The woman whom you gave to be beside me, she gave me from the tree.
And so I ate.
YHWH, God, said to the woman:
What is this that you have done?
The woman said:
The snake enticed me,
and so I ate.
YHWH, God, said to the snake:
Because you have done this, damned be you from all the animals and from all the living-things of the field;
upon your belly shall you walk and dust shall you eat, all the days of your life.
I put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed:
they will bruise you on the head, you will bruise them in the heel.
To the woman he said:
I will multiply your pain [from] your pregnancy,
with pains shall you bear children.
Toward your husband will be your lust, yet he will rule over you.
To Adam he said:
Because you have hearkened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you saying:
You are not to eat from it!
Damned be the soil on your account,
with painstaking-labor shall you eat from it, all the days of your life.
Thorn and sting-shrub let it spring up for you,
when you [seek to] eat the plants of the field!
By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread, until you return to the soil,
for from it you were taken.
For you are dust, and to dust shall you return … .
YHWH, God, said:
Here, the human has become like one of us, in knowing good and evil.
So now, lest he send forth his hand
and take also from the Tree of Life
and eat
and live throughout the ages …!
So YHWH, God, sent him away from the garden of Eden, to work the soil from which he had been taken.
He drove the human out
and caused to dwell, eastward of the garden of Eden,
the winged-sphinxes and the flashing, ever-turning sword
to watch over the way to the Tree of Life. 1
GENESIS 3:1-24
It is quite remarkable that a holy book, which purports to be a guide to conduct, begins with a clear rule that is immediately disobeyed, and a specific threat of punishment which is not imposed. God’s first threat to humankind is unequivocal: He tells Adam, “From the Tree of the Knowing of Good and Evil, you are not to eat from it; for on that day that you eat from it, you must die, yes, die.” The use of the Hebrew mot tamut repeats the words “die” so there is no mistaking the certainty of the threatened punishment. 2 “Doomed to die” is perhaps the best translation. 3 The certainty of the time frame for the punishment—“on the day”—is unique in biblical threats. Normally God simply says “you will die” or “you will surely die,” but He never specifies the day. 4 Yet when Eve and Adam disobey God’s first prohibition, God does not carry out his explicitly threatened punishment. Indeed, the Bible says that Adam lived 930 years. The disobedient couple and their progeny were punished, but in a way very different from what God had threatened.
What are we supposed to learn from a God who fails to carry out his very first threat? Generations of commentators have tried to answer this question. Some of the defense attorneys have sidestepped its troubling implications with creative wordplay. If God’s days are one thousand years long, then Adam died seventy “years” short of one such “day.” 5 This would render the threatened punishment trivial, at least in comparison with what God had threatened. Others argue that God didn’t really mean that Adam would actually die on the day he ate of the tree, but rather that on that day he would be sentenced to an eventual death—in other words, he would become mortal. 6 That is not, however, what God said and—more important—that is certainly not what Adam or Eve understood God to say. God told Adam that he “must die, yes, die” on the “day that you eat from it,” and Adam told Eve that God had commanded them not to eat or even “touch” it. It is clear from the story of the serpent that Eve interpreted God’s threat as immediate death. A midrash says that the serpent pushed Eve against the tree and told her: “As you did not die from touching it, so you shall not die from eating thereof.” 7 The serpent was right. Eve and Adam dined on forbidden fruit and both lived long lives. Taking the serpent’s lesson to its logical conclusion, it would seem that God’s commands can be disobeyed with impunity. God thus showed Himself to be a parent who makes idle threats—a rather ineffective model of discipline.
Although Adam and Eve’s eventual punishment was considerably more lenient than the instant death God had threatened, it was also imposed on their descendants. Hence the Christian concept of “original sin,” which brought death into the world, increased “man’s inclination to evil” and required the eventual redemption of a Savior. 8 The nature of God’s punishments raises profound questions—for Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike—about His concept of justice. He punishes Eve by inflicting the pain of childbirth on all women and by making all women submissive to men. He punishes Adam by requiring all men to toil for their bread. Finally, God also banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in order to assure that his wayward creations do not also eat of the tree of life and “live forever.” 9 All for disobeying His command to refrain from eating the forbidden fruit of a tempting tree!
If we evaluate God by human standards, His first action as a lawgiver seems unfair. The essence of fairness in any system of threats and promises is adequate warning: Punishment should be threatened in unambiguous terms, so that the people to whom the threat is directed will understand; a punishment once threatened should be imposed, unless there are mitigating circumstances; and no additional punishments, not explicitly threatened, should be tacked on. Moreover, the punishment should be limited to the specific person or persons who violated the law, not to innocent descendants. Jewish law, as it eventually developed, recognized that “to punish one person for the transgression of another” is “inconsistent with the very idea of law.” 10 Finally, punishment should be proportional to the harm caused.
