Dealing with the Devil

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Adam’s Contract with Satan

Michael E. Stone
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002) 194 pp., $39.95 (hardback)

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Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden serves as the foundation for Western theologies of the way we are: sinful and guilty. As the New England Primer of 1683 succinctly states: “In Adam’s fall, We sinned all.” For their sin, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden in Genesis 3. In the next chapter, we find them established farmers with two ill-fated sons. But the Bible tells us little beyond that. Did Adam and Eve ever regret their mistake? Did they repent and mend their ways? Or, in their lives east of Eden, did they continue to pass the blame for the human condition, just as Adam once blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake?

Ancient authors couldn’t resist speculating about what happened to the first couple between Genesis 3 and 4. The first such accounts likely originated among Jews during the Second Temple period (roughly 515 B.C.E.-72 C.E.). It was at this time that the serpent became identified with a figure adversarial to God, namely Satan, whose influence over Adam and Eve, and humankind in general, lasted long after the Fall. (In Genesis, the serpent plays instead the role of the “trickster,” a common figure in many religious traditions.)¹

These Jewish tales of Adam and Eve’s traffic with Satan exerted noteworthy influence on the Christian community, especially in 022the East, almost from the very beginning of the church. The Christian community recorded the tales in several fascinating and fun yet relatively little-known apocryphal texts with an unusual theological point all their own.

Michael E. Stone, professor of Armenian studies and the Gail Levin de Nur Professor of Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has long had an interest in the Adam and Eve apocryphal literature. His History of the Literature of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992) is a technical discussion of interrelationships among the dozens of Adam and Eve apocrypha. His most recent publication, Adam’s Contract with Satan: The Legend of the Cheirograph of Adam (under review here), presents his analysis of the stories in a manner that is not only useful to scholars but is accessible to the interested public.

The Adam and Eve apocrypha occur in at least two layers of tradition. The first, probably dating from the Greco-Roman period and most popular in Judaism and the very early church, includes such manuscripts as The Life of Adam and Eve, the misnamed Apocalypse of Moses (which is actually about the Adam and Eve stories) and the Penitence of Adam. The stories are found in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Georgian, Armenian and other languages.² The gist of these tales is that Adam and Eve, after their expulsion, wish to repent and do so by fasting for 40 days while standing in the Tigris River. Satan is so upset at this that he appears to Eve in the form of an angel and tricks her into thinking that the 40 days are up and she has already completed the penance. She succumbs to Satan’s trickery once again, just as she had in the Garden, and Adam is furious. He had warned Eve that she might be tempted again, and so now he rails at her: “O Eve, Eve, where is the labor of thy penitence? How hast thou been again ensnared by our adversary, by whose means we have been estranged from our abode in paradise and spiritual joy?”³ Thus Adam completes his penitence while Eve does not, and the blame for human troubles is thereby laid specifically and heavily at Eve’s feet.

This account reflects the church’s tendency to blame Eve, rather than Adam and Eve jointly, for the Fall. The same trend can be traced by comparing Romans 5:14, in which Paul lays the responsibility on Adam—“death held sway from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned as Adam did, by disobeying a direct command”—with 1 Timothy 2:13–14, where we read that “it was not Adam who was deceived; it was the woman who, yielding to deception, fell into sin.”^a

The second tradition, popular in the Balkan areas from at least as early as the Middle Ages, adds a further twist. In this version, Satan’s second temptation of Eve fails—but, in Satan’s mind, if two wrongs don’t make a right, try a third. This third time, Satan takes no chances. He tricks Adam into signing a contract (Greek, cheirographos—literally meaning “handwritten document”) agreeing to be Satan’s servant.

There are three variants of this second tradition, but in each Satan takes advantage of Adam and Eve’s ignorance to get Adam to sign on the dotted line.

