fruit would have to be constantly renewed. Only thus could even the gods escape death.[1]
6. The Divine Command broken.—The serpent has gone the right way to work; he comprehends woman’s nature better than Adam comprehends that of the serpent. By her curiosity Eve is undone. She looks at the fruit; then she takes and eats; her husband does the same (iii. 6). The consequence (ver. 7) may seem to us rather slight: “they knew (became sensible) that they were naked, and sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves girdles (aprons).” But the real meaning is not slight; the sexual distinction has been discovered, and a new sense of shame sends the human pair into the thickest shades, when Yahweh-Elohim walks abroad. The God of these primitive men is surprised: “Where art thou?” By degrees, he obtains a full confession—not from the serpent, whose speech might not have been edifying, but from Adam and Eve. The sentences which he passes are decisive, not only for the human pair and the serpent, but for their respective races. Painful toil shall be the lot of man; subjection and pangs that of woman.[2] The serpent too (whose unique form preoccupied the early men) shall be humiliated, as a perpetual warning to man—who is henceforth his enemy—of the danger of reasoning on and disobeying the will of God.
7. Versions of the Adam-story.—Theologians in all ages have allegorized this strange narrative.[3] The serpent becomes the inner voice of temptation, and the saying in iii. 15 becomes an anticipation of the final victory of good over evil—a view which probably arose in Jewish circles directly or indirectly affected by the Zoroastrian eschatology. But allegory was far from the thoughts of the original narrators. Another version of the Adam-story is given by Ezekiel (xxviii. 11-19), for underneath the king of Tyre (or perhaps Miṣṣor)[4] we can trace the majestic figure of the first man. This Adam, indeed, is not like the first man of Gen. ii.-iii., but more like the “bright angel” who is the first man in the Christian Book of Adam (i. 10; Malan, p. 12). He dwells on a glorious forest-mountain (cp. Ezekiel xxxi. 8, 18), and is led away by pride to equalize himself with Elohim (cp. xxviii. 2, 2 Thess. ii. 4), and punished. And with this passage let us group Job xv. 7, 8, where Job is ironically described as vying with the first man, who was “brought forth before the hills” (cp. Prov. viii. 25) and “drew wisdom to himself” by “hearkening in the council of Elohim.” No reference is made in Job to this hero’s fall. The omission, however, is repaired, not only in Ezek. xxviii. 16, but also in Isa. xiv. 12-15, where the king, whose name is given in the English Bible as “Lucifer” (or margin, “day-star”), “son of the morning,” and who, like the other king in Ezekiel, is threatened with death, is a copy of the mythical Adam.
The two conceptions of the first man are widely different. The passages last referred to harmonize with the account given in Gen. i. 26, for “in our image” certainly suggests a being equal in brightness and in capacities to the angels—a view which, as we know, became the favourite one in apocryphal and Haggadic descriptions of the Adam before the Fall. And though the priestly writer, to whom the first Creation-story in its present form is due, says nothing about a sacred mountain as the dwelling-place of the first-created man, yet this mountain belongs to the type of tradition which the passage, Gen. i. 26-28, imperfectly but truly represents. The glorious first man of Ezekiel, and the god-like first men of the cosmogony (cp. Ps. viii. 5) who held the regency of the earth,[5] require a dwelling-place as far above the common level of the earth as they are themselves above the childlike Adam of the second creation-narrative (Gen. ii.). On this sacred mountain, see Cosmogony.
8. Origin of the Adam-story—That the Hebrew story of the first man in both its forms is no mere recast of a Babylonian myth, is generally admitted. The holy mountain is no doubt Babylonian, and the plantations of sacred trees, one of which at least has magic virtue, can be paralleled from the monuments (see Eden). But there is no complete parallel to the description of Paradise in Gen. ii., or to the story of the rib, or to that of the serpent. The first part of the latter has definite Arabian affinities; the second is as definitely Hebrew. We may now add that the insertion of iii. 7 (from “were opened”) to 19—a passage which has probably supplanted a more archaic and definitely mythological passage—may well have been the consequence of the change in the conception of the first man referred to above. Still there are four Babylonian stories which may serve as partial illustrations of the Hebrew Adam-story.
