The same blanket release from blame extends to those whose presence in these pages is even more marked and pervasive. I owe Robert Pinsky, Adam Phillips, and Rabbi Edward Schecter the deepest gratitude for years of patient listening, wise counsel, and unwavering friendship. With unstinting intellectual generosity, Meredith Reiches helped me find my way around the difficult, often confusing landscape of evolutionary biology and initiated me into the complex calculations of energy expenditure that governed her fieldwork on women in the Gambia. This work explores a world far away from the dreams of Eden, but it shed an illuminating light on those dreams. With Joseph Koerner, an art historian of singular brilliance, I have in recent years at Harvard cotaught both graduate and undergraduate courses on Adam and Eve. At various points in this book I acknowledge my voluminous debts to him, but I am conscious that they extend well beyond these gestures. It is the sweet peril of team-teaching and close friendship alike that the boundaries between one’s own ideas and those of another become easily blurred.
To my three sons, Josh, Aaron, and Harry, I owe thanks for their patience in putting up with innumerable conversations about primates, for their thoughtfulness, humor, and insight, and for their unfailing love. The experience of love, as Milton understood so well, lies at the center of the story of Adam and Eve. It is all the more appropriate then that my deepest gratitude, in the writing of this book as in so much else, is to my wife, Ramie Targoff. She has brought me as close to the gates of Eden as I will ever get in my life.
Notes
Except where noted, citations from the Bible are to the King James Version, in The English Bible: The Old Testament, ed. Herbert Marks (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), and The English Bible: The New Testament and The Apocrypha, ed. Gerald Hammond and Austin Busch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). The King James Version, one of the greatest literary accomplishments ever produced by a committee, is the translation that, since the early seventeenth century, has shaped the dominant reception of the Adam and Eve story in the English language. Readers (and I include myself) who lack a scholarly command of the Hebrew original can get at least some sense of key translation issues from The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version) 4th ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). I have found Robert Alter’s translation—The Five Books of Moses (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004)—consistently illuminating. The Hebrew text is available online, along with many translations reflecting a wide range of denominations and interests. These may be readily compared for each verse.
For full bibliographic details in the references that follow, please see the Selected Bibliography.
Chapter 1: Bare Bones
6 Poring over the words: The rabbis recognized quite early that the story of the creation and first disobedience in Genesis could produce potentially dangerous speculations. According to the Mishnah—the first major redaction of the Jewish oral law—“the [subject of] forbidden relations may not be expounded in the presence of three, nor the work of creation in the presence of two, nor [the work of] the chariot in the presence of one, unless he is a sage and understands of his own knowledge” (Hagigah 2:1 [Complete Babylonian Talmud]). The Talmud applies the last clause to all three prohibitions, meaning that these three particularly risky subjects—the laws regarding incest, the creation story in Genesis, and Ezekiel’s vison of God’s chariot—should only be taught to the wise. As for the precise age when one was presumed to be wise, there was considerable disagreement, ranging from twenty to twenty-five and even to forty.
6 a particularly beautiful camel: Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Kisa’i, The Tales of the Prophets (c. 1200 CE), in Kvam et al., Eve and Adam, p. 192. On Iblis, see Qur’an, Surah 7:27, in Eve and Adam, pp. 181–82. See Marion Holmes Katz, “Muhammad in Ritual,” in The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad, ed. Jonathan E. Brockopp (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 139–57; Asma Barlas, “Women’s Readings of the Qur’an,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an, pp. 255–72.
10 possess objects called holotypes: At Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, the great biologist E. O. Wilson opened a cabinet not long ago and showed me a few of the vast number of ant holotypes that he had collected, each one a distinct species affixed to a pin and labeled in almost microscopic writing.
11 Bible commentaries traditionally posited: Readers who wish to get a preliminary sense of this enormous field may profitably begin with James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible; Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews; Bialik et al., The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah; Hermann Gunkel, Genesis; and Claus Westermann, Genesis: A Commentary.
