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Overview
A provocative new interpretation of the Adam and Eve story from an expert in Biblical literature.
The Garden of Eden story, one of the most famous narratives in Western history, is typically read as an ancient account of original sin and humanity’s fall from divine grace. In this highly innovative study, Ziony Zevit argues that this is not how ancient Israelites understood the early biblical text. Drawing on such diverse disciplines as biblical studies, geography, archaeology, mythology, anthropology, biology, poetics, law, linguistics, and literary theory, he clarifies the worldview of the ancient Israelite readers during the First Temple period and elucidates what the story likely meant in its original context.
Most provocatively, he contends that our ideas about original sin are based upon misconceptions originating in the Second Temple period under the influence of Hellenism. He shows how, for ancient Israelites, the story was really about how humans achieved ethical discernment. He argues further that Adam was not made from dust and that Eve was not made from Adam’s rib. His study unsettles much of what has been taken for granted about the story for more than two millennia—and has far-reaching implications for both literary and theological interpreters.
“Classical Hebrew in the hands of Ziony Zevit is like a cello in the hands of a master cellist. He knows all the hidden subtleties of the instrument, and he makes you hear them in this rendition of the profoundly simple story of Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and their Creator in the Garden of Eden. Zevit brings a great deal of other biblical learning to bear in a surprisingly light-hearted book.”―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300195330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?
By Ziony Zevit
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Ziony ZevitAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-17869-2
CHAPTER 1
THE FALL IN INTERPRETATION
In popular perception, the Garden story in Genesis teaches about humanity's forfeiture of an ideal relationship with God and about the origins of sexuality and lust in acts of disobedience and rebellion against him. It explains the derivation of some human woes in divine curses: the struggle for livelihood and the pain of childbirth. It instructs wives to submit to the rule of their husbands. It informs us about the curse on Reptilia squamata serpentes (Ophidia) that brought about its novel form of locomotion. Finally, the story explains, at least as some interpret it, why, after a life of struggle, all humans die.
Adam and Hawwa (Eve, by her Hebrew name) were banished from the paradisiacal Garden into the world that we, all of us, their descendents, now occupy. Like them after they left the Garden, we look back to the past wistfully, knowing that what we have will never be as good as what we could have had, because something is inherently wrong with us. We are fallen creatures.
And lest somebody argue that perhaps after banishment the original relationship between people and God could have been restored, the Bible provides further evidence attesting to the fall of humanity. The firstborn of the primal couple, named Qayin (Cain), was jealous of his younger brother, Hebel (Abel), and killed him (Gen 4:8); Lamech, a descendent of Qayin, was violent, arrogant, and boastful: "I have slain a man for wounding me, and a child for bruising me" (Gen 4:23–24). Indeed, one scholar suggests that it is possible to view all Israelite history after the killing of innocent Hebel as connected chains of violent events lubricated by an ever-flowing stream of blood. Hardly an auspicious beginning for humankind! For more than two millennia this understanding has provided an interpretive lens through which the Bible has been read and explained.
This most important and certainly not farfetched interpretation presents a gloomy understanding of humanity that conceives of people as, at best, incompetent, wrongdoing muddlers in an inhospitable and oft en dangerous world. At worst, it may have contributed a sense of justifiable normality to the sanguineous history of the West, where noble warriors fought sword in hand with Bible exegesis in heart and mind.
A JAUNDICED READING
The understanding of the Garden story as the story of a Fall sets a brooding tone that carries over into the other narratives in Genesis. We have only to think about the description of lascivious divine beings selecting wives from among the beautiful daughters of humankind (Gen 6:1–4), of God's declarations that people think "nothing but evil all the day" (Gen 6:5) and that the "desire of the human mind is evil from its youth" (Gen 8:21), of the drunkenness of Noah and the subsequent prurient voyeurism of his son Ham (Gen 9:20–29), and even of certain ethically questionable behavior on the part of Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs, people living under the protective cloaks of divine care, favor, and guidance.
Fearing that men in Egypt and in the Philistine city of Gerar would kill him so that they could take his beautiful wife, Abraham asked Sarah to pass herself off as his unmarried sister. She acquiesced and was taken into the harem of the unsuspecting local kings, triggering dire consequences for their innocent loyal subjects. God afflicted Egyptians and Gerarites with plagues. In the end, Sarah remained untouched and unharmed, while Abraham increased his personal wealth (Gen 12:10–20; 20:1–18).
