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By Root 2362 0

the garden of Eden story ends with curses and with a sense both of gained potential and lost potential. The first story moves by means of its architectonic, repeated, high literary form, imposed by repeated phrases: “There was evening and morning, one day”; or “and God saw that it was good.” We are led through a countdown of days, which imposes a tacit sense of evolution from good to better. The second story moves occasionally through the repetition of words but more often through dramatic presentation. In the first story, humanity is the most important piece of creation before the sabbath. In the second story, the man and his wife are part of the drama. The differences between the man and woman as thinking and interacting characters impels the whole narrative forward.

The garden of Eden story, which raises the issue of immortality even as it denies it, is by far the more complex story dramatically and is usually thought to be much older, being redacted in the monarchic period from traditions that go back several centuries to the northern and southern tribes. The first chapter of Genesis may be one of the last pieces to be added to the pentateuchal narrative, added by the final, priestly redactors, after having seen the great cities of Babylon, as an adequate prologue in heaven to the story they wanted to tell. The second story is merely a charming and amusing story, full of humor and irony, and also likely one of the earliest stories in the Bible.

The Eden story begins with a true moment of paradise. When the water wells up from the ground, creating what amounts to a desert oasis, the grasses begin to sprout and then the LORD God plants a garden for the man He has just made. Every tree grows pleasing to the sight and good for food with the tree of life in the middle of the garden. Here is the first reference to immortality, and this reference lets us know immediately that we are being transported into a fabulous imagined landscape, like the Mesopotamian myth of Enki and Ninhursag, which is the Sumerian myth of the loss of paradise. In Sumer, Eden was called Dilmun where Enki, the water god was allowed to eat eight plants. So there is a cultural context for the fabulous plants and the first of the two critical trees in Genesis, the tree of life.62 The second tree, seemingly its polar opposite in terms of the story, is “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” These two trees represent the two poles of movement in the story. The narrative moves us from paradisiacal amorality and immortality to awareness of good and evil within the limited, mortal world that we all know; the fantasy gives way to our familiar reality.

Indeed the Genesis description of paradise is a Middle Eastern pastoral landscape, familiar to us from the Arabian Nights as well as its ancient antecedents. The garden is filled with the great rivers of the world, including the Giḥon, the spring that waters Jerusalem with the great river valleys of the fertile crescent.63 The lyrical, pastoral tone continues uninterrupted with the first speech of God: “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you must not eat of it, for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die” (Gen 2:17). Though the fabulous description continues, the seeds of the drama are planted just as surely as the tree is.

The LORD God creates the man, as a potter might build a clay figure, but He breathes His spirit (ruaḥ) into him. The man needs companionship so God creates animals which the man names, showing his superiority over those who cannot name themselves. After creating the animals (again in contradistinction to the first story) the woman is created, supposedly to be one who is to be a helper-in Hebrew expressed much more mordantly as “a helper like/opposite him.” Some of the problems inherent in the drama are already expressed in the term used of the woman’s role. The institution of marriage is justified by the first speech of the man. It is very likely an oath of kin recognition:

This one at last

is bone of my bones

And flesh