11 Alexander Ross: Quoted in Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought, p. 49.
13 “tangled bush”: Bernard A. Wood, “Welcome to the Family,” in Scientific American, September 2014, p. 46.
14 a cranium very much the size of ours: Though we did not evolve from these creatures, it is estimated that for at least the “brief” period of five thousand years—the length of all known human history—we shared the world with them and on occasion interbred.
15 rabbi Samuel ben Nahman: In Midrash Rabbah, trans. H. Freedman, 8: 1. On the human’s immense size, see R. Tanhuma in the name of R. Banayah, R. Berekiah in the name of R. Leazar, and R. Joshua b. R. Nehemiah and R. Judah b. R. Simon in the name of R. Leazar (8: 1); on the tail, see Judah B. Rabbi (14: 10). For further speculations, see Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 1: 47–100; and Bialik, The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah, p. 12ff.
Chapter 2: By the Waters of Babylon
23 God instructed an angel: Even here there is a telling confusion, since in one moment (Jubilees 1:26) the Angel of the Presence actually writes the book, while at others (2:1) Moses writes it from dictation.
23 “And the Lord said to Abram”: Trans. Robert Alter, who points out in his note that Abram here “becomes an individual character, and begins the Patriarchal narratives” (p. 56).
24 “By the waters of Babylon”: Psalm 137, in the King James translation (1611). Cf. the Jewish Publication Society version (Tanakh Translation):
By the rivers of Babylon
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion.
(Berlin et al., The Jewish Study Bible, p. 1435.)
The psalms are extremely difficult to date, but the editors observe that the word “there” in the first verse of Psalm 137 implies that the Hebrews are now somewhere else, presumably back in the land from which they had been exiled.
24 the hanging gardens: The actual “Hanging Gardens” were in all likelihood located at Nineveh, and not in Babylon (where archaeologists have failed to find any trace of them). Greek sources seem to have confused the two cities and their respective empires. See Stephanie Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens,” pp. 45–58.
27 From this primordial intercourse:
When on high no name was given to heaven,
Nor below was the netherworld called by name,
Primeval Apsu was their progenitor,
And matrix-Tiamat was she who bore them all,
They were mingling their waters together.
From Distant Days: Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia, trans. Benjamin R. Foster, p. 11. For other translations and commentaries on this and related Mesopotamian origin texts, see Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard; The Harps That Once … : Sumerian Poetry in Translation, trans. Thorkild Jacobsen; and Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, trans. Stephanie Dalley.
28 Life, with its energy and noise: Thorkild Jacobsen suggests that the Babylonians were aware that they had founded their city and civilization on the foundations of their enemy the Sumerians and that this awareness is reflected in their account of the killing of Apsu (Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness, p. 186). If this interpretation is correct, it would suggest that, by rejecting the story of a primordial killing, the Hebrews, in their own orig
in story, were unwilling to acknowledge any such foundational debt.
29 the divided female body: Cf. Jacobsen: “The phenomena of winds and storms Marduk reserved for himself. Below, he heaped a mountain over Ti-amat’s head, pierced her eyes to form the sources of the Euphrates and the Tigris (the Akkadians have but one word for ‘eye’ and ‘source,’ inu, and presumably considered them in some way the same thing), and heaped similar mountains over her dugs, which he pierced to make the rivers form the eastern mountains that flow into the Tigris. Her tail he bent up into the sky to make the Milky Way, and her crotch he used to support the sky” (Treasures of Darkness, p. 179).
29 “I shall compact blood”: “I shall make stand a human being, let ‘Man’ be its name… . They shall bear the god’s burden that those may rest” (trans. Foster, p. 38). To accomplish what he had conceived, Marduk needed blood. He asked who was principally responsible for Tiamat’s rebellion and was told that it was “Qingu who made war,/Suborned Tiamat and drew up for battle.” Accordingly, Qingu was bound and brought before Marduk’s father, Ea:
They imposed the punishment on him and shed his blood.
