Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Truth about Adam & Eve About this episode What really went down in the Garden of Eden? Was there an apple? Was there a snake? Was the 'original sin' all that bad?
To answer these questions and more, Kate is joined by Dr Dylan Johnson, biblical scholar and historian of the Ancient Near East at Cardiff University. His most recent publication is 'Lawgiving in the ancient Near East'.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Batwixters! It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Batwixter Sheets. Hello, how fabulous to see you. How've you been? All right. Well, that's very good to hear. I'm all right as well. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, and it's spoken by adults, to other adults, about adulty things, in an adulty way, covering arranged adult subjects, and you've been an adult too. Right, let's crack on with it.
0:59 Kate Lister? Oh, it's so peaceful here in the Garden of Eden. It really is. The water features are just fab. And what could be better than wandering around, eating fruit, and not having to worry if we get juice on ourselves? Because that's right, everybody, well, me and the two other humans, are naked. Everything is perfect, utopian even. And there really is only one rule, and it would be a real shame if somebody were to break it.
1:49 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Batwixter Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. No matter what we do, I'm sure that nobody could get more blame heaped upon them than Eve. I mean, really, she went on one ill-fated, scrumping expedition, and they haven't let up about it for a flipping millennia. But is it really that simple? No, probably not. Well, today, I'm joined by Dr Dylan Johnston from Cardiff University, who is going to help us get to know Adam and Eve a little bit better. All right, fig leaves are ready, everyone, let's do it.
2:27 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Dr Dylan Johnson. How are you doing?
2:33 Speaker 01 I'm doing very well. How are you?
2:35 Kate Lister? I'm doing fabulous. Thank you so much for dropping by to tell us a little bit more about the Adam and Eve story, because I don't think I know much more than I remember from like the Usborne Guide to the Bible when I was like four or something. But before we even get into that, can I ask you about your origin story? And how did you end up being a scholar of the Bible and of the ancient Near Eastern cultures?
2:59 Speaker 01 Right, in a very circuitous way. I started university wanting to do history. I always knew I was going to do something with history in a tiny little liberal arts college in Canada, which is where I'm from, hence the accent. And basically, one of the great opportunities they had there were archaeological field schools in the Near East. So this kind of got me over there, interested in the region of Israel, Palestine, Iraq, that whole area, basically. Then I just followed it through grad school, did a master's degree at Harvard, did my PhD at NYU, and now through other various circuitous routes, found myself in the UK, teaching at the University of Cardiff. So yeah, just one of those opportunities that you kind of jump
3:42 Speaker 01 at. And that's what led me to this, really.
3:45 Kate Lister? What is it that you find so fascinating about Bible history? What is that that's so appealing to you about that?
3:50 Speaker 01 Well, first, that it is history. I mean, when my earliest encounters with the Bible were in Sunday school as a kid. So I never really thought of it in terms of as an historical source. So these two aspects of my life were kind of compartmentalized, kept apart. And it was only through encountering a couple scholars, a couple people in my undergraduate degree, that I started to think, oh, actually, you know, this text, at least the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible that I study, has these really deep connections to really deep antiquity. And this region that I just find incredibly fascinating, that region being the ancient Middle East or the Near East, however you describe it. And then just seeing these parallels, once you start reading the ancient literature more widely,
4:35 Speaker 01 you start to read these biblical texts in really different ways than maybe your Sunday school teacher would have taught you. And it's kind of a, it's a bit of an adventure in that respect, trying to piece out the ancient thoughts that are embedded in these texts that are actually quite familiar and making them unfamiliar. So that's, that's the passion.
4:55 Kate Lister? That is, that is really, really interesting because as you said, it's so easy to not think of the Bible as an actual historical document and think of it just as a collection of stories that, you know, some people have a lot of faith in as well. But it is a historical document and let's have a think then about this, I don't know if I'm going to phrase this right. If I say who wrote the Adam and Eve story, that sounds mad, like you're not going to know like an author. But I'm just trying to think like, where did it come from? Because presumably the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, didn't just turn up in its perfect form. And then the New Testament was tacked on the end. It must have been first written down or translated, transmitted somewhere. Do we have any idea of where that happened?
5:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, there's some obvious clues. So there's two levels to that question. One is what does tradition say? Tradition has a very simple answer. Moses wrote the story.
5:42 Kate Lister? Moses wrote the story, stupid question, Kate.
