Weekly Torah Reading, Bereshit, October 29, 2016

Don’t Touch That Tree!

 

Who was responsible for the Fall of Man, Adam or Eve? I’m sure some learned readers may object to this very formulation. The whole idea that what happened in the Garden of Eden was some kind of “fall” is an entirely Christian notion to begin with, they may say. Jews never saw the events in the Garden that way—this view of things comes straight from the New Testament.

 

And they are almost right. But actually, if you go back far enough, the roots of the Christian doctrine of original sin appear in a number of Second Temple texts, in fact, even the word “fall” appears in the Jewish apocryphon known as the Fourth Book of Ezra: “O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours who are your descendants.”

 

But back to the question of responsibility: Was it Adam or Eve who brought about the couple’s failure to obey God’s commandment? Who was responsible for their expulsion from the Garden?

 

On the face of things, it was mostly Eve’s fault. After all, the snake talked her into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. It was only after this that she gave the fruit to Adam and he ate. Furthermore, when God subsequently punished the three principals, He first reproved the snake, then Eve, and only after her, Adam. Didn’t this represent a descending order of guilt, with the snake as the most culpable, then Eve, and Adam the least?

 

No wonder that numerous early Jewish sources specify that Eve was the first cause of humanity’s bad beginning, and Adam the victim of her waywardness. Ben Sira, the second-century BCE sage, left no doubt about it: “From a woman was sin’s beginning, and because of her, we all die” (Sir 25:24). “Oh evil woman,” the author of the Apocalypse of Moses chimed in, “Why have you wrought destruction among us?” (14:2, 21:6). In the late first century CE, Josephus wrote: “Thereupon God imposed punishment on Adam for having yielded to a woman’s counsel” (Jewish Antiquities 1:49).

 

There is, however, one detail in the biblical account that incriminates Adam. When God first tells Adam about the Garden that he is to inhabit, He says: “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat of it, you shall die” (Gen 2:16-17). However, when the snake asks Eve what can and cannot be eaten, she gives a slightly different answer: “God said, ‘You may not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the Garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

 

Where did she get the idea that it was forbidden even to touch the tree? Not from God. When God gave His instructions to Adam, “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden,” etc. (Gen 2:16-17), Eve hadn’t yet been created! So if she thought it was forbidden to touch the tree, it must have been because Adam had told her so. Perhaps with the best of intentions, he tried to keep her as far from that dangerous tree as possible. But in so doing, he supplied the snake with the perfect way to trick her. According to the midrashic compilation Avot deR. Natan, as soon as Eve reported that it was forbidden to even to touch the tree, the snake said to her, “But I can touch the tree and not die, and so can you.”

 

At that point the snake hit the tree so hard that some of its fruits fell to the ground. The snake then picked one up and popped it in his mouth. “Look,” he said, “I can eat this and not die—and so can you.” Whereupon Eve thought: “All the things my husband has told me are lies,” unfortunately including what God had indeed forbidden, eating the fruit. (Avot deR. Natan ch. 1)

 

The lesson was clear: Adam may have had the best of intentions, but adding on new prohibitions to old ones can sometimes have the opposite of the desired effect—a lesson that some rabbinic authorities might keep in mind today.

 

Shabbat shalom!