God's Stories #1: The Sin (Adam & Eve)

The first film in the ‘God’s Stories’ series of Arabic Bible movies.

Several years ago, I wrote a few articles and blog posts about Middle Eastern Bible movies in which I mentioned an Arabic movie about Jesus called The Savior. I was vaguely aware at the time that the makers of that film had previously made some Old Testament movies, but I didn’t know much more about them than that.

Now comes word that Savo’s Productions has spent the past year or two working on a digital “upgrade” of the series: re-editing the films, upscaling the original video footage to 4K, and creating new visual effects and a new sound mix. I was able to watch screeners of most of the films—which are collectively known as ‘God’s Stories’—and I plan to write some brief comments about them over the summer.

The first film is the shortest. The Sin—which tells the story of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel—covers just four chapters from Genesis, so it’s not surprising it clocks in at just 47 minutes. What might be surprising is that it packs an abbreviated version of the first three chapters into the first five minutes, so that the Creation of the world and the Fall of mankind all take place, in abbreviated form, in the pre-title sequence.

That leaves the remaining 40-odd minutes to cover just one chapter of Genesis—the chapter about Cain and Abel—and it’s a lot more interesting than I expected.

For starters, the film takes time to flesh out Adam and Eve’s growing realization that they might not get to see the Garden of Eden again.

Yes, they were expelled, but God promised that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent, didn’t he? So the couple have hope that their children—who, after all, did not eat the forbidden fruit themselves—will be “innocent” enough to gain entry into the Garden, and perhaps take their parents back there with them.

But increasingly, there are signs that this won’t happen. As boys, Cain and Abel both disobey their parents’ instructions, just as Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s. At one point, Adam actually takes his sons back to the place where the flaming swords once stood—only to find that there is nothing there now but dust and sand.

Adam is distraught. Cain says he isn’t interested in the God who threw his parents out of the Garden. But Abel wants to know more about God. And Eve says she and Adam have to teach their boys the hard truth that they won’t be going back to Eden.

This leads to an interesting sequence in which the film cuts back and forth between Adam teaching Cain about God and Eve teaching Abel. The two parents emphasize different things—Adam says Cain must seek God with all his strength, while Eve says God was kind and gentle; Adam describes the loss he felt after he ate the forbidden fruit, while Eve says she knows God must still love them because why else would he have made clothes for them?—and the family dynamic, where the father seems to be closer to the “bad” son while the mother is closer to the “good” son, is reminiscent of the favoritism that Isaac and Rebekah will eventually show Esau and Jacob.

Along the way, the film expands on the narrative like a midrashic commentary, filling some of the narrative gaps while adding a layer of interpretation to the story.

For example, why does Cain resent his brother Abel to the point where he ultimately murders him? The biblical explanation is that God favoured Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s, so presumably Cain was jealous. But that just raises another question: why did God prefer Abel’s sacrifice to begin with? The film suggests it’s because Cain approached the sacrifice as “a competition for the favour of God”, whereas Abel was just sort of in tune with the divine will and knew that a sacrifice was the right thing to do. So Abel approached his sacrifice in the right spirit, while Cain did not.

The film also imagines that Cain’s aggression towards Abel was stimulated, in part, by Abel’s animals wandering through his crops and ruining them. Abel says he’ll compensate his brother—and Eve reminds Cain that he, too, benefits from the wool and meat produced by Abel’s sheep—but Cain’s resentment burns anyway.

Meanwhile, Eve still hasn’t quite accepted responsibility for her role in the Fall. It’s kind of God’s fault that she ate the fruit, she implies, because God told Adam to avoid the tree but he never told her that. It’s also Adam’s fault, because he let her take the fruit. These are the sort of arguments that some interpreters have made to explain why Eve ate the fruit, but coming from Eve, they feel like self-justifications.

Eve also points out that Adam blamed her for eating the fruit when he could have blamed the serpent for tricking them, like she did. And indeed, many interpreters of this story have focused on how there was a lot of blame being thrown around when God confronted Adam and Eve over their disobedience. (In Genesis, Adam even implicitly blames God for his actions, by saying he was just following “the woman you put here with me”. So it’s God’s fault that Eve made it all happen, is it?)

Not all of the film’s assumptions about life after the Fall quite work for me.

For one thing, the characters eat meat, but many people have noted that God didn’t give human beings permission to eat meat until after the Flood (Genesis 9:2-3); prior to that, he had only given us permission to eat food from seed-bearing plants that grew in the ground (Genesis 1:29-30, 2:16, 3:23). Granted, one might wonder why Abel kept livestock, or why he sacrificed animals to God, if killing animals for food was not allowed. But animals have other uses, too (e.g., the aforementioned wool).

Also, in one scene Adam excuses his sons’ behaviour by telling Eve, “It’s nothing. Young boys playing.” He says this like they’ve seen young boys before, or like there’s an established precedent for how young boys are supposed to behave.

But the film explores other aspects of life after the Fall in ways that underline how new and different it would have been for the first humans.

Things we take for granted would have seemed peculiar to them: Adam comments on how “strange” it is that leaves die but are then replaced by new leaves, and Eve concurs, noting that the Garden didn’t have seasons but was always green. As time goes on, Adam begins to see these changes in himself: he can’t run as fast as he used to, and he says it’s “like the summer of my life is turning to fall.”

The end result is a film that does a surprisingly good job of humanizing characters who have always felt a little abstract to me. Whether you’re inclined to think of Adam and Eve as historical or mythopoetic, The Sin convincingly tells their story in a way that brings to life what it’s like to feel such hope and loss for the first time.

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An English dub of The Sin is available on Tubi, but the dubbing quality isn’t very good. Watch the original Arabic version of the film if you can.

Bits of the film appear in this super-trailer for the ‘God’s Stories’ series:

The Sin also has its own dedicated trailer (also available in an English dub):