5:46 Speaker 01 Right, so he wrote the first five books, but since the Enlightenment, we have started to question mosaic authorship. So the historical critical answer is, well, it's someone who speaks Hebrew, because it's written in Hebrew, which places them in the geographic orbit of Israel, Palestine, probably based on the way that the Hebrew is written. Sometime between, and here's dates, always a debate, sometime between the ninth and let's say, fourth centuries BCE. And that's being, that's being broad. And I don't think there's many people who would disagree with that very broad dating scheme,
6:24 Speaker 01 which places this individual, this scribe, this author, probably in kingdoms that we know as Israel and Judah, but also then later developments where they lose their autonomy and become provinces, Persian, Yahud, Hellenistic Judea, so somewhere in there. But beyond that, it's a literate individual, which implies an elite individual. And as we're going to get into, literacy in the ancient world especially, is probably going to fall into a Gender category of males, that's the usual assumption, but we don't know. That's just the going assumption, and this becomes very important, as we'll get into, because gender is such a core component of this narrative.
7:08 Kate Lister? How is the Old Testament comprised then? Because the New Testament is a series of gospels that were written by various people and then kind of put together. How is the Old Testament compiled? I mean, do we have any idea about who was in charge of that? Who was editing that?
7:23 Speaker 01 This is really biblical scholarship today is trying to answer those questions. Who are these redactors? Because we know the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, it's a compiled text. It's not written in a single moment. It's written over the course of centuries. I mean, the language evolves. The language changes at one point in the Hebrew Bible. It stops to being Hebrew and starts being Aramaic.
7:44 Kate Lister? That's quite a shift.
7:46 Speaker 01 So obviously, these are not one person writing, nor does the Bible make that claim. So who are the people? It's a really complicated question because it probably grows very slowly and depends on what part of the text you're looking at. So let's take the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. This is the real core of the Old Testament. This is the most important part for Jewish congregations. There's theories, priestly redactors, living after the exile in 586 BCE by the Babylonians. But priesthood is a very large category, and there's probably lots of different kinds of priests. Royal scribes, are they recording the annals of kings?
8:30 Speaker 01 Are they helping to put together, you know, long historical narratives about the monarchy? Samuel Kings, which gets rewritten again later in a book called Chronicles. So the long answer to a very short question is a lot of different redactors, all kind of semi-consciously working to put this book together. And book is a bit of a misnomer because they don't even have books. They don't know that they're making a book. It's only us who have the Old Testament in a book. They're making individual scrolls. So that's a very complicated answer. I'm sorry.
9:03 Kate Lister? That's no, that's a very good answer. Thank you. And leading on from that, are there any other versions that we have, different edited versions of the Old Testament? I mean, maybe one that the Adam and Eve story isn't in, or is the one that we have the only one that we know exists?
9:18 Speaker 01 Um, so all of the extant manuscript versions, so that is the physical scrolls on which Genesis appears, has the Adam and Eve story, the Eden story with with some small variations. And usually these are more grammatical, they're not changing the plot, they're not, you know, revolutionizing our understanding of the story. But we do have different versions. We can say we have what we call the Maseratic text. This is the standard version of the Hebrew Bible. This is the version from which most Bible translations are based on. And these are medieval manuscripts from around a thousand AD. So so way after the time period we're talking about, because they're scrolls, they don't last that long. And it's, this is, this is what we have.
10:03 Speaker 01 So most of the critical editions are based on this. It's a scribal community in and around Tiberias, which is a city in in Israel, right by the Sea of Galilee. These were Jewish rabbis who who put this version together. But we have other versions. We have something called the Samaritan Pentateuch. So this is from a group of Jews known as the Samaritans, famous from a biblical parable in in the New Testament. And they have an alternative version of of the first five books of the Bible, the Torah or the Pentateuch. Most notably, they have an extra, one of the 10 commandments, they have an extra commandment.
10:37 Kate Lister? What's the extra commandment?
10:38 Speaker 01 The extra commandment is that God chose his holiest place in Israel at a place called Mount Gerizim, because that's where the Samaritan community is. So it's not Jerusalem, Jerusalem is not the center, it's it's Mount Gerizim. So that's a big, that's a big variation.
10:51 Kate Lister? Yeah.
10:52 Speaker 01 And then we also have something called the Dead Sea Scrolls. So these are more or less all of the biblical manuscripts.
11:00 Speaker 01 Adam and Eve narrative, no major variance there, but there are some, some pretty dramatic changes. And then we have something called the Septuagint. This is the Greek translation from the Hebrew, which is about third century BCE. So these are our oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. It's not even in Hebrew, it's in Greek. And there we have some major variants, again, not major variants for our narrative, but for the book of Samuel, for the book of Jeremiah, for instance, these are almost different versions of those books. So there's, there's sometimes some major variants that we're going to encounter.
11:31 Kate Lister? Do any of those scrolls survive today? I mean, are they available in a museum that you can go and see? Part of the original Old Testament scroll? Have we lost them all?
11:38 Speaker 01 No, original, no. Original, um, that's, that's a really thorny question too. What's the original scroll? Some of them you can. So, so the Aleppo Codex, you can go, if you ever find yourself in St. Petersburg and go to the Hermitage Museum, that's where it's stored. I don't know what access is like, but that's where it is.
