Adam and Eves Expulsion from Paradise - Term Paper Example

 «Adam and Eve’s Expulsion from Paradise» I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned, And I know my wickedness only too well. Therefore I make this prayer to you: Forgive me, Lord, forgive me. Do not let me perish of my sin, Nor condemn me to the depths of the earth. For you, O Lord, are the God of those who repent, And in me you will show forth your goodness. Unworthy as I am, you will save me, In accordance with your great mercy, And I will praise you without ceasing all the days of my life. For all the powers of heaven sing your praises, And yours is the glory of the ages. Amen. —Manasseh’s Song from the Book of Common Prayer The story of Adam and Eve is a simple one, but like so many simple stories of this kind, it opens itself to myriad interpretations by the very nature of its simplicity. Adam and Eve, at home in the Paradise God has created for them, succumb to the temptation to do one of the things that has been forbidden them: Eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (It is, perhaps, interesting to note that there may have been other forbidden behaviors; Eve does not tell the wily serpent that this is the only rule God has established, only that it is the only rule He has established about what fruits they can eat.) They clumsily attempt to hide their disobedience and failing to do so, quickly pass the blame: Adam to Eve, Eve to the serpent. And so they are expelled from Paradise, cursed to hard labor (for Adam) and childbirth pains (for Eve). I’ve heard it argued that this expulsion wasn’t a punishment in the strictest sense of the word — that while it did ban Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, it did not separate them from God in a fundamental way. I must disagree: I think that’s exactly the consequence of the exodus from the Garden, that man and woman were irreparably separated from God and from the life that would have been had they not fallen into temptation and been driven from Eden. As I’ve said, the story of Adam and Eve is one that lends itself to interpretation, and this is mine: Adam and Eve tried to move too quickly to the next stage of their being — to “grow up too fast” — and in doing so, missed out on the opportunity for the fruitful maturation and spiritual development God intended for them. Let me start by agreeing with David Clines that it’s important not to equate the condition of pre-Fall humans with a childlike naivety. Clines points out that “Milton, at any rate, pictured Adam as a fully developed man, lord of the human race, and — had he not fallen — still living in Paradise, whither all generations of humanity would come from the ends of the earth to pay him homage.” (555) Indeed, God treats Adam and Eve as responsible adults, entrusting them with care of the earth and dominion over the fish and animals who live in it (Genesis 1:26-29) and strolling like a friend through their home in the Garden (2:8), indicating that they indeed creatures in his own image and not children who require adult supervision. Adam and Eve, then, in choosing to consume fruit from the tree of good and evil in the center of the garden, were not choosing to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. They were choosing to engage in a specific kind of knowing for very particular reasons. Part of the reason for their transgression, of course, is that they were tempted by the serpent, but it’s important to remember that temptation only works when it’s something we want to do anyway. Still, the serpent in Genesis is quite good at what he does, first by creating doubt in Eve’s mind, then by questioning God’s motives in making his restrictions and at last — irresistibly — showing her that breaking the rules could lead to freedom. It’s interesting, I think, to ponder why Eve is susceptible to this temptation. In her book And It Was Good, a commentary on the Genesis narratives, Madeleine L’Engle posits that the motivation for Eve’s sin was as simple as taking for granted the wonders of Paradise: If Adam and Eve had remained satisfied, joyous and grateful for the wonders of creation, for the creatures they had named, for the beauty of Eden, they would not have listened to the tempter, who came to them with the same temptations he offered Jesus: if you do what I say, you can be as God. You can be God. (62) Perhaps dissatisfaction is the human condition — or, to put it more kindly, eternal optimism that something else — something other and beyond is better than that which we have in front of us. Perhaps it was that the took the wonders of Eden for granted, having known nothing but its pleasures, or perhaps it was simple curiosity or an overwhelming thirst for deep understanding. Whatever their reasons — and, indeed, Adam and Eve may have each had entirely different reasons for making the choices they did — Adam and Eve chose to break the rule and eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And in that moment, everything changed for them and for the human relationship with the divine. Let’s pause for a moment and consider whether that had to be the case. Eve says that God commanded them “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you shall die.” (3:4) In fact, though, Adam and Eve do not die, and eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil does not seem to make them mortal in a way that they were not before; in fact, a few verses later, God says one of the reasons they must leave the Garden is that if they stayed, they could eat from the tree of life growing in the garden, which would make them in fact immortal. (3:22) So, what, in fact, is the death that God explains is the sentence for this particular disobedience? Unless we want to assume that God has been dishonest in His attempts to keep Eve and Adam from sinning (which seems to me an inherently