What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?

By Ziony Zevit

A provocative new interpretation of the Adam and Eve story from an expert in Biblical literature.

The Garden of Eden story, one of the most famous narratives in Western history, is typically read as an ancient account of original sin and humanity’s fall from divine grace. In this highly innovative study, Ziony Zevit argues that this is not how ancient Israelites understood the early biblical text. Drawing on such diverse disciplines as biblical studies, geography, archaeology, mythology, anthropology, biology, poetics, law, linguistics, and literary theory, he clarifies the worldview of the ancient Israelite readers during the First Temple period and elucidates what the story likely meant in its original context.

Most provocatively, he contends that our ideas about original sin are based upon misconceptions originating in the Second Temple period under the influence of Hellenism. He shows how, for ancient Israelites, the story was really about how humans achieved ethical discernment. He argues further that Adam was not made from dust and that Eve was not made from Adam’s rib.  His study unsettles much of what has been taken for granted about the story for more than two millennia—and has far-reaching implications for both literary and theological interpreters.

“Classical Hebrew in the hands of Ziony Zevit is like a cello in the hands of a master cellist. He knows all the hidden subtleties of the instrument, and he makes you hear them in this rendition of the profoundly simple story of Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and their Creator in the Garden of Eden. Zevit brings a great deal of other biblical learning to bear in a surprisingly light-hearted book.”―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780300195330

Book preview

What

Really

Happened

in the

Garden

of Eden?

What

Really

Happened

in the

Garden

of Eden?

ZIONY ZEVIT

Copyright © 2013 by Ziony Zevit.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [e-mail] (U.S. office) or [e-mail] (U.K. office).

Scripture quotations identified as NJPS throughout this book are reprinted from the Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1985

The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia.

Designed by Mary Valencia.

Set in Minion and Myriad type by Westchester Book Group, Danbury, Connecticut.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zevit, Ziony.

What really happened in the Garden of Eden? / Ziony Zevit.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-17869-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Eden. 2. Fall of man. 3. Bible.

Genesis II–III—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS1237.Z48 2013

