September 3. Story of the Day: Garden of Eden

Today's story is one that I wrote, inspired by legends you can find in Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews (see details in the author's note below). I first published the story in my class blog for Fall 2018, and I've copied it here.

Looking for more stories? Click here for previous Stories-of-the-Day.

Who's to Blame in the Garden of Eden?

God went looking in the Garden for Adam and Eve, but he did not see them because they were hiding. God knew what this meant: they had eaten the figs from the Tree of Knowledge in the midst of the Garden. So now they were hiding, ashamed to face him.

God had expected this might happen, and he knew he would have to punish them. He had told the man Adam that he would die if he ate the figs that came from that tree. But he wanted to give Adam and Eve a chance to confess what they had done; he would forgive them if they admitted to eating the figs. If not, well... so be it.

God called out to Adam, "Adam, where are you?"

Adam heard God's voice from where he and Eve were hiding in the trees, awkwardly pressing fig leaves against their bodies, trying to hide their nakedness.

"I am hiding here in the trees," Adam shouted. Eve stared at him, dumbfounded. Why would Adam say that? Now God was going to find them for sure.

"Why are you hiding?" God asked him. "Tell me what happened."

Adam said, "That woman, the one you gave me, she gave me fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and I ate it." Eve was furious: Adam was going to try to blame it all on her!

"Eve," said God, "what have you done?"

Eve shouted, "The serpent tricked me; he made me eat the figs."

Then God called out to the serpent. "Serpent, explain yourself!"

The serpent hissed, "It was all that other female'sssssssss fault; I wasssssss jussssssst following ordersssssss."

As the snake was still hissing, Adam's first wife burst forth in a flash of light and stood there staring God face to face.

"Okay, I did it," Lilith said defiantly. "I told the serpent to trick Eve into eating the figs. But it wasn't my idea: Samael put me up to it."

God had suspected Samael might be involved. He was one of the worst troublemakers among the ranks of the angels.

"Samael!" God shouted.

Thus summoned, Samael came swooping down from the heavens, alighting on the ground next to Lilith.

"That's right," he said. "I asked Lilith to help me get revenge on Adam because he cooked and ate my child!" The angel was still carrying the empty stewpot in which Adam had cooked the little boy's corpse.

Adam then burst forth out of the trees, dropping his fig leaves as he ran. "It's not my fault!" he shouted. "Eve told Samael she would take care of the baby, but then she just went off and left him lying there, and that's why he wouldn't stop crying, and that's why I killed him. But it's all Eve's fault, not mine!"

So Eve also came rushing out from behind the trees. "You're always blaming me for everything," she screamed, "but it wasn't my fault. I was trying to get supper ready before you came home, and I had to go get more wood to put on the fire."

Looking up angrily at God, she added, "This all happened because the fire is so greedy for wood; it's the fire's fault, not mine."

"Fire," God said patiently, "what do you have to say about all this?"

A flicker of flame rose up from the ground and whispered, "It's not my fault that I am greedy for wood. That is how you made me, God. This is really all your fault."

God had not expected this. What it really his fault? God thought about what the fire had said, and he realized that it might indeed be his fault after all. He should have been more careful when he created the fire, but what's done is done; God could not unmake what he had made.

"I'm sorry, fire," he said. "It is in your nature to eat the wood. You are not to blame."

"It's okay, God," said the fire. And then he added, "And I'm sorry you had to go get more wood to feed me, Eve."

Eve said, "I accept your apology, fire."

And so the fire vanished.

Then Eve looked pointedly at Adam.

"Well," Adam said, "I shouldn't have blamed you for leaving the baby alone. And I'm sorry I went and killed him, Samael. That was wrong of me."

Samael was still angry, but he nodded at Adam and said, "Lilith was only doing what I told her. I shouldn't have used her to get my revenge like that." He then took flight, vanishing into the sky as dark storm clouds gathered in his wake. Samael would visit the humans again in his own time.

Next it was Lilith's turn. "I admit I had a grudge against Adam and Eve, but that doesn't mean I should just do whatever Samael tells me." She turned to the serpent and added, "Serpent, I am sorry I got you involved in all of this."

The serpent waved his head slowly up and down in acknowledgment of Lilith's words as he hissed an apology to Eve. "Sssssso sssssssorry for what I did."

Then Lilith and the serpent both vanished; only God, Adam, and Eve were left.

And that's how Eve found herself apologizing to Adam. "I didn't want to be the only one in trouble, so I made you eat the figs too. I'm sorry."

Adam hugged Eve and said, "I'm sorry, too."

Then they both looked up at God, wondering what would happen next.

God smiled and said, "I think we all learned something from the Tree of Knowledge today. Things will be different from now on, but we'll figure something out to make it all work. Let me go write down some notes about all of this and get back to you."

God eventually returned with the Torah, which he gave to Adam and Eve. But that's the beginning of another story, and the end of this one.

Author's Notes

I always thought that the scene in Genesis with God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent was like a chain-of-blame, so I wanted to extend that chain. To do that, I used Lilith (Adam's first wife before Eve), and I also used the legend of how Adam killed Samael's infant son. In that legend, Samael left the baby in Eve's care, but Adam killed the baby because he wouldn't stop crying. But the corpse kept crying, so Adam chopped up the corpse, and still it kept crying, so he cooked the pieces in a stew, and then he and Eve ate the stew. Yet the baby still kept crying from inside their hearts, so God made the Torah to comfort them.

I took the idea of Samael and the baby, and also the Torah, so that in my story, instead of expelling Adam and Eve from Eden, God is going to give them the Torah, like in the Samael legend (and afterwards the book passes to Noah and then to Enoch and eventually to King Solomon). I also reversed the chain-of-blame into a chain-of-apology. I was inspired to do that from the Jewish legends that say God really did want Adam to just honestly admit what he had done, and it was only when Adam refused to admit what he had done that God resolved to punish him.

The detail that the fruit of the tree was a fig comes from Ginzberg's book of Jewish legends; that's why they used fig leaves to cover themselves. The Wikipedia article about Forbidden Fruit discusses various traditions about just what the fruit was: quice, apple, grape, fig, or pomegranate (plus two pretty weird ideas about wheat and mushrooms).

Bibliography.

The Holy Book -- Lilith -- The Punishment which all come from The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg.

Images

Sculpture of Adam and Eve from MaxPixel.
Eve and the Serpent by Henri Rousseau.
A vision by William Blake. This is not a depiction of Samael, but I liked the idea that this could be Samael looking into the pot which held the remains of his son. I cropped and flipped the image.
Medieval illustration by Cunradus Schlapperitzi at the New York Public Library.