Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [101]
WHOSE IRONY IS IT?
More than a decade ago, the prolific literary critic, Harold Bloom, suggested that the author of this creation story was a woman. That was a sensational suggestion, very inspirational to the new women’s movement and just what a professor of religion at a women’s college (but part of a major university) would have liked to have happened. But the suggestion, upon reflection, seems farfetched. It is always possible, but there is nothing inherent in the story to make a woman author or narrator necessary.
The ironies here are not that of a woman writer’s having fun at a man’s expense, as Harold Bloom has too blithely assumed but, unfortunately, another kind of not so innocent fun designed by men, men in a very maledominated ancient, social world. Even when men are in charge, they reflect ironically on the power that women hold over them because of sexual attraction.
Though fabulous in wealth and fertility, Eden is meant to be a topsyturvy world, emphasized for comic effect. When I say that it is a comic vision, I do not mean that it has no serious purpose. I mean that like good comedy, this story tells us something serious and deep about our nature as human beings. It picks humor to show us that truth.
However I do mean to say that to valorize Adam’s position is to miss the point. Adam is duped, which makes him just as guilty of disobedience as Eve. I see no reason to think that the Hebrews blamed the woman any more than the man nor to think that human life was therefore considered depraved. Life, as we know it, is a punishment in this story. But there is no suggestion that there is a modicum of unatoned guilt in it. Indeed, if anything, the punishment for stealing fruit from the fruit bowl is already extreme, way beyond “measure for measure.” The story merely explains how we got into this fix called mortal life and why we do not live in an Eden, though we can all imagine a paradise. In short, unlike Candide, the Bible thinks we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Indeed, even God must fight continuously to preserve his initial act of creation. The Eden story was not written for us; it was written for the people who also understood the story of Adapa, where, for committing a minor culinary offense, humanity learned wisdom by losing immortality. The result of Adam and Eve’s casual, childlike, disobedient credulity is terrible until we realize that this punishment merely defines life as we know it. Though sin is disobedience, the result is not the loss of immortality, which we can only imagine as an infantile fantasy, but the basic human predicament, as we all know it.
Now we see the effect of the comedy. The story comically implies that if the issue were native intelligence we would be living in a very different world, one in which women ruled. The reason that women are subject to men is that otherwise women would continuously lead unsuspecting men astray by their intelligence and seductiveness. Under the humor is a ferocious and discriminatory irony but it is as much a direct criticism of men as of women. The final effect of the story is to proof-text a world in which men are dominant; we could call this misogynistic after all (at least it must seem so to us, given our assumptions about the equality of women in work environments). But the story pokes fun at everyone and was written in a society that assumed that women were subject to the command of their fathers and husbands, not the society we live in.
In form, the story of the garden of Eden is quite like the story of Adapa, who followed Ea’s bad advice about eating the bread of immortality and so was led astray