222’.1106—dc23

2013017554

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for

Zehava and Eli, Noam and Ayelet, Yonatan and Reut

whose eyes open anew each day and

who see more than what appears

Contents

A Preface about Really

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Fall Is with Us Always

PART ONE Now and Then

1. The Fall in Interpretation

2. The Fall in the Hebrew Bible

3. Who Wrote the Garden Story and When?

4. What Is a Reader-Response Approach to Interpreting the Garden Story?

5. Reading, Presenting, and Evaluating the Garden Story

PART TWO Before Then

6. A Down-to-Earth Story (Gen 2:4–7)

7. Why Eden? Why a Garden? Where Were the Trees? (Gen 2:5, 8–10)

8. Where in the World Was Eden? (Gen 2:10–14)

9. The Gardener and His Tasks (Gen 2:15)

10. The Second Commandment (Gen 2:16–17)

11. The First Social Welfare Program (Gen 2:18–20)

12. The First Lady (Gen 2:21–23)

13. Why Therefore? (Gen 2:24)

14. How Bare Is Naked? (Gen 2:25)

15. Clever Conversation and Conspicuous Consumption (Gen 3:1–6)

16. Dressing Up for a Dressing Down (Gen 3:7–11)

17. Interrogation and Negotiation (Gen 3:11–13)

18. Procreation in the Garden (Gen 3:14–19; 4:1–2)

19. Not a Leg to Stand On: The Serpent’s Sentence and the Israelite Culture of Curse (Gen 3:14–15)

20. No Bundle of Joy: Hawwa’s Sentence and Israelite Predilections in Legal Reasoning (Gen 3:16)

21. Toil and Trouble: Adam’s Sentence and the Rights of Laborers (Gen 3:17–19)

22. Out of the Garden (Gen 3:20–24)

PART THREE Then and Now

23. The Essential Plot of the Garden Story

24. A Literal Translation of a Literary Text

25. Allusions to the Garden Story in the Hebrew Bible

26. Contra the Common Interpretation

27. Beyond the Tower of Babel

Appendix: Transliterating Hebrew for Tourists in the Garden

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A Preface about Really

Even people who have never read the Garden story in Genesis know its essential elements and are familiar with its interpretation as the story of the Fall. God first made Adam out of the dust of the earth and placed him in the idyllic Garden of Eden as a caretaker. Later, he made Eve out of Adam’s rib and presented her to Adam as a helpmate. God placed only one restriction on their activities: They were not to eat fruit from a certain tree commonly referred to as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The snake, however, tempted Eve into consuming the forbidden fruit. Eve in turn seduced Adam, who ate also. This great sin and its after-math constitute the drama of the Fall.

Once everything came to light, the three involved in violating God’s prohibition were punished harshly. The snake lost its feet, so now every snake crawls on its belly. Eve’s punishment was more severe. She and her female descendents were sentenced to suffer pain and anguish in childbearing, to long for their husbands sexually, and to be under their husbands’ control. For her descendents to behave otherwise was, by implication, to act unnaturally and to violate God’s explicit directives. Adam and his male descendents were sentenced to a life of constant labor, each earning bread by the sweat of his brow. That was not all. Concerned that humans might also eat from the Tree of Life, the couple were driven from the Garden in Eden and left to fend for themselves.

Out of the Garden and in the world the sinful couple had sexual relations and Eve conceived. Eventually, she gave birth to three sons: the first, Cain, became the first murderer; the second, Abel, became the first victim; and the third, Seth, became the one from whom all living humans are somehow descended. Their three children were born tarnished by the sin of their parents, and all living humans are similarly tarnished.

This idea found popular expression in the New England Primer, first published in 1690, that was used to teach children the English alphabet for almost two hundred years. To illustrate the letter A it presented the following rhyme: In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all. The solution for the fallen state of humanity was spelled out in the rhyme for the letter B: Thy Life to Mend / This Book Attend. Though witty, these two lines from the Primer reflect powerful ideas in Western civilization that influenced the writing of my book.

One of the many questions that the story triggers is whether or not what most people say or think the Bible says concerning the Garden story is what the Bible actually says. The difference between these possibilities may be illustrated by juxtaposing the following two questions and querying the rhetorical import of really in the second question: (1) What happened in the Garden of Eden? (2) What really happened in the Garden of Eden?

The first What happened? is concerned with surface phenomena, with what the eye sees and the ear hears when reading the story through once. In the second formulation—What really happened?—the additional word intimates that there may be more to the story but that whatever constitutes the more has to be sought; it indicates that the more is there when one knows where to look and how to see.

My intention in using the word really in the book’s title is tied to the brief story of what precipitated my writing of this book. In part, this book originated as a response to complaints against and comments about the story of Adam and Eve as broadly understood by students—mainly women—in classes that I taught on Biblical Literature. Some of these classes were offered in regular university programs, others in informal settings such as continuing education classes and Elder Hostel programs. The women ranged in age from the late teens to the late seventies. Most, not all, were members of churches and synagogues who sometimes identified themselves to me as conservatives or liberals. Usually they had positive views about feminism. Those who paraded their religious affiliation tended to ask questions of a theological nature; others posed historical and sociological questions from the vantage point of informed agnosticism and atheism. People from the second group regularly distinguished themselves from those of the first by prefacing their remarks or questions with expressions such as I’m an atheist but … or I don’t think that God exists but … or I don’t believe in the Bible but … It took me a while to realize that although they identified themselves theologically vis-à-vis a deity who, according to their individual backgrounds and philosophies, may or may not exist, they were concerned with the first four chapters of Genesis that definitely do exist. They were sufficiently concerned to take a class or to attend a public lecture and to ask questions.

All were troubled by different aspects of the story or its interpretation: Why is it called the Fall? What is the Fall? How bad was Eve’s sin? Why did God curse humanity? What is original sin? Why is the story in the Bible at all? Did it really happen, or is it a myth? All of these questions are comprehensible as negative reactions to, or rejections of, standard responses to the What happened? question.

