The Genesis of Justice (6 page)

to refrain from eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Yet it was Eve, and all future Eves, who were punished most severely, not
only in absolute terms, but also relative to Adam and future Adams: “Toward your husband will be your lust, yet he will rule
over you.” Here we find the origin of the infamous double standard regarding sex: Women must be monogamous toward their husbands,
but husbands are free to direct their lust at other unmarried women—that is, women who do not “belong” to other men. In the
command that wives must be submissive to husbands, we also see the origins of misogyny.

An anthropological explanation of Eve’s punishment might take the form of a “just so” story.
¹⁴
These mythological tales begin with observable phenomena—for instance, a leopard’s spots or an elephant’s long ears—and weave
narratives that purport to “explain” them. Just as leopards always had spots and elephants long ears, so too the double standard
and the submissiveness of women had long been observable realities. The punishment of Eve could be viewed as a “just so” story
explaining these observable phenomena. Yet there is an obvious difference: Spots and ears are biological facts with no moral
connotation, whereas the double standard and the submissiveness of wives is anything but biologically determined and morally
neutral. It is prescriptive as well as descriptive of past practices that are capable of changing—unless, of course, they
are deemed to be divinely ordained.

The inequality of women—a characteristic of most traditional religions and cultures—violates modern sensibilities. For that
reason, contemporary religious law struggles mightily to interpret the punishment of Eve as the decision by God to assign
to women a different, but not unequal, role in the life of the family. These efforts cannot help but invoke analogies to the
“separate but equal” doctrine under which blacks were segregated from whites during the Jim Crow era of American history.
Just as blacks were surely separate but never equal, so too wives were assigned different roles but were never the equals
of their husbands. God’s own words prove this inequality beyond dispute: Your husband “will rule over you.” There is nothing
ambiguous—either in the original Hebrew word
yimshol
or in the English translation “rule”—about the relative status of husband and wife. He is the ruler, she the ruled. All because
Eve was persuaded by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit and then invited Adam to do likewise.

Based on this sequence of events, it is neither logical nor moral that husbands should rule over wives. Eve had a far more
compelling defense than Adam. She was never told directly by God about the prohibition, and she was misinformed about its
scope by Adam, who told her that God’s prohibition extended beyond eating and included even
touching
the fruit. This misinformation allowed the serpent—who was “more shrewd than all the living beings of the field”—to entice
Eve into sin. Indeed, a midrash cautions: “You must not make the fence [around the law] more than the principled thing, lest
it fall and destroy the plants.”
¹⁵
In other words, if you make prohibitions so broad they will not be enforced, the law may lose its credibility, as it did
to Eve. Meanwhile, Adam—the direct recipient of God’s commandment—did not need to be enticed. He was simply offered the fruit
and accepted it. Eve did not compel or order Adam to eat it. She did not act as a ruler and Adam as a subject. Why then does
Adam and do all future Adams get to rule over Eve and all future Eves? We are not given a good answer. By any standard of
law, justice, or equity, the punishment inflicted on all women on account of Eve’s sin is unfair. Nor did the punishment rationally
“fit the crime.” What do labor pains, lust, and subordination have to do with Eve’s sin?

It is interesting to speculate what God’s punishments would have been had Eve eaten the fruit but never offered it to Adam
or if Adam had rejected it. (In an effort to mitigate Adam’s sin, a midrash speculates that “he had engaged in his natural
functions [in other words, intercourse] and then fallen asleep,” so that he was not present during the serpent’s conversation
with Eve and presumably was unaware that the fruit given to him by Eve came from the forbidden tree.
¹⁶
) If Eve alone had eaten, she would have knowledge of good and evil, and Adam would have remained happily ignorant and immortal.
Who would have ruled over whom? We will never know.

Until the twentieth century, women were legally subordinate to men in nearly all countries. Historically a wife would not
sue her husband or act independently of him. As recently as 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant
group in the United States, declared that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership.
¹⁷
There were also some advantages growing out of such subordination. Until the nineteenth century, a wife who committed certain
crimes in the presence of her husband was deemed by the common law to be acting on his behalf and at his direction. The husband,
not the wife, was held responsible. God, however, did not grant Eve this advantage. Clearly he regarded her as the more culpable:
She was punished before Adam and more severely.
¹⁸
Even Adam’s defense showed less remorse. He blamed Eve
and God
for his own sin by saying: “The woman
whom you gave to be beside me
, she gave me from the tree” (emphasis added).

Throughout the Bible we see numerous instances of women regarded as legally subordinate but psychologically dominant and manipulative,
especially when such a perspective serves the interests of the patriarchal society. Nor is this inconsistency limited to biblical
times. As recently as the early 1950s, Ethel Rosenberg—who played a minor role in her husband Julius’s espionage—was executed
because she was deemed to be the stronger of the couple emotionally. When it comes to the role of women, male-dominated societies—from
biblical times to the recent past and in some places to the present—want to have it both ways. They can point to the story
of Adam and Eve as support for any number of double standards. By imposing misogynistic punishments on innocent future generations—instead
of carrying out the punishment He had threatened—God paved the way for an inequality that would endure for millennia.

Even had God followed through precisely on his threat to Adam, there would still be questions about God’s justice. If Adam
and Eve did not know the difference between good and evil
before
eating of the tree, how could they fairly be punished for being deceived by the serpent into violating God’s prohibition?
In most societies committed to the rule of law, the basic test of responsibility is the capacity to distinguish right from
wrong. If a paranoid schizophrenic shoots a man he honestly, but mistakenly, believes is about to shoot him, he cannot be
held responsible for his conduct. As Maimonides posed the question in the language of his time: “By what right or justice
could God punish” if humans lacked free will?
¹⁹

Since sin is impossible without some understanding of the difference between right and wrong—animals can’t sin—eating the
forbidden fruit was the
prerequisite
for all
future
sins. This may explain the word “original,” as it relates to the eating of the fruit, but it still doesn’t explain “sin,”
since before eating the fruit Adam and Eve lacked the requisite knowledge to distinguish right from wrong. They were more
like intelligent dogs disobeying a trainer’s command than sentient human beings making a deliberate decision to do wrong.

