Stephen Greenblatt - The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

ALSO BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Shakespeares Freedom

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Hamlet in Purgatory

Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher)

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles

Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley

EDITED BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Shakespeares Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays (with Peter G. Platt)

Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall (with Ramie Targoff)

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto

The Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor)

The Norton Shakespeare (general editor)

New World Encounters

Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies

Representing the English Renaissance

Allegory and Representation

Copyright 2017 by Stephen Greenblatt

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To Eden and Isaiah

Contents

When I was a child, my parents told me that, during the priestly benediction that brings the Sabbath service to a close, we all had to bow our heads and keep our eyes down until the rabbis solemn words came to an end. It was extremely important to do so, they said, because in these moments God passed above our heads, and no one who saw God face-to-face could live.

I brooded on this prohibition. To look into the face of the Lord, I reasoned, must be the most wonderful thing any human being could experience. Nothing that I would ever see or do in all the years that lay ahead of me would even approach this one supreme vision. I reached a momentous decision: I would raise my eyes and see God for myself. It would be fatal, I understood, but the cost was surely not too high. I did not dare to tell my parents of my determination, for I knew that they would be distraught and try to dissuade me. I did not even tell my older brother Marty, since I feared he would reveal my secret. I would have to act alone.

Several Saturdays passed before I could muster the courage. But finally one morning, standing with my head bowed, I conquered my fear of death. Slowly, slowly while the rabbi intoned the ancient blessings, I raised my eyes. The air above my head was completely empty. And I found I was by no means alone in looking about the sanctuary. Many of the worshipers were glancing around, staring out the windows, or even gesturing to friends and mouthing greetings. I was filled with outrage: I have been lied to.

Many years have gone by since this moment, and I have never recovered the nave faith that led me to prepare to sacrifice my life for a vision of God. But something lives in me on the other side of lost illusions. I have been fascinated throughout my life by the stories that we humans invent in an attempt to make sense of our existence, and I have come to understand that the term lie is a woefully inadequate description of either the motive or the content of these stories, even at their most fantastical.

Humans cannot live without stories. We surround ourselves with them; we make them up in our sleep; we tell them to our children; we pay to have them told to us. Some of us create them professionally. And a few of usmyself includedspend our entire adult lives trying to understand their beauty, power, and influence.

This book is a life history of one of the most extraordinary stories ever told. God created Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman, and placed them, naked and unashamed, in a garden of delights. He told them that they could eat the fruit of any of its trees, with a single exception. They must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; on the day that they violated this one prohibition, they would die. A serpent, the subtlest of the beasts, struck up a conversation with the woman. He told her that disobeying the divine commandment would not lead to their deaths but rather would open their eyes and make them be like gods, knowing good and evil. Believing the serpent, Eve ate the forbidden fruit; she gave it to Adam, who also ate it. Their eyes were indeed opened: realizing that they were naked, they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. God called them and asked them what they had done. When they confessed, He issued various punishments: serpents would henceforth be forced to crawl on the ground and eat dirt; women would bring forth children in pain and would desire the men who ruled over them; and men would be compelled to sweat and labor for their sustenance, until they returned to the ground from which they were taken. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. To prevent them from eating from another of the special treesthe tree of lifeand living forever, the humans, by Gods command, were driven forth from the garden. Armed cherubim were set to guard against any attempt to return.

Narrated at the beginning of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve has over centuries decisively shaped conceptions of human origins and human destiny. On the face of things, it was highly unlikely ever to achieve such preeminence. It is a tale that might captivate the imagination of an impressionable child, such as I was, but grown-ups, in the past or present, could easily see that it bears the marks of the imagination at its most extravagant. A magical garden; a naked man and woman who are brought into existence in a way that no other humans have ever been born; people who know how to speak and function without the prolonged childhood that is the hallmark of our species; a mysterious warning about death that no such newly created beings could possibly understand; a talking snake; a tree that confers knowledge of good and evil; another tree that confers eternal life; supernatural guardians wielding flaming swords. This is fiction at its most fictional, a story that revels in the delights of make-believe.

Yet millions of people, including some of the subtlest and most brilliant minds that have ever existed, have accepted the Bibles narrative of Adam and Eve as the unvarnished truth. And, notwithstanding the massive evidence accumulated by geology, paleontology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, untold numbers of our contemporaries continue to take the tale as a historically accurate account of the origins of the universe and to think of themselves as the literal descendants of the first humans in the Garden of Eden. Few stories in the history of the world have proved so durable, so widespread, and so insistently, hauntingly real.