Genesis is my favorite Biblical text, and within it the story of the Garden of Eden comprises my favorite chapters. It confronts the most fundamental issues of being a human: our relationship to nature, to God, and to our own mind. And, best of all, like a clever piece of steganography, this meditation is hidden in plain sight, in Motel-6 drawers and left-breast-pockets around the country.
Christians get Genesis startlingly wrong. This is understandable. A Christian does not read Genesis. A Christian knows what Genesis should teach him; he reads that.
These days, we all know that God is good, and just, and man is wicked. But when humanity was younger, we knew otherwise. God was awful and terrible and capricious, and viewed Man less as a beloved child and more as a dangerous rival, who might one day grow up to challenge the position of the elder. Greek mythology is rife with this theme, and the treatment of humans by those gods is probably familiar: persecuted by plagues, refused the gift of fire, drowned by deluge.
When we read Genesis with this sort of God in mind, it reads much more smoothly:
Genesis 2:9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
…
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.
The modern reading of this myth is “the wages of sin is death”. Man paid the price for defying God with his life. But in fact, this is impossible to reconcile with the actual contents of the text. Later we read:
Genesis 3:1 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.
When the man and woman do eat thereof, the word of the serpent is confirmed. They do NOT die. Their eyes are opened, and they “know good and evil”. Meanwhile, God is sweating nervously:
Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
The text tells us directly why God ejected man and woman: not to punish them for sin, but because he feared them as equals. In fact, God lied to the humans when he told them they would die. He put them out to prevent their ascension.*
The other player in this drama is the serpent, the most wise and subtle of beasts. In this myth, the serpent is the archetypical trickster/culture hero. He confounds God to steal gifts for mankind - and in so doing invites the wrath and retribution of the angry deity. The trickster is a familiar character - Bugs Bunny, in essence. Disdainful of authority, too clever by half, making and unmaking by habit, driven by sheer curiosity. Trickster appears in thousands of stories in every culture. These stories are often astonishingly similar, and the coherence of their central character (and often his evolution into the culture hero) suggests that Trickster is something close and familiar to us. I believe the trickster represents the human mind.
Now the myth becomes beautiful: mind produces insight; insight results in discrimination, which produces knowledge. From thence flows civilization. A mixed blessing, to be sure, one which brings with it hardship and toil. But we are no longer one of many dumb beasts, content and placid in the Garden, living by the will of God. We have become as Gods: we think for ourselves. We act according to our own volition.
This is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: agency. We became thinking creatures and so gained free will, driven by something other than the rough passions imbued in us by the Creator. Eve is a hero, a liberator; God is almost villainous, a petty tyrant who treats slyly with his slaves.
There are older myths than this, in which the gods befriend humanity and instruct them in agriculture, teach them to wear clothes, etc. Genesis is a deliberate reconstruction of such myths, a purposeful statement of the notion that humans stand erect because we lifted ourselves up.
It should be obvious why such a myth, celebrating the human intellect, should appeal to me, the scientist. And bizarre, again, that we read it in reverse, with the roles and message reversed. The Garden is the prison we escaped, God the warden who kept us. The Fall was not a moment of shame, for which we must seek atonement; it was the moment of our birth.
* This theme of God’s jealousy of humanity turns up later in the Babel myth, when he destroys the tower and scatters human language:
Genesis 11:4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
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