Seoul Hero

This is the third and last of my commentaries today on the book of Genesis.

Chapter 3 continues the story began in 2:4.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

The presence of the snake here is interesting. The early Sumerian story of Gilgamesh, mentioned in the commentary on Genesis 1, also featured a snake who played a pivotal role in human history. In that story, Gilgamesh, the hero-king of Uruk (biblical Erech), seeks to find immortality. He is told that if he can take a certain plant from the bottom of the world, he will live forever. He takes the plant, and travels back to his city with it, thinking to test it on an old man first. Along the way, he stops for a bath in the river, and a snake smells the plant and carries it away. The snake immediately sheds its skin. Gilgamesh resigns himself to mortality.

Here, the snake also functions as an animal that will take away the chance of immortality from humans, albeit indirectly, and perhaps even unintentionally. The snake appears to be a sort of “trickster” so popular in folk stories around the world. He deliberately misquotes God, prompting Eve to then get the quotation wrong herself. Eve’s misquoting of God (”neither shall you touch it”), together with her taking of the fruit, have historically been used in Christian communities to deny leadership positions to women, something I always tell my students.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
The serpent’s motives in saying this are not clear in this story, and later Christian interpretations of the snake as Satan will be unhelpful to us if we want to look at this story on its own merits. Nevertheless, the serpent is right. First, the humans do not die, something God had said, and in the second, their eyes are opened (see verse 7, which uses the same expression), something the serpent said. If we compare the serpent to a character like Prometheus, it becomes possible to view the snake very sympathetically, seeing him as a “culture bringer” who wanted to help humanity.

What follows is one of the saddest stories ever, interpreted according to the Christian tradition. That interpretation is not mandatory, however.

Yahweh God asks Adam where he is, and Adam says he’s shy because he’s not wearing anything. Yahweh God knows immediately what his humans have been up to, and interrogates Adam. Adam passes the buck to Eve, and Eve passes the buck to the serpent. We are then given three aetiologies all at once. “Mommy, why do snakes travel on their bellies?” “Well, that’s because a long time ago…” “Daddy, why did mommy scream when she had my little sister?” “Well, my little son, that’s because, a long time ago, God cursed women.” “Daddy, why are you so sweaty today?”

Again, we can compare the serpent to Prometheus, who suffered punishment from Zeus because he gave fire to the human race. Zeus can be compared to Yahweh God in the same way. Both Zeus and Yahweh God are unhappy about giving humanity divine privileges. Yahweh God actually seems a bit scared when he says “and now, lest they reach out and take hold of the fruit of the tree of life–.” The sentence is unfinished, but Yahweh God clearly wants to avoid granting the humans the same powers that he has, now that they have knowledge and are as gods. He exiles them from the garden, placing two cherubim to guard the entrance.

In that connection, I should note that Yahweh God did not entrust two naked chubby-cheeked pink little babies to guard the entrance to Eden:

No, what we should think of are these:

(In passing, I note that, were the first picture the authentic representation of cherubim, the poor little fellows would quickly have been squashed whenever Yahweh wanted to go traveling: cf. Ps. 18:10, where Yahweh rides and flies on a cherub.)

Genesis 3, then, remains a delightful tale with several aetiologies, and the entire tragic interpretation provided the passage by the Christian point of view does great violence to it. It is possible to view the passage from a point of view that is sympathetic to both the woman and the snake, as bringers of culture, but as the text has functioned within Christian communities this has not been the case. On the other hand, the view of the environment and humanity’s role within it is a significant improvement on what we saw back in Genesis 1.

Altogether, I find the modernism of the ancient Greeks more appealing.