From his blood he made mankind,
He imposed the burden of the gods and exempted the gods. (39)
The material used to make mankind was thus drawn from a god executed for rebellion, though the text, at least as it has survived, does not speculate on whether this origin affected the result. The possibility that it might have done so, producing in humans an innate tendency to rebel, is the subject of a fascinating analysis in Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 175ff.
29 “the black-headed people”: Savage-man, Pritchard explains, is probably a derivative of the ethnic name Lullu. “That the Lullu were linked by Akkadian sources with the remote and dim past may be gathered from the evidence … as well as from the fact that the flood ship lands on Mount Nisir, in Lullu country” (Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 68, n. 86).
29 the supreme god Marduk: Though Babylonians conferred upon their own city’s god an absolute preeminence and gave that god a crucial role in the creation of man, there had been alternative accounts in Mesopotamia of the origins of things. In one of these accounts, humans were created not by a god but by a goddess, the wise Ninhursag. She is “the mother-womb,/The one who creates mankind” (Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 99), and in an incantation evidently used to facilitate childbirth, she is shown fashioning offspring to serve the gods: “Let him be formed out of clay, be animated with blood!” (ibid., p. 99). There was clearly an elaborate mythology constructed around this mother goddess—a mythology that included a place of perfect beauty called Dilmun and a wild succession of sexual couplings—but the cult of Marduk absorbed what it could and swept the rest away.
29 the Atrahasis: Citations of this work are from Foster, From Distant Days. See the helpful introduction in Millard et al., Atra-Hasis: The Babylon Story of the Flood, pp. 1–30.
31 imagined violence: The fantasy of revenge serves as a symbolic warding off of a threatened assimilation, whether as entertainer or servant or suppliant, to the victor’s culture. The enemies in this fantasy are simply “the children of Edom,” that is, the descendants of Jacob’s rival and brother, Esau. As such, they are restored to their place in the ancient mythic history that gives the Jews their sense of identity.
32 Babylonians allowed the upper classes: Cf. Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 284.
33 enormous stone blocks: What visitors see is in fact the magnified, grandiose form given it centuries later by Herod the Great. In 70 CE, some five hundred years after the initial rebuilding, those blocks were pried loose and flung down from the temple mount by the Roman soldiers who brought the city to its knees in yet another historical disaster.
33 The prophets raged: Ezekiel declared that the Lord brought him to the north gateway of the Temple, where women sat “weeping for Tammuz” (Ezek. 8:14–15). Jeremiah, who foresaw the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, passionately argued that the looming disaster was the consequence not of military or diplomatic incompetence but rather of the infidelity of God’s people. In Jerusalem, he wrote, “the children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven” (Jer. 7:18).
It is difficult at this distance to take in the horror and rage provoked by ceremonies that seem so appealingly familial and domestic. Who was “the queen of heaven” whose little cakes were deemed an intolerable affront? Though Jeremiah did not give her a name, the deity so honored was evidently the goddess associated with the planet Venus, whom the Babylonians called Ishtar or Inana, the Canaanites Astarte, and the Hebrews Asherah. Archaeologists have found ancient shrines to Asherah in the kingdoms of both Israel and Judah. The Hebrews may even have regarded her as Yahweh’s consort.