Initially, I referred questioners to some new publication or shared some recent insight from the perspective of feminist criticism. As questioning became more persistent, however, I grew uncomfortable with some of what I was fobbing off as answers. The material to which I directed questioners was too removed from what medieval Jewish exegetes labeled the peshat of a text. Peshat, a Hebrew word, was coined by medieval scholars to refer to the straightforward or plain meaning of a text in its writ and script in the original language in its literary, biblical context as conceived by the particular exegete. As a person living in the twenty-first century, I expanded the definition of peshat to encompass the meaning of a text in the intellectual world of the ancient Near East within which the biblical story was originally read.

Reading biblical texts following this contextual approach in order to discover their peshat is a concern of some contemporary Catholic and Protestant authorities. It is reflected in the encyclical, a letter to clergy, Divino Afflante Spiritu, issued by Pope Pius XII in 1943:

What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time … ; the interpreter must go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use.

For the ancient peoples of the Near East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their time and centuries.¹

Elsewhere in this document Pius XII made clear that the literal sense is not necessarily the most important meaning that a given text can have, but without it, there could be no subsequent Catholic interpretation and application.

A Protestant formulation of the same idea is found in Old Testament Survey (1982), written by the conservative Protestant scholars W. S. LaSor, D. A. Hubbard, and F. Wm. Bush:

Yet at the same time, the modern reader must try to see the Old Testament passages on their own terms. The reader must ask: What was the Old Testament author saying to his own times? He or she must sit with the hearers in the marketplace, city gate, temple, or synagogue and try to understand his words as they heard them. He or she must see God through their eyes and discern his purposes in their lives.

In other words, one must be sensitive to the original context of an Old Testament passage. Why was it written and when? What problems called it into being? What question was it initially intended to answer? What did it tell the people about God’s will and ways or about their responsibilities that they would not otherwise have known? Only when one understands the intent of a passage for the author’s own times, can he then catch the full significance of the passage for Christian faith and life. The Old Testament context will not tell all one needs to know about the meaning of the passage. But unless one starts there, it becomes easy to twist the Scriptures to one’s own purpose. Rather, the sense of the individual authors must be grasped in order to capture the meaning put there by the overall Author, the Spirit of God, who speaks through all of Scripture and whose speaking gives the whole Bible its authority for his people.²

Both formulations maintain the principle enunciated in 2 Timothy 3:16 that all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness. Both recognize honestly that a scripture’s usefulness depends on the specific meaning of individual passages in context, meaning that can be established only through the study of original languages and texts, tasks requiring special expertise.

This realization led me to consider the impact of inserting really into the What happened? question. When I did so, I recognized that for me the word evoked issues of truth, objectivity, and facticity beyond surface appearances. Therefore, I formulated my own question: What was the peshat of the Garden story within (1) its literary context in the Israel of the eighth–sixth centuries BCE, (2) the intellectual context of the Iron Age, which ended with the destruction of Solomon’s temple and the exile of Jerusalem’s elites to Babylonia in 586 BCE, (3) the broader literary contexts of the story in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament; Tanakh) and the Greek New Testament, and (4) the cultural context of early Judaism and Christianity? This gem of a question immediately generated a host of more focused questions about vocabulary and grammar, as well as about literary, historical, and philosophical matters, only some of which I undertook to answer: Why did God create the man? Was he created sin-free? Exactly why was the woman created? What is a helpmate? Why was the woman created from a rib? What is the Fall? Who is responsible for it? Was the serpent Satan? Was the Garden of Eden paradise? Where was the Garden? Each of these questions was preceded by the words according to the story.³

I thought that answers based on linguistic and literary criteria considered in their historical and cultural contexts, if achievable, might be of interest to people like my former students and would assuage discontentment with the story. Subsequent discussions with colleagues, a chatty fellow in a kosher take-out Chinese restaurant, my barber, as well as with personal friends in business, crafts, and trades revealed to me that interest in such questions is much broader than I had first anticipated. My own intent, however, did not extend formally beyond suggesting a new peshat.

