The human story in the Bible begins in a garden with Adam and Eve and the mysterious tree of knowledge of good and evil. What is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? A look at five puzzles arising from the story may help yield an answer.
God prohibits eating from the tree of knowledge, and only later banishes the humans lest they eat as well from the tree of life. Why not prohibit the tree of life first?
God tells Adam if he eats of the fruit he will die. He and Eve eat but do not die. Why not?
Why is Adam and Eve’s first reaction to eating from the tree of knowledge to become ashamed of their nakedness and to clothe themselves?
Why after leaving Eden is the couple’s first act to conceive a child?
In what sense are human beings expelled from paradise?
The Denial of Death, by the social psychologist Ernest Becker, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974. According to Becker, it was not sex, as Freud had postulated, but death that underlies our human experience, specifically the fear and denial of our own mortality. Our obsession with sex hides a deeper obsession with death since, like eating and bathroom functions, sex reminds us we are bodies that decay and die. Like animals we eat, eliminate, and procreate.
For Becker, everything from table manners to disgust with our own waste to the endless dance surrounding sexuality is an attempt to deal with the reality of corporeality.
Bottom of Form
We are certainly caught in this strange enduring paradox: you can be thinking the most exalted thoughts, but if your body makes an insistent demand, it must be obeyed. In Jewish law, a dead body is av tum’ah, the greatest source of ritual impurity.
What then is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Instead of just being about morality as some argue, it could denote the tree of the knowledge of death. If we lived forever, things would be neither good nor bad. A broken friendship could be restored next century, or you could lose weight in your seven-hundreds. Why was the tree not prohibited earlier? Adam and Eve did not think to eat of it: death was unknown to them.
When they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they did die. Not in a literal sense but in a psychological sense – as we all do the first time we become aware that things fade and break and die. Now they knew they were mortal. (According to many commentators they were at first immortal, but in this reading they were always mortal but did not know it.)
Why clothes? For the first time they are aware of themselves as bodies and so feel shame. The paradise they lose is the paradise of permanence. What is the first thing they do upon leaving the garden? They conceive a child, leaving descendants, which is one way mortal creatures reach beyond this life.
The story of Adam and Eve is etiological – it explains the origins of things. It touches upon the fundamental human dilemma and suggests responses:
“Therefore a man will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife” (Genesis 2:24). This is what Adam and Eve do to God: they “leave” God and cling to each other. One answer to death is love, as the Song of Songs says, “Love is as strong as death” (8:6). A second answer to death is procreation, having a child to carry on.
God “breathes the breath of life” into him (2:7). The source of life comes from beyond ourselves. This verse is used by the Talmudic sages to prove the concept of the soul’s life after death. For if life comes from beyond, it is not extinguished when the body fails.
Is the Garden of Eden story a parable of the fall, of “original sin”? Not quite. Jewish prayers insist each morning, “God the soul You have given me is pure.” Rather, the story of Adam and Eve explains the gift of life, the dilemma of death, the human need to reach beyond the grave, and the religious promise of eternity. ■
The writer is Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of David the Divided Heart. On Twitter: @rabbiwolpe