The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  The ancient biography went on to imagine that Adam proposed a desperate ritual of penitence. He told his wife that he would stand up to his neck in the waters of the Jordan for forty days; as the weaker of the two, Eve could limit herself to thirty-seven days immersed in the Tigris. But before the period had ended, an angel appeared to Eve and told her that merciful God had heard her groaning and accepted her repentance. He had been sent, the angel declared, to take her to the food she had been craving and that God had lovingly prepared for her. Eve came shivering out of the river—“Her flesh was like grass from the water’s coldness”—and hurried happily to her husband. But when Adam saw her, he cried out in anguish that she had once again been deceived. The angel of light was their enemy Satan in disguise.

  Eve flung herself to the ground and asked Satan why he so hated them. The Life of Adam and Eve then rehearses what became one of the major motifs in the elaboration of the origin story. The devil explained to Eve that it was because of Adam that he and his fellow rebel angels had been driven out of heaven. When called upon to worship the newly created man, they refused, since they regarded themselves as older and superior. For this refusal, they had been cast down into hell. They would take their revenge now in any way that they could.

  Adam, still standing in the water and determined to complete the full term of his ritual of penitence, was bitterly angry at his wife. Eve wandered off in despair to the west, determined to live out her life in solitude until death came for her. Theirs was not only the first marriage, then: it was also the first separation. But it turned out that Eve was three months pregnant, and when the time of childbirth was upon her, she cried out in pain. Hearing her cries, Adam rejoined her, and they resumed a life together with their newborn. “At once the infant stood up and ran out and brought some grass with his own hands and gave it to his mother. His name was called Cain.”

  There is not a hint of any of this in Genesis. But the anonymous author of The Life and those who eagerly read it were trying to think through the aftermath of the disaster, to conjure up the existence of original ancestors, and to find a comprehensible motive—and a plausible identity—for the serpent. They wanted what in the theater is called a backstory, a hidden history that would make sense of behavior that in the Bible’s terse narrative seemed to come from nowhere: “And the serpent said to the woman, ‘You shall not be doomed to die. For God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will become as gods, knowing good and evil’ ” (Gen. 3:4–5). Even setting aside the problems of a serpent that somehow talks—with what vocal cords? in what language? with what degree of consciousness?—there was the problem of a rationale.

  Rabbinical sages long pondered God’s words in chapter 1 of Genesis, “Let us make a human in our image.” Who was the “us” here? (Ancient Hebrew apparently does not have a “royal we.”) In the religion of Babylon or Rome, the plural would suggest that Yahweh was speaking to his fellow gods, as Marduk or Zeus often did. But if that had ever been a possible idea for the Hebrews in some distant past, anyone who proposed it in rabbinical times would have been labeled a heretic, particularly after the early Christians began to claim that the plural referred to the Trinity.

  In the late third century CE, Rabbi Samuel ben Nahman imagined what must have happened when Moses, taking down the Torah from divine dictation, reached that word “us.” “Why dost Thou furnish an excuse to heretics?” Moses asked. “Write,” God replied. “Whoever wishes to err may err.”

  The correct explanation, most rabbis thought, was that God was consulting with the angels. But they went on to speculate that some of the angels were quite upset and broke up into competing parties. The angelic party of Love supported the proposed creation; the angelic party of Truth opposed it. So too Righteousness was in favor; Peace against. Rabbi Hanina suggested that to undermine the opposition to his plan, God told the angels about all the piety that would spring from mankind and concealed from them all the wickedness. And while the parties squabbled with one another, God went ahead and did what He proposed to do anyway.

  Some rabbinical commentators began to develop an account that attributed opposition to the creation of man not to parties upholding one or another heavenly principle but rather to angels motivated by envy or malice—the feelings confessed by Satan in The Life of Adam and Eve. Early Christians, starting with this speculation, gradually elaborated a grand narrative focused on the Prince of Darkness and his legions. Moslems later developed a comparable account focused on the refusal of the devil, Iblis, to obey Allah’s command and bow to Adam. Allah asked, “What prevented thee from prostrating when I commanded thee?” And Iblis replied, “I am better than he: Thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay.” For this pride and arrogance, Allah cursed Iblis and consigned him to Jahannam, the Islamic hell.

  Christians proposed a further resolution to the problem of the mysterious “us” in “Let us make a human in our image.” In the opening words of his gospel, the evangelist John seemed to allude to the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The “us,” they concluded, must refer to the divine Logos, the Word that became incarnate in Jesus Christ. It was Christ then who carried out, against the malicious hostility of the demons, God’s plan of creation. And it was Christ who through his sublime sacrifice would redeem humankind led astray by the lies that Satan, in the form of the serpent, had told.

  But none of these interpretive schemes ever satisfied everyone or silenced the arguments or quieted the need for further exploration. In Genesis, vast stretches of Adam’s life history are summed up in a very few words: “He lived nine hundred and thirty years, and then he died” (Gen. 5:3–5). “And then he died” is a phrase that called out for elaboration, for this was the first natural death in the history of humankind. In The Life of Adam and Eve, Adam summoned his children and told them that he was ill—“I am in great pain”—but they could not even understand what he meant by the words “illness” and “pain.” How could they have done so? In anguish, Adam sent Eve and his favorite son Seth to the doors of Paradise to plead for the healing oil of mercy, but the angel Michael sternly refused.

