In the Beginning

by Isaac Asimov

  Isaiah refers to all the terms used for Chaos when he promises the victory of God over the destructive forces: “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1).

  In later times, when Judea was a province of the Persian Empire, the Jews picked up the notions of the eternal conflict between the principles of Good and Evil and abandoned the notions of a once-and-for-all victory of Good at the start.

  Satan came into existence in Jewish thought as an eternal anti-God, striving constantly to undo the work of Creation and restore Chaos; eternal vigilance was required to prevent that. The thought then arose that the serpent was really the embodiment of Satan, a thought presented with unparalleled magnificence in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

  There is, however, nothing in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden to indicate that. The notion of Satan seems to have been entirely an afterthought.

  5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, 113 knowing good and evil.

  113. There is a distant echo of the epic of Gilgamesh here. One character in the epic is Enkidu, a wild barbarian, and Gilgamesh must tame him. Gilgamesh uses a harlot for the purpose; she tempts him to sex with her beautiful body and her honeyed words, “Thou art beautiful, Enkidu; thou art like a god.” She succeeds, and so does the tempting serpent, who promises the woman she shall be like a god.

  6 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, 114 and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

  114. The nature of the fruit is not mentioned. Traditionally, in the West, it was considered to have been an apple, but there is no warrant for that. In fact, we can be just about certain it wasn’t an apple. Apples were not common and may not even have grown in ancient Palestine. If we want to take the tree of knowledge seriously, we would have to consider it a unique and possibly divine tree that could not have existed anywhere but in the Garden, and thus its fruit would not be within human ken except for that one sample eaten in disobedience.

  From the prosaic standpoint of modern thought, the story is considered a legend and nothing more, and so the nature of the fruit is unimportant.

  7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they ware naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.115

  115. The loss of innocence brought shame, and the man and woman sought to cover up their genitalia by making makeshift loincloths (“aprons”). It is because of this verse that the convention arose of carving leaves (usually referred to as fig leaves) over the male genitalia on statues. The pagan Greeks didn’t do it, of course.

  8 And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day; and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

  9 And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

  10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

  11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? 116

  116. This portion of the story is primitive indeed. God walks in the Garden, taking his constitutional when it is breezy, as a man might. The man and his wife hid, and God must call for them. God must ask if there had been disobedience, as if he were not all-knowing.

  Later commentators, of course, explain these things in a variety of ways. The man and his wife hide because they are unaware of the powers of God, God asks the question only because he wishes a free confession, and so on.

  And yet, in early myths, divine beings were not always all-knowing and were not even always very bright. Sometimes a clever man could get the better of a god. Perhaps, in the days before commentators, when the story was first told, listeners might have felt some suspense and wondered if the man would be able to worm his way out of the fix.

  12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

  13 And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

  14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed 117 above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, 118 and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: 119

  117. God doesn’t ask the serpent for an explanation, but condemns it unheard. Perhaps it is because this is the J-document’s version of the battle between God and Chaos.

  In the P-document, the battle was an utter victory for God, complete and instantaneous, when light was created and darkness retreated at God’s word.

  In the J-document, God wins again by a mere word in the form of the curse, but not till after Chaos had had its victory in upsetting the original plan of the man and his wife in the Garden. Later commentators had to avoid this appearance of God suffering even a partial defeat, how ever small, by making it appear that the Temptation and the Fall were part of God’s original plan, but there is no clear sign of that anywhere in the Old Testament.

  118. At no time does the Bible actually say the serpent walked on legs. The curse might well mean that the snake, which was created without legs, must now continue forever to lack them and to forfeit all chance what ever of someday gaining them as a reward for good behavior.

  That, however, is not the way the passage is usually interpreted by readers of the Bible. It is almost universally supposed that the serpent did walk on legs until the curse compelled it to crawl upon its abdomen.

  In a way, there is validity to this. It seems clear from the scientific view that snakes evolved from reptilian ancestors with the usual four legs and achieved their leg-lessness at least seventy-five million years ago. Nor was this a curse, though it may seem so to human beings. The long, thin bodies of snakes, their ability to hide in crannies and to creep along unseen, have made them by far the most successful group of present-day reptiles in the world.

  One possible source for the tale of the curse rests again with the Babylonian dragon of Chaos. Babylon, at the lime the Jews were exiled then, was at its peak of glory, the largest city in the world. Its Walls were enormous and mighty, and the Ishtar gate, the chief entrance into the city, was decorated with large numbers of lions, bulls, and dragons (supposed to lend their symbolic strength to the city).