God, of course, constantly violates these rules throughout the Bible—He kills without warning, punishes innocent children for the sins of their parents, and imposes disproportionate punishments 11 —so we should not be surprised that He begins His career as a lawgiver in this capricious manner. Commentators make heroic efforts to rationalize these apparent violations of human norms of fairness by reading ambiguity into God’s clear words. For example, many later commentators interpret God’s threat to Adam as punishment in the hereafter—a common explanation whenever God threatens punishment or promises reward but fails to carry it out. But the Jewish Bible never mentions the hereafter. * God tells Adam quite directly: “You are dust and to dust shall you return.” 12 It is untrue to the text of Genesis to read into punishment threatened here and now an implicit postponement to a world to come. It is also—in the spirit of the Maimonidian debate described earlier—a far less interesting answer, which obviates the need to struggle with the text. Accepting an invisible afterlife in which threatened punishments and promised rewards are meted out, as some commentators do, provides a tautological answer to all questions about injustice in this world. 13 It is far more interesting to search for enduring interpretations based on what was believed at the time, not centuries later. In the end, it is the plain meaning of a threat that is most important. No one can deny that God plainly threatened Adam with one punishment and then inflicted a quite different one on Adam, Eve, and their descendants. Moreover, the nature of the punishment God inflicted on all women raises the most profound issues of fairness. God directly commanded Adam, not Eve,
to refrain from eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Yet it was Eve, and all future Eves, who were punished most severely, not only in absolute terms, but also relative to Adam and future Adams: “Toward your husband will be your lust, yet he will rule over
you.” Here we find the origin of the infamous double standard regarding sex: Women must be monogamous toward their husbands, but husbands are free to direct their lust at other unmarried women—that is, women who do not “belong” to other men. In the command that wives must be submissive to husbands, we also see the origins of misogyny.
An anthropological explanation of Eve’s punishment might take the form of a “just so” story. 14 These mythological tales begin with observable phenomena—for instance, a leopard’s spots or an elephant’s long ears—and weave narratives that purport to “explain” them. Just as leopards always had spots and elephants long ears, so too the double standard and the submissiveness of women had long been observable realities. The punishment of Eve could be viewed as a “just so” story explaining these observable phenomena. Yet there is an obvious difference: Spots and ears are biological facts with no moral connotation, whereas the double standard and the submissiveness of wives is anything but biologically determined and morally neutral. It is prescriptive as well as descriptive of past practices that are capable of changing—unless, of course, they are deemed to be divinely ordained.
The inequality of women—a characteristic of most traditional religions and cultures—violates modern sensibilities. For that reason, contemporary religious law struggles mightily to interpret the punishment of Eve as the decision by God to assign to women a different, but not unequal, role in the life of the family. These efforts cannot help but invoke analogies to the “separate but equal” doctrine under which blacks were segregated from whites during the Jim Crow era of American history. Just as blacks were surely separate but never equal, so too wives were assigned different roles but were never the equals of their husbands. God’s own words prove this inequality beyond dispute: Your husband “will rule over you.” There is nothing ambiguous—either in the original Hebrew word yimshol or in the English translation “rule”—about the relative status of husband and wife. He is the ruler, she the ruled. All because Eve was persuaded by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit and then invited Adam to do likewise.
Based on this sequence of events, it is neither logical nor moral that husbands should rule over wives. Eve had a far more compelling defense than Adam. She was never told directly by God about the prohibition, and she was misinformed about its scope by Adam, who told her that God’s prohibition extended beyond eating and included even touching the fruit. This misinformation allowed the serpent—who was “more shrewd than all the living beings of the field”—to entice Eve into sin. Indeed, a midrash cautions: “You must not make the fence [around the law] more than the principled thing, lest it fall and destroy the plants.” 15 In other words, if you make prohibitions so broad they will not be enforced, the law may lose its credibility, as it did to Eve. Meanwhile, Adam—the direct recipient of God’s commandment—did not need to be enticed. He was simply offered the fruit and accepted it. Eve did not compel or order Adam to eat it. She did not act as a ruler and Adam as a subject. Why then does Adam and do all future Adams get to rule over Eve and all future Eves? We are not given a good answer. By any standard of law, justice, or equity, the punishment inflicted on all women on account of Eve’s sin is unfair. Nor did the punishment rationally “fit the crime.” What do labor pains, lust, and subordination have to do with Eve’s sin?
It is interesting to speculate what God’s punishments would have been had Eve eaten the fruit but never offered it to Adam or if Adam had rejected it. (In an effort to mitigate Adam’s sin, a midrash speculates that “he had engaged in his natural functions [in other words, intercourse] and then fallen asleep,” so that he was not present during the serpent’s conversation with Eve and presumably was unaware that the fruit given to him by Eve came from the forbidden tree. 16 ) If Eve alone had eaten, she would have knowledge of good and evil, and Adam would have remained happily ignorant and immortal. Who would have ruled over whom? We will never know.
