The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us

by Stephen Greenblatt

Overview

“Endlessly illuminating and a sheer pleasure to read.” —Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

Daring to take the great biblical account of human origins seriously, but without credulity.

The most influential story in Western cultural history, the biblical account of Adam and Eve is now treated either as the sacred possession of the faithful or as the butt of secular jokes. Here, acclaimed scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores it with profound appreciation for its cultural and psychological power as literature. From the birth of the Hebrew Bible to the awe-inspiring contributions of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in bringing Adam and Eve to vivid life, Greenblatt unpacks the story’s many interpretations and consequences over time. Rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, narrow literalism, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature: all can be counted as children of our “first” parents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393634587
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	47 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has written extensively on English Renaissance literature and acts as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Swerve, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Will in the World, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Hometown:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

November 7, 1943

Place of Birth:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Yale University, 1964; B.A., Cambridge University, 1966; Ph.D., Yale University, 1969

Table of Contents

Prologue: In The House Of Worship 1

1 Bare Bones 5

2 By The Waters Of Babylon 21

3 Clay Tablets 39

4 The Life Of Adam And Eve 64

5 In The Bathhouse 81

6 Original Freedom. Original Sin 98

7 Eve's Murder 120

8 Embodiments 139

9 Chastity And Its Discontents 163

10 The Politics Of Paradise 189

11 Becoming Real 204

12 Men Before Adam 231

13 Falling Away 250

14 Darwin's Doubts 269

Epilogue: In The Forest Of Eden 285

Appendix 1 A Sampling of Interpretations 303

Appendix 2 A Sampling of Origin Stories 313

Acknowledgments 321

Notes 325

Selected Bibliography 367

Illustration Credits 393

Index 397

Editorial Reviews

The garden, the man, the rib, the woman. The command, the apple, the snake, the expulsion into pain and death. The story of the couple in the primal garden is a sequence of scenes so ancient and familiar we may think we "know" it as we know ourselves -- and in fact, as Stephen Greenblatt argues in his richly woven The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, it is a story that's so compelling that once we hear it, it feels impossible to forget. But the fact that we all recognize the outlines of this odd origin myth doesn't make it any less strange. Why would God, so generous in his initial creation, so immediately and pointedly tempt the people he himself had just made? If the people were made in God's image, how could they not already know good from evil? Why a snake? Why a rib? Didn't the all-knowing actually know he was creating curious souls? In this rich book, Stephen Greenblatt plays tour guide to some of the story's enduring oddness. With him, we can unpeel layers of history and try to encounter the myth as it emerges and evolves along with our culture.

{This means starting at the beginning, so to speak, in the landscape into which and against which the myth was created. It means traveling through the ways it has been used -- to separate Jews from those around them; to cement the notion of Original Sin in early Christianity; to make humans fall so that they can -- in graceful medieval counterpoint -- later be saved by Jesus. Adam and Eve's shame has been used to justify the oppression of peoples who may not have had reason to be ashamed of their nakedness; Eve's eating of the fruit has been used to justify a forceful misogyny that has held all women through all time responsible for Eve's error. Greenblatt explores these foundations, illuminating histories, variants, art, and historic exegesis, so that the origin myth itself re-forms as a forked garden of weird possibility.

There is the section where Greenblatt reminds us that in Islam, Adam and Eve are not a sinful counterpoint used to set the stage for later salvation, but figures of error, and later of both stewardship and prophetic illumination. (In that version, Eve was not tempted by a serpent but by a particularly beautiful camel.) There is a long chapter in which Greenblatt invites us to see Adam and Eve as a creation myth in comparison to what it is not - - namely, a story like Gilgamesh, where coming to the city and meeting prostitutes (as opposed to eating fruit and getting kicked out of a garden) is the fundamental civilizing act. There are two chapters about Augustine's childhood that feel like fascinating divagation until Greenblatt ties them together to let us know how Augustine (who himself apparently had fathered a child out of wedlock and then banished the mistress he loved) helped cement the idea of Original Sin. There are trips through Renaissance art studios, with an especially nice cameo of Dürer crafting his own naked body as a possible study for the original man. And there are several chapters about Milton's basic antisocial character and his own first bad marriage that help set the groundwork for understanding how the late-blooming poet was finally able to craft Adam and Eve so beautifully within Paradise Lost.

