The King James Bible is an epic like no other, layered densely as a diamond, shining with meaning and mystery. The Greek critic Longinus called the opening of Genesis the quintessential instance of the poetic sublime, which no other work approached in confidence or authority. For all its grandeur, this is also a book about every side of human nature, and we only start to grasp its meaning when we bring our entire selves to the reading. Genesis challenges and questions us, and we have to challenge and question it in return.
How to Read a Mountainside
The Bible is at heart a human story, keen with passion and poignancy. Its guiding theme is Good vs. Evil. What does God decree and explain as Good? How should we humans understand God and his Creation, what should our worldview and attitude be? How must we live our daily lives, to become more Good and less Evil? God is in another dimension, mostly beyond our vision and our ken. He is the greatest character in his book, but these tales tell of individual humans, of how they made wise choices and God favored them; or of when they chose wrongly, and then how they paid for that.
Before we meet any humans, Genesis opens with epic fanfare:
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
The second verse is my favorite, so cosmic and pregnant with mystery. So far, God has only created heaven and earth. Earth is just a globe covered in water, where on the third day God will gather the waters under heaven together, to let the dry land appear.
The first chapter of Genesis sings like a ritual incantation, its rhythms and repetitions conjuring Creation into shape with succeeding layers of detail. There are many yoked complementary pairs: heaven and earth; day and night; waters below the firmament and waters above; seas and dry land; male and female humans. Before we get to “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” we see already that “darkness was upon the face of the deep”.
Where then did the deep, and the darkness upon its face, come from? Was there already matter, and did God form heaven and earth out of it? Is the deep an abyss, a raw chaos? Does evil lurk there — or is the deep just a vast inertia, innately resistant to God’s organizing decrees?
If God were Platonic, if he were essentially an abstract omniscience (by “he”, I mean the character Yahweh in this book), then he would perceive Good as a conceptual blueprint, and create that exact blueprint in three dimensions. But God is not Platonic, because he does something different: he creates light and then, only after doing so, “God saw the light, that it was good”. Is God surprised by his own creation? Is Goodness not a pre-ordained law, but instead a living quality — so that, as human generations and the stories between us grow more complex, Goodness will unfold in ways God could not have foreseen? Does Good evolve and deepen as humans do likewise?
Yahweh’s incantation of Creation in Genesis, chapter I, is a proclamation of his dominion over heaven and earth. His main mission is to impose Virtue, Order and Obedience on everything and everyone. He will continue his pontificating and scolding through the rest of The Bible, directing it mostly at his chosen people. But the primal darkness upon the face of the deep always resists him, and human spirits continually rebel. And lo, God must then do a whole lot of smiting.
Why did God put the Tree of Knowledge in Eden?
15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. . . .
21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. . . .
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
WTF? On the face of it, God lied about the fruit, while the subtil serpent told the truth. Because Adam did eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — but did not then, as God had definitively threatened, “surely die”. Eve ate of the fruit too — and then, just as the serpent promised, her eyes were opened and she became as a god, knowing good and evil. How can this possibly be so? The moral here cannot be: God is a liar, but you can trust the serpent.
God creates all the world, finally creating Adam and Eve, “in his own image”, and he grants them “dominion over . . . every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Does being in God’s image make them naturally good? Doesn’t God granting them dominion show that he trusts them to run things wisely?
God puts a tree in Eden, but commands Adam not to eat of it. The serpent meddles, Eve falls, Adam falls, then they both hide in shame from God. God curses all three sinners, and exiles them from Paradise. We all know this tale of Forbidden Fruit and human frailty as a tale of primal Temptation. As such, it is utterly unfair. God never explained his tree at all, and he lied about its danger. How could the newborn Adam comprehend and follow God’s arbitrary edict when he didn’t even know good from evil yet?
This story permeates Western culture, usually seen as a moral tale. Through modern eyes (through mine at least) it makes no sense. The tree doesn’t need Adam to garden it; Eve says they’re forbidden even to touch it. Why did God put that tree in the middle of Eden, in easy reach? God’s forbidding planted it in Adam’s mind, and now Adam walks by it every day, with its fruit looking delicious and promising wisdom.
The only reason to put that tree in the midst of the garden is to tempt Adam and Eve. Though irrational, this does fit the narrative of the Old Testament: God has a nasty habit of demanding that humans obey his commands precisely, however asinine the commands sound to them. Perhaps the root problem here is not that The Bible and mortal life don’t make much sense, but that we foolish mortals keep insisting they must (in spite of all evidence to the contrary).
Philo of Alexandria reaches beyond the text to fabricate sense, like squeezing logic out of a dried-up lemon. Philo divines the import of Eden’s rarest trees thusly:
And these statements appear to me to be intended symbolically rather than literally. For no trees of life or of knowledge have ever at any previous time appeared upon the earth, nor is it likely that any will appear hereafter. But I rather conceive that Moses was speaking in an allegorical spirit, intending by his paradise to intimate the dominant character of the soul, which is full of innumerable opinions, as this figurative paradise was of trees. And by the tree of life he signified the greatest of the virtues—namely, reverence towards God, by means of which the soul is made immortal; and by the tree which had the knowledge of good and evil, he was intimating wisdom and moderation, by means of which things contrary in their nature to one another are distinguished.
Therefore, having laid down these boundaries in the soul, God then, like a judge, watched to see which way man would incline. And when he saw that the disposition of man had a tendency to wickedness and was but little inclined to holiness or piety, by which qualities an immortal life is secured, he drove him forth as was very natural and banished him from paradise; giving no hope of any subsequent restoration to his soul, which had sinned in such a desperate and irremediable manner . . .
