East of Eden

Poetry holds something beyond conceptual thought—and by the last, of course, I mean the rigorous, the philosophical kind. The poet tries to capture something elusive. He or she has been inspired. The act is a kind of mirror-making. The mirror is made of images drawn from sensory, actual, day-to-day experience. What it suggests is the not-quite-graspable. But if poetry then also mythographic works like Genesis. Both are subject to hermeneutics; we contemplate them; we try to extract meanings implicit but not sharply visible in them. Some view hermeneutics negatively: dissect the apple, analyze it chemically. The knowledge never tells you how an apple tastes. But we engage in hermeneutics all the time—even if the word is unfamiliar. We’re always pondering the meaning of our own intuitions and experiences.

The hermeneutic task I set myself today is to examined Genesis 3:19, the last verse of what is known as “the curse on man and woman” after their disobedience. It is interpreted to mean that death first appears in human experience after the fall. Yes. That’s an interpretation. The verse says (Revised Standard):

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The verse certainly doesn’t say: “Although my original plan was that you should live forever, always young, I’m now introducing a change. Your body will decay and you will die. You came from matter and back to that state you shall go.”

But then verses 22-24 complicate matters. They are much more specific. Do they already represent a bit of hermeneutics that got included into the myth itself later? Here is the passage:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

A curious verse. Adam had not been forbidden to eat of the tree of life. But now, now that he had knowledge, it was time to prevent him? Such readings of the Torah, of course, suggested to Paul (in Romans, for instance) that death came with the fall—not because of knowledge so much but because the fruit of the tree of life was then also denied—by denial of access to it.

But no. I’m not talking tongue in cheek here. This is a myth, a poetic statement. The sensory images of trees, magic although they are, are symbols easy for ordinary minds to grasp and to imagine. They simplify through images. They suggest the gist of things. The distance between human and the divine is symbolized simply as the distance between the lord-owner of the rich estates and the poaching peasant who doesn’t know his place. Genesis 3 is not a problem for the poet. Two big intuitions are wrapped up in it and turned into a story without too careful a logical parsing. One is the wayward, willful, selfishness of man. Another is an explanation of our current condition. One is said to cause the other. No critical analysis of each verse was contemplated by the writers—or, indeed, undertaken by them—much less the isolation of single verses as if they were hard facts like gravity.

There is no hint here, not the faintest, that after his body returns to the dust Adam’s soul shall rise into the heavens there to be judged. Materialists might find great comfort in Genesis 3. Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return is rather, you might say, orthodox materialism. Isn’t it? But the poetry of humanity is not exhausted by reading Genesis. Genesis was one take on the subject. There are others. In some death may be viewed as a great blessing—rescuing the individual who, like Paul, in Romans 7:24, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”