The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve Read online

  In the Genesis storyteller’s account of the Flood, the divine smiter and the divine protector are one and the same. This reduction to one supreme divinity from multiple gods, one cleverly thwarting the destructive design of the others, preserves the omnipotence of the Creator who has made all things and now, at his own will and discretion, can destroy them. But doing away with multiple gods introduces certain problems, starting with the very notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing god who nonetheless repents what he has himself created. Did the wise maker not anticipate what his creatures would do? How is it possible for an omniscient divinity to regret what he has done? And how is it possible to justify or even comprehend the arbitrariness and cruelty of the destruction that he unleashes, destruction that sweeps away not only adult malefactors but also small children, newborn lambs, virgin forests?

  In the Mesopotamian origin story, neither the murderous gods nor the irrepressibly noisy humans are morally judged for what they do. But in Genesis, humans bear responsibility for their actions and for what befalls them. God is neither arbitrary nor capricious. It was the fatal wickedness of Noah’s contemporaries that led God to regret his creation of humans. And lurking somewhere behind that wickedness are the first humans and the behavior that led God to expel Adam and Eve from their perfect garden. But how could such wickedness have arisen from creatures made in God’s image?

  These questions had been there from the beginning, troubling the minds of the pious as well as the doubters. Notwithstanding all the efforts of prophets and preachers, inquisitors and artists, moral philosophers and systematic theologians, they continued over the centuries to linger in the shadows of cozy parish churches and to slumber just below the surface of familiar, well-thumbed pages. George Smith understood that what he had stumbled upon, after more than two thousand years, would reanimate the half-buried disturbances and unsettle even his most complacent Victorian contemporaries. It was as if you had grown up with an inheritance you thought you perfectly understood and in which you took great pride, but now that inheritance had been made to seem less comfortable, coherent, and sustaining. Your stories were no longer entirely your own. You had strange ancestors you never dreamed that you had.

  Smith lost his life in search of these ancestors. In October 1875, at the urging of the British Museum, he set out for Nineveh, in present-day Iraq, hoping to find more tablets. There were bureaucratic delays in Istanbul, an outbreak of plague, disquieting reports of political unrest in the area where he intended to dig, increasingly unbearable heat. He fell ill with dysentery and died at the age of thirty-six in a small village north of Aleppo. His claim to immortality, of the kind scholars hope to attain, rests on the moment he jumped up and began to tear off his clothes, the moment he discovered Gilgamesh.

  There may have been a real ruler named Gilgamesh who reigned in the city of Uruk (now Warka, in southern Iraq) and ordered the construction of its walls and ramparts some five thousand years ago, but the Gilgamesh in the tablets Smith deciphered is a mythical figure, two-thirds god and only one-third human. The tablets bear the name of the person who compiled them, the scholar-priest Sin-lequi-unninni. About Sin-lequi-unninni nothing is known, except that, like Homer or the Genesis storyteller, he was a brilliant artist who was working with already existing materials, texts and oral legends that reached far, far back into the past. The Torah was probably assembled in the fifth century BCE; the Iliad somewhat earlier, perhaps between 760 and 710 BCE. But Sin-lequi-unninni wrote his text sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE, and the earliest surviving written tales of Gilgamesh date from around 2100 BCE. Older by more than a thousand years than either Homer or the Bible, Gilgamesh is quite possibly the oldest story ever found.

  Already by the time of the Babylonian captivity, Uruk had lost much of the political influence it once exercised in the region. Still, it retained a peculiar prestige, for it was there in the far distant past that something amazing had been invented. Over an area covering some 5.5 square kilometers small settlements had come together to form an unprecedented economic and administrative whole. Even at the time, people understood that they were participating in a phenomenon of singular importance. What was emerging was the first city in the ancient Near East and perhaps the first city in human history.

  The setting of Gilgamesh is not a garden at the beginning of time but a crowded city. The work does not attempt to reconstruct a world before humans existed; it seems to imagine rather that we have always lived in communities and always shared stories. And yet though it does not give us a moment before which nothing existed, it includes a remarkable scene of creation, one that resembles the primal moment depicted in the Enuma Elish. As the work begins, the people of Uruk are suffering under the uncontrolled and uncontrollable desires of their ruler. One-third human, two-thirds god, Gilgamesh is a mighty warrior and a great builder, but his sexual appetites are destroying the city’s morale. Heeding the people’s complaints, the gods launch a complex, roundabout scheme. The first step is taken when the mother goddess Aruru washes her hands, pinches off a piece of clay, and forms a creature out of it. The creature—“Shaggy with hair was his whole body” (1:105)—is named Enkidu.

  Eating grass and drinking from water holes, Enkidu roams naked in the wilderness with gazelles. When he sees traps set for his animal companions, he breaks them, and he fills in the pits that the hunters have dug. One day a frustrated hunter catches sight of the wild man. Understanding now why his attempts to capture game have been failing, the hunter travels to Uruk, a three-days’ journey, to ask Gilgamesh for advice. Gilgamesh counsels the hunter to go to the Temple of Ishtar, the sex goddess, and request help from a priestess named Shamhat. The priestess is a temple prostitute skilled in all pleasures.

