The Bible's Cutting Room Floor by Joel M. Hoffman

Author:Joel M. Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466848269
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

5

ADAM AND EVE: FALLING DOWN AND GETTING BACK UP

Judge a tree by its fruit, not its leaves.

—LATIN PROVERB

Perhaps surprisingly, their first question wasn’t how to survive. It was why they had to survive. Or, more precisely, why no one was taking care of that for them.

Up until now, in their brief and sheltered experience, everything had automatically been attended to, requiring no effort on their part. Survival had been easy. But no more.

Their new reality was so shocking, in fact, that it would take them a whole week to realize that they were hungry.

So their first question was, Why? And not just why they suddenly had to take care of themselves. They wanted to know why things had changed.

The simple answer was that it was their own fault. They had known the rules and willingly broken them. And considering what the consequences could have been, their sentence had perhaps even been lenient.

But, though accurate, that answer seemed unsatisfactory. So even amid the demands of their new and surprising need to survive, they tried to make sense of things.

They are Adam and Eve, and the account of their life after Eden comes from a variety of documents in Greek, Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Slavonic, and even Old Irish. Most of them are translations, either of each other or of original documents that have long been lost. Some are obvious adaptations. The work is usually called the Life of Adam and Eve, though the Greek version is sometimes misleadingly titled the Apocalypse of Moses, because that text purports to show the life of Adam and Eve to Moses.

The various versions are not entirely consistent with each other, making it difficult to pin down exactly what the original text was, when it was written, and in which language. Still, by carefully combining the different versions, we can get a pretty good sense of the text. And we can date it with reasonable confidence to the days of Jesus. It was probably written in Hebrew or Aramaic.

In other words, the Life of Adam and Eve is the second half of the Bible’s Adam and Eve story, and it dates to the days when the content of the Bible was still in flux. As it happens, the first part of the story features prominently in Genesis, while this second part was relegated to the obscurity of the cutting room floor, which is a shame, because in many ways it’s the post-Eden part of the story that speaks most directly to the human condition.

The Genesis account of Adam and Eve in Eden spans less than a few dozen verses, yet the story continues to have almost unbelievable impact. It is hardly a coincidence that Adam and Eve are the focus of artistic expression from Michelangelo’s Adam to Marc Chagall’s Creation, in addition to works named Adam and Eve by such luminaries as Rubens, Raphael, and others, or that Milton based his Paradise Lost on the story and Shakespeare used some of its themes—like the snake and the garden—in Hamlet.

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