In short, this is a book of stories about a story, stories that help us see the way a story is a river that also takes on the shapes of what it flows by, even when it eventually encounters such formidable challengers as Darwin. Or, to float another metaphor, it's a book that reminded me of the Hebrew Bible's concept of Midrash, where interpretive stories enclose and nest and build upon biblical stories, so that the story about the story becomes integral to finding ones way back to the story itself. Writing about Dürer, Greenblatt remarks that his 1503 "nude self-portrait bears witness . . . to the search for the original, the essential body." Greenblatt's book is not autobiographical, exactly, but one does sense in it the hunger to strip the story away from all the vines that have come to cling to it. Greenblatt wants to peer back through both vine and story to see what each tells us about our strange, unusual humanity. In some ways, the modernity that has made the story seem smaller is itself small in comparison to the centuries of belief that preceded it. And the story as story remains puzzlingly unforgettable. Even when it falls, it lives on.

Tess Taylor is the author of The Misremembered World, a collection of poems. Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Reviewer: Tess Taylor

The Barnes & Noble Review

★ 07/10/2017
In this fascinating exploration, Greenblatt (The Swerve), a Harvard humanities professor and Pulitzer-winning author, probes the “beauty, power, and influence” that the Adam and Eve story has held through millennia. Utilizing recent archaeological discoveries, Greenblatt compares the Genesis account, first written as a “counternarrative to the Babylonian creation story” by Hebrews returning to Jerusalem from exile, to both the ancient Gilgamesh legend and long-forgotten alternative narratives recently discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, such as “The Life of Adam and Eve.” Greenblatt undertakes an in-depth analysis of key historical figures whose obsession wielded enormous impact on religion and culture: Augustine’s insistence on the story’s literal truth led to the concept of original sin; Albrecht Dürer’s engraving The Fall of Man captured “the sheer unconstrained beauty of... our first parents”; John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost realized them as “flesh-and-blood people.” Greenblatt then explores how the European discovery of New World natives, Voltaire’s insistence on the story’s allegorical nature, and, finally, Darwin’s evolutionary theory led to today’s widespread acceptance of the story as myth. In a beautiful closing chapter, Greenblatt studies Ugandan chimpanzees for “traces of the Bible story... the actual origins of our species.” This is an erudite yet accessible page-turner. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Brilliant enough to make me seethe with envy."

Simon Schama

"Almost dizzying in its scope; Greenblatt draws from history, religion, art and science, and he writes about all of these fields with infectious enthusiasm. It’s a strikingly intelligent book, but it’s also accessible; he’s a clear, unpretentious writer who can hardly hide his fascination with the subject."

NPR Books - Michael Schaub

"No one does intellectual history quite like Greenblatt.… In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, he turns his attention to one of humanity’s founding stories. Expect a nuanced, careful, thrilling exploration of the story’s lasting influence."

Forward

"That Greenblatt is himself an extraordinary storyteller will come as a surprise to no one familiar with his books. And here he treats us to absorbing accounts of Augustine and Milton—the anchors of the book—as well as Du¨rer, Darwin, and many others."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Paul A. Kottman

"Powerful and capacious."

San Francisco Chronicle - Carl Rollyson

"Greenblatt brings a storyteller’s sense of drama to the turbulent life of [Milton] and, as he does with Augustine and his mother, views the making of a major work… through the lens of [Milton’s] private and public struggles."