problematic position to adopt), we have to ask what kind of death God means. What is the punishment for this transgression, and why does God describe it as a death? When Eve and Adam sin, God knows what they have done as soon as Adam apologizes for not coming out to join Him on His walk because he is embarrassed by his nakedness: “Who told you that you were naked?” God asks. “Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?” (3:11) Instead of facing God, Adam quickly blames his wife, who in turn blames the serpent (3:12-14). “Neither the ’adam nor the ’isha are able to assume responsibility for their actions. Each places the blame on someone else or on Adonay Elohim. Since assuming responsibility for one’s actions represents maturity in its most accomplished state, its absence here signals immaturity. By this point in the story the pair have begun to mature, but maturation is a slow process which begins in the garden and continues throughout adult life in the ‘world’. (Bechtel 79) No longer united as one flesh, the man and the woman are utterly alienated from one another and from God: “There is no love here, no mutual trust, no sharing, no mutual accountability; there is only guilt, blaming, trying to avoid responsibility, even to the point of endangering relationships within community.” (Brachter 331) It’s tempting to speculate as to what this means in the context of the narrative. After all, as Bechtel points out, God placed the tree in the Garden, along with the temptation to consume it: “If the garden represents a ‘paradise,’ it should, by definition, be devoid of binary opposition and have only life, goodness, permanence and prosperity. Why has God placed a tree for discernment of good and bad and a snake of evil and death in this paradise?” (77) The answer, perhaps, is simple: It would be possible for the man and woman to consume the fruit of the tree in a way that was in keeping with God’s plan. What that way would be is not clear, but what’s clear is that the way Adam and Eve chose was not it: The focus of this story is not on the serpent and his trickery but on the man and the woman. We must leave them at the center of the story. To do otherwise would be to shift the story away from the responsibility of the couple and place it on the serpent. That is exactly what the woman tries to do later in the story! We are again unwittingly drawn into the story in seeking to blame the serpent’s trickery and temptation for the humans’ disobedience. We find ourselves wanting to find an excuse for the disobedience of the couple, wanting to shift the blame away from them … from us? (Brachter 330) Adam and Eve could not take responsibility for their actions: they hid from God and from responsibility. Who knows what might have been the fate of mankind had they behaved differently? But they were not ready to take responsibility for what they’d done or for the knowledge they had gained, and so they had to be sent from the Garden where they had walked beside God and into the world where his presence was much less evident and their relationship with him much more complicated. How simple it must have been in Eden, when Adam was confused, to ask God to explain what he meant as they strolled together through the twilight. How difficult that transition must have been, to try to remember God’s words and make sense of them without His physical presence. Though God acknowledges that Adam and Eve have gained the knowledge of good and evil that they wanted through their transgression (3:22), they have achieved something for which they were not spiritually ready and which they don’t know how to use wisely or well. Though Jesus’ sacrifice was necessary because of Adam and Eve’s sin, the nature of his sacrifice demonstrates the clearest understanding of the knowledge of good and evil: Until we have the spiritual knowledge to take responsibility for our actions and to make sacrifices for our fellow sinners instead of placing our blame on their shoulders, our knowledge will always be greater than our understanding. “Knowledge without wisdom can be a terrible thing,” says L’Engle (71), lamenting the regrettable fast-forward in knowledge that the expulsion from the Garden generated: We have more knowledge than the human mind can cope with, and we can’t make it go away — and we don’t want it to go away. It is not the knowledge which is the problem, but our misuse of it. How ironic that we’re still far from having the knowledge of good and evil, and it is even more difficult to distinguish between them today than it was in Eden. (70) And so Adam and Eve brought a great deal of confusion into the world by reaching too quickly for a knowledge for which they were not ready. As Clines points out, “the knowledge Adam and Eve gain is indeed a deeper self-awareness, but not all self-awareness or acts of autonomy lead necessarily to greater maturity.” (575) In doing so, they utterly and irrevocably altered the relationship between mankind and God. No longer could a woman engage directly in dialogue with God, no longer could man stroll beside God in the evenings. There were no more rules about what to eat and what not to eat — man would have to sort those out for himself. (As the book of Leviticus suggests, he had little trouble managing that part of it anyway.) He carried with him the same responsibilities for naming animal and tilling the earth that he had had in the Garden, but now he had to manage these tasks without God by his side. God’s plan may well have been to ultimately send Adam and Eve out of the Garden and into the world to do these very things, but by seizing the opportunity to make choices against God’s timeline, Adam and Eve speeded things up to the point where they doomed mankind to generations of struggle, confusion and mixed messages. There’s no reason to believe that Eve would not have eventually become a mother