The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  THE HUMAN FORMED FROM CLAY became a living creature, it was written in the Bible, when a breath of life was blown into his nostrils. There is a powerful truth encoded in that mythic scene. At some moment in an immensely distant past it was a breath that brought Adam to life, the breath of a storyteller.

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  By the Waters of Babylon

  On the big island in Hawaii, molten lava erupts through cracks in the volcano. You can walk across the black fields of twisted, cooled lava to the cliff’s edge and watch a head of burning magma force its way out, like a stupendous birth, and fly hissing into the sea. You can feel that you are present at the origin of the world, but of course the world already exists, and you know it. The whole point about stories of creation is that no one can actually claim to have been an eyewitness or to remember it or even to be part of a chain of remembrance leading back to someone who had been there.

  We cannot know when someone, venturing to imagine how the universe and humankind came to exist, first told this story about what transpired in the beginning to set our species on its course. We cannot identify the person who first thought of the garden or who dreamed of nakedness without shame or who came up with the notion of the fatal fruit. There must, we know, have been a moment of inspiration, but we have no way back to it. It is lost to us forever.

  There was a moment too when someone first chose to write the story down. But we have no access to this moment either, no way of knowing if the writer was a man or a woman, no clear indication of the place or the circumstances or the language, no precise or even approximate marker of the time. Some scholars think that a version could have been inscribed as early as the time of King Solomon (990 BCE to 931 BCE) and that other versions might have circulated in written form during the reigns of his successors. Since no actual manuscript traces of the story survive from these long centuries in the life of the Hebrews—all have been lost to fire, flood, and the teeth of time—the dating is speculative, sometimes wildly so. The closest we can come to an historical starting point is the moment when the story finally found its way into the book of Genesis. The precise date and circumstances are uncertain, but the fog of mystery slowly begins to lift.

  Most scholars currently attribute the form in which we know the story to the sixth century BCE and think that the Pentateuch—the Greek term for the Five Books of Moses, assembled together—was probably compiled in the fifth century, roughly corresponding to the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Even here the ground is uncertain. Every inch of the textual history has been fought over at least since the eighteenth century, and anything that I or those more learned than I am say about it will be contested, often vehemently, by someone else. Still, whatever its most distant origins, the story of Adam and Eve eventually became part of a sacred document, the Torah, whose author was said to have been Moses. At least then there was an author, someone of the utmost prestige to secure the account’s truthfulness. Reasonably enough, people asked how Moses could possibly have known what transpired in the Garden of Eden, so long before his time? He could, defenders of the story’s strict accuracy answered, have learned the details as they had been handed down through the generations reaching all the way to Noah and then back still further before the Flood to Adam’s third son, Seth. The Bible’s “begats” provided a list of these generations, extending to the beginning of time. The exceptionally long lives attributed to the early patriarchs—Methuselah was said to have reached the ripe old age of 969 years—conveniently reduced the number of links in the chain.

  Since it was well known that stories had a way of changing in the course of repeated retelling, it was often added that Moses wrote at God’s own dictation or at least was guided in his writing by God’s spirit. That spirit could be counted on to correct any errors that might otherwise have crept in and impugned the veracity of the creation story. A work written in the second century BCE, the Book of Jubilees, went still further in an attempt to shore up the narrative’s authenticity. On Mount Sinai, it declared, God instructed an angel to give Moses a faithful account of the first beginnings. The angel, along with his cohort, had been an eyewitness to the creation of the world and to the scenes in the garden. Moses simply had to reiterate the impeccably accurate report that the angel dutifully provided.

  But elaborations like the Book of Jubilees—which is now regarded as canonical only by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church—were as much signs of doubt as they were reassurances. They suggest that at least some of those who read the account of the garden and the first humans and the talking snake wondered about its reliability. They wanted to know how far they could trust it, or perhaps they sensed, just outside the charmed circle of belief, its possible origin in a more familiar scene of storytelling, the realm of fantasy.

  The Torah could have begun, after all, at what would have seemed a far more obvious and secure historical juncture: the origin not of the first humans but of the first Jews. “And the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing” (Gen. 12:1–2). Instead, it began with events that clearly precede any possible historical record: the creation of the cosmos and of humankind. To understand why it seemed critically important to the Jews to launch their sacred book with an account of the beginning of time, before they themselves existed, it is important to understand the disaster that had befallen them.

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  IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, the fall of kingdoms was often followed by wholesale massacre of the vanquished, but Nebuchadnezzar II, the ruler of the great Babylonian Empire, thought that deportations made more sense. After the small kingdom of Judah, ruled by a venerable dynasty that called itself “the house of David,” surrendered to his armies in 597 BCE, he set up a puppet government in Jerusalem and deported a significant number of Hebrews, including the toppled king and his court, to Babylon. Across a vast gulf of time, Psalm 137 manages to convey their misery, homesickness, and rage: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down,/yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

  The Hebrew exiles, living testimony to Nebuchadnezzar’s latest triumph, swelled the labor pool that his enormous ambitions required. After a long period of decline, Babylon was once again in the ascendant. There were irrigation ditches to dig, fields to tend, vines to dress, innumerable bricks to bake, fortifications, ziggurats, and palaces to build. The Hebrews were not the only exiles who sweated in the work gangs and dreamed of their lost home. They labored alongside Assyrians, Medes, Scythians, and Egyptians, and in the company of native-born Babylonians who had fallen hopelessly into debt. Defeat and enslavement produced in Babylon a kind of servile cosmopolitanism.