The first is contained in a fragment of a cosmogony in Berossus, now confirmed in the main by the sixth tablet of the Creation-epic. It represents the creation of man as due to one of the inferior gods who (at Bel’s command) mingled with clay the blood which flowed from the severed head of Bel (see Cosmogony). The three others are the myths of Adapa,[6] Ea-bani and Etana. As to Adapa, it may be mentioned here that Fossey has shown reason for holding that the true reading of the name is Adamu. It thus becomes plausible to hold that “Adam” in Gen. ii.-iii. was originally a proper name, and that it was derived from Babylonia. More probably, however, this is but an accidental coincidence; both adam and adamu may come from the same Semitic root meaning “to make.” Certainly Adamu (if it is not more convenient to write “Adapa”) was not regarded as the progenitor of the human race, like the Hebrew Adam. He was, however, certainly a man—one of those men who were not, of course, rival first-men, but were specially created and endowed. Adamu or Adapa, we are told, received from his divine father the gift of wisdom,[7] but not that of everlasting life. He had a chance, however, of obtaining the gift, or at least of eating the food and drinking the water which makes the gods ageless and immortal. But through a deceit practised upon him by his divine father Ea, he supposed the food and drink offered to him on a certain occasion by the gods to be “food of death,” “water of death,” just as Adam and Eve at first believed that the fruit of the magic tree would produce death (Gen. iii. 4, 5).
The second story is that of Ea-bani,[8] who was formed by the goddess Arusu (=the mother-goddess Ishtar) of a lump of clay (cp. Gen. ii. 7). This human creature, long-haired and sensual, was drawn away from a savage mode of life by a harlot, and Jastrow, followed by G. A. Barton, Worcester and Tennant, considers this to be parallel to the story which may underlie the account of the failure of the beasts, and the success of the woman Eve, as a “help-meet” for Adam. This, however, is most uncertain.
The third is that of Etana.[9] Here the main points are that Etana is induced by an eagle to mount up to heaven, that he may win a boon from the kindly goddess Ishtar. Borne by the eagle, he soared high up into the ether, but became afraid. Downward the eagle and his burden fell, and in the epic of Gilgamesh we find Etana in the nether world. According to Jastrow, this attempted ascension was an offence against the gods, and his fall was his punishment. We are not told, however, that Etana had the impious desire of Ezekiel’s first man, and if he fell, it was through his own timidity (contrast Ezek. xxviii. 16). But certainly the myth does help us to imagine a story in which, for some sin against the gods, some favoured hero was hurled down from the divine abode, and such a story may some day be discovered.
To these illustrations it is unsafe to add the scene on a cylinder preserved in the British Museum, representing two figures, a
- ↑ Note the food and drink of the gods in the Babylonian Adapa (or Adamu?) myth.
- ↑ The mortality of man forms no part of the curse (cp. iii. 19, “dust thou art”).
- ↑ See H. Schultz, Alttest. Theologie, ed. 4, pp. 679 ff., 720; Driver, Genesis, p. 44.
- ↑ See Cheyne, Genesis and Exodus.
- ↑ Cp. the “fair shepherd” Yima of the Avesta (Vend. ii.), the first man and the founder of civilization to the Iranians, though not like the Yama of the Vedas.
- ↑ See Jastrow, Rel. of Bab. and Ass. pp. 548-554; R. J. Harper, in Academy, May 30, 1891; Jensen, Keilinschr. Bibliothek, vi. 93 ff.
- ↑ The wisdom was probably to qualify him as a ruler. It is too much to say with Hommel that “Adapa is the archetype of the Johannine Logos.”
- ↑ Jastrow, op. cit. p. 474 ff.; Jensen, Keil. Bibl. vi. 120 ff.
- ↑ Jastrow, p. 522 f.; Jensen, vi. 112 ff.
