Ishmael

by Daniel Quinn

  And as they were talking in this way, a lion went out to hunt, and the gods said to themselves, “Today is the lion’s day to go hungry, and the deer it would have taken may live another day.” And so the lion missed its kill, and as it was returning hungry to its den it began to curse the gods. But they said, “Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world, and today is your day to go hungry.” And the lion was at peace.

  And the next day the lion went out to hunt, and the gods sent it the deer they had spared the day before. And as the deer felt the lion’s jaws on its neck, it began to curse the gods. But they said, “Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world, and today is your day to die just as yesterday was your day to live.” And the deer was at peace.

  Then the gods said to themselves, “Certainly the knowledge of good and evil is a powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world without becoming criminals. If we had yesterday sent the lion away hungry without this knowledge, then indeed it would have been a crime. And if we had today sent the deer into the lion’s jaws without this knowledge, then indeed this too would have been a crime. But with this knowledge we have done both of these things, one seemingly opposed to the other, and have committed no crime.”

  Now it happened that one of the gods was away on an errand when the others were eating at the tree of knowledge, and when he returned and heard what the gods had done in the matter of the lion and the deer, he said, “In doing these two things you have surely committed a crime in one instance or the other, for these two things are opposed, and one must have been right to do and the other wrong. If it was good for the lion to go hungry on the first day, then it was evil to send it the deer on the second. Or if it was good to send it the deer on the second day, then it was evil to send it away hungry on the first.”

  The others nodded and said, “Yes, this is just the way we would have reasoned before we ate of this tree of knowledge.”

  “What knowledge is this?” the god asked, noticing the tree for the first time.

  “Taste its fruit,” they told him. “Then you’ll know exactly what knowledge it is.”

  So the god tasted, and his eyes were opened. “Yes, I see,” he said. “This is indeed the proper knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die.”

  5

  “Any questions so far?” Ishmael asked.

  I jumped, startled by this break in the narrative. “No. This is fascinating.”

  Ishmael went on.

  6

  When the gods saw that Adam was awakening, they said to themselves, “Now here is a creature so like us that he might almost be one of our company. What span of life and what destiny shall we fashion for him?”

  One of them said, “He is so fair, let’s give him life for the lifetime of this planet. In the days of his childhood let’s care for him as we care for all others in the garden, so that he learns the sweetness of living in our hands. But in adolescence he will surely begin to realize that he’s capable of much more than other creatures and will become restless in our care. Shall we then lead him to the other tree in the garden, the Tree of Life?”

  But another said, “To lead Adam like a child to the Tree of Life before he had even begun to seek it for himself would deprive him of a great undertaking by which he may gain an important wisdom and prove his mettle to himself. As we would give him the care he needs as a child, let’s give him the quest he needs as an adolescent. Let’s make the quest for the Tree of Life the occupation of his adolescence. In this way he’ll discover for himself how he may have life for the lifetime of this planet.”

  The others agreed with this plan, but one said, “We should take note that this might well be a long and baffling quest for Adam. Youth is impatient, and after a few thousand years of searching, he might despair of finding the Tree of Life. If this should happen, he might be tempted to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead.”

  “Nonsense,” the others replied. “You know very well that the fruit of this tree nourishes only the gods. It can no more nourish Adam than the grasses of the oxen. He might take it into his mouth and swallow it, but it would pass through his body without benefit. Surely you don’t imagine that he might actually gain our knowledge by eating of this tree?”

  “Of course not,” the other replied. “The danger is not that he would gain our knowledge but rather that he might imagine that he’d gained it. Having tasted the fruit of this tree, he might say to himself, ‘I have eaten at the gods’ own tree of knowledge and therefore know as well as they how to rule the world. I may do as I will do.’”

  “This is absurd,” said the other gods. “How could Adam ever be so foolish as to imagine he had the knowledge that enables us to govern the world and to do what we will do? None of our creatures will ever be master of the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die. This knowledge is ours alone, and if Adam should grow in wisdom till the very eclipse of the universe, it would be as far beyond him as it is right now.”

  But the other was not disconcerted by this argument. “If Adam should eat of our tree,” he persisted, “there’s no telling how he might deceive himself. Not knowing the truth, he might say to himself, ‘Whatever I can justify doing is good and whatever I cannot justify doing is evil.’”

  But the others scoffed at this, saying, “This is not the knowledge of good and evil.”

  “Of course it’s not,” the other replied, “but how would Adam know this?”

