Hail and welcome. I’m back again today revisiting the content of my earliest essays, and for this one we’ll be focusing on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as it appears in the second and third chapters of the Book of Genesis.
The first things we want to ask when reading this kind of text are, when was it written and for whom? The when is an especially difficult question when we’re talking about the books of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also called the Pentateuch when we’re talking about the books as they appear in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Tradition dates the composition to around the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were unified and ruled from Jerusalem by the kings Saul, David, and Solomon. That’s almost certainly not the case, and we suspect that different parts of the text were written at different times and compiled later, probably some time after the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE, when the Israelites were overthrown by the Neo-Babylonian Empire and deported, only to return after the Babylonians were overthrown by the Persian Achaemenid Empire led by Cyrus the Great. The theory that the Torah is a compilation is called the documentary hypothesis, and the (now lost) documents believed to be the sources are referred to by letters: J, E, D, and P, standing for Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly. Scholars now dispute whether there were four such documents, or more, or fewer, or whether any of those documents are themselves compilations, but the general idea that there was some compilation involved in the Torah is widely accepted.
We’re not going to worry too much about the specific documents or when they were written. For our purposes, it’s enough to know that the part of Genesis we’re talking about today comes from a different source than the first creation narrative presented in the first chapter and the first few verses of the second, and that the part we’re talking about today was probably written some time in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE. Now, that’s a 500 year stretch of time that saw several different political arrangements of the Israelite people in the Levant, but throughout that period the Israelites remained concerned with their constitution as a people and the relationship thereof to their God and their religion and way of life. The text was written in Hebrew rather than the regional lingua franca of Aramaic, so we can assume that the primary audience of the text was the Israelites themselves, and that the text would serve to codify and preserve the Israelites as a people during unstable and insecure times.
One of the big clues as to what content came from which source is how the text describes and refers to God. In the first chapter of Genesis, God is a transcendent being referred to by the title Elohim, which is just a formal rendering of the Hebrew word for “god.” It is thus the equivalent of the word “God” as it is used in English to refer to the specific god described in the Bible, and is a close cognate of “Allah” in Arabic. In the first chapter of Genesis, we see a God who is not in the world as a physical being but rather outside of it as a purely spiritual being. But starting at Genesis 2:4 we see reference to God as Yahweh elohim, which we would translate as “the god Yahweh,” “Yahweh” being a proper name rather than a title. This gives us a clue as to when this part of the text was composed because monotheism—the belief that exactly one god exists—was not a feature of Israelite religion until the Babylonian captivity. We know that, in the Iron Age Levant and possibly back as far as the Bronze Age, Yahweh was one god among a pantheon of gods present in the religions of the Ancient Near East. Yahweh was the national god of the Israelites and so was given a particular focus but other gods were honored as well. Yahweh even had a consort, Asherah (Finkelstein, 2007; Van de Mieroop, 2016), a fertility goddess. So it makes sense that an older text would refer to God by name, by way of saying, “Of all the gods, the god Yahweh is the one who created the world,” and if a text refers to God in that way, we can assume that it on the older side. So we have good reason for believing that this second account of creation in Genesis is older than the first.
We’ll also note, skipping ahead a bit, that the God of the second creation narrative is an immanent deity, physically in the world and possessing a physical form. Genesis 3:8: “And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” This God is also not omniscient, as we see in Genesis 3:9: “And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?”
But let’s start where the narrative starts, Genesis 2:4: “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.” Clearly we’re dealing with a different storyline here because this doesn’t match up with what we covered in Genesis 1, which saw God create the world over the course of six days. Genesis 2 has the world created in one day and fast forwards us to the creation of the first person in Genesis 2:7. For comparison, let’s take a look at Genesis 1:27, which contains the creation of humanity in the first narrative: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” In many versions of the Bible, this verse is offset from the rest of the text because it is believed not to be a continuation of the prose of the prior verses but rather an interruption in poetic verse. It has a very poetic rhythm in the Hebrew and displays a common feature of Hebrew poetry: parallelism, the same thing being said multiple times in different ways. These aren’t three statements but rather three different perspectives on a single statement, and viewed in this way, the verse draws attention to the creation of both male and female as reflecting the image of God. I’ve written elsewhere about how we should understand this verse with regard to modern gender politics—suffice to say it throws a big wrench in the patriarchal and heteronormative standards of religious conservatives—but for our purposes today, I just want to point out that that narrative makes sense when you’re describing a monotheistic God as being the creator of all the peoples of the world, whereas, in the second creation narrative, the emphasis is on the specific lineage of the Israelites, which makes sense when when your god is a national god, a god of your people specifically.
