Temptation and the Fall

I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself
Genesis 3:10

I

Here we are, the temptation and the fall from paradise. In many ways the story of the temptation and the fall from Eden was the corner piece of the jigsaw puzzle for me. Once that was in place, other pieces seemed to fit far more naturally. If we see the biblical stories as a roman à clef, then Genesis 3 is surely the key. The analysis of this important section first started becoming clear to me when I read Lynne Isbell’s masterpiece The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (2009) and followed that up with her article in the 2013 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 110 titled “Pulnivar Neurons Reveal Neurobiological Evidence of Past Selection for Rapid Detection of Snakes.” 

It was Isbell’s work that turned the light switch on for me. Once that light switch was on I was able to pull all sorts of things together to make sense of the story of the temptation and fall. The questions that were left to me were on the connection between nakedness and shame and what that had to do with the knowledge of good and evil. I put a great deal of thought into Genesis 3 and what follows represents my absolute best attempt to understand what is going on in this absolutely crucial story which sets the stage for the biblical narrative to follow.

II

Genesis 3 opens with an introduction to the serpent. “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made” Gen. 3:1.

Cunning.

The serpent is cunning. The intellect, what Milton calls the “highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom,” is arrogant and falls in love with its own creations. In falling in love with its own creations, the intellect eschews a need for the transcendent. So, like Lex Luthor and so many other bad guys, the serpent is introduced as cunning. Early (~3rd century) Christian mystics connected the serpent in the garden with Satan himself. The reason why is something we will get to towards the end of this essay. For now, all we have is the serpent and all we know of him is that he is cunning.

The ancient Hebrew word translated here as “cunning” is arum. Other translations are “crafty,” “prudent,” subtle” and “shrewd.” The Strong’s suggests the word used here is a passive participle of aram which is cunning but in a specifically negative way. I cannot see how this is, but the Strong’s does and I think that makes it worth thinking about.

Shrewd, cunning, subtle and crafty — this is our introduction to the serpent. The serpent begins the game with Eve by asking her a question. He asks, “has God indeed said, “you shall not eat of every tree in the garden?” To which Eve responds that they may eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden “but of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God said, “You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die” (Gen. 3:2).

The serpent, now letting on that he may know more than his first question suggested, says “you will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Cunning, shrewd.

The serpent is making the case to Eve that, firstly, you cannot trust God as he is just trying to trick you. Further, he is doing it solely because he is jealous and he is lying about you dying. Finally, if you do eat it your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil — so that is a pretty good thing!

Crafty, subtle.

In the battle of wits between the serpent and Eve, the serpent wins. Eve sees the “tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise” (Gen. 2:6) and with that she succumbs to the serpent’s enticement and eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The serpent, one of the main predators of tree dwelling primates such as our early ancestors for some sixty million years, is eternally associated with the tree. We are, by and large, a product of our reactions to predation. Our fate is eternally bound to that of the serpent.

After eating, she gives the fruit to her husband and he eats it as well.

And what is the lesson of the serpent? For humans, evolved from tree dwelling primates, the serpent’s lesson is “wake up.” Lynne Isbell, in the book I mentioned to start this essay out, does an extraordinarily good job at detailing how human co-evolution with snakes shaped our consciousness. Humans had to become very good at detecting the camouflage patterns of snakes, especially in the lower half of our visual field, and the evidence shows that a large part of why humans have such acute vision (eyes opened if you will) is do to this co-evolution with snakes and the predation pressure requiring us to spot them instantaneously.

However, the kind of vision that can immediately detect a moving snake in a tree comes at a price. The price for this vision is the growth of our brains. Simply put, human vision requires a lot of brain. The consequence of this brain growth, especially the cerebral cortex, is that one day we woke up and discovered the future. The future is, technically, the place where all the potential snakes might be hiding rather than merely the one snake you see in the tree.

Interestingly enough, several years after Isbell published her work a team (including her) of scientists made an interesting discovery. It was long known that people can be conditioned to fear pictures of snakes faster than pictures of guns. This was chalked up to what was believed to be an innate predisposition against snakes. However, it was discovered that pulviner neurons (one of our most ancient cognitive systems) reveal an actual  cognitive circuit specifically for rapid detection of snakes. It is not a mere predisposition, but a neurobiological system which evolved over tens of millions of years for the sole purpose of snake camouflage pattern recognition and instantaneous correlate negative emotions. It’s part of our damn brain.

This is why when we see a snake we don’t see “a snake” and then infer “danger” we instantly see “danger.” If we needed to take a second cognitive step in order to react to the danger of the snake we would not have survived as a species. The snakes would have won.