  The others shrugged. “Perhaps in childhood Adam might believe he was wise enough to rule the world, but what of it? Such arrogant foolishness would pass with maturity.”

  “Ah,” said the other, “but possessed of this arrogant foolishness, would Adam survive into maturity? Believing himself our equal, he would be capable of anything. In his arrogance, he might look around the garden and say to himself, ‘This is all wrong. Why should I have to share the fire of life with all these creatures? Look here, the lions and the wolves and the foxes take the game I would have for myself. This is evil. I will kill all these creatures, and this will be good. And look here, the rabbits and the grasshoppers and the sparrows take the fruits of the land that I would have for myself. This is evil. I will kill all these creatures, and this will be good. And look here, the gods have set a limit on my growth just as they’ve set a limit on the growth of all others. This is evil. I will grow without limit, taking all the fire of life that flows through this garden into myself, and that will be good.’ Tell me—if this should happen, how long would Adam live before he had devoured the entire world?”

  “If this should happen,” the others said, “Adam would devour the world in a single day, and at the end of that day he would devour himself.”

  “Just so,” the other said, “unless he managed to escape from this world. Then he would devour the entire universe as he had devoured the world. But even so he would inevitably end by devouring himself, as anything must that grows without limit.”

  “This would indeed be a terrible end for Adam,” another said. “But might he not come to the same end even without having eaten at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Might he not be tempted by his yearning for growth to take the fire of life into his own hands even without deluding himself that this was good?”

  “He might,” the others agreed. “But what would be the result? He would become a criminal, an outlaw, a thief of life, and a murderer of the creatures around him. Without the delusion that what he was doing was good—and therefore to be done at any cost—he would soon weary of the outlaw’s life. Indeed this is bound to happen during his quest for the Tree of Life. But if he should eat of the tree of our knowledge, then he will shrug off his weariness. He will say, What does it matter that I’m weary of living as a murderer of all the life around me? I know good and evil, and this way of living is good. Therefore I must live this way even though I’m weary unto death, even though I destroy the world and even myself. The gods wrote in the world a law for all to follow, but it c
annot apply to me because I’m their equal. Therefore I will live outside this law and grow without limit. To be limited is evil. I will steal the fire of life from the hands of the gods and heap it up for my growth, and that will be good. I will destroy those kinds that do not serve my growth, and that will be good. I will wrest the garden from the hands of the gods and order it anew so that it serves only my growth, and that will be good. And because these things are good, they must be done at any cost. It may be that I’ll destroy the garden and make a ruin of it. It may be that my progeny will teem over the earth like locusts, stripping it bare, until they drown in their own filth and hate the very sight of one another and go mad. Still they must go on, because to grow without limit is good and to accept the limits of the law is evil. And if any say, “Let’s put off the burdens of the criminal life and live in the hands of the gods once again,” I will kill them, for what they say is evil. And if any say, “Let’s turn aside from our misery and search for that other tree,” I will kill them, for what they say is evil. And when at last all the garden has been subjugated to my use and all kinds that do not serve my growth have been cast aside and all the fire of life in the world flows through my progeny, still I must grow. And to the people of this land I will say, “Grow, for this is good,” and they will grow. And to the people of the next land I will say, “Grow, for this is good,” and they will grow. And when they can grow no more, the people of this land will fall upon the people of the next to murder them, so that they may grow still more. And if the groans of my progeny fill the air throughout the world, I will say to them, “Your sufferings must be borne, for you suffer in the cause of good. See how great we have become! Wielding the knowledge of good and evil, we have made ourselves the masters of the world, and the gods have no power over us. Though your groans fill the air, isn’t it sweeter to live in our own hands than in the hands of the gods?” ‘”

  And when the gods heard all this, they saw that, of all the trees in the garden, only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could destroy Adam. And so they said to him, “You may eat of every tree in the garden save the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat of that tree you will certainly die.”

  7

  I sat there dazed for a while, then I recalled seeing a bible in Ishmael’s odd collection of books. In fact, there were three. I fetched them and after a few minutes of study looked up and said, “None of these has any comment to make on why this tree should have been forbidden to Adam.”

  “Were you expecting them to?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “The Takers write the notes, and this story has always been an impenetrable mystery to them. They’ve never been able to figure out why the knowledge of good and evil should have been forbidden to man. Don’t you see why?”

  “No.”

  “Because, to the Takers, this knowledge is the very best knowledge of all—the most beneficial for man to have. This being so, why would the gods forbid it to him?”

  “True.”

