It's All Their Fault

Abstract

It's All Their Fault Peter Heinegg The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. By Stephen Greenblatt, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2017. 419 pp. $27.95. A vivid, learned‐but‐lively survey of what may have been the Christian world's worst category error—confusing the etiological myths of Genesis 2.4b‐3.24 for a sequence of actual events—and its fateful repercussions. As in The Swerve (2011), Greenblatt seizes on a grand cross‐cultural meme (original sin, as found in Augustine's sublimely pessimistic writings—more or less the polar opposite of the liberating Epicurean materialism found in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura) and rings the changes on its antecedents, its components, and its prodigious career. Actually, it would have helped if Greenblatt had started out by telling readers that an etiological myth doesn't aim to provide a scientific or factual or logical explanation of some important phenomenon, but instead meditates imaginatively on it. Thus, the author of the Yahwist creation story talks about “the man” and “the woman,” generic beings, not individual persons, no Mr. Adam or Ms. Eve. That unknown writer must have known that, left to themselves, a single pair of humans could never have gotten to a third generation without launching a deadly cycle of incest. But he (pace Harold Bloom) had other things in mind, perhaps most crucially the mystery of self‐consciousness, which elevates us to a godlike state, capable of moral judgment, but reveals the truth about death, and thus makes us literally mortals. This dark picture, as opposed to the Priestly creation myth (Gen. 1‐2.4a), with its bold gender equality and its happy ending on the Sabbath, where humans expressly imitate their Creator, does not, however, constitute a Pauline‐Augustinian “Fall” into permanent alienation from God, with a catastrophic burden of guilt. Greenblatt knows how this genre works, of course; and near the end of the book he talks about “just‐so stories,” but he might have done it sooner. Greenblatt begins by tracing the Bible to its presumed source: the crucible of the Babylonian exile. Crushed by military defeat and facing deracination and assimilation by a powerful, seductive enemy culture, the Jews (once they were set free by Cyrus in 538 BCE) had to forge a cohesive identity. They did so by “changing the story” through “the dream of the master text” that would bring together all the vital strands of tradition, to serve “as an alternative to the ruined Temple, a substitute for what had been lost.” The Bible was meant as a “counter‐narrative” to the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis story, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. In those ancient Mesopotamian documents the Flood is caused not by Yahweh's furious indignation at human depravity, but by the gods’ disgust with the horde of raucous earthlings. Genesis borrowed many items from its pagan predecessors, like the figure of Utnapishtim (=Noah; but the Noachian covenant, with its noble theme of a new birth for humanity, introduces us to a friendly God who makes reliable treaties with his creatures). Greenblatt is distressed by the whole notion of cosmic punishment for sin, which would be picked up and vastly expanded by the Christine doctrine of the Fall and Redemption. That was a spectacular misreading of Genesis 3; it eventually gave birth to all sorts of literary and artistic splendor, but at the cost of imposing on believers a harrowing, demon‐ridden, life‐denying (see Nietzsche's Anti‐Christ) narrative, whose final refutation at the hands of Darwin Greenblatt chronicles and celebrates. The Jews, according to Greenblatt, rejected some of the positive features of Gilgamesh, for example, the intense, loving brotherhood of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and especially the joyous humanizing of Enkidu through the ministrations of the hierodule Shamhat. By contrast, when Adam and Eve are initiated into the fullness of human self‐awareness, the result is “disaster.” On other hand, Greenblatt seems to slight the overwhelming bitterness with which both Enkidu and Gilagmesh lament the coming of death. The Yahwist myth of Adam and Eve proved to be irresistibly fascinating and gave rise to a host of different interpretations. One of the more curious responses came...