Snakes, predatory cats and predatory birds — we spent tens of millions of years evolving in such a way as we can instantaneously react to them defensively. You can see this when a car backfires behind you and without any thought you instantly crouch in such a way as to protect yourself from something jumping out of a tree at you. You do not think “this is a spiderweb” when you walk into a spiderweb, you instantaneously go into a defensive mode that took untold generations and mutations until all the primates who didn’t do that became extinct.

But it is not just snakes that Isbell points to, but also that human’s color vision comes about as our brains are growing and we become better at picking out ripe fruit.

Furthermore, human females share food. This is not the ordinary in the animal kingdom. Food sharing, with very few exceptions, is done only between mothers and offspring. However, it isn’t too much of an evolutionary tweak to see how women went from sharing food with offspring to offering food to a mate.

The offering of the fruit is a contract. By offering food the female essentially tells the male “look, we aren’t going to make it alone. Let’s form a team.” What does this have to do with becoming self-conscious? Well, it is a bargain. Here is some fruit. However, I am going to need you to be awake and pay attention — to keep your eyes open. Why? Because there are enemies, predators and I intend to have an incredibly needy infant and you are going to have to wake up and take care of us and in return I will be offering you fruit. That’s the bargain. This is the human deal. I offer you fruit and you become self-conscious and we are a team.

And so, here in Genesis 3, we see Adam and Eve are given vision by the serpent and the fruit and, as it turns out, that happens to be correct. I suggest you spend some real time thinking about that in a very serious way.

So this accounts for the tree, the fruit and the serpent, but we are left to ask about the role of women here. After all, self-consciousness doesn’t emerge until we have Eve. So we ask ourselves, what role to women play in relation to men? The primary role women play in relation to men is, as it turns out, making them self-conscious — and that is not something men particularly enjoy. We can think about this very simply. Rejection.  When a man is rejected by a woman he becomes incredibly self conscious. Why? Because the particular woman is a stand in for nature as such and the rejection is not merely a particular woman saying no but is a rebuff from nature regarding your suitability for propagating genetic material into the future.

We can think of this deeper with regard to our evolutionary split from our common chimpanzee ancestor roughly 6-8 million years ago. Chimpanzees are non-selective maters. When a chimp female is in heat any of the males can procreate with her. The dominate males chase off the subordinate males and as such propagate dominate genes, but it has nothing to do with female selection. The human split from chimpanzees likely came due to human female participation in hypergamy. It seems the way it works is, instead of dominate male chimps chasing away subordinate male chimps from a female in heat, human males compete amongst one another for position in the male dominance/competence hierarchy. Because human females are selective maters they will pick men from the top of the hierarchy established, through competition, by the men themselves.

This hypergamous mating from women placed massive amounts of selection pressure on men and is one of the reasons that human evolution was moved so rapidly (in evolutionary terms).

The serpent, the tree, the fruit, the woman.

Cunning.

III

Having eaten from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the result is that “the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked; and sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings” (Gen. 3:6-7).

The implication of this is that prior to eating the fruit their eyes were closed. If their eyes are now open it must be the case that before they must have been closed. Whatever it was that God created was, in some sense, blind. Not physically blind. Adam wasn’t bumping into cows in the garden. There was some kind of metaphysical blindness which has now been removed by what just happened. Further, whatever blindness was removed, it also caused them to realize they were naked and to be ashamed of it.

Just what kind of eye opening was this?

To take this apart we need to pay very close attention to the line that was drawn. The line, we can call it the fruit line, is the demarcation point from where, on one side, Adam and Eve exhibited some form of blindness and also were unaware of their nakedness. On the other side of the line Adam and Eve have their eyes open and are aware of their nakedness. The question you have to ask yourself in order to figure out just what is going on here with this eye opening is a difficult one.

What does it mean to realize you are naked?

The take on the shame of their nakedness having to do with sexuality just does not seem to hold water. Instead, I would suggest, that when you realize you are naked what you realize, what your eyes are open to, is that you are vulnerable, flawed and insufficient.

I want to make a quick aside and talk briefly about African ungulates. Let’s say you are a gazelle and you are living on the plains. You need to protect yourself from threats like lions. However, in the essay titled “Predator-Specific Responses and Generalization of Predator Recognition in a Prey Species” in Behavioral Ecology by Creel et al. we learn that there is an energy conservation principle amongst African ungulates. You can’t simply run off away from everything or you will exhaust yourself to death.

So, as a gazelle, you look for threat-specific responses in predator animals like lions. One of these threat-specific responses is proximity. Simply put, you do not know that anything over 100 meters away is a threat. You also look for behavioral clues and rank them. For instance, laying down or grooming lions are low risk and crouching, starin or stalking lions are a high risk and the response is matched by the prey animal.

So you are a gazelle and 100 meters off there is a lion laying down. What do you do? Absolutely nothing, continue grazing. You don’t have the kind of brain that can associate a lion which is laying down 100 meters away with a lion that is staring at you 20 meters away in a crouched position. As far as you know, those are two entirely different types of animals and only one of them is a predator.

If you had any idea that the lion laying down 100 meters away can very quickly become the lion staring at you crouching 20 meters away you might get all the gazelles together and build a city to protect yourselves from the lions. Instead, you eat grass.

Humans, however, are not like that. Humans woke up and realized that they are permanently vulnerable and the first thing they do is cover themselves — clothing is, after all, the first sign of civilization. This is what the story of Adam and Eve is telling us, how it was that our awareness of our permentant insufficiency and vulnerability came into existence. This opens the biblical corpus which then goes on to suggest more and more sophisticated ways to deal with that vulnerability from sewing together fig leaves to building cities straight through to the ultimate answer presented in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

A series of increasingly sophisticated measures to deal with the vulnerability and insufficiency of man is the plot of the Bible. Here, in Genesis 3, the origin of that vulnerability and insufficiency is explained and it will take the entire bible to find the proper response.

Adam and Eve realize they are vulnerable and naked and that that is not a very good thing. Their eyes have opened enough that they became self-conscious and they began to notice their own vulnerability and the first thing they do, the first step of culture, the first attempt to mitigate the catastrophe of life which they are now painfully aware of, is to cover themselves.

This is step one.

IV

With this we have Adam and Eve, eyes uncovered, aware of their nakedness and having sewn fig leaves together to make coverings. At this point “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves” (Gen. 3:8).

There is an interaction with God and he calls to Adam and asks “Where are you” (Gen. 3:9). To which Adam responds, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself” (Gen 3:10).

So we see not just that Adam hid and was afraid, but he leaves no doubt as to why he was hiding — he was naked. Keep in mind, it was a mere few lines ago that Adam and Eve were in the garden naked and not ashamed.

What is the implication of hiding? Prior to being woken up and given vision, prior to the recognition of his nakedness and

vulnerability, there was no reason for man and woman to hide from God.  So what is all this about? Why is their nakedness and knowledge of their vulnerability reason to hide from God?

Think about it this way. Imagine that you have the capacity to live truthfully and courageously. Imagine you have the capacity to live a forthright and noble life. Now ask yourself, if you have the capacity for a truthful, noble and courageous life why don’t you do it?

Well, how does fear and shame sound?

We can say that the idea of living a forthright, truthful and courageous life is analogous to walking with God in the garden. What stops people from walking with God in the garden? It is the recognition of their own inadequacies. Have you ever taken a minute to ask yourself what you have hidden from in your life because of your self-perceived inadequacies? Quietly ask yourself that one day and see how quickly a multi-volume book appears in your head.

Adam’s recognition of his nakedness is very much the same as having his eyes open to his vulnerability, inadequacy and shame. Adam, like so many of us, is left asking how a being so flawed, so broken and weak, so inadequate and naked can possibly live an honorable and courageous life in such a flawed world.

Adam’s eyes are open, he realizes he is naked and because he sees himself as lowly and vulnerable he hides from God.

And so, when God asks where are you, Adam answers “I was hiding because I was naked.” How can this not be the case? What do we do when we realize that the very task of life is too much for us to contend with? We hide. Of course we hide. It is no wonder Adam is hiding. It is not fear and shame that is hard to understand, it’s courage.

The hypothesis, here in Genesis 3, is that when God calls, men and women hide because they are ashamed, naked and vulnerable.

Us humans, man. We woke up one day.  We woke up and were shocked to find that the place we were in was full of danger and that we were naked. There is some serious trouble that needs attending to and we are not what we could be, we are inadequate and ashamed. What do we do? Hide.

And so this is what the story is telling us. We woke up. We became self-conscious. We realized our own vulnerability and that made us hide from manifesting our divine destiny. And yes, it is exactly right.

We are naked.

V

 

God, aggrieved that Adam has decided to hide, asks “who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded that you should not eat?” (Gen. 3:12)

Several posts ago, I made the argument that the fruit of the tree was a meta-fruit and that the thing which is common amongst all fruit is that it is food. Further, I claimed that while food is meta-fruit, it is knowledge that is meta-food and that is why the forbidden fruit is on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And so, God commands Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of knowledge and they were disobedient which leads immediately to nakedness and shame.

I think it is of some value to mention that while God does tell Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree, they do not agree to it. We will make more of this when we get to Exodus and God’s insistence that all of the people of Israel willingly accept the law and vow to follow it. In the meantime, I think it is important to remember that God’s prohibition against eating of the fruit was not an agreed upon covenant.

Adam seems to be on the spot here. He is naked, ashamed, hiding and God want’s to know if he has been disobedient. Adam, in the first post-fall utterance, turns to God and says “the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Gen. 3:12).

Adam, in a single sentence, manages to immediately blame everyone he can — including God. What a sentence. It was the woman. The woman YOU gave me. Just to be clear because I really love this line, the first thing Adam says is “it’s not me it’s the woman” and then the second thing is “it’s God’s fault because he gave her to me.” There are times when these biblical stories just amaze me with their universal

relevance and we see it here in all its splendor and glory. It takes no more than a very cursory glance at the internet for you to realize that when the world does not turn out for people the way in which they wanted it to they will immediately find a scapegoat and then blame God. This is an absolute universal. It is a rare thing indeed to find someone for whom the world is not working out the way they had hoped that looks to themselves and wonders what they did to get there. It is almost always an immediate scapegoating and then blaming existence itself.

And so God asks Eve “what is this you have done?” to which eve responds “the serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Gen. 3:13).

The modern feminist interpretation of this story claims that Eve’s painted  as the universal bad guy. Eve eats of the fruit which has been forbidden and tempts her husband into doing the same. So yes, Eve screwed up. That said, Eve has somewhat of an excuse. She was lied to by a serpent and we already have been told that they are subtle and shrewd and cunning not to mention, we find out later, the serpent is Satan himself, the author of all evil. So yes, Eve kind of dropped the ball here. But anyone who can actually read should see quite clearly that it is Adam who really comes off poorly.

I mean, what does Eve know? Adam, however, immediately blames Eve and blames God. So now, not only is Adam naked, vulnerable, ashamed, hiding and disobedient he is also a rat who sells out his wife and a nihilist who blames God for creating the world in such a way that he found out he was naked.  As always, in the most trite and unthinking way possible, the feminists could not have got this more wrong. I find it hard to believe that any literate human being can paint this story as Eve being the universal bad guy, inferior to her husband, without doing so intentionally knowing they were not just wrong, but anti-right. This, again, is the problem with all feminist interpretation. The decision that the biblical corpus makes Eve, and through her all women, out to be the bad guy setting up a two millennia history of misogyny was decided first and then shoehorned into the story. This is not scholarship, it is pure ideology — and not even well done ideology at that.

And with this God outlines the consequences.

The serpent will be cursed more than every beast of the field, which happens to be true. Further, the serpent will need to go on its belly for all the days of its life. As it turns out, snakes are lizards which lost their legs during their evolutionary run so that actually winds up being accurate as well. Finally, in store for the serpent, is eternal enmity between serpents and women — something we alluded to earlier with the female nervous system being hyperaware of predation owing to their role in childbirth and rearing. So this too turns out to be accurate.  Finally, that the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent will eternally be at odds and “he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:14-15). This we will get into more when we discuss the crucifixion.

The consequences God lays out for Eve are sorrow and pain in childbirth and “that he (your husband) shall rule over you.” Notice that it is the case that God says her husband “shall” rule over her, not that he ought to. The consequence God outlines is not the marital slavery so often thought to be the case by biblical detractors, rather it is a statement about

nature in a post-fall world. In the garden there was no call for Adam to rule over Eve. It is only in the world after the fall that childbirth is painful, babies are dependent, enemies will look to kill you and food needs to be extracted from the ground through toil. Because of the realities of post-fall nature, female vulnerability will be such that her husband “shall rule over” her not that this is the way things ought to be.

Finally, God lays out the consequences for Adam. God says, “cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground” (Gen 3:17-19).

What is this? It is the invention of work and the beginning of the biblical sacrificial system. People work. What is work? Work is the sacrifice of the present for the future. Why do you make this sacrifice? Because you know you are vulnerable and because you are awake and because you recognize your nakedness. From here on in there is no return to unconscious paradise.

We live in a world full of problems and no matter how many of the problems of today you solve you will have more problems coming up. No matter how much you work, no matter how much you sacrifice, you will never solve all the problems.

From now on man will always be terrified of the future and this is the price for waking up. This is the end of paradise. This is the beginning of history. This is the story of Adam and Eve — the story of humans in the world.

VI

So here we are.

Humans were tempted by the serpent, they eat the fruit, they wake up, they realize they are naked, they realize they are vulnerable, they realize they are insufficient, they realize the future and that they are going to die. They realize their vulnerability is a permanent state. This leads humans to realize they have to work, sacrifice. This accounts for difficulty in childbirth and the loss of unconscious paradise. Seems to all tie together nicely, but there is something missing. What does all of this have to do with the knowledge of good and evil? Where does that fit in? What does opening your eyes and realizing you are naked and vulnerable have to do with good and evil?

The Mesopotamians believed that human beings were made of the blood of Qingu, the worst demon that the goddess of chaos could conjure up. That is us, that is humans and this is the tradition that the early stories of Genesis come out of. Whatever it is humans are there is some kind of deep and demonic flaw. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the twentieth century and the atrocities committed should easily be able to understand why it is that the milieu out of which our foundational document arises explains human beings in such a way.

You do not have to dig into the old texts like the Malleus Malefficarum, a witch hunter manual detailing how to go about torturing suspected witches, nor do you have to look at the notebooks from medieval torture chambers to understand the evil men can, have and do inflict on others. The creative and excruciating manner in which people have thought up ways to torture other people and have then committed to doing them is breathtaking.

There is a Christian idea that Jesus takes the sins of the world onto himself. Take that idea seriously and think about what people are capable of. Then, and this is most important, remember this: the absolute worst things that have ever been done to people were done by people and you are one of them. Do not be so quick to point to others and say “look at the atrocities they commit” without realizing that it is humans, like you, that commit them. This is what Jung meant about the necessity to confront one’s shadow in order integrate their psyche. Until you realize that you could have been a Soviet gulag guard or researcher with Japanese Unit 731 you haven’t incorporated your shadow, you haven’t realized that you too have the capacity for evil and without realizing that capacity you can never psychologically mature.

So what is it about the nakedness and vulnerability that brings with it the knowledge of good and evil?

The moment mankind realizes they are vulnerable and can be hurt, they know how to hurt others and people have been using that knowledge, elevated to an art form, for a very, very long time.  It is when man is self-conscious and aware of his own nakedness that he understands the fragility of others. If you know how you can be harmed you know how to harm others. Man has the capacity for evil and this is where we see the evil of man introduced into the world.

So let’s say there is a serpent in a tree and you are a tree dwelling primate some sixty million years ago. Well, that’s no good for you. The snake, given the chance, will kill you. So what do you do? You watch the hell out for the snake and if you get the chance you kill it.

Now let’s say your brain grows a bit and you become more sophisticated. The snake that is in the tree, that’s the least of your problems once you start waking up. The problem is that somewhere out there is a place where all the snakes are. Those can be understood as potential snakes. A more evolved, larger brain now sees beyond the snake in the tree and to all the potential snakes out there in the world. So what do you do? Well, you get out of the tree and go find where the snakes are and kill them. Great, problem solved. But not really.

Now that you have the snake in the tree killed and you destroyed the lair of snakes where all the potential snakes might be, you have to contend with the human snakes. You have a tribe and tribal enemies and now they are preying on you the way the snake used to. So you band tribes together, form a civilization and you defeat the external snakes. Great. You have an empire and the external snakes are no longer a threat.

Everything is perfect now, right? No. Because the snake isn’t just a snake in a tree and it isn’t just the potential snakes out in the forest and it isn’t just your enemies — the snake may also be your friend because a friend can betray you. And so as you get more sophisticated and your brain becomes more complex the snakes don’t go away, they actually multiply. Well, let’s say you protect yourself well enough from all actual snakes, potential snakes, enemy snakes and friend snakes … you still have a problem, there is a snake inside of you. This is why, in the third century, early christian mystics associated the snake with Satan and it is absolutely brilliant.

In the end, what is the enemy? The enemy is the snake. That is fine if you are a tree dwelling primate. However, if you are a sophisticated human being with millions of extra years of evolution under your belt and you are trying to really get to the bottom of what it is that is really the greatest enemy of mankind you eventually realize that it is the inner snake, the human propensity for evil as such.

The human propensity for evil as such is the figure of Satan. That is what it means to be Satan. In the words of John Milton, “from the author of all ill could bring so deep a malice, to confound the race of mankind in one root, and earth with hell to mingle and involve, done all to spite the great creator” (Paradise Lost: Book 2, 1667).

In Genesis 1 there is a logos that God uses to speak order out of the chaos in the beginning of time and this is its antithetical spirit. It does the exact opposite of the logos and is motivated by nothing but malevolence and the desire to destroy.

This is why the serpent becomes associated with Satan and this is why self-consciousness, nakedness and vulnerability is the fruit from the tree of good and evil.