45 distant echoes: The Hebrew God in the opening words still bears a plural name, Elohim, and he does not start from nothing. Apsu and Tiamat, to be sure, are nowhere to be found, but there is something called tohu v’ bohu—chaotic, formless matter, as well as tehom, the deep or abyss. “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste [tohu v’ bohu] and darkness over the deep [tehom] and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light’ ” (Robert Alter, trans., The Five Books of Moses). For an account of some of the echoes, see Howard N. Wallace, The Eden Narrative; W. G. Lambert, “Old Testament Mythology in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context” [orig. pub. 1988], in Lambert, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Mythology: Selected Essays, pp. 215–28.
45 any level of excitement: See Damrosch, pp. 11–12. As he labored to put the pieces together, Smith made several significant mistakes—it is a wonder that he got so much of the assembling, transcribing, and deciphering right—but scholarly research over the ensuing century, along with a succession of further discoveries, generally confirmed that what he already perceived in the first seconds turned out to be correct. The clay tablets were in fragments only fully deciphered and sorted out in the 1960s.
47 large-scale infant mortality: Assyriologists have hypothesized that in a missing part of the Atrahasis the gods also agree to establish a natural end to the human life span. See W. G. Lambert, “The Theology of Death,” in Lambert, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Mythology: Selected Essays; cited in Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, pp. xliv–xlv.
50 arbitrariness and cruelty: It is not as if the Genesis story is indifferent to moral values: Noah was saved because he “was a just man and perfect in his generations,” while the rest of the earth “was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:9–10). And yet the same god who was deeply repelled by the spectacle of so much violence in the world he had brought forth—“It grieved him at his heart” (6:6)—decided indiscriminately to wipe out virtually all living things. Chapter 6:5–8 comes from the J source (most scholars posit), while starting with v. 9 through the end of the chapter is P. Evidently there are different theological conceptions visible here; in P, Elohim regrets nothing, even as in J, Yahweh regrets his creation. I owe this account to Professor Jay Harris, Harvard University.
50 These questions had been there: Particularly illuminating are two books by Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.
51 he discovered Gilgamesh: Unless otherwise noted, citations of Gilgamesh are to the edition and translation by Benjamin J. Foster. The textual history of Gilgamesh is complex; there are multiple versions, none of them complete, from different periods and places. The key tool for differentiating these versions is Andrew George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition, and Cuneiform Texts; see also George, Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. There is a modern translation in verse—not accurate as a scholarly rendering but beautiful and evocative—by David Ferry. I have also profited from the translations by Stephen Mitchell and by James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, and Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia.
51 the first city: This innovation—which has changed the course of all of our lives—was facilitated by a series of crucial technological developments, above all by the invention of the first system of writing. The cuneiform tablets recorded the complex computations, regulation of weights and measures, transactions, contracts, and laws that make possible and still characterize urban life, but they also registered an awareness of the symbolic significance of the new mode of existence. Uruk was an image of the cosmos, and its founding hero was more divine than human. Cf. Nicola Crüsemann et al., eds., Uruk: 5000 Jahre Megacity.
52 pinches off a piece of clay: In Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 74:
Aruru washed her hands,
Pinched off clay and cast it on the steppe.
[or possibly, drew a design on it; or spat upon it].
53 nature to culture: Cf. from Bernard F. Batto, Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition, p. 55:
Sumerian myth “Ewe and Wheat”:
Shakan (god of flocks) had not (yet) come out on dry land;
Humankind of those distant days
Knew not about dressing in cloth,
Ate grass with their mouth like sheep,
Drank water from the water-hole.
Similarly, another Sumermian text, Ur Excavation Texts 6.61.i.7’–10’ (ibid.):
Humankind of those distant days
Since Shakan had not (yet) come out on dry land,
Did not know how to dress in cloth;
Humankind walked about naked.
56 same-sex friendship: Is Gilgamesh a “gay” epic? It is difficult to say. While there is no explicit abjuring of a sexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, there is no representation of it either. What there is instead is precisely what Gilgamesh’s wise mother says that there will be: a deep male bond that involves the sharing of danger and an absolute fidelity. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are the love of each other’s life.
57 to launch a new story: We do not know whom the editors of Genesis chose to construct this new story. What we do know is that they chose brilliantly. If it seems plausible that the writer who wrote the first chapter reviewed a number of earlier accounts and used them to create his cosmology, it is still more plausible that the writer of the second and third chapters was a cunning weaver of different strands. For several centuries now the verses have been carefully, even obsessively scanned in order to try to sort out just how many strands there might have been. The exact number remains uncertain, but the person who undertook the great task—the one biblical scholarship calls J, for Jahwist—almost certainly assembled a number of distinct ancient Hebrew oral legends and texts.
