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The Bible opens upon Adam and Eve, whom some believe to have been real people. Whether literal or allegorical, what is the significance, and legacy, of their story? (The italicized text is my own summary.)
Man
On the sixth day, after having created everything else, God fashioned man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. ‘And so God created man in His image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.’ He gave them dominion over the animals, and told them to subdue and replenish the earth.
In Genesis 1, it seems that God created man and woman at the same time. What’s more, God created them in His own likeness, breathing Himself into them—suggesting that, unlike other animals, they share in divine attributes such as language, reason, and imagination—which rely all three on the symbolic thought that animals seem to lack. He gave them a share in His dominion and made them the custodians of creation. He also told them to replenish the earth: All of humanity descends from them; all of humanity is one big family.
Eden
God planted a garden of plenty to the east in Eden, in which He placed man ‘to dress it and to keep it’. It contained many pleasant and fruitful trees, including, in its midst, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God said to man, “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.”
In Genesis 2, God creates the Garden of Eden, and man is confirmed as the crowning glory of creation. The state of plenty in which he finds himself corresponds to the Golden Age of the Greeks, Hindus, and others: a primordial period of peace and prosperity, innocence and virtue.
Many mythologies also feature a central tree, vine, pillar, mountain, or other axis mundi that bridges Earth and Heaven. For example, in Plato’s Myth of Er, souls on the road to rebirth travel to the Spindle of Necessity, a shaft of intensely bright light that extends into the heavens and holds together the universe. The connection to Heaven symbolizes man’s affinity and longing for pure, abstract ideals such as love, justice, beauty, and God Himself, even though he, at least in his present incarnation, has never seen these perfect or Platonic forms.
In Eden, there are not one but two central trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, the tree of moral consciousness, of choice and freedom. God forbids man to eat from the latter tree, warning him that if he does he will surely die.
Eve
God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone…” He brought every animal to Adam to name, but none seemed a suitable helpmate. So He put Adam into a deep sleep, and fashioned the first woman out of one of his ribs. Upon beholding Eve, Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
Although woman seems to have been created in Genesis 1 (‘male and female created He them’), Genesis 2 finds Adam alone in the Garden of Eden. This is but one inconsistency, or apparent inconsistency, in the genesis story. God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” suggesting that man is a social animal and unsuited to solitary living.
Adam names the animals, and to name something is to exercise dominion over it, and also to exercise language and symbolic thought, which, as John 1:1 attests, are divine attributes: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Adam has a share in creation, and a share in the divine.
Given his superior nature, none of the animals is deemed a suitable companion for Adam, and so God creates Eve from one of Adam’s ribs or sides. Upon rising from the first ever general anaesthesia, Adam says that Eve is as another self, indicating that man and woman are equal, or, at least, created equal: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh…”
There is a parallel here with Plato’s myth of Aristophanes, according to which human beings were literally sliced in two, ‘like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’, as a punishment from the gods, and remain incomplete until able to find their ‘other half’. Both accounts imply marriage and monogamy as the norm for man.
The Serpent
One day, the serpent, the most subtle of all the beasts in God's creation, took Eve apart and reassured her that she would not die if she ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God lied because, “He 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.” Eve took of the fruit and ate, and gave to Adam to eat. ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.’
Like man, the serpent has the ability to speak and to reason. The only other animal that speaks in the Pentateuch is Balaam’s ass, and then only because God opened its mouth.
The serpent is seductive and phallic in form, and, on one level, represents sexual temptation or adultery, offering up, like the tree itself, the possibilities of choice, freedom, guilt, and remorse.
But of course, it must have been God Himself who made the serpent and the tree, and who put them both within the reach of man, in the certain knowledge—this being God—that man would eat from the tree.
Either man before the fall had no knowledge of good and evil, in which case he was bound to surrender to the serpent; or he did have some knowledge (despite not having yet eaten from the tree), but succumbed to the temptation, that is in the nature of man, to rise to the equal of the gods.
Some of the most striking Greek myths, such as those of Prometheus, Sisyphus, and Icarus, who famously flew too close to the sun, can be read as warnings against hubris, which is the defiance of the gods from excessive pride, leading to nemesis, or downfall.
‘Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,’ and it is also from pride that the angel Lucifer [Latin, ‘Light-maker’] fell from Heaven: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! … For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God … I will be like the most High.’
Although there is in Genesis no mention of Lucifer or Satan, the serpent is usually assimilated with the devil.
The Fall
Upon hearing the voice of God, Adam and Eve hid their nakedness among the trees. Adam blamed both Eve and God: “The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” Eve in turn blamed the serpent: “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” In retribution, God cursed the serpent to go on his belly and eat dust, and put enmity between the serpent and man: “[the seed of man] shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” He cursed Eve to marital subservience and the pangs of childbirth. He cursed the very ground, condemning Adam to a life of toil and sorrow: “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.” God clothed Adam and Eve in skins and cast them out of Eden, lest Adam, who “is become as one of us, to know good and evil… put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” To guard the tree of life, He placed the angel Cherubim and a flaming, revolving sword at the gates of Eden.
Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and the sin most hated by God, because it bears all the other sins, and blinds us to truth and reason. Yet, it is arguably the serpent who spoke the truth, and God who misled, since Adam and Eve did not die from eating from the tree—or, at least, not immediately, Adam being said to have lived to the ripe old age of 930. So either God was jealous of His own powers, or He set up the tree and the serpent to test man, in the knowledge that man would succumb.
Of course, Eve took most of the rap for the fall of man. In his treatise on the apparel of women, the early Christian writer Tertullian (d. 240 CE) decried women as ‘the devil’s gateway’: ‘On account of your desert,’ he vituperated, ‘even the Son of God had to die.’ Eve serves as a warning to man, and especially to woman, that to disobey is to court disaster.
The misogyny on display is not a cultural exception. Greek myth is littered with dangerous and destructive temptresses such as Circe, Medea, and the sirens, and even fair Helen is chiefly remembered for sparking the Trojan War.
Eve’s Greek counterpart is Pandora. In Greek myth, Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the gods and shared it with mankind. In retribution, Zeus ordered Hephæstus to mold the first woman out of earth and water, and each of the other gods to endow her with a ‘seductive gift’. He named this booby trap Pandora [Greek, ‘All-gifted’] and sent her off to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus with a jar of evils in dowry. Prometheus had forewarned his slow-witted brother not to accept any gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took Pandora in and soon married her. After the wedding, Pandora remembered the jar. Although she had been told not to open it, her curiosity got the better of her. As she unsealed the lid, she released every evil onto the earth, bringing man’s golden age to its close. Aghast, she hastened to replace the lid, but all the contents of the jar had already escaped—all, that is, except for Hope.
But just as Prometheus delivered stolen fire to man, so Eve, and the serpent, delivered man into self-consciousness, setting him up, were it not for his limited lifespan, as rival to God. The fall from Eden removed us from nature into a life of need, uncertainty, fear, guilt, shame, blame, enmity, and loneliness, and the product of this estrangement, the fruit and flower of this exile, is, of course, culture.
‘God,’ wrote Victor Hugo, ‘made only water, but man made wine.’
Read more in For Better For Worse: Essays on Sex, Love, Marriage, and More and The Meaning of Myth.