  The dragons (called the sirrush) may well have been the dragon of Chaos. Some of those decorations still exist today on the ruins of the walls. The back, neck, and tail of the sirrush are clearly reptilian, though it is a quadruped like the lions and bulls. Cover up the legs of the sirrush and what is left is a serpent. It is easy to see, then, that the dragon of Chaos, cursed with leglessness, becomes a serpent.

  119. Serpents, of course, do not eat dust. They are carnivorous creatures. The dust-eating is simply an over-hasty conclusion from the position of their heads near the ground and from the constant flicking of their heat-sensitive tongues—a flicking that is not designed to lick up dust but to sense the near presence of some warm-blooded prey.

  15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; 120 it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.121

  120. Many people seem to have a horror of snakes. My own feeling is that we are so used to seeing mammals and birds in trees, in the air, or at the very least well above the ground that we don’t generally inspect the ground itself for creatures above the size of insects. When a snake crosses our line of sight, therefore, we become conscious of movement where we are not expecting it and we have a “startle” reaction.

  When snakes are on display in zoological gardens and are not
in a position to be startled, we seem to watch snakes with equanimity, and even children are fascinated.

  121. Taken literally, this section of the verse seems to make obvious sense, A human being trying to kill a snake will surely aim at the head. A snake, on the ground, striking at a human being who is standing is likely to sink its fangs into the heel. It sounds as though it is an uneven fight, with the human being striking at a vital point while the snake cannot, and a human victory is implied. If the snake is poisonous, however, the fight is not as uneven as it seems. A strike at the heel can be deadly enough.

  The apparent promise of human victory is sometimes taken as a Messianic prediction. A descendant of the woman (“her seed”) is interpreted by Christians as Jesus Christ, and he will bruise the head of the serpent (Satan), thus bringing about the final victory over Chaos. It seems to take a convinced Christian to see this, however.

  16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; 122 and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.123

  122. The woman has not had children yet, and one wonders whether, if the man and woman had stayed in the Garden, they would ever have children. (If children had been born, presumably the process would have been easy and painless.)

  One might argue that if the fruit of the tree had not been eaten, the man and woman would have continued to live in eternal bliss in the Garden. It was only after the fruit had been eaten and death had entered the world as an inevitable eventuality that the question of replacement arose.

  This question arises only in the J-document. In the P-document Creation-tale, procreation exists from the beginning: all animals, and human beings in particular, are commanded to be fruitful and multiply. Under those circumstances, one might expect that death would be part of the life-scheme from the start, for ever-fruitful production of additional immortal creatures would quickly crowd the world unbearably.

  Those one-celled forms of life that produce by simple division are, at least potentially, immortal. A virus can form replicas of itself endlessly. A bacterium, an alga, a protozoon can divide and redivide without cessation, and each cell formed in the divisions is as “young” as the original cell.

  To be sure, one-celled organisms don’t fill the Earth—as they assuredly would in a very short time, if they were all literally immortal-because vast numbers are constantly dying of starvation, of desiccation, of chemical pollution, and (mostly) of being eaten by somewhat larger organisms.

  Multicellular organisms, on the other hand, are formed of anywhere from dozens to tens of trillions of various groups of specialized cells, and among them are the sex cells (eggs and sperm), which are entrusted with the task of reproducing new individuals.

  Once there are sex cells for the job, the remainder of the organism tends to wear out in time even if the environment remains entirely favorable to life. We might say that the development of sex and of natural death came about simultaneously.

  This is oddly akin to some allegorical interpretations of the tale of the serpent and the Temptation. Those who see the serpent as a symbol of the male genital organ would make it appear that the “forbidden fruit” was sexual experience. In that case, God was only pointing out the inevitable in saying that sex would mean death.

  As for women bringing forth children “in sorrow,” it would appear that women do have a difficult time of it in childbirth, more so than most animals do. This may be related to the rapid evolution of the human brain and to its tripling in size in the last half million years. The pelvic opening of the female has barely kept pace with this growth, and the head of the newborn infant, which is the largest part of the body and the first to emerge, does not slip through the pelvic opening easily. It is a tight fit.

