Becoming Human
Into and Out of the Garden
In our last episode, we watched the first two human beings eat a piece of fruit and get dressed.
Some people (you know who you are) think their snack was sinful, marking not only them but all their descendants with an indelible stain. The owner of the garden is most certainly going to be annoyed when he discovers what they’ve eaten. The question for now is whether anything has actually changed in them or about them metaphysically. The answer is yes, but the change has nothing to do with sin.
Today, in this week’s free post, I want to take some time to consolidate our understanding of the implications of what we’ve just read. Rather than move forward in Genesis 3, I want to move forward into the literature that developed from the Bible and then backward to the literary background of the Bible.
It’s usually not a good idea to get your news only from a single source, so let’s have a look at another report of this event, from the book of Jubilees. That’s an “extra-canonical” book — one that was not included in the Bible, though it “sounds” biblical, retells biblical stories, and in this case may even predate the biblical book of Daniel. Such books are now easily accessible to all of us via the Jewish Publication Society title Outside the Bible. Get that book for an introduction, translation, and commentary on Jubilees by James Kugel.
You may remember that both the snake and the woman talk about the two humans acting as a pair; onscreen, though, we saw the woman eat some fruit and then give some to her man, after which “they knew that they were nude.” Wouldn’t she have known that in between eating and giving him some? Jubilees 3:20–21 thinks so:
Jubiless 3:20And the woman saw the tree that it was pleasant and it was pleasing to the eye and its fruit was good to eat* and she took some of it and she ate. 21And she first covered her shame with a fig leaf, and then she gave it to Adam and he ate and his eyes were opened and he saw that he was naked. 22And he took a fig leaf and sewed it and made an apron for himself. And he covered his shame.
Kugel’s note, marked by the asterisk, adds:
In Gen. 3:6 Eve (“the woman”) saw that the tree “was good for eating and a delight to the eyes.” The order seemed illogical to the author of Jubilees—the fruit ought to have appealed first to her eye, and only after that should she have guessed that it tasted good as well. So the author of Jubilees changed the order. He also had Eve cover herself with a fig leaf before approaching Adam (contra Gen. 3:6–7), apparently to avoid any implication of immodesty.
Rather, I suspect, it’s because that metaphysical change occurred in her as soon as she ate, just as it did in him. Again, the difference between the two of them has been much more important for later interpreters than it was for the creator of Genesis 3, who saw them as acting together. As for the illogical order of “good for eating and a delight to the eyes,” there is more illogic to it even than that. The author of Jubilees, retelling the story, was as limited as a translator in how he could comment on it.
What was that metaphysical change? The text of Genesis is quite clear about it. They were not suddenly marked by sin. What happened was that they “knew that they were nude” (v. 7). Abarbanel comments:
So were all the other animals; but it was more evident in the case of the man and the woman because they stood upright and were not covered with wool or hair or feathers.
They were standing upright before they ate, of course, and once we get to v. 14 we may start to wonder whether the snake had not been standing upright too, as noticeably naked as the two humans, and equally unembarrassed. Most of us in 21st-century cities don’t have as much experience with animals as our ancestors had, but one thing we all know it that animals are not particularly embarrassed by the fact that they don’t wear any clothes. Here’s Nahum Sarna:
In the Gilgamesh Epic, putting on clothes is one of the tokens of the wild Enkidu’s abandonment of his outdoor life with the beasts of the field.
Gilgamesh may be the first actual person in human history whose name is still known to us. He was the hero of multiple classic stories in the ancient Near East. There is plenty of Gilgamesh on the web, with as much or as little serious scholarship involved as you might want. A reliable, readable source for it is Stephanie Dalley’s Myths from Mesopotamia. What concerns us for now is Gilgamesh’s doppelganger (try saying that five times fast), Enkidu. (Go here for a quick look at him.) He was created as an animal, but had sex with a woman and then discovered that he was, unfortunately, human. He could not return to his life with the animals.
What has happened to our friends is what happened to Enkidu — not that they were pure and became sinful, but that they were animals and have now become human. The gap between humans and animals is certainly not as wide as it was thought to be in biblical times, but this is not a story about biology. It’s a story about becoming human — something we all want to be, something we’re glad to be … yet something that we all understand comes at a psychological cost.
Together, Eve and Adam have now initiated human history, a never-ending tale of defiance and submission in which people grow, accumulate knowledge, strive for wisdom, but still die. The new species is neither divine nor animal but holds elements from both. [Jack Sasson, “What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?”]
We’ve mentioned before that the loss of immortality is also a theme in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is Enkidu’s death that prompts Gilgamesh to search for the secret to eternal life. After many adventures, he is told by the hero of the Mesopotamian Flood story (whom we’ll meet again when we get to Genesis 6) where to find a plant that will rejuvenate him. He finds it and has immortality in his grasp, until he falls asleep and the plant is taken from him — by a snake.
You see how our story has taken elements from these stories (and from others we no longer have) and rearranged them into a completely different work of literature, in the service of Israelite religious ideas. In Genesis, our heroes have eaten from the Tree of Sorting and know that they are naked. What they don’t seem to know is that the garden also contains an immortality plant: the Tree of Life. We know about that Tree, but Genesis 3 will keep us in suspense until v. 22 before we find out what’s going to happen. Meanwhile, we’ll go on with v. 8 next time.