*

It is clear on both historical and sociological grounds that religion infuses culture and is infused by it. It cannot be contained by a sacred label and segregated neatly from the rest of culture, which is then referred to as secular. Accordingly, to respond to both the questions raised here and others, this book explores many elements of Israelite religious culture: language, law, geography, labor ethics, social hierarchies, notions of divine imminence, and, unsurprisingly, various stories from the Bible as well as stories from other Near Eastern cultures that thrived during the biblical period. This approach works with the broad understanding that religion, in the present as in the past, is lived and comes to expression in the world through what people say, do, write, and create everywhere on every day of the week.

Many questions asked in this book are old, and earlier generations provided themselves with satisfactory answers. But answers that we find acceptable today may differ because they envelop recent discoveries that stimulate new insights. Even when an answer appears the same, it is different because the informational context and intellectual climate of question and answer have changed.

This does not imply that insights produced in the past may be ignored when responding to contemporary questions; rather, it means that their limited adequacy for determining answers to today’s questions must be recognized.

Sometimes old commentary is of interest primarily to historians as an artifact reflecting what some or many people once thought, but sometimes it provides important insights and suggests approaches to the Bible that are useful in the contemporary search for understanding and new knowledge. At other times, it is clear that ancient, medieval, and pre-modern scholars got it right, even by the most demanding of contemporary standards. That is the reason that I consulted their works and cite them often in this book. They contribute measurably to the search for answers to what really happened.

The philosophical attitude that I take in writing this book may be called contentment. I am gratified to work in history because I find examining how people thought in the past an aesthetic pleasure. I find discovering the original meanings of words and texts an enriching experience, and applying proper methodologies to achieve these results a challenging, worthwhile, and even artful undertaking. I assume that many of those whose observations in the past contributed to the formation of my own ideas felt the same way.

As research progressed, answers to the different questions emerged, often surprising me and shocking or delighting friends and colleagues at scholarly meetings, at public lectures, and in private conversations. When the answers to the many disparate questions meshed, they resulted in a text-bonded understanding of the story that was representative of its cultural milieu and far-reaching in its simplicity.

What follows, then, is a cultural reading of the Garden story, informed both by my own stance in the cultures of contemporary Western society and contemporary scholarship and by the ancient culture of those who produced and read the story. Anyone who thinks that discussion of Genesis or Adam and Eve falls exclusively within a narrow part of culture called religion and is restricted to it should keep Ira Gershwin’s lyric in mind: It ain’t necessarily so.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to students who, during the 1991–93 academic years, first asked the questions and to colleagues who reacted to papers presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Biblical Literature in 1993 and 1994 in which I tested initial answers. Members of the Biblical Symposium of the Hebrew University and of the Bible Faculty Seminars at Haifa University and at Bar Ilan University, where I presented some tentative, general conclusions in 1995, offered useful suggestions and posed additional questions for me to consider. A second round of thanks is due students who posed new, useful questions during the 1996–97 academic years and to my colleagues in the American Oriental Society who, in 1997, commented on and helped improve some of the answers that appear now in this book.

I express my appreciation to the Rockefeller Foundation for enabling me to update and revise the growing manuscript during my tenure as visiting scholar at the foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center at the Villa Serbelloni in February–March 2001. Colleagues there from around the world, representing disparate disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, taught me where my work required amplification and clarification for people curious about the topic but not specialists in the Bible or Semitic languages. Fellow members of the now defunct, intimate Biblical Colloquium West, the first to hear much of the full analysis presented in this book at our annual retreat in February 2004, and colleagues at the Annual Meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association who attended my extensive Research Report presentation in August 2004 provided much constructive criticism and many productive demurrers that led to additional corrections and additions.

Stephen Hanselman, Julie Hanselman, and Debby Segura read and critiqued some of the early chapters of this book; Zehava Zevit did likewise with Chapters 16–20. Jeanette Friedman read through the entire manuscript and was generous with her comments and suggestions. They provided me with good ideas and inspired two years of additional research and writing. Henry L. Carrigan read, commented on, critiqued, and helped me to improve the final manuscript immensely. Mary Pasti, my editor at Yale University Press, sharpened the manuscript, improving the quality of my writing through her careful, close readings, her flow of queries, comments, and quips, and her insightful suggestions.

Rick Burke, former director of the Ostrow Library at the American Jewish University; Paul Miller, current director; and Patricia Fenton, manager of Judaica and Public Services, conjured up books within days of my requests. Their good-willed support facilitated my research for this and other projects over many years. David Deis of Dreamline Cartography created the maps for this book, and Debby Segura provided an alphabet chart and two line drawings. Ron Petrisca and Yasmin Hubashi of the Technology Department at the American Jewish University helped prepare most of the other figures for publication.

My dear friends Yaela and Yohanan Wosner on many occasions provided an intellectually stimulating haven in Jerusalem, where I wrote and revised many parts of this manuscript a few times over the years.

I am grateful to Stephen Hanselman, my agent, who helped make this book possible, and Jennifer Banks, senior editor at Yale University Press, for accepting it onto the Press’s list.

And I thank my wife, Rachel, for her unfailing good sense and humor, her good company, and her encouragement.

To all, thank you.

Introduction:

The Fall Is with Us Always

Christians and Jews have read the narrative about Adam and Eve in the Garden for more than two millennia, or at least they have heard about it. Preachers and scholars regularly address its plot, themes, and theology—none of which are understood to bode well for humanity. Because of constant retelling, the story is so ingrained in popular awareness that it is possible to know it through hearsay and folklore alone.

Many Americans who spent a summer or two at camp may have made their first acquaintance with the story through the hand-clapping spiritual Them Bones Will Rise Again in one of its many variations. The following lyrics, with the chorus and the repetitions of the title line omitted, are typical:

Now the Lord decided to make a man.

He took some water and he took some sand,

Took a rib from Adam’s side,

Made Miss Eve for to be his bride,

Well, he made a garden rich and fair,

Told them to eat what they found there.

To one tall tree they must not go.

There, forever the fruit must grow.

Around that tree old Satan slunk,

And at Miss Eve his eye he wunk.

"Eve, those apples look mighty fine.

Just try one—the Lord won’t mind!"

First she took a little slice,

Smacked her lips and said, ’Twas nice.

Next she gave a little pull;

Soon she had her apron full.

Soon the Lord came a-walking round,

Spied those peelings on the ground.

Adam, Adam, where art thou?

Here I am, Lord, I’m a-coming now.

You ate my apples, I believe.

Wasn’t me, Lord, it was Eve.

The Lord rose up in his mighty wrath,

Told them, "Beat it down the path.

"Adam, you must leave this place,

Earn your living by the sweat of your face."

They took a pick, and they took a plow—

That’s why we’re all working now.

That’s all there is, there ain’t no more.

Eve got the apple and Adam got the core.

That’s the story of the Fall from Grace

Until Jesus saved the human race.

Though humorous and light-hearted, the song closely adheres to the Bible’s story. Where it differs, the song reflects widely held beliefs about the story. For example, the song identifies the serpent who speaks with Eve in the Bible as Satan, characterizing him as a folksy, flirtatious conniver. It connects Satan directly to Eve’s misbehavior that resulted in sin, exile from the garden rich and fair, and a sentence of hard labor for all humanity.

The song reflects interpretations of the story that originated in the Middle Ages and earlier. It assumes that apples were the forbidden fruit, which was never identified in the Bible’s story. Likewise, unlike the biblical story, in which both Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit, the song assigns blame only to Eve, failing to mention that Adam ate also. The last two lines draw the song into the orbit of standard Christian theology, teaching that salvation from the fallen state became available only with the coming of Jesus.

*

Because jokes are usually part of popular oral culture, they are of particular importance in ascertaining how widespread knowledge of the Fall is outside religious settings. Jokesters intend their audiences to comprehend a punch line quickly, without having to stop and think. Examining jokes about Adam and Eve allows us, then, to determine the common knowledge that jokesters assume their audience to possess. Insofar as the following three jokes work, even on adults and college students who admit to not having read the story, they may be used to guesstimate what many know about the Fall.

Joke 1

One day in the Garden of Eden, Eve called to God, Lord, I have a problem.

What’s your problem, Eve?

I know that you created me and put me in this lovely garden with all the animals. But I’m just not happy any more.

Why not, Eve? What’s gone wrong?

Well, Lord, I guess that I’m getting lonely. These animals don’t talk. And to tell you the truth, fresh apples just don’t do it for me any more.

Eve, I have a solution. I’ll create a man for you.

What’s a man, Lord?

Well, he’s a bit like you, but flawed. He’s tough and not easy to get along with. But he will be bigger and faster than you so he can help out when needed. But he’ll be a bit slower than you and you’ll have to help him figure out what to do.

Eve thought for a few moments, scratched her head, and asked, What’s the catch, Lord?

Well, there will be one condition attached.

Eve smiled wisely and asked, And what’s that, Lord?

You’ll have to let him think that I made him first.

The humor in this joke lies in the assumption that the audience knows that Adam was created before Eve and that the animals were formed for his benefit as God sought a helper for him. The punch line plays on the image of the so-called dominant male as a somewhat oafish character who can be controlled by a wily woman. This alludes both to the idea that it was Eve who seduced Adam into eating the forbidden fruit and to the divine order that the man would rule over the woman. The punch line works by restoring the backwards world set up by the joke to its ostensible mirror image as known through the biblical story.

Later in this book, I will demonstrate that the idea of Adam’s seduction is based on a mistranslation of the biblical text.

Joke 2

One day in the Garden of Eden, Adam called out to God, Lord, I have a problem.

What’s your problem, Adam?

I’m lonely and the animals aren’t fun. The food is a bit flat and there’s nobody to talk with.

Well, Adam, I have a solution. I’ll create a woman for you.

What’s a woman, Lord?

Well, a bit like you, but she’ll know how to take care of you. She’ll cook good dinners; she’ll give you a massage after you shower. She’ll fill you in on what happened all day. She’ll remind you what you have to do. She’ll be your friend.

Adam thought for a few moments, scratched his head, and asked, How much is this going to cost me, Lord?

I was thinking about an arm and a leg.

Adam smiled wisely and asked, And what could I get for a rib?

The assumption here is a common awareness that the first woman was formed from Adam’s rib to be his helper. The punch line works because it treats literally the figure of speech costs an arm and a leg, which usually translates as costs a great deal, while explaining how it is that God decided to make Eve out of Adam’s rib.

Below, I will explain how this comprehension of Eve’s origin developed from a misunderstanding of the biblical text.

Joke 3

Mr. Yotan wanted to encourage students in the school cafeteria to select healthy desserts from among the items offered, particularly fruit. He leaned a neatly printed sign against a bowl of chocolate-chip cookies: Take only one! God is watching. About ten minutes later, he noticed that someone had appended a note to his sign: Take all you want. God is watching the apples.

The allusion to the story of the Fall is more oblique in this joke than in the two preceding ones. The humor is based on the assumption that the forbidden fruit was the apple and plays on the notion that God was concerned with theft from his apple tree. The punch line works because it suggests how to get away with a misdemeanor without getting caught and punished as were Adam and Eve. In fact, the Bible story makes clear that all fruit from the tree was prohibited, not just second helpings.

People whose knowledge of the Fall was gained through the song Them Bones Will Rise Again could understand each of these jokes.

To be understood, these jokes all require knowledge about the sequence of events in the Garden, the relationship between Adam and Eve, Eve’s intelligence, the couple’s sin, and their punishment.

The third joke assumes that everybody in the lunch line knew that they should take only one chocolate-chip cookie for dessert. The punch line is effective because it tolerates low-grade unethical behavior with a wink and a smile. It appeals to the touch of petty larceny that many believe lies in the souls of all people and that accepts questionable acts of self-gratification, particularly when a misappropriation can be justified as victimless.

*

Advertisers, as specialists in manipulating the hearts and souls of people, sometimes expect their target audience to have a sophisticated comprehension of the Garden story. They use the story of Adam and Eve overtly when appealing to the barely suppressed desire for self-indulgence characteristic of potential consumers. They appeal to wealthy clients and play on guilt effectively when selling expensive cars, handbags, or watches— Don’t feel guilty. You deserve it.

Waiters in some restaurants use a similar tactic when plying a calorie-rich dessert: It is wicked, but you will enjoy it. Would you like to share it? What the waiter conveys is not only that the cake or mousse or parfait is exceptionally good but that consuming it is not good for you and consequently may be a source of guilty pleasure.

The message of both advertisers and waiters is that to act against better judgment can provide pleasure and self-satisfaction. Their allusions to the Garden story combine consumption, guilt, and pleasure to give an oblique but clear message: Sin in haste; repent, if you chose to do so, in leisure.

Contemporary awareness of the story among adults raised in some denominations sometimes generates an uneasy sense of guilt when they feel too good about themselves. Some, after achieving fame, success, and wealth, come to fear a fall, a precipitous decline in their fortune. The most common expression of such concern is charitable giving. It is explained variously as giving back or righting the scale or helping the less fortunate or helping those less blessed than I. One of its purposes is to direct questionably gotten (though not illegal) wealth into paths of righteousness: schools, hospitals, churches, synagogues, and shelters for various categories of unfortunate people. It is a way of diverting God’s attention away from extravagant accumulation or consumption to extravagant good.

The examples of jokesters, advertisers, waiters, and even charitable givers address both the story and the idea of the Fall as light elements in popular culture. But the idea of the Fall is simultaneously a major building block in the construction of Christian theologies. In Christian thought, it is the event that necessitated a counterevent for the salvation of humanity: the resurrection of Christ, which, though interpreted variously, is generally understood as a sign of divine grace. Accordingly, the significance of the Fall extends through interpretive instruction and preaching and beyond abstract theology into the lives of many, influencing thought and behavior.¹ It is so deeply interwoven into some aspects of Western culture that it also influences those who do not believe its message but recognize certain attitudes that it engenders as common wisdom based on human experience.

*

Through the polarity between fallen and saved in Christian theological interpretation, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden has shaped and continues to influence attitudes toward wealth (as with the charitable givers), family structure, and authority, as well as theories of personality types and deviant behaviors.²

In Damnation and Deviance (1978), Mordechai Rotenberg, a philosopher of psychotherapeutic modalities, draws attention to the influence of Calvinist theology of the Fall on people-changing professions in the West. He argues that this theology, with its well-defined notions of who is predestined for election and who for damnation, generated beliefs about what constitute deviant behaviors and why they are often considered irreversible. He also traces how such beliefs contribute to the problem of social alienation. Rotenberg maintains that after certain assumptions about deviance became embedded in culture, they came to be viewed as axiomatic within various social-science disciplines. Then he points out how they give rise to pernicious outcomes in therapeutic situations when the people-changers—social workers, prison officials, parole officers, family therapists, and psychotherapists—and their clients share the view that the clients are among the unsaved.³

*

Adam and Eve had everything before the Fall and then nothing. A lapse in judgment, an impulsive decision, resulted in a sin that precipitated the forfeiture of a blissful life in a state of grace before the presence of God. Outside the Garden they labored to survive and became prey to all types of misfortune that visit those out of God’s favor. We, their descendents, labor to improve our lot and the lot of humanity. But, like Adam and Eve, we are always skirting misdeeds and tottering on the brink of a new fall.

Thoughts such as these may have filled the mind of Katherine Lee Bates when she wrote the words to America the Beautiful in 1893 as a meditation on the nature of America’s soul. She was both awed and inspired by the natural and human scenery that she viewed through her window on a train trip from the East Coast of the United States to Denver one summer. Her poem, which many believe should become the national anthem of the United States, refers to scenes of awe-inspiring natural beauty and marvelous human achievement. Bates discerned human achievement in the transformations that disciplined labor had brought to the land and that freewheeling Protestant capitalism had brought to the cities.

Every stanza begins with a description of something wondrous about the dynamic Eden still being settled and built. She mentions spacious skies, purple mountains, and fruited plains, pilgrim migration routes, liberty, and alabaster cities but concludes each stanza with a prayer on behalf of America. Four examples represent her major themes: America, America, God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea; God mend thy every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law; May God thy gold refine till all success be nobleness and every gain divine; and God shed his grace on thee till selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free.

The prayers address moral faults that she perceived: lack of brotherhood and self-control, illicit and selfish gain, and liberty unbridled by law. Bates recognized the faults as arising out of the exuberance of American freedom, but presupposed that the forces driving America, however virtuous, must be subordinate to antecedent values taught by God. Her prayers express her belief that until people learn to control themselves and act properly, they require God’s grace to manage. Those requiring God’s grace are the fallen. They are the focus of her prayers. The historical origin of the conception that some or all people require such grace is one of the many concerns of this book.

The actual biblical text that may have inspired Bates is Jeremiah 9:3–11. In these verses, God condemns Israelites for cheating and lying, for deceiving their brothers and neighbors; he denounces them for ambushing one another instead of behaving as friends. Consequently, Jeremiah announces that God will melt them and test them and bring retribution on the nation that will affect the mountains and the habitations in the wilderness, that he will drive away animals and so change nature that it will be abandoned. He will then destroy the city of Jerusalem and make other cities desolate.

Jeremiah’s verses refer to nature and to the human inventions that Bates praised—paths in the wilderness, cities—as well as to the faults she saw. At the level of the individual, however, the list of faults alludes obliquely to Adam and Eve in the Garden. They disobeyed a divine law: they lacked self-control and took what was not theirs. Their backbiting and counteraccusations before the divine judge were hardly a demonstration of amity. Because of their acquisitive selfishness they lost everything.

In Bates’s view, America required God’s grace because what happened to Adam and Eve in Eden could happen to the people she viewed through the window of her train. For her, sensitivity to the Fall and its consequences could inspire Americans to act in ways that would make them worthy of God’s grace and of his forgiveness when they did wrong.

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In Part I of this book, I describe when, where, and why these ideas developed and raise the following question: Why is the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible unaware of the idea of the Fall? In Part II, I question the notion that the sin was due to a lapse in judgment and examine whether or not the Garden story indicates that Adam and Eve experienced any sense of guilt over what they had done. In Part III, I illustrate how the Garden story is addressed and evaluated in the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible in books other than Genesis.

This book explores the origin of understandings of the Fall in both the high and low cultural traditions of the West reflected in the examples presented above. It illustrates that much of what is considered obvious and self-apparent in the biblical story is neither obvious nor self-apparent when the story is read closely and examined carefully. Moreover, it argues that much, not all, of what people believe about the story is based on misconstruals of the story’s language and incorrect interpretations of the sequence and meaning of events.

PART ONE

Now and Then

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now.

—Paul, Epistle to the Romans 8:22 (ca. 50–60)

"and he closed, wayyisgor, the flesh beneath it"—From the beginning of the book until this passage, the lettersamech is not written. Because she was created, the satan was created with her.

—Bereshith Rabbah 17:6 (fourth century)

The deliberate sin of the first man is the cause of original sin.

—Augustine of Hippo, On Marriage and Concupiscence, II, xxvi, 43 (419/420)

[The] members of the race should not have died, had not the first two merited this by their disobedience; for by them so great a sin was committed that by it the human nature was altered for the worse, and was transmitted also to their posterity, liable to sin and subject to death.

—Augustine of Hippo, City of God, XIV: I (426)

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam. He brought death into the world.

—Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

1 THE FALL IN INTERPRETATION

In popular perception, the Garden story in Genesis teaches about humanity’s forfeiture of an ideal relationship with God and about the origins of sexuality and lust in acts of disobedience and rebellion against him. It explains the derivation of some human woes in divine curses: the struggle for livelihood and the pain of childbirth. It instructs wives to submit to the rule of their husbands. It informs us about the curse on Reptilia squamata serpentes (Ophidia) that brought about its novel form of locomotion. Finally, the story explains, at least as some interpret it, why, after a life of struggle, all humans die.

Adam and Hawwa (Eve, by her Hebrew name) were banished from the paradisiacal Garden

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Mockers mock the word of God
They will fail like grass
But word of God abides forever