11:55 Kate Lister? They probably just don't let you just wander in and have a look at that, do they?
11:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're pretty fragile. The Dead Sea Scrolls are kind of distributed around a few museums, but the, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem that has the majority of them. The, the Septuagint, these are stored in places like the Vatican Library. So again, they're there. It's just a matter of who you know to be able to get access to. Yeah, right. But we have digitized, you know, digitized versions of these things. So if you're really interested, you can go and look at them online. You just have to train yourself to read first century Hebrew.
12:26 Kate Lister? Oh God, of course, of course. Yeah. You just be sat looking at, well, this was completely useless. I have no idea what any of this says. So I can't imagine anyone's listening who isn't at least vaguely familiar with the Adam and Eve story. But in a nutshell, God creates Adam and Eve as the first two people on earth. He gives them a nice place to live, Eden, says, you can do anything you like, but don't eat the fruit on that tree. A snake turns up, temp, like tempts Eve into doing it. She does. Then they gain knowledge and God gets really cross and flings them out. That's basically the story.
12:59 Speaker 01 Right, but there's two trees, remember. So the one tree is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The other tree is the tree of life or the tree of eternal life. And that's important for the plot because that's part of the reason they get flung out.
13:10 Kate Lister? Oh, really? So go fill out my awful knowledge, my awful version of that story then. Like, tell me about the tree of knowledge and why they weren't allowed to eat from the other tree.
13:20 Speaker 01 So first off, it's a pretty good synopsis that you did.
13:23 Kate Lister? Thank you.
13:23 Speaker 01 One, one minor detail, it's okay. So, so start at the start of the beginning. And, and what's interesting is if you actually read Genesis one in the beginning, you have a whole chapter that comes before Eden and in there humanity is already created. Women and men are created already in chapter one. Chapter two, the Eden story, just pretends that does, that didn't happen.
13:42 Kate Lister? So that whoever was editing that needs to have a word because that, that doesn't make sense.
13:48 Speaker 01 Right, but we're striving for narrative continuity, right? We, we want to read a story that doesn't have, you know, redundancies and plot holes. They're trying to preserve sacred scriptures. So you can't just toss this story out, right? You have to include it and you have to try and, try and harmonize. This is, this is what these redactors were doing. Exactly as you said, story begins, we have a very anthropomorphic deity here. He's, he's kind of, he's in a garden, he's, he's planting. He's like a human being in, in certain respects, but exactly as you say, he creates man. And I, I appreciate you said man, not Adam, because it's really important to pinpoint. He has no name. His name is man. It's not Adam as a proper name because in certain places they just call them the man. So he has no name. The woman initially has no name either.
14:33 Speaker 01 Eve comes at the very end of the story. Um, so man and woman in the garden, God plants the garden himself. Again, very anthropomorphic and he, in the midst of the garden, he plants two trees. One is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And one is the tree of life, as will be revealed to be tree of eternal life. And you can't eat from either of them.
14:51 Kate Lister? Right.
14:52 Speaker 01 Eat from everything else, but neither of those two. And this gets to my reading and what this story is all about. It's about what those two trees represent in terms of. Ancient scribes, ancient Hebrew-speaking scribes, trying to make sense of humanity's place in the world. It's a creation story. That's what all these creation stories are about. I'll leave it there. We can kind of get into the the details, but that's otherwise the synopsis is right.
15:19 Kate Lister? Why do we call him Adam then? If that wasn't his name, where do the names come from?
15:23 Speaker 01 So he's never given a name, right? Unlike Eve, who is given this this name, which derives from a etymology for to live. So her name literally just means life. But Adam doesn't get a name, which seems a bit unfair. He's the first man. We've got to call him something. Right, right. So so I think just tradition. I don't know when exactly, perhaps in the Rabbinic period, perhaps even earlier, they start to read this common noun, which is Adam, man, or humanity, depending on its usage, as a proper name, because he doesn't have one in the narrative.
15:56 Kate Lister? So his name literally just means a man?
15:58 Speaker 01 Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly.
16:01 Kate Lister? Right. So we've got life and a man. The next detail I'd like to pick up on is what is the fruit that they're not supposed to eat? Like, is it an apple? And if there's two trees, and to be honest, I hadn't realized there were two trees. What was the fruit on the other tree? Was it like bananas or pineapples? Like, what is it? Does it mention anything about what kind of fruit it is?
16:21 Speaker 01 Right. Well, we're not sure. But what it almost certainly is not is an apple. Because you ever visit the Middle East and you go to these places, you'll you'll notice a sparsity of apple trees. It's it's not a very conducive climate to growing apples, right? So so just put yourself in kind of a Middle Eastern climatic context and start to think about possibilities. So my go to is a fig. You know, it's it's a tempting, delicious item, dates, I mean, something sweet, something that you would want to want to consume. I don't know enough about the arboreal realities of the Middle East to fire off too many other trees that grow there. But those are kind of my ideas, right? So
17:03 Speaker 01 so think in terms of that. And of course, it doesn't really matter. The Hebrew just calls it a fruit, a fruit.