whether she and Adam had been expelled from the Garden or not, but there is every reason to believe that had she waited to do so in the fullness of God’s time instead of the impetuous rush of her own time, the process of childbirth might have been entirely different. By choosing to grasp knowledge before they were fully ready for it, Adam and Eve also strove to circumvent God’s timeline. Like any premature creatures, they faced a life of difficulty in which they would have to struggle to survive. After Adam and Eve’s expulsion, God’s word becomes increasingly muddled. Even those to whom he spoke directly, such as Noah, Moses or the prophets, heard his words as riddles to be solved rather than as clear commands most of the time. Even when it was clear, God’s words were scary, not comforting. Burning bushes took the place of evening walks. The easy dialogue of the Garden is replaced with prayer and silence. Adam and Eve sinned — not, it is important to note, by seeking knowledge but by refusing to accept responsibility for their actions. Instead of coming to God and facing Him with their actions, they hid from it, bringing shame and guilt and confusion into the world. The inadvertent consequence of their sin, of course, was that humans would need expiation for their sins, making the sacrifice of Jesus necessary. Only by some doctrine of a ‘greater good’ … can anything positive be found in the Fall story. Only when it is viewed from a broader perspective, as initiating the history of salvation or as bringing into being a world where there can be not only guilt but also forgiveness, can the Fall be spoken of as felix culpa (‘blessed sin’). (Clines 575) Perhaps, then, Jesus’ sacrifice was necessary because Adam and Eve — and their generations of sons and daughters after them — were unable to believe that guilt could be redeemed, that it had to be hidden and sacrificed for rather than simply faced and forgiven. It is interesting to think that Adam and Eve’s action altered man’s relationship in such a way that only such an extreme act of exculpation such as Jesus’ crucifixion could grant comprehensible forgiveness to mankind. Had Adam and Eve waited for the natural growth of that knowledge which they uncovered so unnaturally, Jesus’ sacrifice might not have been necessary because mankind might have been able to confront its own sin and be its own Savior. What would we have gained if we had not needed Jesus’ death for our salvation? What miraculous life might have been possible in a world where redemption was never needed? In no way is this intended to make light or make little of the great sacrifice of Christ, but it is tempting to imagine a world in which humans were able to be close to God without needing his death to facilitate the relationship. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that expulsion from the Garden has created an almost adversarial relationship with God for so many people, when the nature of the expulsion proves how reluctantly God sent Adam and Eve away. He trusts the man and woman in the Garden with the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, knowing that they might break His rules but giving them the opportunity to feel trusted and loved. He offers them the opportunity to explain themselves — knowing that they have eaten from the tree, he asks rather than accuses. He is careful to clearly outline the consequences of their actions in verses 16-19, not to curse them but to make them aware of what they would be facing outside the Garden so that they could prepare for it. He makes clothes for them from animal skins to cover them when they leave the Garden. He even sets cherubim to guard the tree of life, knowing that their newfound knowledge is likely to offer them the greatest temptation to seek immortality and keeping the burden of that choice from falling on their shoulders amid the other new burdens that they must now bear. There is nothing cruel in this God: When Adam and Eve left Eden, they were God’s children. Even bickering, blaming each other, rationalizing and alibi-ing, they were still God’s children. They could no longer walk and talk with their maker when [He] walked in the evening in the cool of the Garden, but even though they could not see [Him], the Lord was there, watching them, caring. (L’Engle 71) Perhaps that loss of faith in the inherent goodness of God is the saddest consequence of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. Works Cited Anderson, Gary A. The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Barr, J., “Adam: Single Man or All Humanity?,” Hesed ve-emet: Studies in Honor of E.S. Frerichs, ed. by J. Magness and S. Gitin. Atlanta: Scholars, 1998: pp. 3-12. Bechtel, Lyn. “Rethinking the Interpretation of Genesis 2:4B-3:24.” A Feminist Companion to Genesis, ed. by Athalya Brenner. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993. pp. 77-117. Bratcher, Dennis. “The ‘Fall:” A Second Look: A Literary Analysis of Genesis 2:4-3:24. Biblical Resources for Holiness Preaching: From Text to Sermon, vol. 2, edited by H. Ray Dunning. New York: Beacon Hill Press, 1993. pp. 317-332. Clines, David J.A. “Sin and Maturity.” On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1967-1988, Volume 2. (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 555-73. Hauser, A.J., “Genesis 2-3: The Theme of Intimacy and Alienation,” in D Clines, et al, eds. Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature, ed. by David Clines. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982. pp. 20-32. L’Engle, Madeleine. And It Was Good. Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1983. Morrissey, Lee. “Eve’s Otherness and the New Ethical Criticism.” New Literary History. Volume 32, Number 2, Spring 2001. Pp. 327-345. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha. New York, Oxford University Press, 1973. Read More