New York Review of Books - Marina Warner

"With all his usual clarity and freshness, one of our foremost literary historians and critics sets out a comprehensive picture of how a story foundational for European civilisation developed, from its origins in Western Asia to its much-contested place in the post-Darwinian world.… This is a rich, learned, lively book, which should engage all who are interested in the history of our imagination and the interweavings of faith, poetics, and philosophy."

Rowan Williams

"This is the kind of book—lucid and delightfully infuriating—that I wish more academic superstars would write."

Boston Globe - Anthony Domestico

"Most modern theories of human civilisation are, fundamentally, about the need to deal with mortality. Stephen Greenblatt’s thrilling new book, however, on the peregrinations of the story of Adam and Eve—the world’s most influential attempt to arrest the infinite regress of creation—shows just how central the question of human origins has been to pre-scientific conceptions of humanity."

Guardian - Tim Whitmarsh

"A rare combination of wide-ranging erudition with verve of exposition. Even the most familiar materials are seen in a fresh, and humane, light. This is a book that makes one understand why old myths matter, even when they are perceived unblinkingly as myths."

Robert Alter

07/01/2017
Greenblatt (John Cogan Univ. Professor of the Humanities, Harvard Univ.; The Swerve) explores one of humanity's most extraordinary stories: the biblical account of Adam and Eve. Beginning with its written origins during the Hebrews' exile in Babylon surrounded by competing Mesopotamian creation myths, and continuing through Darwinian evolution, Greenblatt thoughtfully meanders through various understandings of this narrative over time. Two of the most prominent figures in the book are Augustine, who set Western Christendom on a course away from an allegorical interpretation toward a more strictly literal one, and poet John Milton, whose Paradise Lost was, in many ways, the culmination of Augustine's vision. Ironically, the more real Adam and Eve appeared, the more problematic a literal interpretation became for many readers. In the end, Greenblatt hopes to rescue the story from the misogynistic and sexually oppressive consequences of an Augustinian interpretation and restore its creative and imaginative power as enduring literature. While readers with a special interest in one of the many subfields touched upon may wish for more, Greenblatt has shaped an enjoyable and well-paced narrative that effectively draws from many disciplines. VERDICT Recommended for readers attentive to deep truths embedded in a good story. [See Prepub Alert, 3/13/17.]—Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY

Library Journal

2017-04-30
The Pulitzer and National Book Award winner considers the enduring appeal and manifold interpretations of the biblical account of the first humans' expulsion from paradise."How does something made-up become so compellingly real?" asks Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, 2011, etc.), positioning himself as a secular-minded admirer of a story that religious thinkers for millennia have struggled to fit within a coherent theological framework. The author notes that this tale of humanity's origins was uncomfortably reminiscent for many early Christians of the pagan creation myths they scorned as absurd: the talking snake, the arbitrary deity, all those animals named in one day, etc. Some, like the Alexandrian scholar Origen Adamantius, tried to frame the story as an allegory about the evolution of the soul, but the interpretation that triumphed was that of St. Augustine, who insisted that the story of Adam and Eve was literally true. From that assertion flowed the concept of original sin, the denigration of sex, and the powerful strain of misogyny (it was all Eve's fault) that characterized the Catholic Church for centuries. During the Renaissance—Greenblatt's focus as a scholar and the subject of this book's best pages—artists like Albrecht Dürer and writers such as John Milton sought to give the rebellious couple of Genesis a palpable human reality in images and literature, most thrillingly in Milton's great epic Paradise Lost. When Greenblatt moves on to the challenges to belief in the literal truth of the Bible posed by Enlightenment philosophers and 19th-century scientists (culminating with Darwin's The Origin of Species), his narrative speeds up and loses focus. The author seems to be making an argument for the enduring power of stories while decrying fundamentalism, but his point isn't clear, and a final chapter positing a chimpanzee pair in Uganda as a present-day Adam and Eve is simply odd. Many fine passages charged with Greenblatt's passion and talent for storytelling can't disguise the fact that he's not quite sure what story he's trying to tell here.

Kirkus Reviews