Eden Revisited

It’s my intention to return to Abraham, the hero of Genesis, but before doing that, I’d like first to discuss a couple of the earlier chapters in Genesis, stories everyone knows from childhood. My reading of Bloom’s Book of J, and my efforts to think about the circumstances that gave rise to the authorship of Genesis, have caused me to reconsider some of these very familiar stories. Let’s start with the Garden of Eden – Adam and Eve.

For much of the world, this is the tale of original sin – the serpent playing the villain, and Eve often portrayed as his accomplice. Judaism doesn’t necessarily buy into the concept of original sin, but traditional Jewish thinking characterizes this story as a tale of good and evil. “The story of the Garden of Eden [teaches] that evil is a human product.” Man, through the exercise of his good will corrupts God’s good world and, “puts evil in its place.” (Sarna 24). Now let’s see if I got this right. God’s destruction of Noah’s entire world, including all the giraffes, peacocks and hummingbirds, is just some cosmic mistake, a mistake he admits immediately thereafter, when he gives Noah the rainbow; but Adam and Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden introduces evil into the world. Is that right? The more modern and enlightened view of Eden, as explained in Joseph’s Bones is that it’s a story about commandments and disobedience. But I think all these interpretations are wrong.

The Garden of Eden is not a story about good and evil; in fact, it’s not a didactic story at all. Rather, it’s descriptive. Think about the punishment visited on Adam and Even. The woman will bear children through pain, and the man will earn his bread through toil and labor. That’s not a punishment; that’s just a description of our lives. And that’s what the Bible is telling us in the Garden of Eden; it’s a story about the human condition.

Where can we find paradise today? Somewhere east of the Tigris and Euphrates? In Shangri-La? How about in my back yard? The squirrels and rabbits that live in my back yard live in paradise. They have all those tulips and acorns and Susan’s herb garden to feast on all summer long. In the winter, even if they can’t find food, they get to snuggle up with their mates in their respective dens, probably right under my back porch. There are no predators to speak of. And while they may have a sense of the change of seasons, they have no concept of their mortality. For all they know, they’ll live forever, feasting on our flowers, and climbing in our trees.

What was different about Adam and Eve was that they came to understand the human condition. This is a story about the development of consciousness, and with it, the awareness of human mortality. The Adam and Eve story depicts that point in history, in pre-history really, when our ancestors separated themselves from the animals with whom they had lived. J, or whoever sat down to write this story, tried to describe what exactly it is that makes us human. And she did that three thousand years ago, six hundred years before Plato. We’ve all relegated Genesis to the Sunday school teachers. But J was writing wisdom literature, not stories for kids. We’ll return to that topic when we get back to Abraham, but considering the time, and the nature of the world in which she wrote, J’s vision and her originality are startling.