  Shamhat accompanies the hunter back to the waterhole and waits for Enkidu. “Toss aside your clothing,” the hunter urges her, “Let him lie upon you,/Treat him, a human, to woman’s work!” (1:184–85). It comes to pass just as the hunter had hoped. Shamhat and Enkidu spend six days and seven nights in fervent lovemaking. Then at the end of this time, when Enkidu attempts to rejoin the gazelles and other wild creatures, they all run off. He is bewildered at no longer being able to keep up with them, but his disorientation and loss are the preludes to a new state of being: “You are become like a god,” Shamhat exclaims. “Why roam the steppe with wild beasts?” (1:207-8). It is not only his body that has changed but also his mind. He is no longer a beast among beasts.

  When the benevolent Shamhat tells Enkidu about Gilgamesh, her words seem to awaken some longing in him. But they cannot instantly go to the city. Civilized life requires initiation, accommodation, and an extended learning process. The harlot begins by dressing her naked charge: “She took off her clothing, with one piece she dressed him,/The second she herself put on” (2:20–21). The clothing is not a response to a feeling of shame, nor even an adaptation to the environment. It is a mark of the movement from nature to culture.

  That movement continues when Shamhat takes Enkidu to dine in a hut with shepherds. The rustic meal is simple, but to someone accustomed to browsing on grass and suckling the milk of gazelles, it is as strange as the first morsel of solid food on the tongue of an infant. Shamhat teaches him to eat bread and to drink beer. Having drunk seven goblets, Enkidu, who has become carefree and cheerful, “treated his hairy body with water,/He anointed himself with oil, turned into a man” (2:42–43). The lines may simply mean that he washed his hair, but they may also suggest that he rubbed the fur off of his body. We are watching the ascent of man.

  This ascent sets the stage for the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, a friendship carefully prepared long before they set eyes on one another. “Let me show you Gilgamesh,” Shamhat exclaims, giving her charge a vision:

  He is radiant with virility, manly vigor is his,

  The whole of his body is seductively gorgeous. (1:236–37)

  So too in Uruk, she tells Enkidu, Gilgamesh will dream of a star that has fallen from the heavens. “I
fell in love with it,” Gilgamesh tells his mother, to whom he has related his dream. Interpreting the dream, his mother explains to him that the star to which he was drawn is the friend he is fated to meet: “You will fall in love with him and caress him like a woman” (1:273).

  The powerful erotic charge leads into their first encounter, but in a surprising way. Arriving in Uruk, Enkidu takes it upon himself to block Gilgamesh’s access to a bride whom he intends, as is his custom, to rape on her wedding day. The desperate prayers of the people have been answered: the wild man barring Gilgamesh’s way is the fulfillment, by an extremely circuitous route, of the gods’ plan to save the city.

  Gilgamesh is enraged that anyone should oppose his wishes. He and Enkidu lock bodies in a mighty struggle that shakes the doorframes and the walls of Uruk. When Gilgamesh is finally victorious, the victory is sealed with an embrace: “They kissed each other and made friends” (2:115). The bride is forgotten. Inseparable friends from this moment forth, Gilgamesh and Enkidu embark together on a succession of reckless, heroic adventures.

  But at a certain moment, the gods decree that Enkidu must sicken and die. The terrified human blames Shamhat, who has taken him from the life of the gazelles ranging the hills to the anguish of a mortal man: “May you never make a home that you can enjoy,” he bitterly curses her; “May you never caress a child of your own” (7:71–72). The issue here cannot be mortality itself—after all, as Enkidu knows, the gazelles had been hunted and killed—but rather the peculiar human awareness of mortality. That awareness, the special anguish that is our lot, is the terrible cost of the initiation into civility so lovingly conducted by the temple prostitute. The beneficent sun god Shamash, the god of fairness and moderation, directly intervenes to remind Enkidu of all he owes to that initiation: food and drink that have sustained and delighted him, beautiful clothing he wears, honors of which he is proud, and above all his deep friendship with Gilgamesh. Before he dies, Enkidu, though still frightened, repents his curses and blesses the prostitute who has made him fully human.

  Gilgamesh, who has lovingly attended his friend through the long death agonies, goes into deep mourning. The pain of loss is bound up with fear for himself:

  Enkidu, my friend whom I loved, is turned into clay!

  Shall I too not lie down like him,

  And never get up forever and ever? (10:69–71)

  The inconsolable hero leaves Uruk and embarks on a search for a way to avoid death. He is determined somehow to find the survivor of the ancient flood, Utnapishtim, reputed to be the only human who has ever achieved immortality.

  The search leads the wanderer to the shores of the sea, where he encounters an alewife, Siduri, who keeps a tavern. When he explains to Siduri that he is set on crossing the sea to find Utnapishtim, she urges him to accept the way things are. It makes no sense for Gilgamesh or anyone else to torment himself with longings for immortality. He should embrace whatever joys life has to offer:

  As for you, Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full,

  Always be happy, night and day,

  Make every day a delight,

  Night and day, play and dance.

