How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
The conquerors may even have thought that singing one of the songs of Zion would for the conquered be an agreeable form of nostalgic remembrance. But the psalmist bitterly refuses, implying that such remembrance would be tantamount to forgetting. Why? Because it would have acceded to the victor’s wishes; because it would have threatened to trivialize deeply held belief; because it would have acknowledged the possibility of detaching that belief from the place held sacred by the Hebrews, the place that the conqueror had destroyed. Perhaps too because the allure of the dominant Babylonian culture—its landscape and its buildings, its rich fund of songs and stories and its great Storm God Marduk—was intense and because the Hebrews were uncomfortably aware of how much and in how many ways they were being shaped by it.
Such an awareness—a queasy sense of unwelcome but inescapable influence—may lie behind the weird eruption of violence in the psalm’s closing lines:
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it: even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed: happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
The sudden whiplash of rage still has the power to shock. One moment the exiles are sitting and weeping and clinging to memories of home; the next moment they are dreaming of throwing babies against the stones. The pivot point that turns melancholy into thoughts of murder is recollection of the destruction of Jerusalem. The Hebrews must have known perfectly well that the order to raze the temple came not from the daughter of Babylon but from Nebuchadnezzar and his general Nebuzaradan. But their anger is directed at a whole culture and its people.
The triumphant Babylonians want to hear a little music from their slaves. The psalm’s closing words express hatred in its purest form, hatred that wells up from the seething resentment of a defeated and demoralized people. The psalm begins with a gesture of refusal—the captives have hung their harps on the willows—and then, after shifting to a lament, it gives the Babylonians a song all right, but not a song calculated to heighten their mirth. The dream of killing Babylonian babies takes the remembrance of disaster and the feeling of being vulnerable and turns them into imagined violence against those who are still more vulnerable.
The Babylonian Captivity, as it is traditionally called, lasted for decades. It must have seemed as if it would never come to an end. The elders died; those who had been children at the time of the deportations of 597 grew old; their children and grandchildren knew nothing but the shadow of the baked-brick ziggurat and old, half-crazed stories of a beautiful stone city with a grand temple that had once been theirs. The exiles from Judah kept Hebrew as their national language, but they ordinarily spoke its linguistic cousin, Aramaic, which was, along with Neo-Babylonian, the language of everyday life in Babylon. There was no language barrier then between themselves and their captors, and for the well-born Hebrews at least there was only a modest social barrier. The Babylonians allowed the upper classes of those whom they deported to live in the royal court. Some of the more learned exiles may also have acquired knowledge of Old Akkadian, Old Babylonian, or even Sumerian, the ancient languages in which the ritual life of Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom was conducted and in which the Babylonian scribes continued to keep the sacred stories of their people. Whether the Hebrews were fascinated or repelled by what was going on around them—the songs, the festivities and observances, the folklore, and the elaborate myths—they could not possibly block it out.
Then, with startling suddenness, the Babylonian Empire began to fall apart. In the wake of Nebuchadnezzar’s death, there was a succession crisis that weakened the state just at the time that a new and dangerous threat was gathering, under the leadership of Cyrus, in neighboring Persia. When in 547 the formidable Cyrus conquered the immensely wealthy Lydian king Croesus (from whom we get the phrase “rich as Croesus”), he consolidated a powerful empire that then moved relentlessly southward into Mesopotamia. On October 12, 539 BCE, Babylon surrendered to the Persians. A canny politician, Cyrus paid homage to Marduk, but he also liberated the enslaved Hebrews and allowed them to go back to Judah.
To pious Hebrews, permitted after so many years of exile to return to their homeland, Cyrus could only have been the chosen agent of their god. “He is my shepherd,” Yahweh says of Cyrus in the book of Isaiah, “and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid” (Isa. 44:28). The Persian conqueror might have been surprised to discover that he was the tool of a deity of whom he had probably never heard. But Yahweh, as Isaiah imagines him, spells out the situation directly to the conqueror: “I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me” (Isa. 45:5).
The Hebrew exiles who returned to Jerusalem undertook the immense labor of rebuilding the Temple, enabling them to resume the ancient sacrifices to Yahweh. (Visitors to Jerusalem today who stand by the side of the Western Wall and gaze at the enormous stone blocks flung down in 70 CE by the Romans can get some sense of the scope of the enterprise.) But this building project was not enough for them: they embarked upon the comparably immense intellectual labor of forging out of all of their diverse records and repeated stories a sacred book.
For a thousand years or more, the Hebrews had done without a single, collective sacred text. But in Babylon they had heard over and over again the Enuma Elish with its praise of Marduk, who created the first humans. The trauma of exile, along with the threatened loss of cultural memory, may well have triggered the key determination to bring together the stories and the laws with which the Hebrews defined who they were. For it is in this strange soil—a defeated and embittered people, repatriated at the whim of a foreign prince—that the Bible as we know it seems to have taken root.
