Back to the Garden

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When I first began teaching Old Testament and Hebrew Bible, I happened upon a little book by Conrad L’Heureux called In and Out of Paradise (Paulist Press, 1983). The volume is full of helpful insights about the biblical Primordial History—the stories from the Creation to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 1–11). To this day, I find myself reminding my students, as L’Heureux does, that the punishments God metes out to Adam, Eve and the natural world (Genesis 3:14–19) are “descriptive, not prescriptive.” In other words, the punishments are the Yahwist’s description of how things are (what philosophers call the “human condition”), not how they are supposed to be.

L’Heureux skewers the logic of those Bible interpreters who have claimed that Genesis 3:16—“and [your husband] shall rule over you”—proves that women should be subservient to men. According to L’Heureux, if one reads 3:16 to mean that men must dominate women, then by the same logic, Genesis 3:18–19 (“Cursed be the ground…thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you”) prohibits the use of weed killers on any prickly plants the earth might bring forth. Heaven help any farmer whose air-conditioned tractor keeps him sweat-free as he tends his fields! Because only “by the sweat of your brow, shall you get bread to eat” (Genesis 3:19). And, of course, whoever sees a snake must stomp on its head (Genesis 3:15).

L’Heureux’s brilliantly ridiculous reading of the Punishment Poem (Genesis 3:14–19) has inspired me to look more closely at this text and its stark theme of alienation.

Study this punitive ending to Adam and Eve’s stay in the Garden, and you will find clues to what things were like before the first couple disobeyed God’s instruction. Do this, and you will see a kind of photographic negative of pre-Fall Eden. By reversing the negatives of the poem, you will be able to glimpse the lost positives of the Garden and gain a richer appreciation of the world as God meant it to be.^a

The very fact that Genesis 3:14–19 consists of harsh words highlights the newly broken relationship between humans and God. The split involves a physical separation from God: Before God begins to speak, Adam and Eve are hiding among the trees; later they are expelled from the Garden. Humans have lost 011the face-to-face, personal connection to God they enjoyed in the Garden.

With the cursing of the earth, the man (Hebrew, adam) also loses his connection to the earth (Hebrew, adamah) from which he was formed by Yahweh. The fertility that prevailed in the Garden is at stake. Before the Fall, tilling the Garden required “no sweat” and no weeds diverted the earth’s nourishment from the Garden’s fruitful plants. Notably, God afflicts the man and woman equally in terms of their fertility. As a farmer, Adam will suffer to ensure fruitful fields just as the woman suffers to bring forth the fruit of her womb.

What about the snake? It’s too much to claim that the snake symbolizes the entire animal kingdom. Nevertheless, the new enmity between human and snake represents the kind of physical violence found in the natural world but not in the Garden.

Last, but not least, what about the relationship between the man and the woman? 046We see the lost harmony first when Adam tries to shift the blame onto Eve (“She gave me of the tree,” he tells Yahweh in Genesis 3:12). The depth and dreadfulness of this loss are conveyed by Yahweh’s warning that the woman’s desire will bring pain (childbirth) and the chilling assertion that the man will now rule over the woman (3:16). Reading backwards, we can detect the earlier mutuality between the man and woman, a harmonious relationship expressed by Genesis 2:23, in which the man “clings to his wife” and together they are “one flesh.” The harmony of the relationship is evident even without the philological argument that the Hebrew words designating Eve as Adam’s “helper as his partner” (Genesis 2:18) does not imply subordination.

Explicitly or implicitly, all religious traditions confront the human condition. Jews, Christians and Muslims articulate their awareness of the all-too-human dilemmas of injustice, suffering and death with a version of the Adam and Eve story. Each religious tradition tries in its own way to restore the harmonies that were modeled for us before the Fall and to bring us back to the Garden.

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The Punishment Poem

¹⁴Then the Lord said to the serpent,

“Because you did this,

More cursed shall you be

Than all cattle

And all the wild beasts:

On your belly shall you crawl

And dirt shall you eat

All the days of your life.

¹⁵I will put enmity

Between you and the woman,

And between your offspring and hers;

They shall strike at your head,

And you shall strike at their heel.”

¹⁶And to the woman He said,

“I will make most severe

Your pangs in childbearing;

In pain shall you bear children.

Yet your urge shall be for your husband,

And he shall rule over you.”

¹⁷To Adam He said, “Because you did as your wife said and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’

Cursed be the ground because of you;

By toil shall you eat of it

All the days of your life:

¹⁸Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you.

But your food shall be the grasses of the field;

¹⁹By the sweat of your brow

Shall you get bread to eat,

Until you return to the ground—

For from it you were taken.

For dust you are,

And to dust you shall return.”

Genesis 3:14–19

When I first began teaching Old Testament and Hebrew Bible, I happened upon a little book by Conrad L’Heureux called In and Out of Paradise (Paulist Press, 1983). The volume is full of helpful insights about the biblical Primordial History—the stories from the Creation to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 1–11). To this day, I find myself reminding my students, as L’Heureux does, that the punishments God metes out to Adam, Eve and the natural world (Genesis 3:14–19) are “descriptive, not prescriptive.” In other words, the punishments are the Yahwist’s description of how things are (what philosophers call the […]