  When they returned and reported the refusal, Adam, grasping that death was imminent, took the occasion, as he had repeatedly done throughout this account, to blame his wife: “Adam said to Eve: ‘What have you done? You have brought on us a great affliction, fault and sin unto all our generations.’ ” He knew that the fate he was now suffering would be visited on his descendants, and he was eager that the source of their misery be made clear to his entire lineage. He instructed his wife therefore to tell their offspring what she did.

  Eve’s turn to die came six days after Adam’s death. As if in fulfillment of Adam’s injunction, she called Seth and her other children together, but she subtly modified the message. There was no reason why her children and her children’s children should believe that the blame was entirely hers. They and their entire lineage are condemned to die, she told them, because of what both she and Adam did.

  She then made a crucial provision, the provision of a cultural transmission that depends not only on speech but also on a more durable inscription. The Life of Adam and Eve attributes to the first woman the idea of writing.

  Make tablets of stone, and other tablets of earth, and write on them my whole life, and that of your father, which you have heard from us and seen.

  If he judges our race by water, the tablets of earth will dissolve, but the tablets of stone will endure. If, however, he judges our race by fire, the tablets of stone will be destroyed, but the tablets of earth will be fired.

  Determined that the story survive whatever catastrophes lie ahead, Eve carefully prepared for the possibility of either flood or fire.

  The Life of Adam and Eve provided the elaboration of the sparse Genesis account that many people craved. But for some Jews and early Christians, the expansion of the story only intensified the old, disturbi
ng ethical questions. What was the point of it all? “Why didst thou weary thine undefiled hands and create man,” asks the visionary Sedrach in a dialogue written in the second or third century CE, “since thou didst not intend to have mercy on him?” God replies that Adam violated his explicit commandment, and “being beguiled by the devil ate of the tree.” But invoking the devil does not settle the matter. “If thou lovedst man, why didst Thou not slay the devil?” The argument continues back and forth, ending only when God shuts it down with the kind of question that silenced Job: “Tell me, Sedrach, since I made the sea, how many waves arose and how many fell”?

  Demanding to know the number of waves in the ocean may serve to close this particular conversation, but it obviously did not quiet the larger doubts that the story of Adam and Eve continued to provoke. The most extreme solution was offered by a very early Christian bishop named Marcion, born in the Black Sea city of Sinope around the year 85. Marcion proposed that the church simply abandon the Hebrew Bible altogether as the basis for faith in Christ. The God whose acts and intentions are recorded in the history of the Jews, he argued, is manifestly tainted by evil. A divinity who forbids humans access to knowledge in the Garden of Eden and then punishes them horribly for an act that only the possession of such knowledge could have prevented is not the pure, spiritual, holy, and good God whose spark redeemed Christians find within their own bosoms. Marcion conceded that Yahweh was indeed the Creator, as Genesis affirms, but he was an evil creator. He was the father of the implacable law given to the Jews but not the father of Jesus Christ. Marcion drew the sharpest possible line between the old god and the new. The worship of Yahweh should go the way of the cult of Marduk, Ammon Ra, or innumerable other gods swept away by the new revelation.

  But, though his views drew a large following, Marcion was eventually denounced as a heretic. The church committed itself to the Hebrew scriptures whose God was the ruler of the universe and whose ancient prophecies Jesus had fulfilled. Jesus made sense precisely as a response to Adam. St. Paul had established the crucial connection: “For since by man came death,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “by man came also the resurrection of the dead.” It was, the apostle’s words suggested, impossible to understand Christ without understanding the sin of the first humans and the consequence of that sin. Christianity could not do without the story of the Garden of Eden.

  In the imagination of Christian theologians, each moment in the cosmic scheme began to fall into place: the day on which Christ was incarnated was mystically linked to the day on which God formed man out of the ground; so too the day the holy infant was put to the breast and the day on which God formed the stars; the day the Savior suffered on the cross and the day Adam fell; the day Christ rose from the dead and the day God created light. The links between the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, integral to the whole vision of Jesus’s life and mission as recounted in the gospels, were forged with tireless zeal and ingenuity. The method, known as typology, exerted a huge, enduring influence on the Christian faith.

  Typology insisted on the historical reality of the events described in Genesis. If those events only found their ultimate meaning in the New Testament, that meaning did not make them less real in themselves. The dust from which Adam was formed and the animating breath in his nostrils, the wound made in his side in order to extract the rib to fashion Eve, the garden with its ominous tree, the sweat on his brow when he was set to labor, all were perfectly real and at the same time were “fulfilled” in the life of Christ—in his incarnation, in the bitter “tree” to which he was nailed, in the wound that the soldier’s lance made in his side, and so forth. To call into question these elaborate connections, as Marcion and his followers had done, was to incur charges of heresy. Already by 180 CE, in St. Irenaeus’s book Against Heresies, it was spelled out clearly: Christians were not permitted to repudiate Yahweh or to claim that the Savior was a previously unknown and hidden god or to forswear the story of the first humans. No Adam, no Jesus.

