Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [102]
Some overriding questions need to be addressed: First we need to ask about immortality and mortality. Were the man and his wife (now perhaps better Adam and Eve in their post-lapsarian identities, 3:20) immortal in the garden because that was their natural state or did they gain immortality temporarily in the garden because they were continuously eating from the tree of life? Is the fruit of the tree of life like a daily vitamin, conferring immortality but only for a period? This may actually have been the intention of the narrator. The verbs in the Lord God’s banishment command support either interpretation: “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil now he might stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat [continually?] and so live forever….” The past tense of many of the verbs suggests that the act is to be a single one. Yet, the Hebrew present participle for “live” will support either the sense of present stative or present and future continuous action.
Eating from the tree of life was not forbidden until now. If the Lord God means that one bite of this fruit will make one immortal, then the real stupidity in the story is that Adam and Eve did not eat from it before God prevented them at the end of the story! Surely the story means for us to believe that we missed immortality by our own mistake; but this irony is a bit greater than the previous one, that our punishment is so much greater than our crime. I do not think that was the intent of the narrator. Everyone knows what the human condition really is; any other outcome would be seen merely as ridiculous and a waste of time. The narrator’s job is only to explain how we got this way.
THE QUESTION OF EVIL IS BEST UNDERSTOOD IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
More intriguing still is the question of why the snake enticed the woman, if he is just a snake and not a cipher for Satan. The one thing that the identification with Satan does is to clarify all the motivations in the story: Satan’s presence would say right from the beginning that we live in an eternal struggle between good and evil, present even in these childlike people. And it would say that Satan is stronger than God because he forces God to make people mortal, evidently opening up the rich possibility for a hell. That is the dominant interpretation of western Christianity. But it is enormously tendentious. When read properly, there is not a trace of this interpretation actually in the story with that doctrine in the background. Then why did the snake commit the crime?
A later text in the Bible sequentially, but perhaps one written around the same time, seems to suggest something rather more profound about the ways God picks His agents:
Then Micaiah said, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him. And the LORD said, “Who will entice Ahab, so that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-Giliad? Then one said one thing, and another said another, until a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying: “I will entice him.” “How?” the LORD asked him. He replied, “I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. Then the LORD said, “You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do it. So you see, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has decreed disaster for you.” (1 Kgs 22:19-23)
The scene is the court of the evil King Ahab where we hear the true prophecy of Micaiah ben-Imlah, a historical prophet who unfortunately has left us no writings. But his