  “The knowledge of good and evil is fundamentally the knowledge the rulers of the world must exercise, because every single thing they do is good for some but evil for others. This is what ruling is all about, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And man was born to rule the world, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. According to Taker mythology.”

  “Then why would the gods withhold the very knowledge man needs to fulfill his destiny? From the Taker point of view, it makes no sense at all.”

  “True.”

  “The disaster occurred when, ten thousand years ago, the people of your culture said, We’re as wise as the gods and can rule the world as well as they.’ When they took into their own hands the power of life and death over the world, their doom was assured.”

  “Yes. Because they are not in fact as wise as the gods.”

  “The gods ruled the world for billions of years, and it was doing just fine. After just a few thousand years of human rule, the world is at the point of death.”

  “True. But the Takers will never give it up.”

  Ishmael shrugged. “Then they’ll die. As predicted. The authors of this story knew what they were talking about.”

  8

  “And you’re saying this story was written from a Leaver point of view?”

  “That’s right. If it had been written from the Taker point of view, the knowledge of good and evil wouldn’t have been forbidden to Adam, it would have been thrust upon him. The gods would have hung around saying, ‘Come on, Man, can’t you see that you’re nothing without this knowledge? Stop living off our bounty like a lion or a wombat. Here, have some of this fruit and you’ll instantly realize that you’re naked—as naked as any lion or wombat: naked to the world, powerless. Come on, have some of this fruit and become one of us. Then, lucky you, you can leave this garden and begin living by the sweat of your brow, the way humans are supposed to live.’ And if people of your cultural persuasion had authored it, this event wouldn’t be called the Fall, it would be called the Ascent—or as you put it earlier, the Liberation.”

  “Very true…. But I’m not quite sure how this fits in with everything else.”

  “We are furthering your understanding of how things came to be this way.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “A minute ago, you told me that the Takers will never give up their tyranny over the world, no matter how bad things get. How did they get to be this way?”

  I goggled at him.

  “They got to be this way because they’ve always believed that what they were doing was right—and therefore to be done at any cost whatever. They’ve always believed that, like the gods, they know what is right to do and what is wrong to do, and what they’re doing is right. Do you see how they’ve demonstrated what I’m saying?”

  “Not offhand.”

  “They’ve demonstrated it by forcing everyone in the world to do what they do, to live the way they live. Everyone had to be forced to live like the Takers, because the Takers had the one right way.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Many peoples among the Leavers practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was right, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it. They didn’t say to the people around them, ‘You may no longer live by hunting and gathering. This is wrong. This is evil, and we forbid it. Put your land under cultivation or we’ll wipe you out.’ What they said was, ‘You want to be hunter-gatherers? That’s fine with us. That’s great. We want to be agriculturalists. You be hunter-gatherers and we’ll be agriculturalists. We don’t pretend to know which way is right. We just know which way we prefer.’”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “And if they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn’t like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were able to give it up. They didn’t say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because this is the right way to live.’ For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, ‘This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.’ They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don’t even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam—those who vanished.

  “But it’s not going to be this easy for the Takers. It’s going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they’re doing is right, and they have to go on doing it even if it means destroying the world and mankind with it.”

  “Yes, that’s the way it seems.”

  “Giving it up would mean … what?”

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p; “Giving it up would mean … It would mean that all along they’d been wrong. It would mean that they’d never known how to rule the world. It would mean … relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.”

  “It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods.”

  “Yes.”

  9

  Ishmael nodded to the stack of bibles at my feet. “According to the authors of that story, the people living between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had eaten at the gods’ own tree of knowledge. Where do you suppose they got that idea?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever gave the authors of this story the idea that the people living in the Fertile Crescent had eaten at the gods’ tree of knowledge? Do you suppose they saw it with their own eyes? Do you suppose they were there when your agricultural revolution began?”

  “I suppose that’s a possibility.”

  “Think. If they’d been there to see it with their own eyes, who would they have been?”

  “Oh … right. They would have been the people of the Fall. They would have been the Takers.”

  “And if they’d been Takers, they would have told the story a different way.”

  “Yes.”

  “So the authors of this story were not there to see it with their own eyes. How then did they know it had happened? How did they know that the Takers had usurped the role of the gods in the world?”

  “Lord,” I said.

  “Who were the authors of this story?”

  “Well … the Hebrews?”

  Ishmael shook his head. “Among the people known as the Hebrews, this was already an ancient story—and a mysterious story. The Hebrews stepped into history as Takers—and wanted nothing more than to be like their Taker neighbors. Indeed, that’s why their prophets were always bawling them out.”