Sex and Wisdom: What the Garden of Eden Story Is Saying

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Much ink has been spilled over the Garden of Eden episode (Genesis 2:4b–3:24), but its meaning remains elusive. I submit, however, that there is a plain, unambiguous meaning to the story, which we can readily see by paying close attention to the text, unencumbered by the overlay of subsequent theological traditions. It is a story about sexual awareness and the creativity of which that is a part.

The first human couple is portrayed in two different accounts or traditions. The first is in Genesis 1:1–2:4a. There, the command “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28) cannot apply to the limited space of the Garden of Eden, the setting for the second tradition. After all, Adam and Eve are immortal; if the command were followed and it were applicable to the time they lived in the Garden of Eden, it would soon be overpopulated.

Turning to the second tradition (Genesis 2:4b–3:24), the key to the story is the prohibition against eating from the tree of “knowledge of good and evil.” This expression occurs four times in this story (Genesis 2:9, 17; 3:5, 22). In this context, its meaning is not clear; but the expression “knowledge of good and evil” is found elsewhere in the Bible, where its meaning can be ascertained. Consider two such occurrences: Barzillai, David’s quartermaster general, says “I am now eighty years old. Can I distinguish between good and evil? Can your servant taste what he eats and drinks? Can I still listen to the singing of men and women?” (2 Samuel 19:36). Of course, Barzillai can “distinguish between good and evil.” He has something else in mind. He claims that he can no longer taste food or enjoy music. One need not know Omar Khayyam to realize that the third element after wine and song is—women.

A second example: Moses reminds his people that they will not enter the land, but “your children who do not yet know good from evil, they shall enter it” (Deuteronomy 1:39). Since these “children” are under the age of twenty (see Numbers 14:29–31), and many of them know the difference between good and evil, Moses probably means unmarried children, that is, those who have had no sexual experience.

In short, knowing the difference between good and evil is often a Biblical code phrase for sexual experience.

Turning back to the Garden of Eden text, note that two verses frame the episode of eating the fruit. The one before it states, “The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25). The one after states, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). The Bible thus explicitly informs us that after eating the forbidden fruit, they were ashamed of their nakedness. Does this not tell us, through euphemistic language, that Adam and Eve had sex?

I add one more bit of evidence. After eating the fruit, Adam’s consort undergoes a name change: Heretofore she was called “woman”; henceforth she is “Eve, because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 2:23; 3:20). Before eating the fruit, she did not bear children—which suggests that Adam and Eve had no sexual intercourse in the Garden.

There are five possible objections to my thesis:

(1) “Hence a man…cleaves to his wife” (Genesis 2:24) implies that Adam and Eve, as initially created, were intended for cohabitation in the Garden. But this is an editorial gloss and not an integral part of the narrative.

(2) After their expulsion from the Garden, the text tells us that Adam “knew his wife Eve” (Genesis 4:1). This, however, does not mean that the two had sex only after they were evicted from Eden; the Hebrew yad‘a (knew) is a pluperfect and should be rendered “had known”; that is, they had cohabited in the Garden. Here, incidentally, as everyone recognizes, the words “know” and “knowledge” are used in a sexual sense.

(3) Some might argue that Eve’s pain in childbirth is increased (Genesis 3:16) and that this implies that she was able to bear children before she ate the fruit. This turns out to be no objection at all. Of course she had the potential to bear children in the Garden, but she lacked sexual awareness.

The remaining two objections are more difficult to answer, but they lead to a deeper meaning of the story. I will deal with them together, rather than separately.

(4) Adam is warned against eating the forbidden fruit even before the woman is created (Genesis 2:17). If the story is about sexual awareness, as I contend, and eating the fruit would create sexual awareness, what sense does it make to prohibit Adam from engaging in sex before there was a woman? (5) Surprisingly, the effect of eating the fruit is that “your eyes will be opened and you will be like God [or ‘divine beings’] who knows good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, see also 3:22). If I am correct, so my opponents will argue, this implies that the God of the Bible indulges in sex (“You will be like God”). Sex may be a divine characteristic in polytheistic religions, but surely not in monotheistic Israel!

The answer to objections (4) and (5) is that sex in the Bible stands for something 052more than carnal relations. Its essence has been astutely captured in the rabbinic statement, “Were it not for the evil inclination [which includes sexual drive] a man would neither build a house, nor marry a woman, nor beget children” (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). The rabbis have intuited that sex is an outward manifestation of the creative impulse. The creative impulse can either be constructive or destructive as the rabbis recognized. This, then, is the meaning of the biblical idiom “knowledge of good and evil” creative impulse as manifested in sex (knowledge), can either build a world (good) or destroy it (evil).

This insight enables us to penetrate the metaphoric imagery of the Garden of Eden story. The serpent revealed to Eve that eating the fruit would endow her creative power—a divine characteristic (Genesis 3:5, 22). And if Eve and subsequently Adam yielded to this temptation, it is precisely because they wanted that power. Life in the Garden was paradisal bliss, but it was limited and boring. Adam and Eve already had immortality, presumably by having eaten of the tree of life which was not forbidden to them. Only of the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden (Genesis 2:16–17). Having eaten of the latter tree, if they continue eating from the tree of life, they will possess both immortality and creativity. In short, they will be gods! Their banishment from Eden thus became inevitable: “Now that the man has become like one of us…the Lord God banished him from the Garden” (Genesis 3:22–23).

Indeed, each of the “curses” pronounced against them can be seen as the logical consequence of their “sin” in eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. One curse applies to both Adam and Eve. As God said: “As soon as you eat of it, you shall die” (Genesis 2:17); that is, God is revoking the effect from eating on the tree of life. Here Biology confirms the biblical insight at sexuality is intertwined with death. The lower life forms protozoa, coelenterates, worms, etc.—are immortal in the sense that they divide and their Protoplasm exists eternally. Animals that reproduce sexually are mortal because their protoplasmic existence finite. They age and die. Their immortality is only that of their progeny created sexually through their seed. Thus sexual “knowledge” is inextricably linked to its effect, mortality.

Another curse involves woman, who loses her equal status with man (the meaning of “helpmate,” literally “a parallel helper” who has equal status^a [Genesis 2:18, 20]). She becomes subservient to him (Genesis 3:16), a reflection of her status through the ages. For man, in turn, the curse is “By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat” (Genesis 3:19). In truth, agriculture constitutes the first revolution in the creation of human civilization. Both sex and agriculture create life, one through the body, the other through the soil—but with pain.

Thus the “original sin” is sex—if we keep in mind that sex means the power to create. And the biblical story of its acquisition is not really one of sin and curse, but rather, of choice and consequence. God, so to speak tells the first human couple that they would be better off in Eden. But he gives them the choice—its consequence. The serpent clued them in as to the real effect of the fruit: It would make them like God (Genesis 3:5). They took that option, and we are here today with the power to create God’s kingdom on earth or to turn it into hell.

Much ink has been spilled over the Garden of Eden episode (Genesis 2:4b–3:24), but its meaning remains elusive. I submit, however, that there is a plain, unambiguous meaning to the story, which we can readily see by paying close attention to the text, unencumbered by the overlay of subsequent theological traditions. It is a story about sexual awareness and the creativity of which that is a part. The first human couple is portrayed in two different accounts or traditions. The first is in Genesis 1:1–2:4a. There, the command “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28) cannot […]