Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief

by David Bentley Hart

the Eden myth was originally a tale of the gods and of the chief god Yahweh, who had planted a garden containing the trees whose fruits granted those gods both their immortality and their divine knowledge of the nature and value of things (good or bad); and it tells also of how Yahweh invented a peasantry to tend that garden by crafting a man from clay and then a woman from the man’s side, and of how he kept these two pitiable serfs in ignorance of better things and lied to them by telling them that the magic trees the gods fed upon were in fact poisonous, and of how the cleverest of the animals Yahweh had maladroitly tried to fashion as helpmeets for the man (before fixing upon the scheme of fashioning one directly from Adam’s flesh instead) was the snake, and of how that snake mischievously apprised the peasants of the ways in which they were being exploited, and of how the peasants then stole from their deceitful landlord and ate of the fruit of knowledge and thereby discovered that the snake had told the truth (and that, by the way, Yahweh had not even given them any clothes), and of how Yahweh, on learning of this growing peasant rebellion, fled in panic to the other gods and told them that there was an imminent danger that the man and the woman might now eat from the tree of life as well and become immortals and ultimately displace the gods, and so they must now be expelled from the garden before the catastrophe occurred. In short, it was a fairly typical Mesopotamia...