In the first version, Adam sets out to till the earth, as God had commanded (in Genesis 3:7–19, 23). But Satan approaches him and forbids Adam to plow, claiming that he owns the earth. Adam “knew that the Lord would descend on the earth and would take upon himself the form of a man and would tread the devil under him,”⁴ so Adam assumes that Satan must be telling the truth, that he temporarily owns the earth. Duped by the devil, Adam signs the contract, or cheirograph, making him Satan’s tenant farmer until the coming of Jesus.

In a second version of the cheirograph tale, Adam and Eve, when they are first cast out of the garden, do not know what day and night are. (According to these tales, the garden had always been lit with a heavenly light.) It happens to be nighttime when they leave Eden, and so Adam believes he will have to live in darkness forever. Satan takes advantage of his ignorance: “I shall give you light. Inscribe yourself (as belonging to me) by your handwriting and also (about) your family and children.” So Adam signs the contract and only realizes he has been duped when the daylight occurs naturally. But Satan has hidden the contract: 023“The devil took Adam’s handwriting and hid it (in the Jordan) under a stone where Christ was baptized.”⁵

The third form of the cheirograph story is more elaborate. Cain is born as a monster: “His head was like others, but on his breast and forehead there were twelve snake heads. When Eve suckled him, the snake heads tormented her stomach, and our original mother Eve was covered by a scab because of this torment and fierce torture.”⁶ Satan promises to relieve Eve’s pain and cure Cain if Adam will sign a contract with the devil. So Adam slaughters a goat and uses its blood to sign the cheirograph with the words: “The living are God’s and the dead are yours”—that is, Satan’s. Satan then removes the torturing snakes and puts them in the Jordan to guard the cheirograph. But when Jesus is later baptized in the Jordan, he crushes the snakes. The devil holds on to the cheirograph, however, and brings “the remainders of the handwriting … to Hell where the saints were imprisoned.” But when Jesus rises from the dead and descends into Hell, he tears 024up (or smashes—in some versions the contract is inscribed on stone) the contract, “and he bound the devil and released the souls from Hell and brought them to the first [kind of] Paradise.”⁷

These stories about Adam and Eve and the contract with Satan live in contemporary folktales, especially in the Balkans, Russia and Greece, and have long been part of the pictorial arts in these areas of the Eastern church. A 16th-century mural from a church in Moldavia, in Romania, shows Adam signing the cheirograph in the presence of Satan.

Elements of the second and third variant of the cheirograph story (in which Satan hides the cheirograph in the Jordan, where it is protected by snakes, and Jesus later crushes the snakes and retrieves the contract from Hell) appear more frequently—in Eastern 025images of Jesus’ baptism and the Resurrection.

In the Eastern church, images of the Resurrection are called the Anastasis (from the Greek for “Resurrection”), and they depict Jesus beating down the doors of Hell and rescuing Adam, Eve and other souls. (In the West the scene is known as the “Descent into Hell” or the “Harrowing of Hell”).^b Anastasis images appear in virtually every Eastern Orthodox church, and some (like the painting on the cover of this issue) show Jesus carrying a scroll, which is probably the cheirograph he retrieved from Hell. At least one 17th-century icon shows Jesus tearing the scroll right out of Satan’s hands.

In the third version of the cheirograph story, the contract protected by serpents is sometimes described as being a stone tablet or clay brick rather than a scroll. Stone relates a Romanian folktale in which “Satan asks for the contract to be written. Adam says he cannot write because when he was small there was no school for either Hungarians or Romanians.”⁸ So Satan accepts a handprint on a brick. In images of the baptism, Jesus is sometimes shown treading upon the serpents in the river (as in the 16th-century Armenian gospel illumination shown) or standing upon a rock tablet—the contract—guarded by serpents.

The earliest manuscripts containing stories of Adam’s contract with Satan date to the early Middle Ages, but the tales themselves are likely much older. It is possible they were even known to some New Testament writers. The word cheirographos occurs only once in the New Testament, in Colossians 2:13–14, but it is a key word in a powerful and suggestive passage: “And though we were dead in our transgressions and in the circumcision of our flesh, he has made us alive with him, forgiving us of all sins. He has canceled the contract (cheirographos) and all its stipulations which were laid upon us, and he has set it aside, nailing it to the cross.” This raises the intriguing question, Did the author of Colossians have in mind the legend of Adam’s contract with Satan?

