The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  To Eden and Isaiah

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: IN THE HOUSE OF WORSHIP

  1. BARE BONES

  2. BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON

  3. CLAY TABLETS

  4. THE LIFE OF ADAM AND EVE

  5. IN THE BATHHOUSE

  6. ORIGINAL FREEDOM, ORIGINAL SIN

  7. EVE’S MURDER

  8. EMBODIMENTS

  9. CHASTITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  10. THE POLITICS OF PARADISE

  11. BECOMING REAL

  12. MEN BEFORE ADAM

  13. FALLING AWAY

  14. DARWIN’S DOUBTS

  EPILOGUE: IN THE FOREST OF EDEN

  Appendix 1: A Sampling of Interpretations

  Appendix 2: A Sampling of Origin Stories

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Prologue

  In the House of Worship

  When I was a child, my parents told me that, during the priestly benediction that brings the Sabbath service to a close, we all had to bow our heads and keep our eyes down until the rabbi’s solemn words came to an end. It was extremely important to do so, they said, because in these moments God passed above our heads, and no one who saw God face-to-face could live.

  I brooded on this prohibition. To look into the face of the Lord, I reasoned, must be the most wonderful thing any human being could experience. Nothing that I would ever see or do in all the years that lay ahead of me would even approach this one supreme vision. I reached a momentous decision: I would raise my eyes and see God for myself. It would be fatal, I understood, but the cost was surely not too high. I did not dare to tell my parents of my determination, for I knew that they would be distraught and try to dissuade me. I did not even tell my older brother Marty, since I feared he would reveal my secret. I would have to act alone.

  Several Saturdays passed before I could muster the courage. But finally one morning, standing with my head bowed, I conquered my fear of death. Slowly, slowly while the rabbi intoned the ancient blessings, I raised my eyes. The air above my head was completely empty. And I found I was by no means alone in looking about the sanctuary. Many of the worshipers were glancing around, staring out the windows, or even gesturing to friends and mouthing greetings. I was filled with outrage: “I have been lied to.”

  Many years have gone by since this moment, and I have never recovered the naïve faith that led me to prepare to sacrifice my life for a vision of God. But something lives in me on the other side of lost illusions. I have been fascinated throughout my life by the stories that we humans invent in an attempt to make sense of our existence, and I have come to understand that the term “lie” is a woefully inadequate description of either the motive or the content of these stories, even at their most fantastical.

  Humans cannot live without stories. We surround ourselves with them; we make them up in our sleep; we tell them to our children; we pay to have them told to us. Some of us create them professionally. And a few of us—myself included—spend our entire adult lives trying to understand their beauty, power, and influence.

  This book is a life history of one of the most extraordinary stories ever told. God created Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman, and placed them, naked and unashamed, in a garden of delights. He told them that they could eat the fruit of any of its trees, with a single exception. They must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; on the day that they violated this one prohibition, they would die. A serpent, the subtlest of the beasts, struck up a conversation with the woman. He told her that disobeying the divine commandment would not lead to their deaths but rather would open their eyes and make them be like gods, knowing good and evil. Believing the serpent, Eve ate the forbidden fruit; she gave it to Adam, who also ate it. Their eyes were indeed opened: realizing that they were naked, they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. God called them and asked them what they had done. When they confessed, He issued various punishments: serpents would henceforth be forced to crawl on the ground and eat dirt; women would bring forth children in pain and would desire the men who ruled over them; and men would be compelled to sweat and labor for their sustenance, until they returned to the ground from which they were taken. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” To prevent them from eating from another of the special trees—the tree of life—and living forever, the humans, by God’s command, were driven forth from the garden. Armed cherubim were set to guard against any attempt to return.

  Narrated at the beginning of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve has over centuries decisively shaped conceptions of human origins and human destiny. On the face of things, it was highly unlikely ever to achieve such preeminence. It is a tale that might captivate the imagination of an impressionable child, such as I was, but grown-ups, in the past or present, could easily see that it bears the marks of the imagination at its most extravagant. A magical garden; a naked man and woman who are brought into existence in a way that no other humans have ever been born; people who know how to speak and function without the prolonged childhood that is the hallmark of our species; a mysterious warning about death that no such newly created beings could possibly understand; a talking snake; a tree that confers knowledge of good and evil; another tree that confers eternal life; supernatural guardians wielding flaming swords. This is fiction at its most fictional, a story that revels in the delights of make-believe.

  Yet millions of people, including some of the subtlest and most brilliant minds that have ever existed, have accepted the Bible’s narrative of Adam and Eve as the unvarnished truth. And, notwithstanding the massive evidence accumulated by geology, paleontology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, untold numbers of our contemporaries continue to take the tale as a historically accurate account of the origins of the universe and to think of themselves as the literal descendants of the first humans in the Garden of Eden. Few stories in the history of the world have proved so durable, so widespread, and so insistently, hauntingly real.

  1

  Bare Bones

  Why does the story of Adam and Eve—it occupies only about a page and a half out of 1078 in the modern edition of the King James Bible that sits on my desk—work so brilliantly and so effortlessly? You hear it at five or six years old, and you never forget it. The crudest schematic cartoon conjures it up at once, not perhaps in every detail but in its basic outline. Something in the structure of this narrative sticks; it is almost literally unforgettable.

  In the long centuries since it was first told, it accumulated an enormous apparatus of support: teachers endlessly repeated it; institutions rewarded believers and punished skeptics; intellectuals teased out its nuances and offered competing interpretations of its puzzles; artists vividly represented it. But the narrative seems somehow independent of these complex elaborations, or rather everything that followed in its wake seems to have drawn upon an inexhaustible original energy, as if its core were radioactive. Adam and Eve epitomize the weird, enduring power of human storytelling.

  For reasons that are at once tantalizing and elusive, these few verses in an ancient book have served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires. It has been both liberating and destructive, a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness, a celebration of daring and an incitement to violent misogyny. The range of responses it has aroused over thousands of years in innumerable individuals and communities is astonishing.

  Ancient rabbis looked into the mirror and tried to understand God’s intentions: What were humans that the Creator of the univers
e should have been mindful of them? Why were they created at all? Poring over the words of the sacred text, they concluded that the original obligation to “cultivate the ground” did not refer to agricultural labor; it referred rather to study, precisely the Torah study in which they themselves spent their days and which they regarded as their most exalted purpose in life.

  Early Christians dwelt for the most part not on Adam’s primordial study habits but rather on the devastating loss of Eden caused by his disobedience. The reflection that came to them from the story’s depths was of sinfulness and its consequences. They followed Paul in tracing the tormenting, universal, inescapable fact of death back to the actions of the first humans, lured into evil by Satan. But they found consolation in their faith that a new Adam—Jesus Christ—had through his suffering and death undone the damage caused by the old Adam. The messiah’s sublime sacrifice, they fervently hoped, would enable the faithful to recover the innocence that had been lost and to regain Paradise.

  Islamic mufassireen (or Quranic exegetes) dwelt less on Adam’s sinfulness than on his role as the original prophet of God. The Qur’an, dating from the seventh century CE, resembled early Christian texts in its identification of Satan (or Iblis) as the proud, deceitful angel who lured the first humans into disobedience. Later commentators specified that the form the malicious tempter took was not a serpent but a particularly beautiful camel: “She had a multicolored tail, red, yellow, green, white, black, a mane of pearl, hair of topaz, eyes like the planets Venus and Jupiter, and an aroma like musk blended with ambergris.” As a consequence of their inconstancy, Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, and their descendants must always be vigilant: “O Children of Adam! Let not Satan seduce you as he caused your (first) parents to go forth from the Garden.” But Islamic tradition characterized the wrongdoing that led to this expulsion as an error rather than as a heinous crime transmitted to all posterity. In the wake of his expulsion, Adam took up his role as caretaker of the earth and as religious teacher. He was a figure of prophetic illumination, the first in the line that led to the supreme Prophet, Muhammed, who would guide humanity back into the light of Allah.

  Throughout Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, a wide array of specialists teased out the implications of Adam and Eve’s fate. Buried in the story, they found every urge to immerse themselves in ceaseless study; every nuance of the evil they sensed in their own hearts; every penitential impulse to mortify their flesh and crush their rebellious pride; every longing for prophetic inspiration; every dream of perfect cleansing at the end of time and a return to oceanic bliss. Ascetics, brooding on the temptations of the flesh, studied the verses for hints of alternative ways that the first humans might have been intended to reproduce. Physicians pondered the possible health benefits of a vegetarian diet of the kind our species enjoyed in the Garden. Linguists tried to determine the language that Adam and Eve spoke and to detect the traces of it that might be left. Natural scientists reflected on the ecological significance of a lost world in which relations between humans and other animals were far different from our own and in which the environment was unwavering in its gentle abundance. Among Jews and Muslims, experts in religious law probed the story’s doctrinal and legal implications. In all three monotheistic communities, philosophers debated its ethical meanings. And in the Christian world, visual artists gleefully embraced the invitation to depict the human body in all of its glory and shame.

  Above all, ordinary people—people who had listened to the story told from the pulpit or seen it depicted on walls or heard it from parents or friends—turned to it again and again for answers to the questions that baffled them. It helped to explain or at least to reflect back at them what was most disturbing in sexual intercourse, marital tension, the experience of physical pain and exhausting labor, the devastation of loss and mourning. They looked at Adam and Eve, and, like the rabbis, priests, and Muslim exegetes, they grasped something crucially important about themselves.

  The story of Adam and Eve speaks to all of us. It addresses who we are, where we came from, why we love and why we suffer. Its vast reach seems part of its design. Though it serves as one of the foundation stones of three great world faiths, it precedes, or claims to precede, any particular religion. It captures the strange way our species treats work, sex, and death—features of existence that we share with every other animal—as objects of speculation, as if they were contingent on something we have done, as if it could all have been otherwise.

  We humans, the story goes, were uniquely made in the image and likeness of the God who created us. That God gave us dominance over all other species, and He gave us something else: a prohibition. The prohibition came without explanation or justification. But at the beginning of time it was not necessary that our first ancestors understand; it was necessary only that they obey. That Adam and Eve did not obey, that they violated God’s express command, caused everything that followed in the lives of our whole species, from the universal phenomenon of shame to the universal fact of mortality.

  An insistence on the story’s literal truth—an actual Adam and Eve in an actual garden—became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy. This insistence lies at the center of my own fascination with the story of Adam and Eve. How does something made-up become so compellingly real? How does a stone statue begin to breathe or a wooden puppet learn to stand up on its own and to dance without strings? And what happens when fictional creatures behave as if they were alive? Are they fated, for that very reason, to begin to die?

  For generations pious men and women struggled to make good on a theological proposition, attempting to treat the tale of the naked man and woman and the talking snake as a strictly accurate account of the events that initiated life as we know it. Philosophers, theologians, priests, monks, and visionaries, along with poets and artists, all contributed to this massive collective effort. But it was only in the Renaissance—the age of Dürer, Michelangelo, and Milton—that brilliant new technologies of representation finally succeeded in conferring a convincing sense of reality upon the first humans and in bringing their story fully to life.

  This stupendous achievement, one of the great triumphs of art and literature, turned out to have unanticipated consequences. Adam and Eve were brought together with strikingly life-like pagan statues that art-hunters unearthed from the ruins of Greece and Rome. They were examined and judged by moral standards applied not only to the distant past but also to living contemporaries. They were compared to hordes of newly encountered naked men and women in the Americas—people who appeared strangely immune to the bodily shame that all humans after the Fall were supposed to feel. Precisely because they now seemed so real, Adam and Eve raised difficult questions about language acquisition at the beginning of time, about sexual relations, about race, about mortality.

  The sense of reality renewed in intensified form painful questions that had always hovered around the ancient origin story: What kind of God would forbid his creatures to know the difference between good and evil? How would it have been possible for those creatures to obey without such knowledge? And what could the threat of death mean to those who had never experienced death and could not know what it was? Authorities in the church and state reacted harshly to skeptics who insisted on asking these questions, but it proved impossible to quell a disturbance that had its roots in the very success at making the mythic first humans seem so real. With the Enlightenment, doubts multiplied and could no longer be silenced. What lay ahead was the clear-eyed skepticism of Spinoza, the penetrating gaze of Charles Darwin, and the mocking laughter of Mark Twain.

  NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS throughout the world proudly possess objects called holotypes. Also known as type specimens, these are the singular, officially recognized physical examples of an entire species. This creature in the case before you in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, is for the entire scientific world the designated representative of the rough-skinned
newt (Triturus similans Twitty); that cranium at the Centre National d’Appui à la Recherche in N’djaména, Chad, is the unique type specimen of the extinct primate Sahelanthropus tchadensis. The enterprise of identifying and collecting these examples began as early as the eighteenth century. The type specimen of the gray wolf, Canus lupus, described in 1758 by the great zoologist and botanist Carl Linnaeus, is in the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, along with a large number of other holotypes that he and his devoted students first identified. (Since he based his description on a self-examination, the type specimen of our own species, Homo sapiens, is none other than Linnaeus himself.) The United States National Herbarium in Washington houses some 110,000 holotypes of plants. Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology possesses holotypes of 364 mammals, 174 birds, and 123 reptiles and amphibians. On display in the “wet collections” in the Natural History Museum in Berlin, there are innumerable jars filled with preserved sea creatures floating in ethanol. Some of the jars are marked with red dots, indicating that they contain holotypes.

  Each holotype has been designated as such by the person who has discovered a new species and then named and described it, according to certain formal criteria, in a scientific paper. In successfully publishing this paper and depositing the specimen in an appropriate collection, the discoverer is said to have “authored” the species. The holotype thereby becomes the official specimen, acknowledged by the scientific community; each is the particular, concrete touchstone from which the key features of an entire species may be derived. To date, almost 2 million species have been identified. It is estimated that there are close to 9 million species on earth.

  The Genesis story imagines that God brought each beast of the field and fowl of the air one-by-one before Adam to receive its name, in something of the way that scientists assign names to their holotypes. The text did not specify the language Adam used or how long this process took or when it occurred. Bible commentaries traditionally posited that it happened on the same day that man was created, since it was only in the wake of this feat of naming that God created woman. (Most commentators were loath to believe that Adam lived alone without a mate for a very long time.) Some commentators wondered if the more noxious insects could somehow have emerged and received their names after the six days of creation, as a consequence of man’s sin and not as part of the original plan. Others worried a bit about the fish, since the Bible only mentions creatures of the land and air. “Why were not the fishes brought to Adam?” the English clergyman and amateur scientist Alexander Ross asked in 1622, and then proceeded to answer his own question: “Because they do not so much resemble man as the beasts: secondly, because they could not be such a help to man as the beasts: thirdly, because they could not live out of the water.”