Originary Reflections on Eden

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis has been a bit of a stumbling block for me since I started rethinking the Hebrew Bible in terms the realization that, first, it was compiled, revised and edited and, to a significant extent, written, during the period just prior to, during, and immediately subsequent to, the Babylonian exile; and, second, that much if not all of it, involves appropriating and reversing the mythology and literature of ancient Israel’s imperial neighbors. I knew something of all this when I wrote Anthropomorphics, and earlier, when I spoke of monotheism as a kind of anti-imperialist imperialism, presaging the anti-imperialist imperialism of liberalism and modern democracy, but I’ve been pursuing this line of inquiry in greater depth. The problem with the Eden story is that unlike the direct reliance of God’s covenant with Israel, and the laws dictated in Deuteronomy, upon Assyrian treaties imposed upon vassal states, or the fairly straightforward lifting of the Moses story from the story of Sargon of Akkad (with, as always, significant “subversive” or, if you like, resentful, revisions), the Adam and Eve story is at best vaguely related to Gilgamesh. Indeed, the Biblical scholar David Carr, one of a few upon whom I have relied heavily, argues that the Eden story is probably a particularly ancient one because we see no anti-imperial polemic there (as opposed, say to the clear anti-Babylonian polemic in the Tower of Babel story). But I think it belongs along with the rest of the Torah, either written or significantly revised around the time of the Babylonian exile. Why? Well, even though Carr raises and rejects this claim (while noting it’s a common one), it seems to me that the story is very much one of exile—humans as “always already” exiled.

So, I’m going to plunge in here, with the awareness that I’m still fumbling around in the dark a bit and that I might be going over ground trod by others. I can always do what the authors of the Bible themselves did and go back and revise and layer later on. I will first of all say that the story seems to me very much a Persian one, either written in Persia after the Persian empire replaced the Babylonian one or, perhaps soon after the Persian empire granted the Judeans the right to return and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. I got taken with the idea that there is some connection between the Eden story and the story of Esther, which is set in Persia (if anyone else has made this connection I would love to know about it) and also involves a persuasive woman convincing her husband to make a decision that changes history. In Eden, it’s a disastrous decision, while in Esther it’s a providentially beneficial one (if you will grant, even for the sake of this discussion, that the salvation of the Jews from an attempted genocide is an event to be celebrated), but once the possibility of women influencing men becomes a literary theme we would have to grant it can go either way (and there’s talk in the Bible about Solomon’s foreign wives leading him astray). So, there’s a kind of “misogynist” assumption here to the effect that the informal, subtle influence of women was a concern to the authors of these ancient texts (like the Arabian Nights), and its implications explored. But—and this is what is crucial here—this concern could only have become explicit and interesting in the case of kings, who really made the only consequential decisions in the human orders under consideration here. So, my first guess here is that the Adam and Eve story is a revision of a kind of story told of kings, here “universalized” and situated at the origin of humanity. (For the moment, of course, I’m placing at the center what doesn’t necessarily belong there—Eve giving Adam the fruit to eat, and him eating it.)

The fact that the story is set in a garden is also suggestive of its “Persianness,” and the creation of perfect gardens, of a beautiful world in itself, was a “trademark” of the Persian monarchy, and the word for “garden” (“pardes”) worked its way into Hebrew and other West Asian languages and is, in fact, the origin of our own “paradise.” (The writers of Genesis would not have been hostile to Persia, which provides an answer to Carr.) So, here we have a very familiar move of Ancient Jewish literary culture: “backdating” a creation of a surrounding imperial culture and attributing its creation to God, with the replacing of imperial objectives with divine ones. Furthermore, we could say, now, that the concern with immortality is a universally human one, but I think it’s very likely (and here I’m following a Hegelian thread in Gans’s work that he never pursued very far) that, like many “universally human” characteristics, this one has its origins in the very specific concerns of (and about) kings. (The belief that the dead lived on as spirits may have universal, or close to it, but this was a degraded, frightening condition, not worthy of being called “life.”) Divinized more or less directly, builder of monuments meant to last forever, memorializing themselves in various ways (even going so far as to invent phonetic writing in order to do so) it would have been the ancient emperors who would have found it puzzling and distressing that they can’t actually live forever (at least with all of the privileges, prerogatives and accoutrements they took for granted on earth). I’m not saying anything new in seeing the story is concerned with the origin of human mortality, even if this concern is complicated by the fact that, while God tells Adam he will die if he eats the fruit (and presumably wouldn’t die otherwise? this is not clear) there is at the same time, as we only find out afterward, a Tree of Life that he (and Eve) could presumably have eaten instead of or after eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—in which case, they didn’t know about this tree (did the serpent?) and were not, in fact, immortal in the first place (we readers are told about the scene through God’s reference to it to... who?). But why, then, if the story is concerned with immortality, are they forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil rather than the tree of life—why is that the tree they are made aware of through this interdiction?