The prevailing interpretation of the “contract” in Colossians 2:13–14 is that it represents a bill of sin-indebtedness that humans incurred because of Adam’s sin; the first couple had broken a divine commandment in a contract held by God. Stone points out, however, that the author of Colossians may be referring instead to a contract in Satan’s keeping, which gives Satan dominion over the earth; the contract does not necessarily involve the breaking of a divine commandment. The church father Tertullian (c. 200 C.E.), in his De pudicitia (About Chastity) speaks of Satan’s holding the “contract.”⁹ As Stone notes, there was a widespread tradition in the church “that Christ annulled Adam’s debt not simply by being nailed to the cross, but by going down into Hades, repossessing the bill, destroying it, and bringing Adam and Eve out.”¹⁰ This is the theme of the images of the Anastasis, mentioned above. In his sixth homily, John Chrysostom (ca. 370–400) says “we were all under sin and punishment. He Himself, through suffering punishment, did away with both the sin and punishment … To the cross then He affixed it; as having power, He tore it apart.”¹¹

What are we to make of these rather obscure legends? They are virtually unknown, especially in the Western church. According to Stone, in his summary chapter, they represent an informal but important type of Christian tradition, especially popular in the Eastern church of the Middle Ages and continuing to this day in folklore. Stone demonstrates that the texts and traditions of these legends tended to survive in certain areas, namely, in Armenia, Russia, Greece, Old Slavonic churches, Romania and Moldavia.¹²

Nevertheless, as Michael Stone notes, the stories of Adam’s contract with Satan present a provocative theological position. In the West, in a view influenced highly by Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Luther and others, the occasion of sin and the fall of humankind are the direct results of disobedience to a divine commandment. In the cheirograph story, however, our fallen state arises from ignorance: namely, Adam’s and Eve’s ignorance. As Stone puts it, “within [the cheirograph stories’] overarching economy of salvation from Adam’s sin to Christ’s crucifixion, a more limited world was perceived … The human condition was, in this smaller perspective, due to a mistake and not to sin … The sense of sin and guilt must have been less oppressive; the yearning for freedom from this worldly subjection to the devil very acute.”¹³

These stories thus propose a concept of the human condition that differs significantly from that of the Western church and its Augustinian view that we are creatures who suffer from personal sin and guilt because, in Adam, we broke a divine commandment. In this Western view, we are, in Martin Luther’s phrase, “at the same time justified and sinners.” Thus, we celebrate our freedom from sin gained on the cross and yet confess that we are still bound by it. It is very possible, then, to picture our struggle as a personal one between our redeemed self and our sinful nature. The cheirograph legend holds a different approach. In its theology, we are a deceived people, no divine edict was transgressed, and our ignorance of the deceit holds us in bondage to a usurper lord of the cosmos, Satan. The struggle then becomes one in which we must overthrow this usurper lord while at the same time understanding that we are already freed from his dominion over the earth. Both the Augustinian (Western) and the cheirograph legends’ theologies therefore explain a basic human paradox. But they do so in significantly different 026ways. The social results of these two struggles may also differ significantly; in the West, the struggle is within us; in the cheirograph stories, the struggle is against a false lord of the world.

In Adam and Eve’s Contract with Satan, Michael Stone presents thorough and fascinating scholarship that will serve well both scholars and the general reader. The book is under 200 pages, but it is packed with information, including the stories themselves, pictorial art and Stone’s insightful commentaries. Stone’s work bears witness to the enduring power of both Jewish and Christian apocryphal literature. Not only does he work with the received texts, he gives us an accounting of the transmission of these stories in folktales and in the pictorial art of the church—vehicles of the faith that are all too often underestimated by those whose main work is with texts and more texts.

Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden serves as the foundation for Western theologies of the way we are: sinful and guilty. As the New England Primer of 1683 succinctly states: “In Adam’s fall, We sinned all.” For their sin, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden in Genesis 3.