The cult of God’s domestic partner seems to have been suppressed by the Hebrew priests and prophets after Babylon’s fall and their return to Jerusalem. The leading authorities in the community insisted that Yahweh lived alone in solitary, sexless splendor. There is evidence, however, that the goddess did not go quietly. Jeremiah described the response he received, when he reproached the men and women of Jerusalem for their idolatries:
Then all the men which knew that their wives had burned incense unto other gods, and all the women that stood by, a great multitude … answered Jeremiah, saying, As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. (44:15–16)
The crowd refused to take the prophet’s denunciation as the direct word of God. Why should they stop doing what had long suited them? As for the implication that the offerings were somehow all women’s work, done behind the backs of the men, Jeremiah recorded the wives’ indignant answer:
And the women said, “When we burnt sacrifices to the queen of heaven and poured drink-offerings to her, our husbands knew full well that we were making crescent-cakes marked with her image and pouring drink-offerings unto her.” (44:19; New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition)
35 a new covenant: William Rainey Harper, “The Jews in Babylon,” in The Biblical World, pp. 104–11. To say that this whole topic is complex and contested would be a gross understatement. For a rapid overview, simply focused on the moment when the Adam and Eve story was possibly written, see Jean-Louis Ska, “Genesis 2–3: Some Fundamental Questions,” in Beyond Eden: The Biblical Story of Paradise (Genesis 2–3) and Its Reception History, ed. Konrad Schmid and Christoph Riedweg, pp. 1–27.
35 the People of the Book: See Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book.
35 multiple strands: The recognition of multiple strands goes back at least to the early eighteenth century, when a German Protestant pastor, Bernhard Witter (1683–1715), published a thesis focused on the difference between the divine names Elohim and YHWH. Given the extreme constraints on recognizing, let alone publicly acknowledging, the possibility of multiple strands, it took considerable intellectual fortitude to explore this subject. In addition to Witter, the key early figures were the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) and the French priest Richard Simon (1638–1712). Hence the founding figures included a Protestant, a Jew, and a Catholic. To these brave voices, we should add Jean Astruc and his anonymously published 1753 work, Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Génèse. Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces conjectures. For a popular overview of this complex subject, see Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
37 a committee of redactors: The issues here are particularly complex and contentious. In The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism, John Van Seters vigorously questions the terms “editor” and “redactor” for the Bible, preferring to speak of “authors.” Van Seters’s arguments are reviewed and challenged by Jean-Louis Ska in “A Plea on Behalf of the Biblical Redactors,” pp. 4–18. Ska observes persuasively t
hat the compilers of the Bible—whether we call them redactors or “living channels of transmission” or “custodians of ancient sources”—had a deep respect for the texts they had received and a reluctance to rework those texts into a stylistically consistent, logically coherent whole. They opted instead for minimal changes and bridging passages linking together what we can now perceive as distinct traditions. To this extent, their work is quite different from the reworking of sources that we can follow in a text like King Lear. It is possible to discover the diverse sources that Shakespeare is stitching together and on occasion to catch contradictions in the resulting play, but he confers upon all of them his inimitable style and sensibility. The same is not true even of the first three chapters of Genesis, let alone of the Pentateuch in its entirety. Nonetheless, for many centuries—almost the entire history that my book surveys—the story of Adam and Eve (along with the whole of the Pentateuch) was taken as an inspired, holy text authored by Moses or transcribed by him from the words of an angel. This presumption of authorship led to the long and fateful reception history, one in which apparent textual contradictions and tensions were invitations not to redactional criticism but to sustained meditation, interpretation, and artistic representation.
Chapter 3: Clay Tablets
43 discovery of a trilingual inscription: The person who laid claim to the discovery, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, was one of those Victorian gentleman-adventurers who from this distance seem larger than life: supremely energetic, resilient, and egomaniacal, Rawlinson, as a young lieutenant with the British East India Company, helped to reorganize the shah’s army, while displaying remarkable talents as a horseman, exploring the remoter regions of Kurdistan and Elam (now southwestern Iran), becoming fluent in Persian, and studying the traces of the past. In 1836 he learned of the intriguing inscription, part of an ancient monument to the Persian king Darius the Great located in Behistun, in the Zagros Mountains between Babylon and Persia. The monument was visible from afar but virtually inaccessible, since it had been carved above a narrow ledge on a cliff some three hundred feet above the valley floor. Undaunted, Rawlinson scaled the cliff—along with a local boy who, as usual in these stories, received little money and less credit for risking his life—and obtained a copy of the inscription. In a gripping history, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, David Damrosch describes in detail how it happened. I am particularly indebted to this account. The inscription is transcribed in De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 291.