I think there’s an anti-imperial dimension to this as well. The emperors as the highest judges would have been the final court of appeal on questions of good and evil. But isn’t knowledge of good and evil necessary for a judge, and wouldn’t its acquisition be cause for celebration rather than a result of transgression? It would have been better had there never been a king, but if there is to be a king, it is better that he have this knowledge. The real “fall” is into monarchy. But the backdating of the story to the origin of humanity situates this fall in our own constitution—which means we’ve brought monarchy upon ourselves, and will pay for it—exactly the argument God makes to Samuel when the Israelites demand a king. But this retrodiction also means that the knowledge of good and evil is now a possession of the entire human race, and no longer the monopoly of the emperor. The covenant of God with the emperor is here as well converted into one with, in this case, all of humanity. In that case, the desire for immortality is likewise a universal human possession—to judge is to speak in God’s name and therefore imagine immortality, which one should never do because that implies a desire to be a god, and if there’s only one God, even worse, God. This is paradoxical and convoluted, but the convolution is in the story, and in the revolution it’s trying to effect, not in my account—the very thing that will lead to the desire for immortality, the elevation to the position of supreme arbiter, is here presented as the cause for (or co-constitutive with) the frustration of that desire. It’s an Escher drawing—there’s no “clear” way to present it. Our desire to occupy the center is what reminds us that we can’t. And to prove this, no one else can, either. This desire and its renunciation is so powerful that, I think, human sacrifice, so closely related to the first-born, the first of the flock, etc. (a central concern, of course, elsewhere in Genesis) must lie behind it—but this story chooses not to take that question on, so I’ll leave it here as an aside.

A difficulty for my argument is that we are not shown how Eve convinces Adam to eat the fruit. It seems a matter of course and, indeed, it’s hard to imagine a continuation of the story in which Eve has eaten the fruit and Adam hasn’t. Not only would she, in that case, have knowledge inaccessible to him, but she would have to endure punishments from which he would be free, making their future life together hard to imagine (Milton saw the problem here). So, Adam eating the fruit is a plot necessity; but, still, we have to motivate it. I would assume Eve repeats the serpent’s arguments, along with describing her own enlightening experience of eating the fruit, but since Adam can see the “plot necessity” as well as we can, he really has no choice, which may be why there’s no point to seeing them repeated for him. But the fact that Eve wants Adam to eat as well means that she doesn’t see this new divine knowledge as something that distinguishes her from or gives her some advantage over Adam. Eve has the idea first (or is ready to be convinced first, as the serpent must assume), but the idea she has is for Adam to become like a God. She’s worried he’s not ambitious enough, not claiming his prerogatives (here’s the “misogynist” reading). She’s resentful on his behalf, like an intelligent Queen, with no legitimate aspirations of her own, might be for more a complacent or dull-witted royal husband. The very fact that she was found worthy by the serpent to hear these marvelous and innovative arguments, and had the initiative to act on them, would already be “convincing.” I’m assuming, then, that Eve is a bit of a Lady Macbeth, inflaming a real, but dormant or hesitant ambition on the part of her husband.

And what about the snake? I see the snake, as I’m sure many readers do, as a deflation of more ancient and “titanic” mythological confrontations into the voice of desires that humans would have articulated on their own. A bit of an alibi, in that case—a reduced version of what mythology already is, an alibi for violent desires that the human community is not prepared to avow. I’m also going to keep things resolutely anthropological regarding God, treating Him as an effect of the problem I’m positing as the root of the story: the unacceptable desire for immortality that is constitutive of kingship, at least once it reaches a certain point of continuity, security and grandeur. The knowledge required to be a supreme judge suggests the blurring of the boundary between divine and human, and is therefore problematic. We can further assume (and maybe, due to research I’m unfamiliar with, we don’t have to just assume) that we will find some residues of other mythological material from the surrounding imperial cultures.

So, a kind of “hypothesis” regarding the origin of the human, from creation to our reduction to our (still) present, demanding, somewhat unforgiving condition, filled with pain and hard work, trumps the king as center. The implication is certainly that each individual human is as dear to God as the emperor would proclaim and have himself proclaimed, to be. We can see an extremely powerful and generative resentment which, again, I think only makes sense in terms of an exiled people, bereft of the standard justifications for their existence. The story does eventually bring into focus the desire, including sexual desire of course, constitutive of the monogamous couple (who become “one flesh”), in the couple’s shame at being naked. If we explain this internally to the story itself, we would have to see sexual desire as newly shameful as a result of the knowledge of good and evil, itself gained through transgression. If knowledge of good and evil makes sexual desire, openly displayed at least, shameful, that must be because that knowledge brings us into a civilized state, which has also constrained expressions of sexual desire. In that case, there is no causality here—knowledge of good and evil does not make sexual desire shameful; rather, the sphere of human judgment has set various limits, among them those on sexual activity. We are being told by the text that Adam and Eve now inhabit our world. But I would insist that while sexual desire is, of course, “dangerous” at all levels of the social order, it is royal desire specifically that is the source of narrative material the authors of Genesis would be drawing upon. The desire which in the story leads to man and woman becoming one flesh  is itself likely modeled on and is built to constrain the (potentially transgressive in so many ways) desire constituting the relation of the king and his “consort,” where all the intrigue of the marital bond (the joining of two families, with all the possibilities of divided loyalties, and even two peoples, as we see in the founding myths of so many cultures) can be foregrounded and is here brought within the compass of shared burdens and a shared destiny in the most everyday things (work, giving birth, raising children, creating a future together). We are in our natural married state like kings and queens before God, “made” for each other, with our own territory or estate, lineage, and extraordinary burdens of earning our place as God’s people. And perhaps the suggestion, as elsewhere in the Bible, is that if we earn that place, we won’t need kings. A remarkable onto-theological usurpation.