Behind the decision to compile the sacred book lay the fear expressed by Ezra the scribe—the leader of a large body of the exiles back to Jerusalem—that the Hebrews had “not separated themselves from the people of the lands” (Ezra 9:1). Already before the exile, this fear of contamination had been a major theme. The prophets raged that the cult of Yahweh had become twisted together with observances they regarded as abominations. Seventy years of exile had only made things much worse. The Hebrews had adopted the customs, beliefs, and dress of others. They had intertwined the cult of Yahweh with cults devoted to rival gods. And most threatening of all, they had begun to intermarry.
According to Ezra, the homeland to which the Jews returned was “an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the lands, with their abominations, which have filled it from one end to another with their uncleanness” (Ezra 9:11). Ezra wept, tore his hair, rent his garments, and launched a campaign against intermarriage. And when the ethnic cleansing was complete and the foreign wives and children were all sent away, he gathered the people before him, stood up upon a pulpit of wood, opened a book, and began to read it out loud.
What do you do when warnings and denunciations are not enough? How do you eradicate old legends to which people had been long devoted or stop new cults that were constantly entering the land along the trade routes? It is one thing to pull down an altar you regard as an abomination. The act is relatively easy, particularly when the forces of monotheistic piety are in the ascendant. But the suppressed cults tend to spring up again like weeds. You can, in a frenzy of xenophobia, send away foreign wives and children, but the emotional cost must have been very high. And after a few years, there would always be more foreign wives and children, along with more alluring alien cults. How do you uproot deeply held beliefs?
You chang
e the story.
The dream of the master text, the truth stripped of all uncleanness, was part of a concerted effort to resist the powerful culture of the surrounding peoples, to refuse their reigning divinities, abjure their forms of worship, and reject their accounts of the world. It is likely that this dream originated even before the return to Jerusalem, when the Hebrews were still weeping by the waters of Babylon. Significant portions of the book, such as the story of Adam and Eve or of Abraham and Isaac, may have already been available, written independently in separate parts over many centuries. Bringing these parts together would have served as an alternative to the ruined Temple, a substitute for what had been lost. In the long history of the Jews, in any case, this role is precisely what the sacred text, the Torah, played.
The Torah helped to turn Hebrews—a tribal people occupying a particular, highly vulnerable territory—into Jews. Already the prophets had begun to envisage a new covenant, not between Yahweh and the nation, but between Yahweh and the individual. Marduk might seem for the moment quite overwhelming, but he was a god inseparably linked to the city he protected and to the king whose power he upheld. When the walls crumbled, the king was toppled, and Babylon became the haunt of foxes and jackals, then Marduk would fall. There was no doubt in the minds of the prophets that this time was coming. And when it did, they, the Jews, would remain. They would be in possession of a sacred book—not an esoteric tract bound up with the fate of a particular city and its priests and king, but a collective treasure that recorded for all humankind the deeds of Yahweh, the all-powerful Creator. They would become what in Hebrew is called Am HaSefer, the People of the Book.
The Torah as a whole, most scholars agree, was first redacted in the fifth century BCE, but what exactly does “redacted” mean? It means that one or more editors took multiple strands that had reached them from the past, compared them, corrected them, cut pieces from them, added pieces to them, adjusted them, reconciled them to the best of their abilities, and wove them together. No one knows who these editors were, how many there were, or who chose them. No one knows if there were competing factions, or if there was a dominant figure, someone who adjudicated disagreements and made the final decisions. And no one knows for certain how many strands—full-scale narratives, mythic fragments, genealogical tables, chronicle histories, law codes, letters, tribal records, and the like—these editors, whoever they were, consulted and assembled.
In 1883 a thirty-nine-year-old German professor, Julius Wellhausen, published his Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels). Notwithstanding the less-than-thrilling title, the book caused an immediate sensation. The son of a Lutheran pastor, the author deftly summarized a growing consensus among Bible scholars that, whatever might have been revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai (an event variously assigned by rabbis to 1312 or 1280 BCE), the written Torah as we know it was not the work of a single author. Advancing what he called “the documentary hypothesis,” Wellhausen identified and chronologically ordered four distinct strands or strata that were woven together when the Torah took the form in which we know it. Each represented a distinctive set of features, preoccupations, and ways of referring to God; each emerged at a different moment in the historical development of ancient Israel; each responded to different pressures and represented different institutional interests and theological ideas. What a falling-off there was from the myth of origin: in place of Moses, Wellhausen referred to what he called J, E, D, and P.
Wellhausen hypothesized that J (for Jahwist, after the German spelling of YHWH or Yahweh as Jahweh) was the earliest of the sources, dating from around 950 BCE. It was followed by E (for Eloist, after Elohim, a plural noun used to refer to the deity), dating from around 850 BCE. J and E, he thought, were woven together relatively quickly. He estimated that D (for Deuteronomist) was composed around 600 and P (for Priestly) around 500 BCE. In Genesis, he thought, J (or, more probably, a conflation of J and E) were conjoined with P.