17:09 Kate Lister? Yeah.
17:10 Speaker 01 A fruit. Never gets any more detailed than that. And of course, it's it's a symbol. So so it's it's a symbol of accessing this characteristic that we'll we'll come to learn of wisdom, knowledge, and then on the other side of of eternal life, which are the kind of the the two trees offer those two options. So. Not a satisfying answer, I know, but, but a fruit.
17:31 Kate Lister? No, that's a good answer. When you said there it could be a fig, my mind immediately went to the fact that the fig, the fruit of fig has been a vulva image for a very, very long time. And even today, fika is slang word for, for, for the vulva. I'm reaching there. That's probably not what that means at all, but that's.
17:49 Speaker 01 Right. And it's my guess that it's a fig, so.
17:52 Kate Lister? Yes. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that doesn't mean anything. That was just where my mind went immediately.
17:57 Speaker 01 It's a great connection though.
17:58 Kate Lister? What do these trees symbolize then? We've got a tree of knowledge and a tree of, of life.
18:03 Speaker 01 Yeah. So they kind of explain what, what they're supposed to represent. Let's get back to the, to the point of this whole story, right? Since, you know, the, the third century AD, this has been a story about sin. Famously, St. Augustine interpreted this as, as the original sin, the sin of Eve. She listened to the, to the serpent, who, by the way, doesn't necessarily lie in this narrative, right? God says, you shall eat from all the trees, except for these two. And if, and if you do eat from them, you shall surely die. That's the, that's the biblical line there. You shall surely die.
18:36 Kate Lister? It's such a strange story. I just wouldn't. Would you? Like, if that was like, you can have everything else, but if you eat this, you're gonna die. Fair enough. But then I won't.
18:44 Speaker 01 Right. Right. And this is where the, the serpent comes in, that the tempting serpent, he says, is that true? Is it true that God told you that? That if you eat from this tree, you will surely die? And Eve says, yeah, that's what he told us two verses ago. And he says, no, if you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely not die. So the exact inversion of, of what he says. And he's not wrong, but he's not exactly telling the whole truth, right? So, so they're not immediately executed, which is actually, at a linguistic level, I think, kind of a play on words there because lots of laws in, in the Bible, we have really long lists of laws, things that you can't do.
19:23 Speaker 01 And for quite a few of the, the punishments is the death penalty, you can imagine. And that's what that line is, you shall surely die. That's the biblical death penalty. And what the snake, I think, is saying is you won't die immediately. Like, you won't be executed if you eat this tree, which they're not.
19:36 Kate Lister? Tricky.
19:38 Speaker 01 But they will lose out on the chance to live forever. And that's what that other tree is. And that's where this theme of humanity's kind of existence.
19:50 Speaker 01 Is that we have knowledge, we have consciousness. So we're not like the animals who are also in the garden, but we're not like God or the gods. And I, and I use the plural there because at the very end of the Eden story, the reason we're cast out is not necessarily because we committed a sin, a word that doesn't actually appear in the story, but because we gained consciousness. And by gaining consciousness, we have one of those two elements that define divinity, consciousness, knowledge, whatever that means. That's, that's a divine characteristic that we share as human beings. What distinguishes us is that we die. We're mortal. We don't live forever. And so God's line in the end of the story is you were cast out east from Eden to wander
20:33 Speaker 01 forever. And the, and the gate is barred by a cherub lest you reach out your hand.
20:37 Kate Lister? You could, you could take a cherub. They're just little fat babies. That's, that's no deterrent at all.
20:42 Speaker 01 Oh, oh no. These are not fat babies with wings. These are not, this is a complete Greco-Romanization.
20:48 Kate Lister? That's a rubbish god. Tell me what they mean by cherub then, because what I'm envisioning is just a small toddler of just like, come on.
20:56 Speaker 01 So away from toddler, we're going in the direction more of a sphinx. It's, it's a mixed creature. So it's got the head of a, of a human being and the body of a lion and huge wings.
21:07 Kate Lister? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
21:08 Speaker 01 And if you, and if you want, you can go and see exactly what a cherub looks like. If you go to the Victoria Embankment in London, all the benches right by Cleopatra's Needle there, they have cherubs on them.
21:17 Kate Lister? Those are, oh my God. Wait, so how, whoa, side quest. Then how did we end up with the fat babies? How did we go from sphinx lion, these like monstrous things to fat babies with curls?
21:30 Speaker 01 Hallmark. I, I think.
21:32 Kate Lister? I bet it was the Victorians. I bet it was the Victorians. Almost every episode, they've messed something up somewhere.
21:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think they're likely culprits. Yeah. And, and they're obviously merging a few Greco-Roman motifs in there as well. Cupid and, and I don't know enough about the Greco-Roman visual tradition, but definitely quite a few of the, we call them mishvajin, like these mixed entities, sphinxes and cherubs and things of that sort. These are really common. Architectural features of palaces and we have them in Neo Assyrian palaces under the name of Lamas, so these giant winged bull creatures. So these are really common architectural features. And I think that's what's kind of being invoked in the in the Eden narrative there that has one of these things at its gate. But to get back to the reason why this cherub is placed there to bar entry is very explicit.
22:22 Speaker 01 Less humanity, the man and the woman, the woman's now called Eve, reach out their hand, take from the tree of the knowledge of life and live forever and therefore become identical to the gods, like one of us, is what the text actually says there.
22:35 Kate Lister? Right. I didn't know that bit. That makes more sense, kind of.
22:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
22:42 Kate Lister? It's like you basically can't come back in because you might do it again and then you'll be gods.
22:47 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then that raises the question of who is the us? Who is this plural? Right? I mean, it should only be one god up there. And this has given scholars for centuries kind of pause and question. Christians had a very quick answer. That's Trinity. We don't need to go any further than that. But for Jewish interpreters, it was a real question. Like, who is this plurality? What is being invoked here?
23:11 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah.
23:11 Speaker 01 Is it a dual dimension based on the kind of gender dimorphism? That there's a man and a woman? Or we don't know. We don't know the answer. We just have this plural. But it's really interesting. And that's the core Eden narrative I think most of your listeners would be familiar with.
23:32 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Dylan and Adam and Eve after this short break.
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24:25 Kate Lister? Is the snake Satan in the original text? Or is that a later addition? Or is the snake just a random snake?
24:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, the snake is definitely not equated with Satan. This entire religious tradition surrounding Satan, that comes much, much later in time than when this text is written. Now Satan does appear in the Hebrew Bible twice, and that's it. So it's actually an extremely, and both in late texts, in Chronicles and in the Book of Joe, which it's not the devil is kind of the best way. Satan is not a human being, not a god, somewhere in that messy middle. Some kind of divine-like being, an angel maybe, but they also don't really think of angels like we think of them. And really, his name just means an accuser. So he's kind of a lawyer, which of course the devil has.
25:18 Kate Lister? Of course.
25:19 Speaker 01 Right. So that's kind of his character, but it's not connected at all to this serpent, the snake, who really does seem to be a snake. And again, part of the whole story is kind of explaining, why are things the way they are? Why are we intelligent but not immortal? Why are we different from animals but not quite divine? Why do we have to toil the ground? Why does it hurt in childbirth? And then, of course, why do snakes have no arms and legs?
25:46 Kate Lister? Of course, these are the big questions.
25:49 Speaker 01 Those core questions that really troubled.
25:52 Kate Lister? They were played in the ancient.
25:55 Kate Lister? I love that. What about being naked? Because my memory of the story is that being naked is quite a big part of it, is that before they did this, they ate this fruit. They were quite happy running around in the nip. And then they eat the fruit and then they realize, oh no, this is a bad thing.
26:11 Speaker 01 Right, yeah. It's the dead giveaway for God that they have eaten from the fruit, right? Because once they gain consciousness by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they're aware of shame for the first time. So they make loin closses, you know, the thousands and thousands of artistic representations of Adam and Eve have. Have always relied on last week to pick them actually naked. So we have little fig leaves covering up the
26:34 Kate Lister? Fig leaves, yes, yes. Fig leaves, yeah, your, your argument that it might have been a fig. They've got fig leaves just right there. Look at that.
26:41 Speaker 01 There you go.
26:41 Kate Lister? Convenient.
26:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. More, more support from reception history. So, so it's the dead giveaway that they've, that they've disobeyed this one rule that they, well, two rules, but one of the two rules that they had. And it's a sign of this consciousness that they start to wear clothes because they, they feel shame. And this is probably the point where it's good to digress a little bit outside the biblical text.
27:06 Kate Lister? Okay.
27:07 Speaker 01 Because what clothes represent in that text, that of, that of shame is one, one way to kind of interpret it. But I like to kind of, especially in my capacity as a biblical scholar and an ancient Near Eastern historian, is to just read creation stories more widely and see how these motifs and themes recur in other cultures, neighboring cultures, roughly contemporaneous cultures. And we see a lot of recurrent themes and clothing is an important one, actually.
27:32 Kate Lister? Really?