Moving on to Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” I’ve spoken about this verse before as well. In the Hebrew, what this man becomes when God breathes into him the breath of life is a nefesh, a being. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the whole notion of a soul as the underlying spiritual reality of a person was not part of Israelite thought at this time in history.
Genesis 2:9: “And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” “Good and evil” is rendered from the Hebrew towb wa-ra. Towb is the same word we see used in Genesis 1 when God sees that the light of creation is good but this is the first time we’ve seen the word ra, which encompasses not just moral evil but any sort of deficiency.
Genesis 2:16-17: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Obvious question: why is it there, then? We can ask the same question regarding the tree of life, which God doesn’t forbid despite it granting immortality, as we find out later. If it’s a test of obedience, as some have supposed, why do it as what we’d call in the Army a live-fire exercise? Why not just pick an arbitrary tree rather than having the forbidden tree be one that is actually dangerous?
Let’s read on; I’ll get to the analysis at the end. The rest of chapter 2 sees the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam. Then we get Genesis 3:1, which begins, “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.” This is of course the serpent which Christianity identifies as Satan, but the text doesn’t make any such identification. If you were to read this text apart from the knowledge of any particular religious tradition, you’d come away with the impression that the serpent under discussion in Genesis 3 is a crafty animal. Indeed, the only time the Hebrew word satan appears anywhere in the Torah is in the Book of Numbers, where it’s used as a generic noun meaning “adversary.” Satan does appear as a distinct entity in the Book of Job, which was likely written some centuries after this creation narrative appeared as a story in the oral tradition of the Israelites. In fact, we have no reason to think that the Israelites of this time period had anything like the dualistic notion of God and Satan that we do. A national god like Yahweh doesn’t need that sort of cosmic adversary; his enemies are other nations and their gods. The dualism seems more like something they would have picked up from the proto-Zoroastrianism of the post-captivity Persian Period.
Reading Satan into the Genesis narrative or narratives is, I think, completely fine so long as we’re keeping in mind that we’re reading a comparatively modern concept into an ancient text, not looking for literal parallels but rather reoccurrences of tropes and themes. Given the serpent’s role in subverting God’s plans, we can certainly say that the satanic is present in the second creation narrative, if not the actual character of Satan. But when you take sacred texts and just declare that the entire thing is and always was really about your religion in the first place, I think that does a huge disservice to both the sacred text in question and to the potential for the religion to achieve any kind of universality. Because then you’re not saying, “Hey, look at where our two religions line up, isn’t that interesting,” it becomes “You’re wrong, I’m right,” and I don’t think we can easily take that perspective when we’re talking about God.
I’ll read the next section in full.
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
If we think about Eve’s perspective here, we realize that she doesn’t know what a lie is, nor could she possibly know that anything would deceive her or have any sort of malicious intent towards her. How could she? She hasn’t encountered such in the world and hasn’t eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So she thinks about it, uses her judgement, and makes the rational choice based on evidence to act in her own self-interest in opposition to an authority which would seem to her arbitrary and unsupported.
But in point of fact the serpent has told her the truth. God’s promise was as follows: if you eat the fruit, you die on that same day. The serpent’s promise was, one, you won’t die (or at least not that same day); two, you’ll know good and evil; three, that will make you like gods. What happens when Adam and Eve eat the fruit? Genesis 3:22: “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” Genesis 5:5: “And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years.”
So what’s going on here? Why did God lie to Adam and Eve? Why did God create the tree and the serpent in the first place? My suspicion is that the incoherence of the narrative results from the process of compiling and editing the text from its original sources. Maybe, in the original version, God didn’t create the tree; it was already there and God was just warning Adam and Eve about the consequences of knowledge. Then the monotheists who are compiling the text say, “Wait, we can’t have something in the world that wasn’t created by our all-powerful God” and make the edit.
That being the case, I think it’s more valuable to us to think about what the narrative can mean for us today, here in the 21st century.
We take from the text that Eden is a really nice place to be. We call it a paradise, and in fact the very word “paradise” has come to mean what it does in English because of its association with the Garden of Eden: paradeisos is the Greek word in the Septuagint used to translate the Hebrew word gan, meaning garden. And paradeisos is interesting because what the word literally means is “enclosed by a wall;” “enclosure” would probably be the best word to use if we’re translating from the Koine Greek into English, and that’s a word we use to describe the habitats of zoo animals. Similarly, the Garden of Eden is understood as a place where everything is provided; that’s not stated explicitly in the text, but we certainly get the implication that everything Adam and Eve need are easily acquired. It would be fair to describe their situation as affluent, even opulent.
Humans have certain needs resulting from their nature as biological organisms, things that they require in order to continue living: food, shelter, and also sex, if you consider as well the survival of not just the individual but the species. But these are not the only things that drive us.
I once saw an episode of a nature documentary show starring the celebrity zookeeper Steve Irwin. In one segment, Irwin entered an enclosure containing several crocodiles. He approached them, and when the crocodiles responded with hostility, he ran away. He explained afterwards that he was doing it for the crocodiles’ mental health. The crocodiles don’t just want to have their territory, he said, they want to secure it under their own power. So Irwin was allowing them to chase him out of their enclosure so that the crocodiles would feel powerful. It makes perfect sense and demonstrates Irwin’s insight into animal psychology: being that crocodiles are territorial, they must receive a psychophysiological reward for successfully securing their territory. Irwin was providing them with opportunities to receive that reward and thus to feel more at home in their artificial environment.
Another zoologist, Desmond Morris, described this as the Stimulus Struggle. As Morris describes in his classic book The Human Zoo (1969/1996), animals are in general wired to seek a certain amount of stimulation from their environment. About 539 million years ago, animal life, which had evolved compartively recently, exploded in both population and diversity, rapidly colonizing the planet and becoming the dominant form of life on Earth. They—we—owe this success to adaptability and specialization. Unlike other forms of life, animals form highly specialized tissues that allow for organisms to be “constructed,” so to speak, in a highly modular and adaptable way. Many animals also have advanced centralized nervous systems that facilitate further adaptation. Capitalizing on this adaptability requires a certain measure of restlessness: the desire for constant stimulation leads us to seek out new opportunities, new ecological niches.
So it’s simply not enough for us to just have food or have shelter. It’s a common recreational practice for humans who have plenty of food and shelter to go out into the wilderness, build their own shelter (even if only with the prefabricated components of a polyester tent), and perhaps even hunt or trap or forage their own food. A campsite is rarely as comfortable as a modern bedroom, but the comfort obtained under one’s own power is more satisfying regardless. There’s a story that, when instant cake mix was first invented, it didn’t sell well. The early versions included powered milk and eggs so all one needed to do was to add water, but after some market research, the producers determined that they had made the process too easy. When they took out the powdered eggs, creating the requirement that the bakers add their own eggs, sales took off. That story may well be apocryphal but given the Stimulus Struggle, I find it entirely believable. In fact, Irwin himself engaged in the Stimulus Struggle when he entered the crocodile enclosure. Morris described that sort of behavior as tempting survival, which is part of the broader class of the behaviors of creating problems for oneself to then overcome in order to compensate for the lack of natural survival-based stimuli.
Desire, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tells us, is always in excess, and the drive to fulfill this excessive desire becomes a desire for excess. When we enter the supermarket to get a box of cereal it’s not just the cereal we want but an encounter with the transcendent glory of surplus. We take a box of coco-puffs from the self and put it in the basket; there is another identical box behind it, and to either side, and behind each of those boxes as well, and beyond that, different flavors, different brands, different sizes. The product on sale at the supermarket is not just the fulfillment of a desire for cereal but the promise of the fulfillment of all desire, forever. An American restaurant chain offers “the world’s largest selection of craft beer.” I think they have over a hundred. The product is not the beer but the selection. We don’t see how the beer or the cereal are made, how they get to their respective points of sale, who puts the boxes on the shelves and the beer in the kegs. As Jean Baudrillard points out in The Consumer Society (1970/1988), this involves a certain degree of magical thinking on the part of the consumer, even if we can say that the magic of the modern consumer society actually works, at least most of the time.
So it seems we’ve built for ourselves our own Garden of Eden, and we don’t seem to be at all happy about it; nor should we be. Futurist predictions from the mid-20th century claimed that by the 21st century our technology would allow us to work only four hours a day, perhaps even less. But when that actually came about, instead of working less, we just expanded our economy and worked the same amount or more. Even this wasn’t enough. Wealthy countries now drain approximately $10 trillion each year from the Global South (Hickel et al., 2022) through unfair exchange practices and the tyranny of the International Monetary Fund. The global economic system, established and enforced by the violence of the state, keeps the world poor for the benefit of a wealthy elite. Billions labor so that millions can experience the Garden of their desires, all while the sea levels rise, the atmosphere warms to unprecedented levels, and the natural world is buried under concrete.
Genesis 3:14-21:
And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
I’m speculating here, but what if there were an earlier version of the story where God doesn’t forbid Adam and Eve from eating from the tree but rather gives them a choice: “Here’s the tree. If you eat of its fruit you’ll gain my knowledge, but if you have that knowledge you can’t stay in the garden.” And then when they do eat the fruit, God doesn’t curse them but rather explains the natural consequences of their actions.
In the study of human evolution, there’s a hypothesis called the obstetrical dilemma, which asserts that humans have two huge evolutionary benefits that, when combined, also give us a major drawback, the benefits being that we have big brains and we walk upright. Our big brains grant us intelligence, and our hands, evolved for the fine but muscular work of swinging through treetops, are free for toolmaking and tool use. The tradeoff is that childbirth is more difficult for humans than for other species. It’s more complicated, more painful, more dangerous. But it gives us enough of an edge otherwise to make it a net benefit, no matter how much suffering that puts us through. That’s the inhuman reason of evolution at work. Knowledge has costs. God explains those costs, and the serpent comes along to say that it’s a choice worth considering. They eat the fruit, and God explains the consequences, gives them something to wear, and sends them on their way. Maybe the patriarchal stuff—”thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee”—was added later or maybe it was part of the original story. I really don’t have any evidence at all that there was any such version as I’m describing, but it’s at least possible to read the text in that way and have it remain consistent.
Of course there’s no mention that the sin of this transgression would be passed down from generation to generation, and in fact the whole notion that sin could be passed down like that is dispelled in Deuteronomy 24:16 and Ezekiel 18:20.
To get to the point, our intelligence and knowledge give us an extraordinary amount of power, power that we can use to fulfill our desires, but we’re going about that without a baseline understanding of what our desires really are and how they work. We’ve fetishized the Garden as a lost state of grace and satisfaction and we’re trying to recreate it as we believe it to have been—all desires instantly satisfied—and in the process we’ve brutally subjugated most of humanity and turned the natural world—the real Garden—into garbage, and all for this very transient and empty desire satisfaction through commodity consumption, a process that undermines what actually makes us happy, which is the expression of our own power and agency. What is needed, then, is not to seek to recreate some past state of glory but to acknowledge the present situation, work to understand what it is that really drives us, and consider the possibilities which inhere in our supposedly-fallen state, the possibilities granted us by our knowledge and intelligence. Christians will of course say that transcending our fallen state requires the intervention of Jesus, and there’s an abstract sense in which I agree: I think we need to reach beyond the material and the human to access what is real and enduring. For Christians, Jesus represents that bridge. My allegiances, as you know, lie elsewhere.
Works Referenced and Citations
- Baudrillard, J. (1970/1998). The consumer society: Myths and structures. SAGE Publications.
- Finkelstein, I. and Mazar, A. (2007). The quest for the historical Israel: Debating archaeology and the history of early Israel (B.B. Schmidt, ed.). Brill.
- Hickel, J., Dorninger, C., Wieland, H., & Suwandi, I. (2022, February 14). Imperialist appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015. Global Environmental Change. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
- Morris, D. (1969/1996). The human zoo: A zoologist’s study of the urban animal. Kodansha Globe.
- Van de Mieroop, M. (2004/2016). A history of the Ancient Near East. Wiley Blackwell.