Maimonides addressed this conundrum directly. He believed that Adam and Eve had been endowed with basic intelligence even
before God commanded them not to eat of the tree: “A command is not given to . . . one lacking intelligence.”
²⁰
Maimonides believed that they lacked knowledge relating only to matters of sexuality and shame. Yet if, as Maimonides argues,
they did have sufficient judgment to understand commands, were they not right to eat from the Tree of Knowledge—even in the
face of God’s threat? Knowledge inevitably creates the desire for greater knowledge. That is the history and destiny of humankind.
The quest for knowledge can never be satisfied. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it has been the engine of human progress.
The legendary official who at the end of the nineteenth century suggested closing the patent office because everything that
could be invented already had been did not understand how innovations create the need for additional innovations ad infinitum.
As Ecclesiastes observed: “God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions” (7:29). Could an omniscient God
really have expected humans created in His image to be satisfied with less knowledge than they were capable of obtaining?
Were Adam and Eve not justified in engaging in religious disobedience of God’s command? Is not greater knowledge with mortality
more valuable then ignorant immortality? Would not most intelligent beings choose what Socrates called an “examined life”
with mortality over an unexamined life without end? At a more fundamental level, it can be argued that it is the knowledge
of mortality itself that is essential to understanding, in any real sense, the difference between good and evil. An immortal
being, knowing that he or she will never die, does not have to make difficult choices. Everything can be made right over time.
It is the knowledge of mortality—the realization that life could end at any moment—that requires constant choices. A Buddhist
maxim says, “Death is the best teacher,” while to Kafka, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” In this respect, God’s threat
can be seen as self-enforcing—a prediction rather than a threat: By eating of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve
learned
that they were mortal, something animals do not comprehend.
That
was the knowledge they obtained by eating the forbidden fruit. Realizing that they could die compelled them to make choices
about good and evil. As rabbis, ministers, and priests remind us at funerals—particularly those of young people who die suddenly—we
must always have our moral ledgers balanced, since death may strike at any time. In the absence of death, moral choices may
be postponed forever. Thus, with a single bold act of defiance,

human beings learned of their mortality and realized that they faced brief and painful lives, filled with difficult choices.

Knowledge brings with it the realization that life is not Eden, that it entails pain and toil, which will continue beyond
your own life to that of your children and your children’s children. Nothing worth having—children, sustenance, wisdom—will
come without a heavy price. These are the burdens of knowledge. How much simpler is the innocence of Eden, where ignorance
is indeed bliss. As Ecclesiastes recognized: “Because I increased my knowledge, I increased my sorrow.” The mid–twentieth
century theologian Martin Buber takes this observation one step further. He regards God’s decision to inflict mortality on
human beings as an act of compassion. “Now that human beings have discovered the tensions inherent in human life, God acts
to prevent ‘the eons of suffering’ that would result from eating of the tree of life. Hence, death.”
²¹

My own favorite interpretation of God’s failure to carry out His first threat is that God Himself was still learning about
justice and injustice. The text of Genesis supports the view of an imperfect, learning God. When He creates, He stands back
in wonderment and, like a human artist looking at a canvas, observes that His creations are “good,” thus implying it might
have turned out otherwise. An omniscient and omnipotent God would have no need to look back at what He knows will always be
perfect. Later He repents the creation of man, in effect conceding that this particular creation was not so good.
²²
As we will see in subsequent narratives, this is a God capable not only of “repenting,” but also of being persuaded by humans
and of learning from His own divine mistakes. Perhaps He realized that He was wrong to threaten immediate death as a consequence
for the desire to obtain knowledge. God should have realized that His test of Adam and Eve was really a “catch-22.” Had the
humans remained obedient, they would have been barely distinguishable from the beasts—hardly a fitting status for those created
in God’s image. By disobeying God’s unfair prohibition, however, they became the original sinners whose punishment would be
transmitted from generation to generation. God’s first command is an example of law without reason—
chok
. God never sought to explain to Adam why he had to refrain from eating the fruit of knowledge. On the contrary, His command
defies reason, since it is entirely natural for humans to seek knowledge, especially when it is so pleasant to taste and easy
to secure. It is not surprising, therefore, that God’s first command is disobeyed. Perhaps God learns an important lesson
from His initial failure as a lawgiver: Humans are more likely to obey reasoned rules consistent with their nature than arbitrary
dictates that fly in the face of everything human beings are about. Perhaps God’s initial command necessarily had to be a
chok
, since humans lacked the knowledge presumed by reasoned orders. Once Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of knowledge they became
subject to rule by human reason. Similarly with young children who lack reason, a parent’s earliest commands must necessarily
be
chukim
, which gradually evolve into
mishpatim
as children develop their ability to understand rather than simply obey. Parents are sometimes slow to recognize that reasoned
orders, when age appropriate, tend to be more effective than authoritarian commands. Instead some become too comfortable with
the power to issue unreasoned dictates. Martinet judges never seem to understand this reality of human nature: They become
furious when people disobey their commands, even if the command itself is not substantively important. “Because
I
said so,” is the common refrain. Contempt of court is the sanction for disobeying even a trivial order of a judge. I have
seen judges impose harsh punishments for minor violations of their orders, citing the “majesty of the law” or “the dignity
of the court.” A wise judge often backs away from his initial threat, realizing that the violation does not really warrant
the threatened punishment.