Genesis 2 and 3: Thoughts on Eden and Serpents

Anyone that I ever want to meet in a dark alley believes that evil is a problem. In particular it is a problem that demands two solutions, both one of origins and one of antidote. Here God gave the ancients a story to understand the first of these two solutions. Here historicity first rears its head, or I should even say modernity rears its head. I do agree with Lewis that the fall is one of those undeniables of history, but I can't help but feel that if we were given, or if the Israelites were given a modern historical account of the fall we would both resound even as one: "what? Really? That was the Fall. Surely that is...what?" What I mean by this is that the actual Fall would be so removed from us culturally that it might even be incomprehensible to us. And so the Israelites were given something they would understand (I have no idea when this story was actually written, though I do lean towards the Exile, so I am being purposefully ambiguous in this regard), namely Eden. The land of two trees, of two covenants, of my way or the highway deuterocanonical theology.

This time reading through the text I couldn't help but feel drawn to this image of Eden. I about Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, where "I" ends his pilgrimage in the Watermill Village, a people who have returned to harmony with nature, a people who have revived Eden. In Watermill Village they don't need electricity because night is supposed to be dark, and no trees are felled because enough trees fall down on their own, and death is something to celebrate because people are supposed to die. This made me wonder if in the fall death did not come, but that the problem of death did. This would explain the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Iliad and why all the ancients were obsessed with death almost as much as modern man is obsessed with forgetting death (our little way of undoing the Fall). It is truly shocking how universal the idea of Eden is. Whether in the Golden Ages of cyclical time, or in the Chinese concept of dynasty, or even today in the American Evangelical view of the time before the sexual revolution, and in our own psychology of lost childhood. The Genesis story seems to roll all these ideas together, Adam and Eve created as children (naked and not ashamed) and the fall is a kind of growing up, where Adam shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to Eve and become one flesh, leaving the garden, the immediate presence of the Father and then having children with Eve, East of Eden.

I was just reading Jaques Ellul's book The Meaning of the City, and in it he makes a good point: contrary to images like Watermill Village, the bible fails to end of in the clearly obvious way, in returning to Eden. Christ does not usher us back into the garden, rather he brings to us a city-temple, the New Jerusalem. Eden like childhood, is left to be itself, and even the knowledge of Good and Evil is redeemed. This sounds very Irenean, the fall as "growing up to soon", and I'm not sure if I'm totally comfortable with that idea, though it does seem to be an important element to the story. I'm not sure I have ever seen in film, or in art, a representation of the New Jerusalem, and I wonder why.

In continuation with what I wrote in the last post, I found myself strangely fascinated by the character of the serpent. I tried to unburden my reading slightly, seeing the snake as just that, a snake and not some personification or image of Satan. Reading in this way, the Fall looks much more like a loss of humanity, a return to beasthood. The snake does what chaos does: they question, man's fall is decreation, devolution. I feel almost that I need to think more about this before I write any more, so I'll just put the idea out there as is.