  But the tale of the naked couple and the snake and the forbidden fruit remained troubling. It was, or so it was claimed, an essential foundation stone for the Christian faith, but to some the stone felt unstable or even embarrassing. How was it any different from the most ridiculous pagan origin stories? The sophisticated fourth-century CE Roman emperor Julian treated all such myths with equal contempt. The ancient Greeks, he wrote in Against the Galileans, invented “incredible and monstrous stories.” But the Hebrew story about Adam and Eve, which Christians profess to believe, is no better. What sort of language, the emperor asked derisively, are we to say the serpent used when he talked with Eve? And is it not strange that the Hebrew God would deny to the humans he made the power to distinguish between good and evil? Surely that power is one of the key attributes of wisdom, “so that the serpent was a benefactor rather than a destroyer of the human race.”

  When Julian died of wounds he received in an ill-fated campaign against the Persians, imperial skepticism died with him, and Christianity resumed its place as the official religion of the empire. But the uneasiness with the Hebrew creation story did not disappear. A technique for quieting the uneasiness, at least among some intellectually sophisticated Jews and Christians, had already emerged around the time that Jesus was active in the Holy Land. It was principally the work of Philo, a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher from Alexandria who understood perfectly well why people who had read Plato and Aristotle might find certain Bible stories primitive and ethically incoherent.

  Philo’s solution, radical and brilliant, can be summed up in a single word: allegory (Greek, “speaking otherwise”). The whole effort to take these stories literally has to be scrapped. Each detail instead has to be treated as a philosophical riddle, a hint toward a concealed and more abstract meaning. The Bible says that in six days the world was created, he wrote, “not because the maker was in need of a length of time—for God surely did everything at the same time.” Days are mentioned because “things coming into existence required order.” The first human—the human created in chapter one of Genesis—was not a creation of flesh and blood, according to Philo, but rather a kind of Platonic idea of a human. The Garden of Eden bore no resemblance to gardens we might encounter. As for the Tree of Life in its midst, “No trees of life or understanding have ever appeared on earth in the past or are ever likely to appear in the future.”

  The key for Philo was not to focus on the literal details of the narrative. Instead, they must be understood as symbols, “which invite allegorical interpretation through the explanation of hidden meanings.” In picturing Adam in the garden, Moses was not asking his readers to conjure up the image of a naked peasant who has been set to work in some rural wilderness. The original ancestor, the cosmopolitan Philo wrote, was “the only real citizen of the cosmos,” and the actual garden in which he was meant to labor was his soul. The Tree of Life was a symbol for the highest virtue, reverence for God. The serpent was not a garden-variety snake; it was “a symbol for pleasure, firstly because it is a legless creature which lies face-forward on its stomach, secondly because it takes clumps of earth as food, and thirdly because it carries poison in its teeth, by which it is able to kill those whom it bites.”

  Philo’s strategy enabled Hellenized Jews, steeped in Greek philosophy, to approach the fabulous elements of the story not with embarrassment but with the subtlety and sophistication called forth by myths like the cave in Plato’s Republic. His intellectual stance set the course of Jewish exegesis for centuries, extending even to the present. But it was not for Jews alone that Philo’s allegorical method served as an inspiration and a powerful model. He influenced key figures in early Christianity, most importantly the Alexandrian scholar known as Origen Adamantius (the “Unbreakable”).

  Born in 184 CE, some two hundred years after the birth of Philo, Origen was the son of a Christian who was martyred during one of the cycles of imperial Roman persecution. An intensely pious young man, he thought that his own destiny would
also lead him to the glory of dying for his faith. Instead, perhaps to his disappointment, he merely became a hugely influential teacher and a theologian. Aided by a team of scribes who took his dictation in relays, he is said to have written some six thousand works. “Works” here meant what would fit on a single papyrus roll, something like a chapter. Even so, this is a staggering achievement, and, though much has been lost, Origen’s surviving output—celebrated volumes of biblical scholarship, richly detailed commentaries, collections of homilies, polemics, theological meditations—confirms its magnitude.

  There was always something alarming about Origen, something that aroused the anxiety of church authorities and provoked the conflicts that forced him to lead a deeply unsettled, peripatetic life. Immensely learned, unsleeping, devout, and self-punishing, he possessed many of the qualities that often led to beatification and canonization. But Origen was never made a saint. Some of his theological positions—and, of course, in six thousand works there were a startling number of them—violated what eventually became church doctrine. He suggested that God the Son was subordinated to God the Father, and he hinted at times that all creatures, including Satan himself, would in the end be saved and reconciled to God. Both ideas were ultimately deemed to be heretical.

  But it was not a matter of doctrine alone. A radical ascetic, he brooded on the answer that Jesus gave to his disciples, when they asked him if he was implying that it would be better never to marry. “All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given,” Jesus replied, adding,