The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us

by Stephen Greenblatt

The Hebrew Bible that was stitched together so brilliantly after the return from exile could therefore not begin with Abraham and the origins of the Hebrews. It had to begin with Adam and Eve.

The sublime simplicity of the opening of Genesis was polemical. Creation for the Hebrews was not a tangle of incest, conspiracy, and intergenerational bloodletting; it was the act of Yahweh and Yahweh alone. He did not grapple with a rival or impregnate a goddess. Indeed there was no one else in all the vastness at the beginning of things, no consort, no assistance, and no resistance. The humans were created in God’s image and likeness, animated not with the blood of a murdered rival but with his own breath. He did not produce these creatures in order to serve him and make his divine existence easier. God did not need servants.

The building of cities, the digging of canals, the tending of the flocks, and the exhausting work in the fields were of no interest to him. Rest—the repose of the seventh day—was important to Yahweh, as it was to Apsu, but it could not be impertinently threatened or disturbed. When Yahweh decided to take his rest, he simply took it.

To the Hebrews’ way of thinking, there had to be a moral reason that accounted for the disasters that humans encounter, something in their actions and their inner lives (“every imagination of the thoughts of his heart”). The flood was a response to human evil.

This radical rewriting of the ancient Mesopotamian story was in its way a tremendous achievement. Humans—the black-headed people who reproduce and swarm noisily across the land—must not be conceived of as thoughtless nuisances.

They bear moral responsibility for t...

The Hebrew Bible has many moments of subtle negotiation with Yahweh and of veiled protest against his divine decrees, but these all occur within an overarching understanding that Yahweh, at once just, compassionate, and wise, is the ultimate locus and arbiter of all moral value.

In the Genesis storyteller’s account of the Flood, the divine smiter and the divine protector are one and the same.

But how could such wickedness have arisen from creatures made in God’s image?

The Torah was probably assembled in the fifth century BCE; the Iliad somewhat earlier, perhaps between 760 and 710 BCE. But Sin-lequi-unninni wrote his text sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE, and the earliest surviving written tales of Gilgamesh date from around 2100 BCE. Older by more than a thousand years than either Homer or the Bible, Gilgamesh is quite possibly the oldest story ever found.

The clay breathes; it lives. God has fashioned it and awakened it to life, but He is not in it. Therein lies the possibility of freedom and of alienation.

In Genesis the clay human is created “in the image of God

The dream in Genesis is not leisure but rather purposive work—tilling and watching—that is experienced as pleasure.

If the Hebrew storyteller intended to unsettle deeply held Mesopotamian beliefs, he succeeded brilliantly.

What was a triumph in Gilgamesh is a tragedy in Genesis.

For the first time, then, the humans were forced to grasp that they were themselves animals.

Jesus made sense precisely as a response to Adam.

St. Paul had established the crucial connection: “For since by man came death,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

It was, the apostle’s words suggested, impossible to understand Christ without understanding the sin of the first human...

In the imagination of Christian theologians, each moment in the cosmic scheme began to fall into place: the day on which Christ was incarnated was mystically linked to the day on which God formed man out of the ground; so too the day the holy infant was put to the breast and the day on which God formed the stars; the day the Savior suffered on the cross and the day Adam fell; the day Christ rose from the dead and the day God created light.

The links between the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, integral to the whole vision of Jesus’s life and mission as recounted in the gospels, were forged with tireless zeal and ingenuity.

What sort of language, the emperor asked derisively, are we to say the serpent used when he talked with Eve?

And is it not strange that the Hebrew God would deny to the humans he made the power to distinguish between good and evil? Surely that power is one of the key attributes of wisdom, “so that the serpent was a benefactor rather than a destroyer of the human race.

When Julian died of wounds he received in an ill-fated campaign against the Persians, imperial skepticism died with him, and Christianity resumed its pla...

A technique for quieting the uneasiness, at least among some intellectually sophisticated Jews and Christians, had already emerged around the time that Jesus was active in the Holy Land. It was principally the work of Philo, a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher from Alexandria who understood perfectly well why people who had read P...

Philo’s solution, radical and brilliant, can be summed up in a s...

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The whole effort to take these stories literally has to be scrapped. Each detail instead has to be treated as a philosophical riddle, a hint towa...

The key for Philo was not to focus on the literal details of the narrative. Instead, they must be understood as symbols, “which invite allegorical interpretation through the explanation of hidden meanings.

picturing Adam in the garden, Moses was not asking his readers to conjure up the image of a naked peasant who has been set to work in some rural wilderness. The original ancestor, the cosmopolitan Philo wrote, was “the only real citizen of the cosmos,” and the actual garden in which he was meant to labor was his soul.

The Tree of Life was a symbol for the highest virtue, ...

Philo’s strategy enabled Hellenized Jews, steeped in Greek philosophy, to approach the fabulous elements of the story not with embarrassment but with the subtlety and sophistication called forth by myths like the cave in Plato’s Republic

His intellectual stance set the course of Jewish exegesis for centuries,

He influenced key figures in early Christianity, most importantly the Alexandrian scholar known as Origen Adamantius

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Origen

Aided by a team of scribes who took his dictation in relays, he is said to have written some six thousand works.

The irony of Origen’s cruelly literal understanding of heavenly eunuchs is that he became the greatest early Christian advocate for the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures.

Christianity stamped by a still more durable philosopher than Origen the Unbreakable: Augustine of Hippo.

To someone whose literary tastes were shaped by Virgil and Ovid, these texts were crude in style, while their content seemed disappointingly humble compared with the sophisticated philosophical treatises to which Augustine and his friends were drawn.

it was divided between the powers of light and darkness, two warring and irreconcilable worlds.

Jesus was one of the avatars of light. In the long history of Manichaeism, which spread along the trade routes through Central Asia and as far as China, Jesus took his place alongside other figures of luminous purity, including the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Krishna.

As a Manichee, he had been drawn to an esoteric system that only a small number of adepts could fully grasp.

Now he found himself drawn in the opposite direction: in its apparent simplicity, the Bible was accessible to everyone, but it addressed the deepest questions anyone could ask.

his moment of ecstasy

He insisted that the divine plan, and hence the fate of individuals and nations alike, was bound up with the reality of what had occurred in that garden.

He was convinced that the only way he could truly understand his relation to Adam was to look into himself.

There was no other way back to the beginning of time. All recorded traces of those first crucial moments, apart from the enigmatic words of Scripture, were gone.

But he could find a key in the hidden places of hi...