  Your clothes should be clean,

  Your head should be washed,

  You should bathe in water.

  Look proudly on the little one holding your hand,

  Let your mate be always blissful in your loins. (10:82–90)

  The alewife’s words epitomize the wisdom of the everyday, the advice summoned up by the spectacle of too much heroic striving: know your limits, accept the human condition, savor the ordinary sweet pleasures that life offers. “This, then,” she concludes, “is the work of mankind.”

  Gilgamesh cannot accept this counsel, even after he finds Utnapishtim and learns that the immortality conferred by the gods upon him and his wife after the great flood was a unique event. Taking pity on the tormented hero, the ancient man and his wife give him one final hope: they reveal that a secret tree of life, a thorny plant, grows beneath the sea and magically confers rejuvenation. Tying heavy stones to his feet, the daring hero dives down and seizes the plant.

  But the dream of rejuvenation is shattered. When in the course of his return to Uruk Gilgamesh stops to bathe in a pool of fresh water, a serpent steals the plant away. The plant clearly was effective—before vanishing into the reeds, the rejuvenated serpent sheds its scaly skin—but it is now irrevocably lost. Gilgamesh sits down to weep, knowing that his quest for immortality has failed. He will not be able to escape death. But he consoles himself with the recognition that he will leave behind something splendid: the vast foundation platform and staircases and brick walls, the temples and orchards and ponds, of his city.

  This is the great epic that circulated in the Near East for many centuries before the Hebrews decided to write their account of humankind’s earliest days: a tale of joyous sexual initiation; a gradual ascent from wildness to civility; a celebration of the city as the great good place; a difficult, reluctant acceptance of mortality; above all, a life that has at its center the experience not of marriage and family but of deep same-sex friendship. Then, with the collapse of the cities of Mesopotamia, it vanished. Until its chance recovery in the nineteenth century, the love story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu had been forgotten for millennia, written in a script no one could any longer read and buried under the mounds of rubble. It did not become part of our collective inheritance. Instead, we inherited Genesis.

  Though the epic of Gilgamesh meant nothing to Augustine, Dante, or Milton, it was almost certainly known to the Genesis storyteller. In addition to its account of the deluge and the ark, it provided a narrative of a god who makes a human from clay and an account of the first experience of sexuality, love, suffering, and death. Even in the broken fragments that survive, it is a beautiful and compelling story. If the Hebrews had to answer the Enuma Elish, so too they may have felt compelled to respond to Gilgamesh.

  There was no room for such a response in the terse, impersonal style of the opening, with its successive days of creation culminating in the making of the human in God’s image and likeness: “Male and female created He them.” This cosmology, in its sublime abstraction, could not even hint at the experience of human life that Gilgamesh so brilliantly represented. For that, whoever put Genesis together had to begin again, to launch a new story.

  The narrative that unfolds in the second and third chapters of Genesis begins where the opening left off. Yet it is not a simple continuation. In chapter 1, God had “created the human in his image,” but there was no mention of any material with which God worked, any more than there was for the sun and the moon. They all came forth through the power of His word. At the risk of a contradiction, in chapter 2 the writer provided a different account, one that responded more directly to the challenge posed by Enkidu where the goddess Aruru forms a man from clay. Yahweh too now forms a man from clay, as the punning name of the species insists: clay in Hebrew is ‘adama, and the word for human is ‘adam. Instead of adding some substance from his body to this clay figure, the Hebrew god blows into its nostrils “the breath of life.” Not a substance but a breath. The image brilliantly captures the miracle of animation: the matter is the same as the inert dust of the ground, but it is not inert. The clay breathes; it lives. God has fashioned it and awakened it to life, but He is not in it. Therein lies the possibility of freedom and of alienation.

  In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the animals. In Genesis the clay human is created “in the image of God” and has from the beginning the status of one who is not a companion to the other animals but of one who dominates them. There is no slow evolution toward full humanness; in Genesis the clay creature animated by God’s breath is already fully human. That he does not need to learn anything or experience anything to realize his identity cuts away at a stroke the whole basis for Enkidu’s initiation story.

  Adam’s goal is not the
city—or rather, if for his descendants urban life lies ahead, it represents only a further disaster in the wake of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In chapter 11 of Genesis, some men decide to build a city on the plain of Shinar. As if in acknowledgment of Mesopotamia’s primacy in this invention, the text makes clear that the people are set on building a city not made of stone, like the cities of Canaan, but of bricks.

  And they said to each other, “Come, let us bake bricks and burn them hard.” And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” (Gen. 11:3–4, Alter trans.)

  “Go up,” Gilgamesh proudly tells his boatman, “pace out the walls of Uruk./Study the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork. Is not its masonry of kiln-fired brick?” (11:95). The Genesis storyteller almost certainly knew this passage, and he also seems to have had in his mind the passage from the Enuma Elish in which Marduk approves the making of a great city: “Create Babylon, whose construction you requested!/Let its mud bricks be moulded, and build high the shrine!” In Genesis this brick-built metropolis is a disaster: