Eve (65 page)

As to what was meant by the serpent and what was meant by Elohim’s forbidding of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, I used three sources: Gerald J. Blidstein’s
In the Rabbi’s Garden: Adam and Eve in the Midrash,
Rabbi David Fohrman’s
The Beast That Crouches at the Door,
and Elaine Pagels’s
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.

Were Adam and Eve created at the same time, or was Eve created from Adam’s rib? To carry this further: Is Adam superior and Eve inferior, or are they equal? There are two very different accounts in Genesis, one in which Adam and Eve are referred to as a unit—some scholars say an androgynous being—and the other in which Eve is created from Adam’s side. Why? I don’t know. I am grateful to Phyllis Trible’s article, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread.” In it, she obliterates any need for us to think of men and women as being either
above
or
under
the other. And again, in her engaging
God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality
(p. 128), she encourages us to view Eve’s “curse” as a consequence, not as a punishment:

Hence, the woman is corrupted in becoming a slave, and the man is corrupted in becoming a master. His supremacy is neither a divine right nor a male prerogative. Her subordination is neither a divine decree nor the female destiny. Both their positions result from shared disobedience. God describes this consequence but does not prescribe it as punishment.

Believe it or not, there is a plethora of opinion just on the word
rib.
There seems to be some difficulty in the translation of that pesky Hebrew word.

Eve is fascinated with the fruit-she-cannot-eat. She deems it beautiful and desirable and having all the signs of being delicious. This is important because we see that she is capable of making a good decision. She wants wisdom, certainly. It is interesting that in the Biblical account she asks questions, when given the chance, and considers what to do. Adam, on the other hand, simply takes it from his wife’s hand and eats it (Genesis 3:6).

It was in researching the Garden that I became intrigued with the Garden itself. Where might it be located? Is it buried underneath the waters of the Persian Gulf? Again there is a lot of conjecture on this point and not a lot of answers. I took the opinion of William Willcocks, in his article, “The Garden of Eden and It’s Restoration,” as published in
The

Geographical Journal,
Vol. 40, No. 2 (August 1912). He places the Garden of Eden “on the upper Euphrates between Anah and Hit. Here must have been the first civilized settlement of the Semites, the ancestors of the children of Israel, as they moved down from the north-west.” In the Biblical account, Eden is located at the source of a river whose four headwaters include the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

Was the Garden a perfect paradise with no sickness, disease, or pain-as I was taught as a child—or was it a world like ours today, and it is only our minds that have changed? For this, I used the thought-provoking book
Mosquitoes in Paradise: A New Look at Genesis, Jesus and the Meaning of Life
by John R. Aurelio, in which he suggests that it is our minds and our visions that have been altered. Read Elohim’s wording carefully. Elohim commands Adam and Eve to work the Garden: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” To many people, this would not signify a perfect place. After all, who wants to work? Now pay attention to Elohim’s language when he curses Adam and Eve, after they’ve eaten of the forbidden fruit. He says to Eve (italics mine), “I will
greatly increase
your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. …” In my mind, this means that she had already experienced pain in the Garden. To Adam, Elohim says, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground. …” Did Adam’s work in the Garden not cause him to sweat? Or was it simply easier in the Garden? As my reader will note, all I could do was wonder.

With great interest, I read Jean Bottéros
Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia,
translated by Antonia Nevill. He discusses “Dilmun, the lost paradise,” which Ahassunu references in my story. According to the Sumerians’ creation myth, Dilmun is where the gods and goddesses were formed and given their divine functions. Dilmun is a pure and clean and perfect land where there is no death or illness—similar to how the Garden of Eden has been portrayed in literature, art, and theology.

For hashing out the
why
of Adam and Eve’s expulsion for such a seemingly minor offense, I relied heavily on Rabbi David Fohrman’s
The Beast That Crouches at the Door: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, and Beyond.
His book is warm and conversational. He takes an unflinching look at some of the most confusing passages of this famous story.

You may be wondering: Wasn’t the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil an apple? Well, no. It has become an apple in illustrations and paintings by artists who needed to paint
something,
so they made it an apple. No one knows what the fruit looked like, although, again, there is much speculation.

If you’ve read carefully, you may have noticed that Eve changes Elohim’s commandment by adding the fact they may not
touch
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is curious to me. Why would she have done this? It is a point that is much debated in the literature on Adam and Eve.

Regarding the serpent in Eden: Who was this creature? Simply a snake who could talk? One of the angels? Maybe Satan? Again, it’s not simple. Reams of books have been written on Satan. Elaine Pagels’s book,
The Origin of Satan,
is a great one to start with. Here is a teaser:

In the Hebrew Bible, as in mainstream Judaism to this day, Satan never appears as Western Christendom has come to know him, as the leader of an “evil empire,” an army of hostile spirits who make war on God and humankind alike. As he first appears in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily evil, much less opposed to God…. In biblical sources the Hebrew term
satan
describes an adversarial role. It is not the name of a particular character. …
The satan’s
presence in a story could help account for unexpected obstacles or reversals of fortune. Hebrew storytellers often attribute misfortunes to human sin.

In deciding how I would describe the city people, I came upon the Sumerians’ fascinating culture—at the Ancient Near Eastern Art Exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Susan Pollock’s
Ancient Mesopotamia,
Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat’s
Daily Life in Ancient Meso potamia,
and Jean Bottéro’s
Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
(translated by Antonia Nevill), and Leonard Cottrell’s
The Quest for Sumer.
Absolutely delightful was Samuel Noah Kramer’s
History Begins at Sumer.
Readers might be interested in the Sumerian CD collection from the California Museum of Ancient Art—talks given by Dr. Samuel Noah Kramer, Dr. Wolfgang Heimpel, and Dr. William Fulco—on everything from astronomy to Inanna to shepherds. Although I do not call my city people
Sumerians,
they carry numerous similarities.

When Balili the priest tells Dara and the children about Inanna and the
huluppu-tree,
he says that Inanna made a
pukku
and a
mikku
for Gilgamesh, who had saved her. Opinions range widely on what those objects were. Some conjectures: a drum and drumstick, a hockey stick and puck, or a ball and stick.

Again, when Dara uses a word she doesn’t know—
gidim—
she likes the effect it has on Shala, her naughty little charge. What she doesn’t know is that the
gidim
were the Sumerians’ unburied and wandering dead.

On the character of Eve, I consulted numerous books on how Eve is seen in various cultures and how she has been portrayed in history and literature, for I wanted an Eve who seemed achingly real. Someone with whom I could identify. Someone for whom I was rooting. I relied on Mishael M. Caspi’s
Eve in Three Traditions and Literatures: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
(in collaboration with Mohammad Jiyad), Pamela Norris’s
Eve: A Biography,
and Carol Meyers’s
Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context.
But mostly Eve comes from my heart and from the experiences of my women friends. After all, if she is human, then she has felt everything we feel.

As you already know, the skeleton of the Adam and Eve story is there in Genesis. I have had to bulk it up with fat and bones.
Fictional
fat and bones. Eve’s daughters have emerged from my imagination, as does the reason why Elohim rejected Cain’s offering. I have had to concoct a solution to the puzzle of why Elohim would reward one child and not the other, when they both were being dutiful in their offerings—externally, anyway. I used Rabbi David Fohrman’s
The Beast That Crouches at the Door
to sort out, in my mind, why Cain would kill Abel and what would lead him to do such a thing.

I think the most difficult thing about the writing of the story was how to portray Elohim—how He spoke, what He looked like. I ran the risk of making Him appear like Bob Newhart, and that, I didn’t want, as you can imagine—my sincerest apologies to Bob Newhart. Eve is at a loss for words, as I was too.

It was in the researching of Sumeria that I discovered the sensual Inanna. Cities in Sumeria were often dedicated to one god over all others—and indeed this was the case in the ancient city of Erech, of which she had divine rulership—thus I made Inanna my city’s primary goddess. Texts differ on what, exactly, she is the goddess of, but according to the wonderfully translated
Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth
by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna is the Goddess of Love and Procreation, worshipped in a “Sacred Marriage” ceremony at the New Year’s festival in the fall. The reigning monarch “marries” Inanna, which ensures the fertility of the soil and the fecundity of the womb. Naava is Inanna’s substitute, in this case. Neither Naava nor her family—except Cain—understands the significance of this rite. Hence the chaotic aftermath. In later years, the poets continued composing songs for this female goddess, but sang them to Ishtar, Inanna’s Semitic name.

One of the outstanding features of a Sumerian city is its ziggurat—the tall, stepped, pyramidlike structure with a temple at the top. No one knows why the Sumerians built them. We might surmise they wanted to reach the heavens, where their gods existed. I discovered that the first city of Sumeria, Eridu, had a small one. In Eridu’s earliest phases—dating back to approximately 5500 BC—its ziggurat measured about twelve by fifteen feet. It was made of mud brick and had a niche made for a god’s statue and a single altar upon which sacrifices were laid. What a quandary Adam and Eve would be in if confronted with such idolatry! What would they have made of it?

Amazingly enough, the crops and cuisine of the Mesopotamian region today—present-day Iraq—are similar to what they were back in ancient times. I consulted two fine books—one scientific, the other contemporary—on Mesopotamian eating habits. The first was Jean Bottéros
The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia
(translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan), and the second was Nawal Nasrallah’s
Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine.

Cuneiform writing was introduced by the Sumerians. It began as simple symbols for objects, etched into wet clay with a reed stylus. Later, the symbols were transformed into more elaborate drawings that could substitute for a situation or a phrase. Often, these drawings can only be translated
in context.
Priest-scribes were usually the ones who taught cuneiform in the schools, but overall, cuneiform writing was used for business transactions and archival records and storytelling. Dara learns the most primitive of this cuneiform, in which one might be able to guess immediately what the picture stands for.

Tentative in my usage of the elements of time,
day
and
year,
I was astonished to discover that the Sumerians had already figured out the patterns of the months and seasons. In following the moons phases, they were continually short about eleven and three-quarters of a day, so they adjusted their “lunar-year calendar” to account for lost time. I refer to the day and night cycle being like our own, but to the Mesopotamians, the day cycle began at sunset. A day lasted from sunset to sunset.

In deciding how Eve and her daughters would render their speech, I fell back on the fact that even historians have difficulty deciphering Sumerian cuneiform texts. I did not want the language to be jolting or archaic in any way. I did not want my reader to stumble upon the prose and grow frustrated with it. As you know, the English language is replete with words that are derived from other languages, so I became flummoxed with which words I could use, which words I should avoid. In the end, the only thing I avoided was to use terms they might not understand at the time. What this means is that Eve could not have talked about a “steel-gray sky” because steel did not yet exist. She
does
use the word
plagued
because, although we relate that particular word to bubonic plague, there certainly were other plagues at the time—animal plagues, such as locusts, or biological plagues, such as sickness and disease. When Eve is in the Garden, she refers to Lucifer’s many colors in terms of precious stones, which she could not have known at the time, but remember, she is looking back on her life,
after
she has grown familiar with the precious stones introduced by the city people.