Episode 93: Jack Levison on Adam and Eve
Everyone knows the story of Adam and Eve. But do you know what the biblical text actually says? You might not know the story as well as you think you do! This episode is a deep dive of interpretation into the creation of Adam and Eve and the subsequent temptation story.
Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.
George Mason: We all know the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden eating the forbidden fruit and being cursed forever as a result of it. Do we really know this story? We're going to be talking with Professor Jack Levison of Perkins School of Theology at SMU and we'll be learning more about this story and clearing up some of our misconceptions. Stay tuned for Good God.
George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith in public life. I'm your host, George Mason and I'm delighted to welcome back to the program Jack Levison. Jack teaches Old Testament interpretation and Hebrew Bible at the Perkins School of Theology at SMU and he is my friend and a great gift to the church. So thank you for being here with us again, Jack. Good to have you with us.
Jack Levison: You're welcome.
George Mason: Good.
Jack Levison: Thanks George.
George Mason: So the first episode that we filmed together, the conversation we had was on one of the major emphases of your scholarship and that is the Holy Spirit. But when you were actually just getting started doing your PhD, you wrote on the story of Adam and Eve and the work that you did with a little known but highly influential text called The Life of Adam and Eve, which was a Jewish what we call intertestamental piece of writing.
George Mason: I think there's so many ways to go with this, but the story of Adam and Eve is so fascinating to all of our religions and to the way we interpret that in our faith traditions, let's just dive in and talk about Adam and Eve. Most people think they already know the story. They don't even have to go back to read it in Genesis, but my goodness, we take so much to our reading of it that we almost can't hear what the text itself says.
Jack Levison: That's right.
George Mason: So tell us the story over again and tell us where we go wrong in interpreting it.
Jack Levison: Oh, how fun.
George Mason: It's a big big question, I know right?
Jack Levison: My goodness.
George Mason: Only 30 minutes.
Jack Levison: I'll try to make this brief.
George Mason: Okay.
Jack Levison: Basically we do not have Adam and Eve from the start. We have a man who is placed in a garden somewhere in the Middle East in the story, in Eden, where all the rivers converge, belly of the earth. He is told to take care of the garden. Then God sees that it's not good that that man should be alone, and that man is called Adam, which can mean, as you know, either man or human or Adam.
George Mason: Earthling.
Jack Levison: Earthling. Yeah. So it's not necessarily a proper name yet. So the earthling is put in the earth, made from the earth to be in charge of the garden and he's alone, and it's not good. God sees that it's not good that the man, Adam, should be alone. So begins to parade all the animals in front of Adam and Adam realizes the porcupine would not be a good mate and the giraffe would certainly not be a good mate. And so God puts Adam asleep and takes out of Adam's side someone else. Adam wakes up and says, "Oh my goodness." She is woman because she's from man. In the Hebrew, she's Isha because she's from Ish, and they are naked and unashamed and they are together. And the man will actually leave his house to join the woman it says. It becomes sort of the basis of an interesting kind of marriage where the man leaves and joins the woman. But we'll go there another time.
George Mason: Yes.
Jack Levison: And then the serpent begins to talk and the man and the woman are together and the serpent begins to talk to them and to raise doubt, the seeds of doubt. Did God really say? God didn't say that you would die on that day and raises the seeds of doubt and the woman begins to talk to the serpent and the man is standing there but does not intervene.
Jack Levison: And then the woman of course takes of the notorious fruit, eats the fruit and everything begins to-
George Mason: Not necessarily the apple.
Jack Levison: It's not an apple. No, it's not an apple. Yeah. The makers of Pom juice thought it was a pomegranate. They had this censored wonderful advertisement, very, very sensual advertisement that's no longer allowed to be seen that it was a pomegranate. And so everything begins to fall apart and God comes into the garden in the cool, it's actually the wind of the day, the ruach of the day, and begins to ask them where they are. Adam, where are you? Adam, the man, blames the woman for what happened. The woman blames the serpent for what happened. And then God essentially allows the consequences to unfold. They're interpreted as curses, but they're really consequences of this breaking of all the relationships.
Jack Levison: And so the serpent, which had apparently hands and everything will be on its belly and eat dust, the woman will have pain in childbirth and will have a deep desire for her husband and he will rule over her, and then the man will have pain, same word, pain as he eats the bread that he's toiled for, and then they're expelled from the garden. That's awfully long. But that's the story.
George Mason: All right. So now let's get into some of the places where we have perhaps taken this story into dangerous territory for us, into ways that have had unnecessary consequences.
Jack Levison: Oh yeah.
George Mason: So take for instance the creation of the woman from the man to begin with. You say that the text says that God looked upon the animals and did not find a mate who is right for Adam, and so God made the woman from the man and He looks at her and says, "Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman." So the first thing that we see there is that it is not her unlikeness, it is her likeness to him. The sameness, the unlikeness is between them together and the animal world. And yet in so much contemporary theology, we have what's called nowadays complementarianism, which is to say men and women are fundamentally different from one another and therefore have different roles. They are equal in dignity, it said, but they are different in roles and they are stacked in a hierarchy. That's not in the text, is it Jack?
Jack Levison: No. You have to read this through other texts which you've interpreted, typically the letters of Paul, to find that in the text. Let's take a step back.
George Mason: Yes.
Jack Levison: Before she's made, God makes what's called in Hebrew, you know this, an ezer kenegdo, which gets translated in the King James I think it's a help mate.
George Mason: Help mate.
Jack Levison: Which of course we think of as a helper, Daddy's little helper, little assistant, that kind of thing. Until you look up the Hebrew word, word searches matter, and you look up ezer, every other place in the Bible, I think almost without exception or without exception, it's God.
George Mason: God.
Jack Levison: God delivers us. God is our help in trouble, and usually it's in battle. And so the word used of the woman before she's ever on the scene is the word typically used of God in battle, helping those who are embattled. So even more if she's on the scene, she's not an assistant.
George Mason: She is Eve, the warrior princess.
Jack Levison: She is Eve, the warrior princess. She is a mighty woman going to rescue Adam from something. So the first thing, before she's on the scene, she's an ezer kenegdo, like God. The second thing, as soon as he sees her, he doesn't say, "I've got to get my Women are From Venus and Men are From Mars book and have God sign it. He notices similarity, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. I'm even going to call her Isha because she's from Ish. And then they're naked and unashamed, so the differences do not make them despise each other. And then what it says is for this reason a man will leave his own house and join with the woman. So it's a reversal of what we do. So I always tease my undergrads saying, "Why would the woman take the man's name, when in fact it was the man leaving his house to take the woman's life?"
George Mason: Oh my goodness, there you go.
Jack Levison: So all of Genesis 2 is either deliverance by the woman, equality between man and woman, the man, he leaves what he knows to join the woman, and all of this of course in the light of Genesis 1 where male and female are created in the image of God. There is dead downright equality in Genesis 2. Genesis 3 is when the problem begins.
George Mason: Okay, well before we get to Genesis 3, let's stay in Genesis 1 and 2 and go back to another place where we have challenges with this, and that is let's start with gender itself. So we are in an era now when people are asking how do we identify male and female? Are they absolute categories, right? And so when we're talking about transgender persons today, for example, this is a very challenging thing to people who have grown up with a biblical understanding that you are either male or you are female.
Jack Levison: Yeah.
George Mason: It's one of those two things, and you come out presenting one way or another anatomically and that's who you are. And they use the Adam and Eve story to say so, and even before that in Genesis 1 that God created them, male and female. By the way, male and female, not male or female, which is also something that happens when Paul says we no longer have slave nor free, Gentile or Jew, male and female, not male or female. It's very interesting. And so there is a kind of gender fluidity in the text that maybe I'm reading too much into it, but when it says that God created day and night, we seem to be very comfortable with the idea that there could also be dawn and dusk, that there could be twilight and we don't have to have a strict contrast at the poles of day and night. When it comes to gender on the other hand, we have to in some way from a biblical standpoint. What do you make of that?
Jack Levison: I've never thought of the day and night. That's really lovely. On the one hand, I think bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, Ish, Isha, I mean they're just the same Hebrew word with the feminine ending, Ish and Isha. I mean it's not even a different word in Hebrew. So there is this very... There is this much more overlap between the male and female.
Jack Levison: The other side is that Genesis 2 seems to be, in my opinion, working in a different direction as well by flipping marriage. I honestly think in Genesis 2 it's creating an imaginary world in which there wasn't the man ruling the woman, the male being able to give a bill of divorce to a woman in Israel, the man determining the woman's faith. That there was once a time, once upon a time women and men were together and so you could probably expand that into a world in which gender wasn't deeply bifurcated. There wasn't a deep dichotomy. But it ends... Genesis 2 does end with a man leaves. It's kind of the origin of marriage, but it's flipped marriage.
George Mason: That's so fascinating.
Jack Levison: It's flipped marriage.
George Mason: It is. Okay, now before we get too much further down this trail of thought, let's just stop and say the creation of this imaginary world. Some people-
Jack Levison: Not unreal, but imaginary.
George Mason: Okay, well I think that's an important thing.
Jack Levison: Not unreal, but imaginary.
George Mason: So the people saying, "Oh well you don't believe in the real Garden of Eden or the real Adam and Eve."
Jack Levison: That is the real world.
George Mason: It is the real world.
Jack Levison: We have lost.
George Mason: But it's sort of a difference between people thinking that something has to be literally or historically so in order for it to be true. And what you're saying here, if we read between the lines of what you just said is there was a purpose to the writing of this that came after the experience of brokenness.
Jack Levison: Yes.
George Mason: That wanted to go back and say this isn't the way it was supposed to be at the beginning.
Jack Levison: Yes, and you start right there with the way it's supposed to be.
George Mason: Right, right.
Jack Levison: It's supposed to be Ish, Isha, it's supposed to be where women are the ezer, the deliverer. It's supposed to be where men leave and join their wives.
George Mason: Yes.
Jack Levison: We don't have that world anymore. That's what it was supposed to be.
George Mason: Okay. And when you say men leave and join their wives, again, we're already into language here only of Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve as some say. I think we need to unwind that a little bit too, because again, if we go back to the kinship argument, it's sameness before it's difference and is this text being descriptive of what is normally so or prescriptive of what must be so? And hold that thought because we're going to come back from break.
Jack Levison: No.
George Mason: I'm going to tease you on that one. We're going to come back from the break and we'll talk about that.
Jack Levison: Okay.
George Mason: Thank you. Okay.
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George Mason: We're back with Jack Levison talking about Adam and Eve, the biblical story, and trying to work through what's actually there rather than all the things that we have brought to it and think we see there but aren't really there. And we just left off in this conversation, Jack, talking about whether Adam and Eve, the man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and so it's the man and his wife. You say that that actually is a critique of the patriarchalism of a man ruling over his wife and the woman always going to the man's house. It really flips it, doesn't it?
Jack Levison: Yes.
George Mason: And it flips it in a way of saying it should be like this, not like the way we were experiencing it.
Jack Levison: That's right. Yeah. So is it reading into the text only what we want? I don't think, for example, that the Genesis writers were trying to make a case for same sex marriage. Okay? Let me be clear about that.
George Mason: Yes, obviously.
Jack Levison: This was not their world.
George Mason: This was not their world. However, just as you say, wait a minute, they were trying to undermine the cultural norm here that was oppressive of women, there was a power dynamic involved in this. Similarly, could we not read this notion of human covenantal relationship between the man and the woman and say that there is room for the kinship of male and male, female and female in those kinds of roles? As long as the power dynamic is not present, where for example, so often in war, rape is a way of dehumanizing a male. In other words, sodomy becomes a way of trying to reduce the dignity of an enemy and things of that nature. And so if we're looking at what is wholesome and what is real, it's not just about, well, we violated the male, female bond with same sex relationships. Isn't it really this power dynamic that is most crucial in the conversation?
Jack Levison: You think about the so-called curses in Genesis 3. What is the curse of the woman? You will be passionate for your man, and what will he do? He will rule over you. If that's not a power dynamic, I don't know what is.
George Mason: Right.
Jack Levison: So the world we live in, we're an Israelite, we're an American, and the world we live in is that the man rules over the woman as part of the curse. What's our way out? Well, male and female are the image of God. Woman is the deliverer, the ezer. Woman and man, Ish, Isha, a woman leaves her husband. But underlying that to your question, George, is this is a power dynamic. He will rule over you.
George Mason: Right.
Jack Levison: So this is not so much a gender dynamic as a power dynamic. And I think you can say then what's going on when the man leaves his household to go join the woman is a reversal of the power dynamic. So same sex, whatever, the power dynamic has to be beneficial and good so that someone wants to leave and join the other. It cannot be coercion, it cannot be ruling, it cannot be hierarchical, patriarchal, or matriarchal even for that matter, I think. If that's what you're saying.
George Mason: It is. And so moving into this question of gender roles in marriage and in society, here we have a consequence of reading Adam and Eve and the so-called fall story, which is the eating of the fruit in the garden and there's really no such thing biblically as a fall.
Jack Levison: No.
George Mason: But nonetheless, the consequences that you speak of, or the curses as is more popularly understood, end up with a theology of some people in the church saying that the man ruling over the woman is actually her salvation. That if he does it correctly, if he does it kindly and gently, but nonetheless with strength, and if she is properly submissive to him then and only then will society be ordered in the way God intends it to be and then they will be blessed. That seems to be enfranchising forever the consequences of sin and what's wrong with creation, not reversing it. So isn't the freedom is to go back to the creation rather than the consequences of sin?
Jack Levison: Yes. And in fact, if you look at the consequences, what happens to a man? You will have thorns and thistles. Well, I think if you took the broad swath of America that's on farms, they would say, "We try not to grow thorns and thistles." We do everything we can to undo that curse so that we can grow good corn.
George Mason: Lovely.
Jack Levison: And the same thing. An epidural is not a bad thing during birth.
George Mason: Right, right.
Jack Levison: You know, you don't say, "Oh, it's a woman's job to have pain in childbirth. Let's accentuate that pain. Let's put her in an uncomfortable position." No, you try to make her comfortable and sometimes you give her some things to really make it comfortable. So in most of the curses, we try to undo them. Why then would we try to instantiate the rule of man?
George Mason: Yes, yes.
Jack Levison: It's inconsistent.
George Mason: It is. It is. And even when we look at work itself, for instance, why is it that... the issue is not that work is a consequence of sin, it's that we experience it as toil.
Jack Levison: Yeah. Sweat.
George Mason: As sweat.
Jack Levison: Hurts. Same word as the birth. Same Hebrew word for pain, the woman's pain in childbirth is our pain in eating bread.
George Mason: So if we're to think about what the goal should be, the goal is not that we work, work, work, and have all of this work life period, and then we retire so that we are not tired anymore. That is to say, we stop working and we all know that when we stop working and retire, we begin to die, we begin to decline because our created nature does involve still work, still involved. But the healing of that is that we don't experience it in the burden of it, but in the integrated nature of the joy of our created being.
Jack Levison: Right.
George Mason: So let's talk about another aspect of how we get it wrong. For example, from the life of Adam and Eve, the serpent, the serpent is Satan of course, right? Or?
Jack Levison: Yeah. Certainly in Genesis there is no Satan.
George Mason: Exactly.
Jack Levison: But in this Jewish text that I study, it may be Christian, but it's probably Jewish, there's a whole drama that Satan is jealous of what Adam and Eve eat and Paradise has a wall around it, so Satan goes to the serpent and said, "I want to trap them." And so the serpent says, "Oh, we better not. God will be angry with me," but gives in anyway. And so then the serpent droops over the wall where Eve is standing alone away from Adam and Satan speaks through the serpent to trick Eve. None of that is biblical, not an ounce.
George Mason: None of it is biblical. Now let's talk about what biblical is. Biblical is the agreed upon sense of the community, first of the Israelite community, the people of Israel who we later came to know as Jews, and made the judgment that some books were in and some books were not, and then similarly the early church made a judgment about the Christian scriptures and also what books of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, would be included. So there were many other writings.
Jack Levison: Yes.
George Mason: And they played a role because they could. They were in the library. They were in whatever common resource the people had at the time, so they were influential in the way the canonical books were read, but they were also determined not to be the authorized way of reading the story of life. And yet how influential a book like the life of Adam and Eve is in our reading of that text.
