The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve - Stephen Greenblatt ( PDFDrive

382 Pages·2019·21.83 MB·English

by  Stephen Greenblatt

To Eden and Isaiah
Contents
PROLOGUE: IN THE HOUSE OF WORSHIP
1. BARE BONES
2. BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON
3. CLAY TABLETS
4. THE LIFE OF ADAM AND EVE
5. IN THE BATHHOUSE
6. ORIGINAL FREEDOM, ORIGINAL SIN
7. EVE’S MURDER
8. EMBODIMENTS
9. CHASTITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
10. THE POLITICS OF PARADISE
11. BECOMING REAL
12. MEN BEFORE ADAM
13. FALLING AWAY
14. DARWIN’S DOUBTS
EPILOGUE: IN THE FOREST OF EDEN
Appendix 1: A Sampling of Interpretations
Appendix 2: A Sampling of Origin Stories
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Prologue
In the House of Worship
When I was a child, my parents told me that, during the priestly benediction that
brings the Sabbath service to a close, we all had to bow our heads and keep our
eyes down until the rabbi’s solemn words came to an end. It was extremely
important to do so, they said, because in these moments God passed above our
heads, and no one who saw God face-to-face could live.
I brooded on this prohibition. To look into the face of the Lord, I reasoned,
must be the most wonderful thing any human being could experience. Nothing
that I would ever see or do in all the years that lay ahead of me would even
approach this one supreme vision. I reached a momentous decision: I would
raise my eyes and see God for myself. It would be fatal, I understood, but the
cost was surely not too high. I did not dare to tell my parents of my
determination, for I knew that they would be distraught and try to dissuade me. I
did not even tell my older brother Marty, since I feared he would reveal my
secret. I would have to act alone.
Several Saturdays passed before I could muster the courage. But finally one
morning, standing with my head bowed, I conquered my fear of death. Slowly,
slowly while the rabbi intoned the ancient blessings, I raised my eyes. The air
above my head was completely empty. And I found I was by no means alone in
looking about the sanctuary. Many of the worshipers were glancing around,
staring out the windows, or even gesturing to friends and mouthing greetings. I
was filled with outrage: “I have been lied to.”
Many years have gone by since this moment, and I have never recovered the
naïve faith that led me to prepare to sacrifice my life for a vision of God. But
something lives in me on the other side of lost illusions. I have been fascinated
throughout my life by the stories that we humans invent in an attempt to make
sense of our existence, and I have come to understand that the term “lie” is a
woefully inadequate description of either the motive or the content of these
stories, even at their most fantastical.
Humans cannot live without stories. We surround ourselves with them; we
make them up in our sleep; we tell them to our children; we pay to have them
told to us. Some of us create them professionally. And a few of us—myself
included—spend our entire adult lives trying to understand their beauty, power,
and influence.
This book is a life history of one of the most extraordinary stories ever told.
God created Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman, and placed them,
naked and unashamed, in a garden of delights. He told them that they could eat
the fruit of any of its trees, with a single exception. They must not eat from the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil; on the day that they violated this one
prohibition, they would die. A serpent, the subtlest of the beasts, struck up a
conversation with the woman. He told her that disobeying the divine
commandment would not lead to their deaths but rather would open their eyes
and make them be like gods, knowing good and evil. Believing the serpent, Eve
ate the forbidden fruit; she gave it to Adam, who also ate it. Their eyes were
indeed opened: realizing that they were naked, they sewed fig leaves together to
cover themselves. God called them and asked them what they had done. When
they confessed, He issued various punishments: serpents would henceforth be
forced to crawl on the ground and eat dirt; women would bring forth children in
pain and would desire the men who ruled over them; and men would be
compelled to sweat and labor for their sustenance, until they returned to the
ground from which they were taken. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return.” To prevent them from eating from another of the special trees—the tree
of life—and living forever, the humans, by God’s command, were driven forth
from the garden. Armed cherubim were set to guard against any attempt to
return.
Narrated at the beginning of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve has over
centuries decisively shaped conceptions of human origins and human destiny.
On the face of things, it was highly unlikely ever to achieve such preeminence. It
is a tale that might captivate the imagination of an impressionable child, such as
I was, but grown-ups, in the past or present, could easily see that it bears the
marks of the imagination at its most extravagant. A magical garden; a naked man
and woman who are brought into existence in a way that no other humans have
ever been born; people who know how to speak and function without the
prolonged childhood that is the hallmark of our species; a mysterious warning
about death that no such newly created beings could possibly understand; a
talking snake; a tree that confers knowledge of good and evil; another tree that
confers eternal life; supernatural guardians wielding flaming swords. This is
fiction at its most fictional, a story that revels in the delights of make-believe.
Yet millions of people, including some of the subtlest and most brilliant
minds that have ever existed, have accepted the Bible’s narrative of Adam and
Eve as the unvarnished truth. And, notwithstanding the massive evidence
accumulated by geology, paleontology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology,
untold numbers of our contemporaries continue to take the tale as a historically
accurate account of the origins of the universe and to think of themselves as the
literal descendants of the first humans in the Garden of Eden. Few stories in the
history of the world have proved so durable, so widespread, and so insistently,
hauntingly real.