is also found in Genesis Rabbah 20:12, which tells that the scroll of Rabbi Meir reads garments of light instead of garments of skin: "In R. Meir's Torah it was found written, 'Garments of light: this refers to Adam's garments, which were like a torch [shedding radiance], broad at the bottom and narrow at the top.'" This Garment of Light was described as smooth as a fingernail and yet beautiful as a jewel, like fine linen garments from Bethshean (a wealthy city in Israel destroyed by an earthquake) worn nearest the skin.
Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer also says that the garment of the first man was a "skin of nail" and he was covered with a "cloud of glory." After he sinned Adam was deprived of both the skin of nail and the cloud of glory and saw that he was naked. In another version, after Adam and Eve sinned, the garment of light fell from them. God made for them another garment. The first garment that Adam and Eve had worn fled to heaven, where it is now in the treasury of the heavens.
Thus, the writer of the Odes of Solomon exclaims, "I was covered with the covering of your spirit, and I removed from me my garments of skin." The celestial light was but one of the seven precious gifts enjoyed by Adam before the fall and to be granted to man again only in the Messianic time. The others are the resplendence of his countenance; life eternal; his tall stature; the fruits of the soil; the fruits of the tree; and the luminaries of the sky, the sun and the moon, for in the world to come the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold. Legends of the Jews. Where does the concept of a luminous human originate?
It is usually understood that Genesis 3:21 refers to God's clothing Adam and Eve's nakedness after the Fall. However some biblical scholars argue the verbs are to be taken as pluperfects, referring to the status of Adam and Eve at their creation before the Fall.
Luminous Inheritance: Adam & Moses
In a group of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments known under the title the Words of the Luminaries (4Q504), the following passage about the glory of Adam in the Garden of Eden can be found:
... [ ... Adam,] our [fat]her, you fashioned in the image of [your] glory [...] [... the breath of life] you [b]lew into his nostril, and intelligence and knowledge [...] [... in the gard]en of Eden, which you had planted. You made [him] govern [...] [...] and so that he would walk in a glorious land... [...] [...] he kept. And you imposed on him not to tu[rn away...] [...] he is flesh, and to dust [...] ...
Later in 4Q504, this tradition about Adam's former glory follows with a reference to the luminosity bestowed on another human body--the glorious face of Moses at his encounter with the Lord at Sinai. The author of 4Q504 appears to be familiar with the legends about the glorious garments of Adam, the tradition according to which first humans had luminous attires in Eden before their transgression.
In Jewish and Samaritan sources, the story about Adam's luminous garments is often mentioned in conjunction with the story of Moses. In these materials, Moses is often depicted as a luminous counterpart of Adam. In fact, the Samaritan texts insist that when Moses ascended to Mount Sinai, he received the image of God which Adam cast off in the Garden of Eden. According to Memar Marqa, Moses was endowed with the identical glorious body as Adam. Memar Marqa 5.4 tells that:
He [Moses] was vested with the form which Adam cast off in the Garden of Eden; and his face shone up to the day of his death.
The author also seems to draw parallels between the glory of Adam and the glory of Moses' face. The luminous face of the prophet might represent in this text an alternative to the lost luminosity of Adam and serve as a new symbol of God's glory once again manifested in the human body. It appears that in 4Q504, traditions about Adam's glory and Moses' glory are creatively juxtaposed with each other. The story of Moses glorious face serves as the prototype for the future glory of Christ at the Transfiguration.
In Leviticus Rabbah 20.2, the following passage can be found:
Resh Lakish said: The apple of Adam's heel outshone the globe of the sun; how much more so the brightness of his face! Nor need you wonder. In the ordinary way if a person makes salves, one for himself and one for his household, whose will he make more beautiful? Not his own? Similarly, Adam was created for the service of the Holy One and the globe of the sun for the service of mankind.
This begs the question that do we, as Believers in Jesus Christ, deeply embedded within our cellular memory contain the luminescent replication glory of God and can it be conferred? As a human created in the Divine Image of God I believe this to be true, and the marvelous thing is that we can also impart glory to another, albeit, in a dimmed fashion. When you speak blessing and kindness to another does not the face of their countenance radiate as well as your own?
In the Legends of the Jews we find the following narrative of what happens when a person dies: When the just man appears before the gates, the clothes in which he was buried are taken off him, and the angels array him in seven garments of clouds of glory, and place upon his head two crowns, one of precious stones and pearls, the other of gold of Parvaim, and they put eight myrtles in his hand, and they utter praises before him and say to him, "Go thy way, and eat thy bread with joy."
White Garments
Early Christian tradition states that "Adam and Eve were stripped by the Fall, in such a way that they saw that they were naked. This means that formerly they were clothed." Adam and Eve wore the robe of light or the robe of sanctity before their fall; thereafter, they assumed a garment of humility.
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