27:33 Speaker 01 And so, yes, yes, it is. And so one of the places I turn, and before, you know, I'll preface all of this, is all of these ancient Near Eastern stories, creation stories I'll mention, they're not, you know, they're not the Eden narrative. They, they, they share in the same visual repertoire and conceptual world as the authors of the, of the Eden narrative, but it's not like the authors of the Eden narrative read these ancient myths and then just wrote it down in Hebrew. Like there, there's enough differences that they are distinct tradition, especially with my students. The one place I usually turn is to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is not a creation story, by the way. It's a, it's our first, it's really our first narrative story in the world that we have. And in that
28:15 Speaker 01 story, we have a creation episode of, of a strange entity known as Enkidu. And Enkidu is this hairy wild man creature. He's, he's incredibly powerful, the only, the only being who can really challenge the great king Gilgamesh in terms of feats of strength. And he's created directly by the gods. So like, Man and Eve, he's created from clay, like man is created from the dust of the ground. And we don't get it here, but we also get an echo of the divine breath that's breathed into man that makes him a living entity. In the Mesopotamian world, where the Gilgamesh act that comes from, it's actually the blood of a slain god that animates humanity, that
28:56 Speaker 01 makes us living. So we at least consist of partially some, some part of the divine in, in the act of creation. And in his story, he is civilized, he gains consciousness because he's basically like a Cro-Magnon. He's, he's a, he's, he's a part of nature, you know, the man in nature. And his civilizing process is not a, a fruit, but actually the act of sex. And the act of sex with a prostitute.
29:21 Kate Lister? Shamhat, right?
29:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I remember Shamhat. Yeah. And it's really important, right? Because a, again, there, the feminine is the entry into consciousness for Enkidu.
29:32 Kate Lister? Wow, yes.
29:33 Speaker 01 It's through, it's through copulation, not through eating of a fruit. But what, what happens is he realizes that he's not civilized. So he cuts his hair, he starts to use implements and one starts to drink beer, because it's ancient Mesopotamia.
29:46 Kate Lister? Of course.
29:47 Speaker 01 Drink beer to be a civilized individual.
29:48 Kate Lister? Yes.
29:49 Speaker 01 And you wear clothes. And by donning clothes, this shows like this separation from the natural world, that Enkidu's leaving the natural world and becoming civilized. Let's put it that way. And, and there too, we have this important feminine role. And so, so I think that's what the clothes are, are also symbolizing in the Eden narrative, this, this transition out of an idyllic state of existence, primordial state of existence, where we're really, we're in close proximity with God, we walk along God, to really the reality that these authors were living in. Why do we wear clothes? Why do snakes have no arms and legs? Why do all these things happen? That they're explaining the world through, through these myths. Not, not in the negative sense of myth being that which
30:31 Speaker 01 is untrue, but myth as stories that give meaning and, and explain the world in which these people live.
30:37 Kate Lister? I'd never thought about the parallels between Adam and Eve and Enkidu and Shamhat before, but there is absolutely like this idea that they were. At one with nature, that they were living in a kind of, not quite unconscious, but you know, that they weren't human almost. And then something happens and they become aware of shame, aware of themselves. And in Inkydo's case, then he could no longer talk to animals, which, which was rather sad, I, I felt. But he did get to have sex for like 10 days, didn't he? That was, that's what we're told.
31:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, seven, something like that. And what's interesting is he also, he also shows this great deal of regret for, for having had sex with Shamaq. Because there's this huge refrain, once, once it's portent that he's going to die, he blames everyone. He blames Gilgamesh, he blames Shamhat.
31:22 Kate Lister? Of course.
31:23 Speaker 01 Which raises a question, well, if he'd never done any of this, was he going to die? It doesn't tell us, but it becomes, you know, the major plot point, the turning point in the epic of Gilgamesh is Inkydo's death. So there again, I think this, this, this question emerges, part of the shared conceptual world that these authors are working in.
31:43 Kate Lister? I know that one point of early theological debate amongst the early Christian church fathers was, did Adam and Eve have sex in the Garden of Eden? And I've read what Saint Augustine, his strange theory that they kind of lay down next to one another. And then, and then sort of a weird process of osmosis happened where there was reproduction. So it was, it's very, because they're trying to understand like if they were living without sin and they were living like animals, did they have sex? I mean, what, did they? Well, how would you wade into that debate if you had Saint Augustine here?
32:13 Speaker 01 Right, I would say the connecting thread for all of the early chapters of Genesis, what we call the primeval history, basically up to the Tower of Babel, are genealogies. So and so begat so and so, so and so begat so and so, so and so and begat. So, so there's no, there's no reason to try to think outside the normal bounds of human reproduction. That, that it's the, it's the connecting link between all of these stories. How do we get from Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Seth to Noah?
32:43 Kate Lister? Yeah.
32:43 Speaker 01 Through long lists of genealogies. So I, I, I mean, if it was in the garden or after the garden, I don't know. That we're, we're bound to what the text says. They have other things going on at that moment, so maybe they. They were a bit busy. So I don't know. Um, I don't know what I would say to Augustine. I I would just be very suspicious of his interpretation, considering the fact that, you know, the very first mitzvah, the first commandment humanity ever gets from God is be fruitful and multiply. So.
