And the Lord came down to the see the city and the tower that the human creatures had built. And the Lord said, “As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, now nothing they plot to do will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other’s language.” And the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it is called Babel, for there the Lord made the language of all the earth babble. (Gen. 11:5–9, Alter trans.)
Pious Hebrews who had always feared and hated cosmopolitan Babylon must have loved this story. They must have laughed at the punning reference to the babel of languages and at the inability of the ambitious builders to finish their proud tower. And they must have relished the transformation of the city as fulfillment of human destiny into the city as emblem of human arrogance and futility.
For the author of Genesis 2 and 3 the garden, not the city, was the great good place, the place that Yahweh designed for the human he created, endowing it with “every tree lovely to look at and good for food.” There is no need to venture forth, as Enkidu and Gilgamesh do, to cut down trees in order to build grand gates. In the Genesis story, there is no trace of any structure in the garden in which the human lives, no sign of a hut, let alone an altar, shrine, or palace. The trees are valued for fruit and beauty, not for architecture. The human’s role is not to build anything in the garden but only “to till it and to watch it.”
These tasks imply labor as an essential part of human existence from the very beginning. The term “paradise” was not used in the Hebrew Bible but was given by the Greek translators who may have dreamed of a realm of perfect leisure not imagined by the Hebrews. The dream in Genesis is not leisure but rather purposive work—tilling and watching—that is experienced as pleasure. Labor yes, but not the hard labor that was an essential part of the Sumerian origin myth. Indeed the fact that Yahweh’s design includes a river that “went out of Eden to water the garden” (2:10) seems to lift the heavy burden of digging irrigation ditches that figured so prominently for the Babylonians. God has created the conditions that enable man through his efforts to feed himself and his offspring. We learn later that this provision of vegetarian sustenance was easy, for there were no weeds, and the labor evidently did not cause the man to sweat.
In Gilgamesh, the gods create from clay a wild man who becomes the hero’s friend or life partner. In Genesis, God, seeing that it is not good for the earth man to be alone, forms the woman out of a piece of the man’s own body. This second, separate creation is an astonishingly creative response to the Mesopotamian story. It captures the same deep longing for companionship, the acute need for “help,” the ecstatic pleasure in the existence of another person with whom one’s own life is bound up, but at the same time it completely transforms them.
What is the nature of the transformation? What difference does it make, in representing the central human bond, to shift, as Genesis does, from a man and his male friend to a man and a woman? Both accounts feature the importance of human company: the individual, no matter how powerful and independent, cannot function alone. Both convey the pleasure and excitement, as well as the utility, of human company. Both capture the sense that, in its heroic achievements and its tragic losses, human destiny derives from shared decisions and collective actions. To this extent there is little difference.
The Genesis storyteller does not, as one might have expected, depict the relationship between the first man and the first woman as fundamentally hierarchical. Nothing suggests that the woman God fashions is unequal to the man in either strength or rank. And though in chapter 1 of Genesis humans are commanded to be fruitful and multiply, in chapter 2, when the woman is formed from the man’s rib, that commandment to reproduce is not reiterated. Neither hierarchy nor reproduction seem to have seized the storyteller’s imagination.
What Genesis emphasizes instead is the experience of “cleaving” together. Its account is much briefer. It does not, as Gilgamesh does, represent the couple in conversation with each other, or depict their disagreements, or show how they reached a joint decision or endured loss. But within his tiny scope the Genesis storyteller finds the time to repeat and repeat the strange, ecstatic feeling that the man and the woman are what he calls “one flesh.”
When God brings the woman to the man, the man utters a jubilant welcome, an ecstatic poem that expresses his sense that the creature he sees before him is at the same time a piece of his own body:
This one at last, bone of my bones,
and flesh of my flesh. (Gen. 2:23, Alter trans.)
The woman is part of the man’s actual substance and at the same time different, so that the man, awaking from his deep sleep, sings an ecstatic song about what he sees before him—“This one”—that is at the same time an ecstatic song about himself.
There is nothing like this in Gilgamesh. However intimate the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu—and the poem depicts the emotional current between them as very deep indeed—they do not possess this peculiar feeling, at once metaphor and literal description, of shared being. It is a feeling that the Hebrew writer captured in a play on words, as if the letters themselves could convey the eerie sense that the man and woman are interlaced:
This one shall be called Woman (ishah),
for from man (ish) was this one taken. (Gen. 2:23, Alter trans.)
Gilgamesh and Enkidu kiss, embrace, and hold hands; sworn brothers in arms, they share dangerous adventures; they are sufficiently close that the death of one of them devastates the other. Their relationship is much more developed, intense, nuanced, than the relationship between Adam and Eve. But they are not “one flesh.”
Perhaps the eerie sense that the man and the woman are fused—ish and ishah—is linked to procreation. After all, offspring are the living embodiments of the intertwining of flesh and bone. But as anyone who has been deeply in love can attest, the feeling of union is independent of offspring and very often precedes the production of offspring. Certainly it precedes it here: part of the brilliance of Genesis is precisely to separate the commandment to reproduce—and the fact of reproduction—from this intense feeling of being one flesh.