57 one who dominates them: So at least, before the rise of modern critical biblical scholarship, virtually all commentators to Genesis assumed, carrying over to the account of the clay human in chapter 2 the attributes of the human created in chapter 1.
59 their proud tower: In Hebrew the play on words is with balal, “to confound.” Alter, in Five Books of Moses, observes that the story “is an extreme example of the stylistic predisposition of biblical narrative to exploit interechoing words and to work with a deliberately restricted vocabulary” (p. 59, n. 11:3).
59 the garden, not the city, was the great good place: For a detailed exegesis of the garden, with careful comparisons to other gardens in Near Eastern religions, see Terje Stordale, Echoes of Eden.
59 digging irrigation ditches: In Genesis 1 the world originates in a watery waste from which the earth emerges when God divides the waters and commands the waters under the heavens to be gathered together “in one place so that the dry land will appear” (1.9). In Genesis 2 the problem seems to be not an excess of water but the opposite, a condition of drought, along with the absence of anyone to work the land: “On the day the Lord God made earth and heavens, no shrub of the field being yet on the earth and no plant of the field yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not caused rain to fall on the earth, and there was no human to till the soil” (Alter, Five Books of Moses, 2:5–6).
60 a piece of the man’s own body: One of the pleasures of fiction is that it can violate the rules of nature and realize a fantasy, here the fantasy that the original birth is not from the body of a woman but from the body of a man, along with the fantasy that the love object has been extracted from one’s own body. The fashioning is represented as at once dream-like—it happens in the man’s sleep—and surgical: his side is opened, a bone removed, the skin closed up again. Then the man greets the woman as a piece of himself returned to him, fusing with him emotionally. That fusion is described in ecstatic metaphorical terms, as if it were the original physical truth of the myth–bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. Though we are not meant to imagine that the woman is actually, physically, returning to the man’s body
and once again becoming a single being, the whole force of the metaphor is the physical fantasy that underlies it.
61 jubilant welcome: “Jubilant welcome” is the felicitous phrase of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Quoted in Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11, p. 231.
61 ishah … ish: The play on “ishah” and “ish” (which are apparently not related etymologically) is a further confirmation of the “one flesh” experience, but it is at the same time an act of domination and subordination: that is, the man names the woman, just as he has named the other creatures. And, in rectification of the biological reality, he was not taken from the woman but rather the woman was taken from him. Gilgamesh also has domination and subordination, but it is established through physical contest, not through naming, and there is no “bone of my bones” feeling suffusing the relationship.
62 bringing together of the man and the woman: For the implications in the West of this formation of new families through “looser ties of descent,” see Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, trans. Gerald Chapple, pp. 58–98.
Chapter 4: The Life of Adam and Eve
64 he rescued the rest and set it aside: Circumstances, already strange enough, then took a stranger turn. A half year earlier Mohammed ‘Ali’s father, a night watchman, had been murdered, and, when they were alerted to the killer’s whereabouts, the eldest son and his brothers exacted vengeance. Catching the culprit asleep and unprotected, they hacked off his limbs with their sharpened mattocks and then fished out and ate his heart. The authorities, alerted to the killing and anxious to stop the blood feud, began to question the villagers. Mohammed ‘Ali and his brothers were briefly held and then released. Though many people presumably knew exactly what had happened, everyone remained silent.
With the police still nosing about the village and searching houses for evidence, Mohammed ‘Ali was concerned that the old books, from which he still hoped to make some profit, would be found and confiscated. He entrusted one of them to a Christian priest. The priest’s brother-in-law, a parochial schoolteacher, realized that the find might indeed be worth something. He proposed to contact people who could conceivably be interested.
For further details, see John Dart, The Laughing Savior; Jean Doresse, The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Texts; Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels; James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Story.
65 all save one: The single papyrus book that eluded the Egyptian authorities made it to the United States, where it was purchased, via a Dutch scholar, for the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s Institute in Switzerland. Slowly, scholarly work began on this codex, and slowly too the significance of the whole find began to be grasped.
66 the most startling finds: In one of the most remarkable of these texts, The Secret Revelation of John, the “first man” is a female figure known as Barbelo: “She became a womb for the All because she is prior to them all, the Mother-Father, the first Human, the holy Spirit, the triple male, the triple power, the triple named androgyne, and the eternal aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth” (5:24–26, in Karen King, The Secret Revelation of John, p. 33).