Philo’s figure of the two trees is pretty. To pick the tree of life shows reverence towards God (with a sleepwalking sort of Goodness, submitting entirely to God’s ordered garden); to pick the tree of knowledge leads to wisdom and distinguishing (where “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods” — with more freedom, but also with all the responsibility and worry that entails). However, Philo’s God is a jackass. He made Adam and Eve in his own image; but that he denied them his own knowledge of good and evil; then he set up a test they had no conception of, and, when they came up short, he damned humans to suffering down through all their generations.
Philo’s not the only one who thought that way, many later commentators shared the same theory. And he’s right in at least one meta-respect, I believe — we readers are supposed to chew on these stories, and squeeze some understanding of Goodness out of them.
But I find a very different kind of sense in this story. I see it as a metaphor for gaining maturity and wisdom, but losing the Edenic state of youth and innocence in the process. If you’ve ever read William Blake, I see the pre- and post- Forbidden Fruit worlds as two opposed states of mind, very like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and then his Songs of Experience: the innocent child lives in naive ignorance, but also in a state of grace; the experienced adult is beset by worries, but sees the world more squarely, including all of its harshness.
“Now the Serpent was more Subtil . . .”
The OED with its nice distinctions has two entries, Subtle and Subtile. Shakespeare used each half of the time, while Milton preferred Suttle. They all derive from the Latin for Finely Woven. Subtle is itself a word of subtle nuance. Applied to a mind or personality, Subtle is sometimes a virtue, but other times a vice.
From the OED, Subtle can mean:
7. Of craftsmen, etc.: Skilful, clever, expert, dexterous.
9. Of persons, their faculties, actions: Characterized by penetration, acumen, or discrimination. Now with implication of (excessive) refinement or nicety of thought, speculation, or argument.
10. Of persons or animals: Crafty, cunning; treacherously or wickedly cunning, insidiously sly, wily.
Did the Serpent beguile Eve in order to harm her? Put yourself inside the Serpent’s skin: Subtil, wise, thoughtful, cunning. To the Serpent, this wisdom the fruit offered, the knowledge of good and evil, was surely a supreme good, a step toward godliness. It is close to the defining power of the Serpent. It does also feel like the Serpent was stirring up trouble and possibly dissembling — but the fruit’s knowledge was a most worthy prize in the Serpent’s eyes; it just failed to tell Eve about the cost. Did it know just how wroth God would be, when he discovered this betrayal of his law? Would the Serpent really have precipitated this mess, if it foresaw in advance that God would then curse it to slither on its belly, and eat dust all the days of its life? And make Eve’s children its enemy forever?
Genesis is not a realistic novel, the Serpent is not a character we can analyze and fully comprehend. What we can see is, Eve and Adam are transformed by eating the forbidden fruit, and the whole world of the story changes around them. What Good even means changes too. Before tasting the fruit, “they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” They were not ashamed because nakedness, innocence, and living without worry in a state of paradise were all Good. That was the natural order of the garden that God granted Adam and Eve dominion of, before their Fall.
When Eve and Adam ate the fruit that God forbade, they split their minds into an adult state where they knew good from evil, and they also split their womblike bower into a land of separation and shame. To be precise, they didn’t damage the garden of Eden itself, but they splintered their own perception, so that they saw around them an Eden full of worry and doubt. Before they were at one with Creation, living intuitively and worry-free. Now they had to consider a thousand choices to navigate their days and, when God exiled them from Eden, the world and all its creatures would become hostile and full of strife. So before eating the fruit, their nakedness was natural and good in itself — but after eating the fruit nakedness felt wicked and they became ashamed. Therefore “they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” This covered their nakedness, but did not set things right. They knew their fig leaves would show God that they had discovered shame, and that they must therefore have betrayed him and eaten his forbidden fruit. So they hid from God’s sight.
If Adam and Eve only learned to know good from evil after eating the fruit, then what sense of Goodness did they have before that? Did they have an instinct for what was right? In Chapter 2 we read that “out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Naming is a powerful magic, and God trusted Adam to name each beast and fowl properly, according to their nature. Was Adam vibrating in harmony with God’s creation then, so that rightness and truth came instinctively to him?
After God created light, “God saw the light, that it was good”. Before she learned the knowledge of good and evil, Eve had a similar perception: She “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat”. I find Eve’s natural inclination to eat the fruit, with three clear reasons, much more persuasive and right than God’s uncalled for temptation backed up with a lie about dying.
Or was God’s warning about the fruit (“for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”) really true, but only in a poetic sense? Consider that Adam was in a naive state, with no conception of the adult worrying mind the fruit will bring him, nor of how that world will feel to live in. Is “thou shalt surely die” the best explanation God can give, for Adam to grasp the peril he faces? Adam and Eve are living at one with eternity in Eden, and when they eat the fruit that state of harmony and grace will henceforth be dead and lost to them. They will be trapped in fractured consciousness, and cursed to live in a hostile world. They will be exiled from Eden, and cast out into the valley of the shadow of death. In spite of the Serpent’s promise of Godlike powers, in another sense Adam and Eve were already living in a Godly paradise, but the fruit will teach them mortality and self-doubt.
Essentially this is a tale of maturing, of growing sharp with wisdom, yet heavy with all the worry that brings. In Eden, Adam and Eve are God’s children, living in ease and plenty, protected from care and responsibility. When they step beyond God’s law and choose for themselves, their trespass brings adulthood and mortality crashing down on their heads. They are cast out of their father’s paradise, and must make their way into the wide world — after God unloads several drastic curses on the Serpent, Eve, Adam, and all of his own creation. But I’ve squeezed enough out of this lemon for now; we’ll look at Cursing, Exile & Fratricide next time.