Jack Levison: Yeah. When I teach Genesis in classes at Perkins, at SMU, we take children's Bibles, and we read the children's Bible stories and invariably in the children's Bibles, there's not always Satan, but usually Satan is there, which is not in Genesis. Adam is nowhere to be seen. In one of them, it says, "Oh, and Satan found the perfect time to tempt Eve when she was sitting alone in the cool of the day in the garden." But in the biblical, in Genesis, the man and woman are right there together.
George Mason: Yes.
Jack Levison: In the children's Bibles, she takes the fruit to Adam. In Genesis, they're right there. He eats it right alongside her. But all of this comes from this Life of Adam and Eve text, not from the biblical text. So somehow we've drunk deep of a later interpretation that introduced Satan, that separated Eve from Adam, and that made it a seduction of Adam rather than just a giving of the fruit, and that's not in Genesis.
George Mason: Well, and the whole idea of temptation being something about crossing a boundary that should not be crossed is itself dubious in the text it seems to me. Because the word of the serpent is that you will be like God and it's the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So another way of reading that is this sense of God having put in us a desire to know, to be enlightened, to have a share in this divine knowledge that otherwise we would not have. And it's God who put in us curiosity to learn and to grow, and for us to say, "No, you're simply supposed to stay where you are, not try to push the boundaries of knowledge, not get beyond yourself, just leave it all to God," is not actually the way we should be reading a text like that.
George Mason: When their eyes were opened there's a sense in which they are now actually not just in a fallen state, but they are experiencing the intent of God for them to grow and to change and to understand things, and yet in our Christian tradition at least, there's often a kind of anti-intellectual trend that goes with this. Be fearful of knowing too much. What do you make of that?
Jack Levison: Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, actually did see the eating of the fruit as a positive, as the gaining of wisdom. So there are Jewish, very early Jewish interpreters for whom this is a positive. I struggle with it in the sense that they were allowed to have the Tree of Life, but they wanted to have the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course these are all sorts of source questions. Where did these trees come from? But can you have life without the knowledge of good and evil? Is it full life? So I think that the presence of two trees in the garden really does raise the spectrum of what's the value of knowledge? Can there be knowledge that doesn't bring life or does knowledge invariably bring life? You're kind of implying that knowledge brings life, and I would suggest that maybe knowledge illicitly gained does not bring life.
George Mason: Ah, okay.
Jack Levison: The problem is not so much I think their knowledge but where they get it from. It's not that they're even doubting God. I mean there's all sorts going on there, but that serpent, who's the most wise. They're naked. The words are almost exactly, arummim and arum, they are naked and the serpent is wise and it's almost exactly the same. It's a play on words. And so the serpent is wise, but they listened to the serpent and apparently God is walking in the cool of the day in those days, but they listened to the serpent instead. So for me it might be the source of knowledge is the problem more than the knowledge itself. So I would affirm what you say-
George Mason: Or maybe it could be easy knowledge rather than hard-won knowledge that acknowledges the limitations of our human existence.
Jack Levison: Yes. Yeah. I mean, you said it in the sermon, swords into plow shares. It's easy to kill. It's really hard to cultivate.
George Mason: Exactly.
Jack Levison: And I think there is some knowledge that's cheaply found. Where's my phone? There it is. There's my knowledge, there are my data, there is my information. I'm done, I got it. But cultivating wisdom and life.
George Mason: There it is.
Jack Levison: Why didn't they go to that... I guess they weren't... Yeah, they were allowed to eat of the Tree of Life until they're expelled. Why weren't they going for that tree?
George Mason: Nice. Nice.
Jack Levison: You know?
George Mason: Well Jack, we could go on and on all day.
Jack Levison: Are we done?
George Mason: I'm afraid we are.
Jack Levison: We're expelled. Expel me.
George Mason: Expelled from the garden.
Jack Levison: East of George Mason.
George Mason: Yeah, right.
Jack Levison: East of the Good God.
George Mason: It's been fantastic visiting with you.
Jack Levison: Great. Thank you.
George Mason: Thank you so much for your scholarship, for your spirit, and I mean that in all the ways that the spirit can be understood, because it's clearly present within you. And thank you so much, Jack.
Jack Levison: Thank you, George.
George Mason: Glad to have you.
Jack Levison: Yeah, you too.
George Mason: Okay.
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