67 The Life of Adam and Eve: Anderson et al., A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve, enables the reader to compare the Greek, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic versions. See Michael E. Stone, A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve, and Literature on Adam and Eve: Collected Essays, ed. Gary A. Anderson et al. The tale of Adam and Eve’s life after the expulsion had an immensely long, rich career throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. See Brian Murdoch, Adam’s Grace, and Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible. For a transcription and English translation of the Old French version, see Esther C. Quinn and Micheline Dufau, The Penitence of Adam: A Study of the Andrius Ms.
70 Rabbi Samuel ben Nahman imagined: In Freedman, Midrash Rabbah, 8:8.
71 Rabbi Hanina suggested: Ibid., 8:4.
71 a grand narrative focused on the Prince of Darkness: See Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth; Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan; and Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity.
73 the visionary Sedrach: The text, available in English translation at Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1006.htm), is nominally Christian, but it seems to reflect questions that were asked at the time by Jews as well. See Apocalypsis Sedrach, ed. Otto Wahl, in Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1977).
74 Marcion drew the sharpest possible line: Cf. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God.
74 St. Paul had established: Many scholars have reflected on why Paul made the crucial connection between Jesus and the story of Adam and Eve. The link obviously is bound up with Paul’s origins in a Jewish world—with Paul, in Daniel Boyarin’s phrase, as a “radical Jew.” (Cf. Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994]). But in its account of the origin of evil, traditional Jewish thought, as we have seen, did not typically dwell on the Adam and Eve story. Instead, it tended to turn to the story of the so-called “Watchers” in Genesis 6, that is, the “sons of God” who came down and took wives among the “daughters of men.” From this union sprung up the giants to whom evil was attributed. The problem with this account is that the Flood supposedly killed off all of these mixed-blood giants, leaving the origin problem intact for the postdiluvian world. Beginning in the late second century BCE, with the Book of Jubilees, Jewish thought turned more often to Adam’s transgression as an explanation. See John R. Levison, Portraits of Adam and Early Judaism. On the complex theological issues, see W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, esp. pp. 31–57.
74 impossible to understand Christ: And then he made the link still more explicit: “For as in Adam all dies, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21–22). Again, in the Epistle to the Romans, Paul bound together the free gift brought by Jesus to something that happened at the beginning of time:
Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. (Rom. 5:18–19)
Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 44) argues that Paul introduced the doctrine of Christ as the Second Adam. Others, including C. F. Burney (The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922]), believe that it was already at least implicit in the synoptic gospels. In any case, Paul set the ball in motion: after him most of the early Christian Fathers felt compelled to grapple with the opening chapters in Genesis.
74 In the imagination of Christian theologians: Victorinus, “On the Creation of the World,” in Coxe, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries, p. 341. In the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, attributed to St. Basil the Great, as in many other solemn ritual utterances throughout the Christian world, the overarching design was spelled out and ceaselessly reiterated:
For, since through man sin came into the world and through sin death, it pleased Your only begotten Son … born under the law, to condemn sin in His flesh, so that those who died in Adam may be brought to life in Him, Your Christ.
74 Typology insisted: Reminding his congregants that Adam received the sentence “Cursed is the ground in thy labors; thorns and thistle shall it bring to thee,” St. Cyril, a bishop of Jerusalem in the fourth century, concluded that it is “for this cause Jesus assumes the thorns, that He may cancel the sentence; for this cause also was He buried in the earth, that the earth which had been cursed might receive the blessing instead of a curse” (Edwin Hamilton Gifford, D.D., ed., “The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, vol. 7, p. 87). The thorns that sprang up from the ground after Adam’s fall were genuinely sharp, but their ful
l significance—their destiny, as it were—was only disclosed and at the same time annulled in the Crown of Thorns. On typology, see especially Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 11–56, and Auerbach, “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature,” in Yale French Studies 9 (1952), pp. 3–10.
75 Against the Galileans: In Works of the Emperor Julian, ed. Wilmer C. Wright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913–23), 1: 325–29.
76 a single word: allegory: See Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses, esp. 84–89. Though he may not have been able to read Hebrew—in his many works, he always quoted from the Septuagint—Philo professed the most extravagant admiration for Moses as the author of the Torah. Moses did not simply proclaim laws to be obeyed, Philo wrote, nor did he attempt like the pagan priests to befog the masses with trumped-up fictions and invented myths. Instead, he began the scriptures with an account of the creation of the world, implying that “the cosmos is in harmony with the law and the law with the cosmos” (p. 47).
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve Page 35