  Again, there is a rather interesting interpretation of the chapter that we can make. If the “forbidden fruit” of the “tree of knowledge” does represent knowledge, and since it is the growing brain that makes human knowledge possible it makes a kind of sense to suppose that the pain of childbirth is the consequence of eating the fruit.

  123. Presumably, despite the pains of childbirth, the sexual urge will force women to undergo the process.

  The domination of women by men is a historical fact in most cultures, helped along by the fact that men are, on the average, larger and stronger than women are, and the further fact that women are periodically hampered by menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, and the need to take care of the young. Male domination is here justified as a punishment for the woman having been the first to yield to temptation.

  This apparent Biblical sanction of male chauvinism, and this apparent Biblical condemnation of woman for her special and greater guilt, has, of course, been a source of much misery and unhappiness for women in those societies that accept the Bible as the inspired word of God.

  17 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 soke; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; 124

  124. This sounds very much like the sigh of a farmer. Humanity lived for many thousands of years by gathering food and by hunting. That came with labor enough, to be sure, for finding food was not easy, and in times of drought or of killing frosts, finding enough to feed all the mouths might well have been impossible.

  When farming was developed, proper cultivation ensured a much larger food supply and it became possible to feed many more people on a given area of land. However, the labor of sowing, of weeding, of hoeing, of reaping, of guarding against predators meant backbreaking work. It must have seemed to many a weary farmer that the ground was cursed; that it had to be tended so carefully to produce the desired grain, for instance, and yet it so readily produced undesired, nonedible food.

  If there was any dim recollection of the days of food-gathering, when all that work wasn’t necessary, it might have been another factor that helped give rise to the tale of a fruitful paradise where all you had to do was pick a fruit and eat. It is very common for human beings to recall a past way of life with nostalgia and longing and to compare it favorably with a present way of life, simply by forgetting all the disadvantages of the past and by remembering (with a golden haze of improvements) the advantages.

  18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; 125

  125. Despite the changed conditions, human beings are still restricted to a vegetarian diet. It is part of the punishment, apparently, that even though it would be harder to get food out of the ground, human beings must make do with it.

  And it seems true that once human beings became farmers, grain became the staple food and Vegetarian items formed a much greater component of the total diet than in the days before farming.

  19 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. 126

  126. This is the concept of recycling. We eat plants and animals and convert their tissues into our own. But then we die and decay,’ and our tissues are converted into the tissues of other animals that may devour our bodies, or of lesser forms, worms, maggots, molds, bacteria that will live on the dead tissues. All those various life forms will in turn decay or be eaten, and the atoms and molecules of a once-living human body may well eventually form the tissues of another human body and be part of a living organism once more.

  The Biblical writers knew nothing of microscopic life, but dust is not a bad way of describing it, in the absence of knowledge. Microorganisms are as small as dust grains, after all.

  20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; 127because she was the mother of all living.128

  127. It might be argued that now that human beings would die and be replaced by potentially endless numbers of other human beings, “man” and “woman” are insufficient as a means of iden
tification. Each would need a proper name. The Revised Standard Version begins to use “Adam” instead of “the man” only in verse 3:17, when God pronounces Adam’s doom.

  And now Adam gives his wife a name. By doing so, he reinforces his control over her, which was granted him by God’s dictum, four verses back.

  128. “Eve” is the English form of the Hebrew Chavah. The actual meaning of the name is unknown (one suggestion is that it means “serpent”!), and it is probably not of Hebrew origin.

  The ancient Israelites used names that meant something, however, and when they came across a name that was important to them and that didn’t have an obvious meaning, they would use folk-etymological devices and find a meaning in a similar sound.

  Thus. Chavah has a sound similar to Chayah which means “life” in Hebrew. The Biblical writers therefore suggest that she was called Eve because she was the human source of all subsequent human life.

  21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.129

  129. This is a primitive element of the story, since one gets the picture of God sewing skins together and becoming a tailor as well as a potter. Worse yet, one gets the picture of God killing and skinning animals.

  It is easy to suppose that God merely created the clothing of skins as easily as he created Adam, without having to kill animals for the purpose, but the verse doesn’t make that clear.

  It does make sense to suppose that clothing of skins did come after clothing made of leaves. It is considerably more difficult to catch and skin animals than to pick leaves. On the other hand, it is worth the added effort, for skins offer better protection to delicate parts of the body and offer additional insulation against the cold, something useful and even necessary once human beings moved out of the tropics.

  22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us,130 to know good and evil:131 and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 132