Until the twentieth century, women were legally subordinate to men in nearly all countries. Historically a wife would not sue her husband or act independently of him. As recently as 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant group in the United States, declared that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership. 17 There were also some advantages growing out of such subordination. Until the nineteenth century, a wife who committed certain crimes in the presence of her husband was deemed by the common law to be acting on his behalf and at his direction. The husband, not the wife, was held responsible. God, however, did not grant Eve this advantage. Clearly he regarded her as the more culpable: She was punished before Adam and more severely. 18 Even Adam’s defense showed less remorse. He blamed Eve and God for his own sin by saying: “The woman whom you gave to be beside me, she gave me from the tree” (emphasis added).
Throughout the Bible we see numerous instances of women regarded as legally subordinate but psychologically dominant and manipulative, especially when such a perspective serves the interests of the patriarchal society. Nor is this inconsistency limited to biblical times. As recently as the early 1950s, Ethel Rosenberg—who played a minor role in her husband Julius’s espionage—was executed because she was deemed to be the stronger of the couple emotionally. When it comes to the role of women, male-dominated societies—from biblical times to the recent past and in some places to the present—want to have it both ways. They can point to the story of Adam and Eve as support for any number of double standards. By imposing misogynistic punishments on innocent future generations—instead of carrying out the punishment He had threatened—God paved the way for an inequality that would endure for millennia.
Even had God followed through precisely on his threat to Adam, there would still be questions about God’s justice. If Adam and Eve did not know the difference between good and evil before eating of the tree, how could they fairly be punished for being deceived by the serpent into violating God’s prohibition? In most societies committed to the rule of law, the basic test of responsibility is the capacity to distinguish right from wrong. If a paranoid schizophrenic shoots a man he honestly, but mistakenly, believes is about to shoot him, he cannot be held responsible for his conduct. As Maimonides posed the question in the language of his time: “By what right or justice could God punish” if humans lacked free will? 19
Since sin is impossible without some understanding of the difference between right and wrong—animals can’t sin—eating the forbidden fruit was the prerequisite for all future sins. This may explain the word “original,” as it relates to the eating of the fruit, but it still doesn’t explain “sin,” since before eating the fruit Adam and Eve lacked the requisite knowledge to distinguish right from wrong. They were more like intelligent dogs disobeying a trainer’s command than sentient human beings making a deliberate decision to do wrong.
Maimonides addressed this conundrum directly. He believed that Adam and Eve had been endowed with basic intelligence even before God commanded them not to eat of the tree: “A command is not given to . . . one lacking intelligence.” 20 Maimonides believed that they lacked knowledge relating only to matters of sexuality and shame. Yet if, as Maimonides argues, they did have sufficient judgment to understand commands, were they not right to eat from the Tree of Knowledge—even in the face of God’s threat? Knowledge inevitably creates the desire for greater knowledge. That is the history and destiny of humankind. The quest for knowledge can never be satisfied. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it has been the engine of human progress. The legendary official who at the end of the nineteenth century suggested closing the patent office because everything that could be invented already had been did not understand how innovations create the need for additional innovations ad infinitum. As Ecclesiastes observed: “God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions” (7:29). Could an omniscient God really have expected humans created in His image to be satisfied with less knowledge than they were capable of obtaining? Were Adam and Eve not justified in engaging
in religious disobedience of God’s command? Is not greater knowledge with mortality more valuable then ignorant immortality? Would not most intelligent beings choose what Socrates called an “examined life” with mortality over an unexamined life without end? At a more fundamental level, it can be argued that it is the knowledge of mortality itself that is essential to understanding, in any real sense, the difference between good and evil. An immortal being, knowing that he or she will never die, does not have to make difficult choices. Everything can be made right over time. It is the knowledge of mortality—the realization that life could end at any moment—that requires constant choices. A Buddhist maxim says, “Death is the best teacher,” while to Kafka, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” In this respect, God’s threat can be seen as self-enforcing—a prediction rather than a threat: By eating of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve learned that they were mortal, something animals do not comprehend. That was the knowledge they obtained by eating the forbidden fruit. Realizing that they could die compelled them to make choices about good and evil. As rabbis, ministers, and priests remind us at funerals—particularly those of young people who die suddenly—we must always have our moral ledgers balanced, since death may strike at any time. In the absence of death, moral choices may be postponed forever. Thus, with a single bold act of defiance,
human beings learned of their mortality and realized that they faced brief and painful lives, filled with difficult choices.
Knowledge brings with it the realization that life is not Eden, that it entails pain and toil, which will continue beyond your own life to that of your children and your children’s children. Nothing worth having—children, sustenance, wisdom—will come without a heavy price. These are the burdens of knowledge. How much simpler is the innocence of Eden, where ignorance is indeed bliss. As Ecclesiastes recognized: “Because I increased my knowledge, I increased my sorrow.” The mid–twentieth century theologian Martin Buber takes this observation one step further. He regards God’s decision to inflict mortality on human beings as an act of compassion. “Now that human beings have discovered the tensions inherent in human life, God acts to prevent ‘the eons of suffering’ that would result from eating of the tree of life. Hence, death.” 21
The Genesis of Justice Page 4