Very few scholars would at this point deny the basic premise that there is more than one strand in the story of the first humans and, more generally, in Genesis. The multiple strands are immediately apparent in the fact that the God of chapter 1 is called “Elohim,” while in chapters 2 and 3 he is called “Yahweh Elohim.” But from here on we enter exceedingly difficult terrain, every hillock and pothole of which is fiercely contested, often on dauntingly technical but nonetheless murky grounds. And even if all the battles were fought and won, and sweet concord reigned in the world of biblical scholarship, we would still bump up against the fact that for thousands of years, the story of Adam and Eve was received not as an intertwining of distinct strands but as a single story, a story by which men and women were fascinated, disturbed, and moved.
Outside the charmed circle of faith, the belief that Moses himself wrote down the creation story told in the first chapters of Genesis is no longer credible. But that pious belief had one great advantage: it is difficult to credit a committee of redactors with the fashioning of a work of art so powerful and so enduring. True, at least two distinct strands may be detected in those opening chapters, but why should the perception of such elements frighten us away from the idea of authorship? When Shakespeare sat down to write King Lear, he had before him Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Harrison’s Historical Description of the Island of Britain, Higgins’s Mirror for Magistrates, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Arcadia, and the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters. Close attention reveals fault lines and tension among these sources. Do we think for a moment that Shakespeare was not the author of his great tragedy? Would we ever refer to Shakespeare as “the redactor” of King Lear?
The writer—or the compiler or the transmitter of tradition—who set out to construct a Hebrew counternarrative to the Babylonian creation story may have had more than one old manuscript in front of him; he may have had other old stories stored away in his memory; he may have turned to colleagues for suggestions and support and criticism. None of this is surprising, for nothing comes from nothing. But at the end of the day, someone—let us, for convenience, call him the Genesis storyteller—had to pull the multiple pieces together and to write the Hebrew creation story that has come down to us over the centuries. In that story Adam and Eve, whenever they were first conceived and whatever their status had been in the earlier centuries, came into their own. They were a proof of Yahweh’s supreme power.
Yahweh was not, or not merely, a territorial deity; he was, the Genesis storyteller affirmed, the Creator of the universe; he was everywhere and all-powerful. This meant that he must have created the first humans, just as he must have willed the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of his chosen people as a punishment for their disobedience. It followed that Nebuchadnezzar was merely a tool in his divine hands. The fact that the Babylonians took Jerusalem and razed Yahweh’s temple was decisive proof of Yahweh’s power, since the greatest empire in the world only served the disciplinary purposes of the Hebrews’ god.
To skeptics this claim might have seemed pathetic and almost laughable—a Monty Python–like absurdity in which the most obvious evidence of defeat is trumpeted as proof of omnipotence. But oddly enough it seems to have been the position that triumphed historically, not only among Jews who have for millennia affirmed Yahweh’s power in the face of overwhelming evidence of his failure to protect and defend them, but also, and even more successfully, among Christians who took this argument to a new level. Their omnipotent savior was beaten, spat upon, and executed in the manner reserved for criminals and slaves, but that miserable fate was precisely proof of his fulfillment of the designs of the omnipotent father.
A god who wielded such absolute power—who could treat the likes of Nebuchadnezzar as his vassal—was not only the master of the universe but its creator, not only the chief among the gods but the one true god, not only the maker of the Jews but the maker of all humankind. 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.
3
Clay Tablets
Whether we believe in the story of Adam and Eve or regard it as an absurd fiction, we have been made in its image. Over many centuries, the story has shaped the way we think about crime and punishment, moral responsibility, death, pain, work, leisure, companionship, marriage, gender, curiosity, sexuality, and our shared humanness. Had history developed in a different direction, the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis, and the epic of Gilgamesh might have served as our own bundle of origin stories and would undoubtedly have shaped us other than as we are. That it did not work out this way had consequences.
Like the Bible, the Mesopotamian works that we now read almost certainly had behind them, as the wind in their sails, centuries of oral storytelling to which we can have no access. But even the written records of these great narratives stretch back into deep time, far deeper than any surviving traces of the Hebrew Bible. When and why someone in Mesopotamia first had the idea of writing down creation myths is not clear, but fragments of them survive from almost four thousand years ago.
Most of the speculative genius of early humanity is lost to us forever. But it is as if in these remarkable works a fragile breath—the breath of those in the remote past who wondered who we are and how we became that way—miraculously left its traces. The survival of the traces has everything to do with their place of origin—the sloping alluvial plains along the Tigris and Euphrates, whose carefully tended fields sustained the inhabitants of large, well-organized walled cities—and with the medium in which they were recorded: wet clay tablets inscribed with legible marks and subsequently dried in the sun or baked in a kiln.