33:11 Kate Lister? Go off, you go. Yes, absolutely.
33:14 Speaker 01 Right. So I I don't think there's any kind of sexual appreh- apprehensions, especially with the first man and woman there. And of course, we know they do have kids. They have Cain, they have Abel, they have Set, right? And, you know, the Bible does have euphemisms to to describe sexual acts, laying down with someone, knowing someone, uncovering someone's feet. So they do try to euphemize it at at some point, but but that's not in this text. So read into it what you will, but we have to get from point A to point B. There are kids that do appear.
33:50 Kate Lister? So the million dollar question then, was this Eve's fault? Did she deserve all the blame that gets heaped on her by the later medieval theologians and scholars? Did she do it all? Is it right to blame her? Was Adam just the innocent bystander in all of this?
34:03 Speaker 01 Well, he is certainly a passive agent initially. Eve is taking on the lead role. I've flipped the question on its head. What what is so bad that she gave us exactly, right? So so you could say, well, we're banished from Eden. Okay, well, why why would we want to stay in Eden, right? Because what she ultimately gives us is consciousness and makes us a human being, makes us who we are, what separates us from the adults. Is that so bad? Would be my response.
34:31 Kate Lister? I don't think so. Yes.
34:33 Speaker 01 Right?
34:34 Kate Lister? I don't think so.
34:35 Speaker 01 It comes it comes with with a burden and punishment. But again, my response would would be just me thinking about how authors create stories, right? That that this is not, this is not a story trying to explain. Just, oh, why do I have to toil in this, the ground that, you know, my crops are always failing and my wife has painful labor? It's, it's more a question about who are we? What are we? And there, I would actually say that there's a much more positive view of Eve in that respect, being the, the active agent in claiming consciousness for humanity. It's the one thing that connects us to the divine, right? So, so I would consider it a very important thing. So it is her fault, um, but for, but she gives us something great. So.
35:20 Kate Lister? Did any of the early theologians or scholars take that interpretation? Or have they always been like, god damn it, woman? This is all your fault. Women are clearly to blame. I mean, Saint Jerome really went in on that and so did a whole bunch of others. But has there any, ever been anyone kind of flying the flag going, whoa, whoa, hang on, wait a minute? Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing.
35:41 Speaker 01 I could say Jewish tradition definitely does not follow the, the early Christian fathers' interpretation of, of this as a, as a narrative of sin. There's, there's a bit of rebellion. I mean, there's no shortage of rebellious acts in this section of the Bible, but they're following more in line with it as a creation story, not exactly as I explain it. And, and again, I'm trying to generalize about 2,000 years of interpret history in Jewish, in Jewish community. But, but definitely they don't follow that, that line of analysis of original sin and the fall.
36:13 Kate Lister? Wow, okay.
36:15 Speaker 01 And, and so I think that's a major difference between how different religious communities approach this particular narrative, this shared text. And I don't know enough about how, how some scholars interpret it. I know it appears in the Quran as well. Um, so that'd be another place I'd like to go and see differences of opinion. But definitely modern, modern biblical scholars, I, I think the Augustinian interpretation has kind of fallen by the wayside, which it had since the Protestant Reformation, really.
36:48 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Dylan and Adam and Eve after this short break.
36:59 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
37:41 Kate Lister? So as a final talking point then, could we discuss a little bit about how Adam and Eve were made in the first place? Because I know that there's a lot of debate around this. So, you know, the one that you normally get told is that Adam was created and God, then he just puff and he was alive. But then we get told that he makes Eve out of Adam's rib. But I know that there's some debate around the exact wording and how we interpret the wording of that. So what have you uncovered about that?
38:10 Speaker 01 So the word, exactly as you just described, Adam is created from the dust of the ground and the breath of divine life animates him. This is, you know, this is standard ancient Near Eastern creation myth has it written all over it. They use clay, biblical writers use dust. The sticking point is a very specific noun, salaah in Hebrew, which just means side. So it's from the side of a man. Whatever we imagine that to be, the Bible text gives us no further indication. It is rather unique in terms of creation narratives to have one creature created out of the body of another. But like I told you, you know, in Mesopotamia, we have humanity created out of the bodies of gods all the time.
38:53 Speaker 01 And there are points in the narrative where the man's identity kind of merges into that of the divine. He starts to partake in creation as well. So maybe there's a reverberation of that. But it spawned a real huge debate among various waves of feminist biblical interpretations on not just that fact that she's created second and out of man.
39:17 Speaker 01 Also, therefore, the question is, well, does she also have that divine spark in her? Like, does she have the breath as well? And it stands in pretty distinct contrast to that other creation story in the previous chapter, where man and woman are created at the same time, both in the image of God. So a much more equitable view of creation there. So this has spawned considerably, not just, you know, between feminist interpreters and non-feminists, but within feminist interpretation of this text. Is how do we take that? Is it an inherent, you know, patriarchal version of creation as opposed to Genesis one, which is a more equitable one? And I've already kind of said, I don't think so, because I think Eve has a very really
40:01 Speaker 01 important role in Genesis two. So we kind of are left with a few uncertainties there about the significance, but it might play into the punishments that come at the end of the story. So all of the creatures are kind of punished with the thing from which they're created. So man, famously created from the ground, is going to suffer from having to toil agriculture, crop failures, that's going to be his punishment. And woman, it's going to hurt in childbirth, and she's going to suffer under the dominion of man, right? So again,
40:34 Kate Lister? Damn it.
40:35 Speaker 01 Is that promoting that that position, that that is a natural state of order? Or is it saying this is a fundamental injustice of the world? Explaining why that is the case, why there's misogyny, or men running in control of most of these ancient societies kind of idea. So that's a lot to get from a rib, but that's where we kind of debate the symbolism and the meaning of these kinds of things.
41:03 Kate Lister? Wasn't there one biblical scholar a few years ago now, who went a little bit further than that and said that actually by rib, I think they meant penis? And then everyone went, I'm sorry.
41:12 Speaker 01 You could this be perhaps?
41:15 Kate Lister? I'm sure that I read that is that he argued that it was the bacchus bone that is often found in other animals where you have a penis bone.
41:24 Speaker 01 I have not heard this.
41:25 Kate Lister? If you've not heard, or maybe I've maybe I've just dreamt this, maybe this is some insane fever dream that I've had. Yeah, I'm sure that I read that is that that somebody was arguing that perhaps Eve was created from Adam's penis. But obviously, if you're not aware of this, then this hasn't broken through into any kind of mainstream scholarship.
41:40 Speaker 01 There's a lot of people who write on this stuff. There's absolutely a high chance that I have missed a couple of suggestions. And again, like I said, it's not, it's not, it's not a body word that they use. So it's, it's just like a, it's almost directional. Like you have something on the side of a building. Like, that's the word they use. So, so we're really not sure, which means anything is possible, including penis. Who knows?
42:07 Kate Lister? Including penises, right?
42:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. And if you actually read the Sumerian creation, it's, it's, it's much more integrated, sexuality is much more integrated into those. So it's, it's possible, just looking further afield in the wider world about what's going on.
42:23 Kate Lister? And you certainly got a lot of like penis creation myths and ancient Egyptian mythology. And, you know, so it's not without precedent, to be completely honest.
42:32 Speaker 01 No, no, the Eden narrative is a bit of the outlier, having stripped the sex out of the narrative a bit.
42:37 Kate Lister? So as a final question then, do you think that the Eden story still has resonance today? What do you think that the story has come to mean today? I mean, obviously, there are people who have a lot of faith who believe in it literally or figuratively, but just as a wider creation myth, what do you think that it means to us today?
42:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it definitely has meaning and resonance for me. So me as a critical historical scholar, it resonates with me about the humanity behind, behind the people creating this narrative, like what they were trying to understand and how they understood this thing called humanity in which we all are a part of. And, you know, I have colleagues in the philosophy department that are asking pretty similar questions to this very day, you know, like who are we? What are we? What is our relationship with nature? What is our relationship with the divine?
43:22 Kate Lister? Or his consciousness?
43:23 Speaker 01 Are we just, you know, human? Are we just human animals? Or is there something distinct about us? What is consciousness? These are timeless questions. And what, that's what really resonates with me. And then for people of faith, you know, there's many different divergences in terms of interpretation about sin, especially for Jewish congregations. We can't talk about Eden without talking about the temple, how, you know, encounters with God, how we, how we try to embed that in place and space. That becomes a really interesting question. So when we walk into the synagogue, the temple, the church, cathedral, are these, you know, replications of Eden trying, trying to get us back to that, to that, that thing that's lost?
44:07 Speaker 01 So I think it has real resonance, especially because it's so well known. You know, if people, people forgot Gilgamesh for a long time. So, so it, it, it still resonates with me, but not in the same way as with other people. Right? So that, that for me is, is the significance of the story.
44:25 Kate Lister? Oh, Dylan, you have been wonderful. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
44:32 Speaker 01 They can check out my Cardiff University webpage or listen to the other podcasts, the ancients that I've been on. So I talk a lot about the other stories of, of the Bible.
44:41 Kate Lister? Marvelous. Thank you so much. Will you come back again and tell us more interesting things about the Bible?
44:46 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Had a blast. Thank you for inviting me.
44:49 Kate Lister? Thank you.
44:53 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Dylan for joining us. And if you liked what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got the super sluts, bop, bop, bop. From Empress Theodora to Madame de Barry, we're looking at the women who have owned their sexuality. And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstle and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheats, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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