  The bustling, culturally diverse city on the Euphrates was wealthy, sophisticated, and famously beautiful. Two of its legendary building projects—the immense city walls and the hanging gardens—were counted among the Seven Wonders of the World. In its glazed-brick grandeur, the famous Ishtar Gate, reconstructed today in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, bears witness to the city’s majesty. If the Hebrew exiles could hardly be expected to feel at home in Babylon, they were not complete aliens, for they thought of themselves as having come in the distant past from this part of Mesopotamia. Abraham, the founding figure of the Jewish faith, began his life in nearby Ur, and a return to these roots was evidently not unbearable to everyone. When the opportunity finally came to go back to Judah, a significant number of Hebrews opted to remain where they were. From the period of exile flowered a Jewish community in Mesopotamia that lasted well into the Iraq of the twentieth century.

  For the pious among the Hebrew exiles by the banks of the Euphrates, the great challenge was not to give up on Yahweh. Yahweh had long been their chief god and protector. Occasionally they had been drawn to the worship of other gods as well; that was the point of Yahweh’s repeated injunction “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” But for the most part, even in diffic
ult times, they had been able to keep Yahweh foremost in their hearts and to worship him through the ritual observances and animal sacrifices they conducted in the great Temple in Jerusalem.

  Those rituals continued intact for a decade after Judah’s surrender to Nebuchadnezzar. But then another disaster: Zedekiah, the Hebrew quisling whom the conqueror had put in place, was foolhardy enough to lead an uprising against his masters. The Babylonian army besieged Jerusalem, and the Egyptian allies, on whose aid the Hebrews had been counting, failed to materialize. The siege dragged on, with famine, disease, and desertion taking their terrible toll. Finally the wall was breached, and the Babylonian troops swarmed in. At the king’s command, vengeance was then meted out on the city which had, up to this point, been spared. The great Temple, the palace, and other civic buildings were burned to the ground. The chief priest, his principal assistant, and many other leading figures were put to death. Zedekiah’s sons were executed before his eyes; he was then blinded and carried off in chains. And once again a large number of people were deported, joining those who had already been in exile in Babylon for a decade. A few years later, in the wake of the assassination of the Babylonian governor, still more of the population from the unruly province was deported. The lives of the Hebrews had been shattered.

  Now that the Temple had been destroyed, its desolation seemed to bear mute witness to the overwhelming fact that Yahweh had been unwilling or perhaps unable to protect his chosen people. His abject failure in 597 and again in 587 must have confirmed every subversive thought that less pious Hebrews had ever had about their tribal deity: Yahweh was a priestly fraud, a figment of the collective imagination, or perhaps simply a weakling, the god of losers. The mocking voices have been suppressed—the Bible is written, for the most part, from the perspective of the pious—but they left behind traces of themselves. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,” begins Psalm 14. Fool perhaps, but the psalmist is certain that there are enough such fools in his midst to warrant quoting and attacking them.

  How could it have been otherwise? The national disaster tapped the wellsprings not only of sadness but also of doubt and irony. Yahweh did not exist; or Yahweh did not care; or Yahweh had been bested decisively by the Babylonian god Marduk. In the wake of the fall of Jerusalem and the mass deportations, the skeptics must have found it maddening to listen to the prayers of the pious, imploring aid from a god who was missing in action. Conversely, for the pious, the mockery of the skeptics must have been unendurable. “All they that see me laugh me to scorn,” says the speaker of the 22nd psalm; “they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,/He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him” (22:7–8). And if there is no deliverance in sight, if there is only continuing humiliation and mockery and the cruel dashing of hopes, what then? For the faithful, in exile in Babylon, the central psychic experience was anguish. Where was Yahweh? Centuries later this terrible sense of abandonment surged up in another forlorn Jew who at the moment of his execution quoted the opening words of this very psalm: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

  As an antidote to despair, the Hebrews could tell themselves that the disaster was all Yahweh’s doing, punishment for his people’s refusal to obey his divine ordinances, but the doubters in their midst could easily shake their heads and dismiss the fantasy as pathetic. To make matters worse, faithful and skeptics alike were surrounded by the jubilation of the conquerors and by their hymns in praise of their triumphant god. The exiles would have looked up every day at the glorious Babylonian temple complex called the Esagila—“the house of the raised head”—and at the enormous seven-story ziggurat Etemenanki, “the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth.” Years later the Hebrews’ memory of that astonishing sight, suitably reinterpreted to signify overweening pride and arrogance, became the Tower of Babel.