The Genesis writer underscores this key difference from Gilgamesh: “Therefore does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they become one flesh” (2:24, Alter trans.). Becoming one flesh is linked, in this verse, to a momentous idea not found in Gilgamesh: the idea of leaving one’s parents (absurd in the immediate context of Genesis, where there are no parents to leave) and forming a new unit. The Bible declares that the man leaves his mother and father—where in Gilgamesh it is precisely Gilgamesh’s mother who facilitates and remains central to the relationship between Gilgamesh and his friend. Deep friendship does not necessarily entail the creation of a new family unit, but the bringing together of the man and the woman as one flesh does.
The description in Genesis ends with the vision of the couple in the garden—not in fact a single hermaphrodite, as the metaphoric “one flesh” repeatedly implies, but two people: “And the two of them were naked, the human and his woman, and they were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25, Alter trans.). A trace of the mythical oneness remains, not in their nakedness but in the fact that they were not ashamed of this nakedness. This simple vision is the sum total of their life in the garden together, but it is enough.
For the Genesis storyteller, there is no initiation, no passage to civility, in order to make the primordial relationship possible. Life was somehow unfinished and unsatisfying before the creation of the woman, but now it is complete. There are implied glimpses forward—to clothing, to shame, to the way things are now—but they are marks of suffering or vulnerability after the violation of the divine prohibition. Genesis rewrites initiation as transgression.
“You have become like a god,” the temple prostitute tells Enkidu after his sexual initiation. The Genesis storyteller remembered these words an
d used them to depict not the rise but the ruin of the man and the woman. The serpent who robs Gilgamesh of the branch that would have enabled him to escape death is transformed into the serpent who robs the man and the woman of their hope of eternal life. And the promise with which the serpent persuades the woman to eat the forbidden fruit is the very vision that Shamhat offered to Enkidu: “You will become as gods.” Enkidu did not actually become a god. Clothed and instructed in proper ways to eat, he became fully human, capable of civility, deep friendship, and heroism. There is a price—he was now conscious of his mortality—but mortality itself was always his lot. Like the gazelles with which he used to run, he simply did not know it.
The man and the woman in Genesis could also be said to become fully human only after they eat the fruit. But, while for Enkidu the transformation is ultimately a blessing, for Adam and Eve it is a disaster: their clothing is a response to shame and privation, and their food must be extracted from a recalcitrant, thorny earth. Above all, their lives will be cut short by a death they might otherwise have avoided. They too have achieved greater understanding—the knowledge of good and evil—but it is an understanding purchased at an almost insupportable price.
If the Hebrew storyteller intended to unsettle deeply held Mesopotamian beliefs, he succeeded brilliantly. He turned the ancient origin story upside down. What was a triumph in Gilgamesh is a tragedy in Genesis.
4
The Life of Adam and Eve
In late 1945 an Egyptian peasant, Mohammed ‘Ali al-Samman, went off with one of his six younger brothers to the mountains near his village north of Luxor in search of sabakh, a fertilizer formed from decaying matter in old cemeteries and abandoned settlements. Digging with his mattock, he accidentally unearthed a sealed red earthenware jar, about three feet high. At first he was afraid to open it, for fear that it was under a spell and would release an evil spirit, but, curiosity and avarice winning out, he broke the seal and reached inside. To his disappointment, he discovered not a cache of gold coins but only thirteen books, bound in leather, along with a few other loose scraps of paper. He took what he had found back to his village, where he tried largely unsuccessfully to trade the books for cigarettes or a few piasters. He off-loaded a few of them and threw the others on a pile of straw used in his home to heat the large clay bread oven. His mother tore some sheets off to keep the fire going, but the discoverer must have had some inkling that his find might be worth more than fuel, since he rescued the rest and set it aside.
News of Mohammed ‘Ali’s discovery began to trickle out beyond the confines of the village. By various serpentine routes, and with some further pages lost along the way, the trove eventually reached Cairo, where the antiquities dealers quickly grasped its potential value. Before the books found buyers, however, the Egyptian government got wind of their existence and, managing to seize all save one, placed them in Cairo’s Coptic Museum. There they sat on a shelf for a decade before a project to transcribe and translate them was launched.
The books that came out of the jar date from around 350–400 CE and are copies of earlier texts. The whole cache has come to be known as the Nag Hammadi Library, after the town nearest the site where they were found. They were made out of sheets of papyrus, not glued together into scrolls (an ancient format familiar from the Torah scrolls still used today in synagogues) but stitched together as codices, the more convenient design we continue to use in our printed books. Christians were among the first to embrace codices for their sacred texts, and here, almost miraculously, was a whole collection of them.
Their survival depended on climate and sheer chance, but also on deliberate concealment. Written in Coptic, the language that flourished in Egypt before the Arab conquest, the books had been hidden away. Not surprisingly, those who carefully sealed them in the jar and buried them in so remote a place did not identify themselves, but they were probably monks from a nearby monastery who had been alarmed by the increasingly stringent policing of books deemed heretical by Christian authorities. The church in this period regarded it as important to settle the boundaries of the canon and to distinguish sharply between acceptable beliefs and those, such as the ones at Nag Hammadi, that were deemed dangerous. Whoever hid the books evidently did not want to destroy precious possessions, many of which reached back for centuries. Perhaps they hoped that the persecution would come to an end and that they could then return to the texts over which their community had long pored. But as it happened, the hunt for heterodoxy only intensified, and the manuscripts they had buried remained untouched and then forgotten for fifteen hundred years.
When the hidden library finally returned to the light, interest worldwide was aroused by the unique copy of the so-called Gospel of Thomas, with its claim—still hotly debated—to disclose unknown sayings of Jesus. But in many ways the most startling finds were texts about Adam and Eve. One of these, the Apocalypse of Adam, professes to be in the voice of the first human speaking to his beloved son Seth. “When God had created me out of the earth, along with Eve, your mother,” the father recalls, “I went about with her in a glory.” The glory in question, Adam makes clear, was not solely his possession. On the contrary, he owed it to his wife: “She taught me a word of knowledge of the eternal God.” And the knowledge that they then shared made them both immensely powerful: “We resembled the great eternal angels, for we were higher than the god who had created us and the powers with him, whom we did not know.”
“We were higher than the god who had created us”: in this version of the Genesis story the creatures become stronger than God, God grows increasingly jealous and fearful, and man depends upon the courage and wisdom of woman. Eve is the real hero, for it was she who boldly grasped for herself and for all humanity the knowledge that the envious Creator had been withholding.
Another of the Nag Hammadi treatises, The Testimony of Truth, is written not from the perspective of God or Adam and Eve but from that of the serpent. God’s limitations, according to The Testimony of Truth, are dismayingly clear. What kind of deity would refuse to permit humans to eat from the tree of knowledge? A truly loving Creator would surely have fostered knowledge, not forbidden it to his creatures. The God of Genesis is not our friend. It is the serpent who, in this version of the story, was the humans’ great benefactor.
Evidently, to some members of this community, the story of Adam and Eve meant something radically different from anything we have come to expect. They were gripped by the suspicion that Yahweh was envious and mean-spirited. They attributed to the first humans words that we do not read in the sparse verses of the Bible. They celebrated the serpent who urged the humans to eat and the woman who in the pursuit of knowledge dared to violate Yahweh’s prohibition. To be sure, their interpretation lost out: that is why they had to bury their books in a sealed jar that was forgotten. Perhaps that is why they themselves were forgotten.
But monks in the desert were not the only ones at the time who were asking questions about the origin story and straining to hear words that the Bible did not provide. Here are the opening words of The Life of Adam and Eve, a text that began to circulate in Greek in the first century CE:
When Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise they made for themselves a tent and spent seven days mourning and lamenting in great sadness. But after seven days they began to be hungry and sought food to eat and did not find any… . Walking about, they searched for many days but did not find anything like they had in paradise. They only found what animals eat. Adam said to Eve: “The Lord gave these things to animals and beasts to eat. Ours, however, was the angelic food.”
Probably originating in a Jewish milieu and composed in a Semitic language, this account of the first humans quickly migrated to early Christian communities and appeared in an array of other languages, from Latin to Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic. It continued to be read for centuries.
Together with a massive body of commentary, both rabbinic and patristic, the international popularity of The Life of Ada
m and Eve indicates that by late antiquity the verses of the book of Genesis had come to seem at once tantalizing and parsimonious, a blend of ethical conundrums and baffling silences. Readers demanded to know more. How did the first humans react to their expulsion from Paradise? Did they beat at the gate and beg for permission to return? Did they even understand what had happened to them? Where did they go, and how did they manage to survive? What did they say to each other in the months and then years that followed? Did their love endure? What did they tell their children about what they had done? Did the Creator watch the spectacle of their suffering with indifference or pleasure or possibly a twinge of regret? And how did they experience mortality—first their son Abel’s murder and then their own dying?
The questions were not without risk. These imagined scenes, unrecorded in the Bible, had a bearing on contested topics: the sources of sin; the nature of marriage; the moral difference, if any, between women and men; the justice of God’s anger; the hidden identity of Satan, humankind’s mortal enemy; the possibility of redemption. Both Jews and Christians were struggling to sort out which would be the central, approved sacred texts of the faith—the canon—and which texts would lie outside the boundaries, in the zone designated “apocrypha,” from the Greek word for “hidden.” The process was long and fraught, full of bitter arguments, some of which have not been entirely resolved to this day.
Notwithstanding its wide circulation, The Life of Adam and Eve was never, in any of its many versions, accepted into the canon, nor did it make it into the apocryphal books that often appeared as an appendix in manuscript Bibles and later in printed editions. Instead, it lingered always on the outside, impossible fully to embrace and impossible to suppress. Venturing into the territory of fiction, the anonymous author or authors responded to the almost irresistible impulse to imagine the newly expelled Adam and Eve as people facing a terrible predicament. Hence the opening scene at which we have already glanced. In Paradise the humans’ diet had been identical to that of the angels. When the fallen pair first felt desperate hunger, they realized, to their dismay, that their appetite could only be assuaged with the same food that animals eat. For the first time, then, the humans were forced to grasp that they were themselves animals.
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve Page 7