Sarah mistreated her pregnant servant, Hagar (Gen 16:1–6), and later sent both Hagar and her son, Ishmael, off into the wilderness to die (Gen 21:9–13). Isaac, like his father before him, had his wife misrepresent herself as his sister when he, too, journeyed to Gerar (Gen 26:6–11).
Jacob, the consummate deceiver, exploited his brother Esau's hunger to obtain the status of firstborn (Gen 25:28–34). Later, at the instigation, and with the complicity, of his mother, Rebecca, Jacob took advantage of his father's blindness, deceiving him so that he, Jacob, would receive the blessing that Isaac had intended for Esau (Gen 27:1–30). Fleeing his brother's wrath, Jacob moved to Mesopotamia, where he joined the house hold of his uncle Laban, Rebecca's brother. There, he met poetic justice.
His duplicitous uncle Laban agreed to marry his daughter Rachel to Jacob. At the last moment, Laban substituted his older, possibly nearsighted daughter, Leah, for the younger Rachel, a fact that Jacob discovered only in the morning light, after the marriage had been consummated.
Jacob later tricked his father-in-law through his ability to breed flock animals selectively and thus increase his share of the profits (Gen 30:37–43). Jacob's escapades were such that a prophet preaching around 539 BCE could declare about him: "Your first father sinned" (Isa 43:1, 22, 27).
In the next generation, Joseph, favorite son of Jacob, tattled on his brothers (Gen 37:2). Motivated by jealousy, anger, and a desire for revenge, they sold him into slavery and allowed their father, Jacob, to believe that he was dead (Gen 37:25–36).
Descendents of Jacob's sons, the Israelites, continued to behave improperly. After Moses led them out from slavery in Egypt, they rebelled against God in the wilderness by constructing and worshipping a golden calf (Exod 32:1–4), complaining about manna, a special food provided to them, while longing for their Egyptian diet of meat and vegetables (Num 11:4–5) and refusing to conquer the Promised Land (Num 13:30–14:10). God condemned that generation to die in the wilderness.
Forty years after the exodus from Egypt, after the death of those who refused to enter the land promised to the descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a new generation came along under the leadership of Joshua (Josh 1–24). After his death, their children engaged in idolatry: "The children of Israel did evil in the eyes of the Lord and worshipped the Baalim" (Judg 2:11).
The book of Judges describes the period after the settlement of the Promised Land as characterized by seven cycles of idolatry, which led God to abandon Israel. Abandonment was followed by punishment at the hands of local enemies, which stimulated repentance. Repentance created a space during which a warrior leader saved the Israelites from their enemies and restored peace to the land. As memories of the distant past faded, however, tranquillity gave way to backsliding, and again "they did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord" (Judg 3:12; 4:1; 6:1, etc.).
The book of Samuel tells about the rise and establishment of a monarchy at the request of the people. The book of Kings goes on to describe the centuries from the reign of Solomon until the capture of Jerusalem and the first exile from Israel in 597 BCE, followed by the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon's temple and the second exile in 586 BCE, as four hundred years of continuous disobedience to divine commands (2 Kings 21:10–15; 22:16–17).
WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE
Around 445 BCE, almost 140 years after the destruction of Solomon's temple, Nehemiah, a Jewish official representing the interests of the Persian court, came to Jerusalem. Assuming a direct connection between the depressed circumstances of Jews in the city and what he considered their impious behavior, he undertook to improve their lot in both the material and the religious spheres. To set things right with God, he encouraged public fasting, acts of contrition and confession, tithing, and observance of the Sabbath (Neh 9:1–5; 13:1–27).
Nehemiah composed a great negative confession that drew on Israel's historical tradition to describe his people's past as a long series of misdeeds and rebellions (Neh 9:16–31). The point of his public confession was to acknowledge that all misfortunes that had befallen Israel were of their own making: "You are in the right concerning all that comes upon us, because you acted faithfully and we did evil" (Neh 9:33). Nehemiah's list of misdeeds is of interest for two reasons.
First, Nehemiah indicted his contemporaries. In an era of "it's not my fault" thinking by down-and-out Israelites, he accused them of bearing collective responsibility for their own misfortune. Just as their ancestors had suffered for the sins of their own generations, the current generation's tribulations were the consequence of their own misdeeds. In making this argument, Nehemiah redefined the scope of individual culpability that Jeremiah and Ezekiel had developed 140 years earlier (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18:2).
These two prophets confronted people claiming that the calamities befalling them just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE were unjustified, since only their ancestors had done wrong: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes but the children's teeth are set on edge." The idea behind the aphorism is found in the Decalogue: "I, the Lord, am a jealous god accounting the guilt of the parents upon the children, on the third and on the fourth generations of those who reject me" (Exod 20:5; 34:7, with slightly different wording).
In context, the Exodus passages refer to the postponement of punishment for a particular offense: serving other gods. In any event, both Jeremiah and Ezekiel rebutted the proverb with its underlying idea arguing instead that only the teeth of those who eat sour grapes are set on edge. They denied that individuals are punished for the wrongdoing of their ancestors. This idea of Jeremiah and Ezekiel is an expansive generalization based on a legal principle found in Deuteronomy 24:16: "Parents shall not be put to death for children, or children put to death for parents. A person shall be put to death for his own crime."
Nehemiah expanded the concept of individual retribution, treating the people of his day as a corporate body. Every generation that is punished is punished for its own wrongdoing.
Second, although Nehemiah read through the past with fault-finding eyes, the oldest relevant wrongful act that Nehemiah discerned in history was Israel's collective refusal to conquer the land in the days of Moses and the subsequent sin of worshipping the golden calf (Neh 9:15–18).4 He made no mention of any prior wrongdoings.
WHY PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS
Two hundred years after Nehemiah, some individuals found fault with his explanation of collective responsibility, as well as with the idea of individual responsibility that Jeremiah and Ezekiel had espoused. They changed the question from "What did we do wrong?" to "Why, despite awareness of what we ought to do, do we do wrong and incur guilt?"
To answer their new question, they accepted Nehemiah's historical approach—that a search of the past could provide a relevant answer for their contemporary question. Simultaneously, they expanded his list of misdeeds by moving into the more distant past. They sleuthed after the etiology of humankind's proclivity for the perverse, seeking, like medical researchers, the source of the sickness, as it were. Backtracking on the dark, thorny trail of misdeeds described in their scriptures led them further back than the exodus. They examined the lives of Jacob and his family, and of Isaac, and then of Abraham and Sarah as these were known to them. They continued, going back ten generations to Noah, from whose children all peoples in the world are descended. From Noah, the path led back another ten generations to the first couple in the Garden, and to the series of events that came to be described by Christian theologians as "the Fall."
EARLY ATTEMPTS AT ANALYSIS
In an address to women, the church father Tertullian (160–220 CE) laid out the implications of the events in the Garden, allocating culpability in a form still quite recognizable in the twenty-first century:
I think ... that you would have dressed in mourning garments and even neglected your exterior, acting the part of mourning and repentant Eve in order to expiate more fully by all sorts of penitential garb that which woman derives from Eve—the ignomy, I mean, of original sin and the odium of being the cause of the fall of the human race.
In sorrow and anxiety, you will bring forth, O woman, and you are subject to your husband, and he is your master. Do you not believe that you are [each] an Eve?
The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times and so it is necessary that the guilt should live on, also. You are the one who opened the door to the Devil ... you are the one who persuaded he whom the Devil was not strong enough to attack. All too easily you destroyed the image of God, man.
While Tertullian's analysis of the Garden story with its salty singling out of women shaped much in Christian thought for many centuries, his analysis was not uniquely Christian. It can be traced back to pre-Christian Jewish teachers who first faulted Adam as liable in the biblical story. Some spread the blame to include Hawwa, whereas others shift ed it entirely to her. Tertullian reflects the latter position.
The reassignment of liability was due in part to Hellenistic attitudes toward women and in part to an evolving perception that some element of the punishment for the sin was transmitted biologically, like the spots on Jacob's goats. Additionally, the science of the time accepted that heredity played an important role in establishing the character and nature of an individual, but was uncertain about which parent transmitted which traits to off spring. Consequently, once the Fall became associated with human character, science insisted that the imprint of fallenness had to be passed on from parents to off spring. Differing scientific views about which parent transmitted which characteristic to off spring explain the different assignations of liability, now to Adam and now to Hawwa.
A Jewish composition of the late first century CE, 2 Esdras, a book in the Apocrypha (= 4 Esdras in Catholic Bibles), expressed the already well-developed notion that Adam's sin in Eden affected all his descendents: "O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendents" (2 Esd 7:118). The author of 2 Esdras explained that although Adam was judged only for the deed, the human proclivity to sinfulness was innate: "the first Adam, burdened with an evil heart, transgressed and was overcome, as were all who were descended from him. Thus the disease became permanent" (2 Esd 3:21–22); and "a grain of evil seed was sown in Adam's heart from the beginning, and how much ungodliness it has produced until now, and will produce until the time of threshing comes" (2 Esd 4:30). According to this understanding, Adam did evil because the inclination to do so was part of how he had been created in the beginning. Adam's tendency was owing to a primal birth defect transmitted to all his descendents. Support for this could be found by reading Genesis 8:21 as a diagnostic statement: "the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth."
The author of 2 Baruch, a Jewish composition of the early second century CE, proposed a slightly different explanation that spread blame: "O Adam, what did you do to all who were born from you? And what will be said of the first Eve who obeyed the serpent, so that this whole multitude is going to corruption?" (2 Bar 48:42–43). The explanation that the first sin led to a mutation affecting human progeny for all generations may be imagined—allowing for anachronism—as a pernicious application of the discredited ge ne tic theories proposed much later by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829).
The French biologist explained that changes in the environment influence changes in creatures that are subsequently passed on to their young. His most famous example was the giraffe's long neck that stretched and improved as giraffes reached up to consume the higher-growing leaves on trees. Like Lamarck, the author of 2 Baruch thought that the single misuse of ethical choice in the Garden resulted in the implantation of a horrendous negative trait in human germplasm. "Fallenness," for him, was not an individual's propensity or a developed taste for ethical misbehavior but an acquired trait or state of being become permanent.
The earliest attestation of the "Eve is to blame" explanation in a Jewish source is in the pre-Christian apocryphal book known both as Ecclesiasticus and as the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirah. It is the only apocryphal book identified by the name of its actual author. Ben Sirah, a sage active in Jerusalem at the end of the third and the beginning of the second century BCE, belonged to the elite of establishment families whose worldview was increasingly informed by and open to many types of Hellenistic insights, values, and attitudes. He earned his living and reputation instructing sons of these families in the ways of Jewish piety and summarized many of his teachings in a Hebrew book around 180 BCE. Although large portions of his book are known from medieval Hebrew manuscripts discovered around 1900, we know the complete work only through the Greek translation made by his grandson around 130 BCE.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? by Ziony Zevit. Copyright © 2013 Ziony Zevit. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
A Preface about "Really" ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: The Fall Is with Us Always xix
Part 1 Now and Then
1 The Fall in Interpretation 3
2 The Fall in the Hebrew Bible 18
3 Who Wrote the Garden Story and When? 28
4 What Is a Reader-Response Approach to Interpreting the Garden Story? 48
5 Reading, Presenting, and Evaluating the Garden Story 54
Part 2 Before Then
6 A Down-to-Earth Story (Gen 2:4-7) 75
7 Why Eden? Why a Garden? Where Were the Trees? (Gen 2:5, 8-10) 85
8 Where in the World Was Eden? (Gen 2:10-14) 96
9 The Gardener and His Tasks (Gen 2:15) 114
10 The Second Commandment (Gen 2:16-17) 120
11 The First Social Welfare Program (Gen 2:18-20) 127
12 The First Lady (Gen 2:21-23) 137
13 Why "Therefore"? (Gen 2:24) 151
14 How Bare Is Naked? (Gen 2:25) 158
15 Clever Conversation and Conspicuous Consumption (Gen 3:1-6) 160
16 Dressing Up for a Dressing Down (Gen 3:7-11) 172
17 Interrogation .and Negotiation (Gen 3:11-13) 179
18 Procreation in the Garden (Gen 3:14-19; 4:1-2) 184
19 Not a Leg to Stand On: The Serpents Sentence and the Israelite Culture of "Curse" (Gen 3:14-15) 192
20 No Bundle of Joy: Hawwa's Sentence and Israelite Predilections in Legal Reasoning (Gen 3:16) 206
21 Toil and Trouble: Adam's Sentence and the Rights of Laborers (Gen 3:17-19) 219
22 Out of the Garden (Gen 3:20-24) 227
Part 3 Then and Now
23 The Essential Plot of the Garden Story 239
24 A Literal Translation of a Literary Text 243
25 Allusions to the Garden Story in the Hebrew Bible 251
26 Contra the Common Interpretation 260
27 Beyond the Tower of Babel 265
Appendix: Transliterating Hebrew for Tourists in the Garden 269
Notes 273
Bibliography 335
Index 357