  Nebuchadnezzar had rebuilt both temple and ziggurat in honor of the Storm God, Marduk. Long the city’s patron deity, the god had grown so powerful that his worshipers feared to pronounce his holy name and simply called him Bel, “the lord.” Marduk was exalted as the master of the universe. Having managed to assume for himself the attributes of the surrounding deities, having drawn into his powerful gravitational field the whole rich body of Mesopotamian mythology, he was now in a position to absorb the powers of all rival gods, including Yahweh. From his holy of holies within the Esagila and from the golden shrine at the dizzying summit of Etemenanki, Marduk’s image looked down at peoples whose destiny he seemed to control.

  Every year the Babylonians observed a grand New Year’s festival in Marduk’s honor. Statues of other gods, paying homage to the city’s divine protector, were taken down from their niches and carried in a grand public procession to the main sanctuary. On the festival’s fourth day, led by the king himself, there was a solemn recitation of a sacred text that had been first inscribed on clay tablets in the remote past. The venerable text, bearing the prestige of its immense antiquity, was the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian origin story. In the beginning, it related, there was sex: a stream of fresh water—the god Apsu—rushed into the sea, the goddess Tiamat. From this primordial intercourse, all the other gods in the Babylonian pantheon were formed, like silt deposited at the mouth of a river.

  But the story did not celebrate reproduction as an unambiguous blessing. On the contrary, it focused on the murderous rage that may surge up in a parent, when its quiet is disturbed. The newly created gods proved to be intolerably noisy, and Apsu, unable to rest, eventually decided that he would destroy his offspring. Though her repose had also been disturbed, Tiamat counseled forbearance: “What? Shall we put an end to what we formed?” Apsu persisted. He wanted his rest, and if that meant killing the children, then so be it. The intended victims got wind of the plan to destroy them. Most of them wandered about in despair or sat silent, uncertain what to do. But the cleverest of them, Ea (or Enki, as he is called in the Sumerian versions), managed to avert destruction. He contrived to lull his father Apsu to sleep and then killed him.

  In the beginning then, there was murder as well as sex. In the Enuma Elish, this original murder was not tinged with horror or condemned; it was celebrated. Life, with its energy and noise, had triumphed over sleep and silence. But, while celebrating this triumph, the Babylonians did not simply repudiate the value of repose. Ea built his palace on the body of the father he had slain, and then, after uttering a cry of triumph, he withdrew: “In his chamber, in profound quiet, he rested./He called it ‘Apsu.’ ” Apsu, the vanquished creator, lived on in the name that the victorious murderer, his own son, gave to the shrine of his deepest rest.

  Perfect tranquility, however, did not reign. Now it was the first mother, Tiamat, who rose up in menace. The other gods were terrified—once again their parent was set on destroying them—but Ea’s son Marduk came forward and offered to save them, if the gods swore eternal fealty to him. The gods eagerly agreed. As Ea had killed the primordial father Apsu, so Marduk dealt with the primordial mother Tiamat:

  He split her in two, like a fish for drying,

  Half of her he set up and made as a cover (like) heaven.

  He stretched out the hide and assigned watchmen,

  And ordered them not to let the waters escape.

  Once again the murder was not condemned but celebrated, and once again the victim’s corpse was put to good use: the universe was made from the divided female body, an upper sphere of water that formed the sky and a lower sphere of water out of which the earth emerged.

  In the wake of his great victory, Marduk’s heart prompted him “to make artful things” on behalf of those whom he had saved. The junior gods were sick of doing chores for themselves; they too wanted to rest. “I shall compact blood, I shall cause bones to be,/… I shall create humankind,” Marduk declared. Humans—lullu, as the Enuma Elish calls them, “the black-headed people”—were brought forth for lives of unceasing labor. By building shrines, digging irriga
tion canals, planting and harvesting crops, preparing food offerings, and singing praises, they enabled the gods to relax and enjoy their existence, and thereby fulfilled the design of their savior, the supreme god Marduk.

  In the sixth century BCE, when generations of captive Hebrews were forced to encounter it year after year, the Enuma Elish was already shrouded in great antiquity. Its age conferred upon it a special prestige that it shared with several other ancient Mesopotamian stories of human beginnings. One, called the Atrahasis, told the story of a primordial flood that almost destroyed all of humanity; another, Gilgamesh, recounted the love of a semidivine hero for a human fashioned from clay. These works feature gods—a whole pantheon of them—but Yahweh is nowhere among them, let alone their lord and master. So too they recount the creation of the first humans, but these are not called Adam and Eve and their maker is not the supreme Creator-God of the Hebrews. It would have made perfect sense for the Hebrew captives to embrace the beliefs of the Babylonian victors and to abandon a provincial, local, and, above all, failed god. But they—or at least a pious remnant among them—clung fiercely to his memory.

  “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” The misery that Psalm 137 conjures up is not linked to any obvious oppression: there is no image of laboring in the broiling sun under the lash of harsh taskmasters. Instead, we are given a strange scene in which all that the victor asks of the vanquished is a song: “For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” To the psalmist, the commandment to sing in the shadow of the ziggurat—to perform one’s culture for the conquerors’ amusement—was unendurable. It seemed like a violation of memory, a primal loss of selfhood: