The Ancients - Adam and Eve

Episode Date: February 1, 2026

Adam and Eve: parents of humanity, or characters in a Near Eastern myth about wisdom, mortality, and the limits of being human?Tristan Hughes and Dr Dylan Johnson strip away the Sunday school varnish to re-examine the story of Adam and Eve, starting with the question: was there really an apple? They discuss the origins and multiple layers of the story, try and pinpoint where Eden might have been located, and trace the tale of lost immortality that echoes through the legends of Gilgamesh, Sumerian rivers, and the earliest biblical textsMOREMoses & The ExodusListen on Apple Listen on SpotifyThe Ark of The CovenantListen on Apple Listen on SpotifyWatch this episode on our NEW YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hey, I hope you're doing well and welcome to this latest episode of the ancients. I'm just right next to my kitchen and making a cup of tea as I do this. And today we are delving deep into that famous creation story, that is, that of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. Naturally, as we do always on the ancients, when we cover an Old Testament story, we'll be exploring the ancient historical context behind this tale linked to Mesopotamia. lots of different themes. One that I found fascinating in this chat is that of immortality and

whether Adam and Eve were they created mortal or immortal. That and so much more is all to come. I really enjoyed this chat with Dr. Dylan Johnson, a returning guest, a good friend of mine, who is a lecturer in ancient Near Eastern history at Cardiff University. Let's get into the episode. Adam and Eve, the parents of the human race, formed from earth's dust, a divine breath, and a stolen rib. A pair of innocence, that is, until Eve, tempted by the evil serpent, ate the forbidden fruit. Their transgression was met with bitter punishment from God. The daughters of Eve were condemned to pain in childbirth, and their sons of Adam would forever toil and sweat over the accursed ground for food. We all know the story, but strip away the version you might have learned in Sunday school

and what is left is a dark myth with deep links to the ancient world. Today we will explore the Garden of Eden. It's tied to the ancient Near East and trace this foundational myth back to Mesopotamian epics that predate the Bible. And I'm so pleased to be joined today by historian, biblical scholar and expert in the ancient near East, Dr Dylan Johnson. Dylan. Always a pleasure.

Great to have you back on the show. Great to be back. Thanks for inviting me. It's what we've done now. We've done. Ark of the Covenant, Moses, Sosomen and Gomorrah, the Ten Commandments.

Yeah. But Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, I mean, first of all, what a story. I mean, the way it's composed, the many different layers to it as well, like an onion, and the influences you can see

from the world in which it's written, like at that time. It's fascinating. It's a brilliant story. Absolutely. I mean, it's extremely interesting in terms of the content, what it describes. It's also interesting in terms of its placement within Genesis coming immediately after another creation. So lots of questions there.

First off, big question to start it. Was there an apple? Was the forbidden fruit an apple? No. The forbidden fruit was not an apple. That's purely an accident. Well, we think it's a bit apocryphal. But we think it's an accident of Latin translators.

So in the Hebrew, the word is just pre, which just means fruit. And if we know much about horticulture, historical horticulture in southern Levant, in the Middle East, not many apple trees. But in Latin, there's a funny coincidence that the word for evil, that's pretty important, Malum, is also the word for apple, Malum. So by Eve eating the Malum, she invites evil into this world. So we think that maybe that's kind of a folk tradition, why we think of the first. fruit as an apple, but we don't actually know for sure. So there's a texture error almost or a misinterpretation that's happened somewhere along the line, evil for apple.

Yeah, something like that, or a play on words that it worked for both. Well, I'm glad we saw that straight away, and we will certainly return to the story of the fruit and many different themes within the story of Adam and Eve. But let's get the background out of the way first and foremost. Where in the book of Genesis and where in the Old Testament is the story of Adamadiv said and the Garden of Eden? So if we think of biblical writing as centered in and around this place in the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean, what would become Israel and Judah, then it's east. It's east of their east. How far east? It doesn't really give us a very clear indication because, again, this is a fairly mythological place. Mesopotamia, perhaps, perhaps further east, perhaps nowhere, perhaps is part of that mythical geography that in some ways is connected to real places. but always a little bit further, kind of a Shangri-La, not quite sure where it is exactly,

but it is fairly clear that from the biblical mindset, it's somewhere in the east, which means it's old in certain respects because of the antiquity of those cultures that are further east. And that's where Abraham is as well, isn't it? And like, Er and that's area of Southern Mesopotamia. So it all kind of links to that geographic part of the world. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just this place across the great desert, the great Syrian desert, just the other side of the fertile crescent, really. And also, in regards to the book of Genesis, you mentioned it right at the beginning,

but whereabouts in the book of Genesis is this story replaced? So second chapter. Second chapter. So the first chapter in the beginning, we have the first creation story. So this might shock some viewers, listeners. There are two creation stories. The first one being a fairly unilateral act of God who creates man and woman in his own image. And then chapter two talks about another creation, which is Adam and Eve.

and we'll probably have to qualify Adam, whether that's a name or not. Well, we absolutely will. I mean, another big question, though, is that's where it is in the book. Right. But do we have any idea when this story is composed? Because once again, always get this idea sometimes that the first chapters of the Bible are the oldest in the Bible. But what is actually the story behind this? When do we think this story of Adam Adiv is actually created and written down?

So, as always with biblical texts, we're not sure. We have some good evidence to think it's older than chapter one. So chapter one looks very heavily influenced from the experiences of Judahites, so biblical writers in exile, which means fifth century. So it looks probably older than that, but we can't be sure. And there are people who think, no, it's also exilic. I myself think it's probably pre-exilic, that it dates to a time when kings were still around,

which puts us in the usual time frame that I give for a lot of dates of biblical texts sometime between the 9th and 6th century, somewhere in there. So the early first millennium BC. Yeah, somewhere in there, probably even more towards the mid, if anything. And in regards time scale, how far back they're looking when they're writing down this story, traditionally, how far back in time is the story of Adam Adiv's set? So this is truly in mythological time. This is what we call antediluvian time before the flood.

And this is really important because this is an idea of chronology that's not just unique to biblical writers. We also find it in Mesopotamia and things like the Sumerian kinglist, where before this global flood, the world was different. People lived longer, exceptionally long lives. People had more direct contact with the gods. It was a different world before the flood. So in the mindset of the biblical writers, this is really what we call the primeval history when God was still. actively creating and then ultimately destroying when it comes to the flood. So outside real history, in essence.

And also for context. So the flood story in the book of Genesis, how much further along in the book is the flood story? It's just a couple chapters later. Okay. Yeah. So we have Canaan Abel immediately after the Eden narrative, and then we get into the flood story fairly shortly after that.

Well, let's explore the Adam Adme Dief story now. So it comes right after that first creation story of the seven days and God resting on the seventh day, having created the heavens and the earth. And so how does it then go to the narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? So it more or less just pretends like the first chapter hasn't occurred. Because at a certain point, in verse four, we have this kind of summation of, all right, God has finished creating, including creating man and woman. They now exist.

And when we pick up in verse four, the narrative acts like man and women have not been created. So they don't even try to connect it to the preceding text. because ultimately it's a completely independent account of creation. Now, unlike chapter one, which really focuses on the creation of the cosmos, you know, the sun and the moon and everything in between, this is more focused on living beings, including humanity, but also animals and things like that. So it's a completely separate creation story,

and it sets off with this garden, that God has planted this garden somewhere in the east, and he is want for someone to work it. And this becomes a really important theme that why is humanity created at all? It's to work. And specifically to toil in the land. But to toil a garden at first rather than anywhere else. To toil a garden at first, yes.

So hopefully the toil isn't too laborious. And this will become important when I talk about parallel creation myths from Mesopotamia. But at least from the outset, God creates a garden. There's no bushes in the field. And what's really interesting is there's no rain. So there's no precipitation at this point. And the garden is fed by what translators for millennia have translated as mist, this word aid in Hebrew, but actually comes from Sumerian. We don't get many Sumerian loan words into Hebrew, but this one, id in Sumerian just means a river, specifically, the subterranean river that springs up from the underworld and waters.

And also for context, the Sumerian language by the early first millennium v.C is one that's only really studied by academics. and it's not like a spoken language of the everyday person at that time. So very interesting to have it. Yeah, it's a very erudite language, which makes us suspect that they probably encountered it through some other medium, but nonetheless, there's no doubt that this word is coming from Sumerian. Interesting. And sorry, continue this story.

So Underground River. So Underground River feeding the garden that God is planted. He needs someone to toil the land, and he decides to, what's the word, is to fashion, really to sculpt a human being. The first man, and I think here I can say, when we encounter this name, which we often translate as a proper name, Adam, really the word just means man. It's not a proper name. Unlike Eve, which does become a proper name, Adam is quite clearly not a proper name. So the character should just be called the man, which is what he's called more frequently than not.

So if you've got a friend called Adam today, you're actually just the man. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So he creates man, he fashions him from the dust which is upon the earth. So think in terms of kind of almost a clay figurine here. And really, they're conjuring imagery here of a potter, of potter creating a figurine. And he breathed the breath of life into this being, which animates him. And this is already steeped in Near Eastern traditions, thinking specifically about the formation of cultic statues,

ritual ceremonies like the opening of the mouth and the watching of the mouth ceremony where these sculpted objects are given vitality, usually in the form of divine inhabitants, through these ceremonies. So God is kind of channeling that in the creation of humanity here. And we'll get many parallels to this in Mesopotamian myths, which we can go on to later. But that's a creation of the man. And the man, unlike in the first chapter, starts to partake in creation. He starts to name things, and naming becomes a really important part of creation. Because once you give a name to something, then it springs into existence in both chapter one and chapter two here, but he's lonely. So God decides to give him, and the word here is a helper

and Ezr. And so it's decided that from the rib of man, he will create a companion for him. And this is, of course, the first woman. So the woman is created from his rib. from a component of this of this being that is partially made from the earth but also containing at least some part of the divine essence in him, woman is created secondarily. And this is very interesting because in Genesis 1, man and women are created at the same time and both are created in the image of God. Whereas here, and this is interested, feminist interpreters, the woman seems to be derivative secondary to the creation of man.

So you can imagine how that's been taken in different terms. directions. So Adam and Eve have been created at this time, and the garden's already there. So what's the next key part of the story? So the key part of the story is the introduction of two trees. The first tree is what's known as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the second tree is known as the tree of life to be revealed very shortly that it's really the tree of eternal life. We also get a fairly enigmatic reference to a river and a river that springs up. This is not the aid that had fed the garden before. No, the underground river. Not the underground river, a different river, a nahar, so a different word, a river that then splits into four. And we don't exactly know

the precise significance of it, but we have some good guesses. So the river splits into four, some of which we know and some of which we don't know. So it mentions that this river of the garden becomes the Tigris, it becomes the Euphrates, it becomes the Gihon, which is actually a tiny little stream in Jerusalem. There's a Gihon Spring, right? The Gihon Spring that runs right along and actually under part of the Temple Mount. And then something called the Pichon, which we don't really understand. It's associated with Kush, so people think, well, the Nile.

The Nile? Yes, but we have the word Nile. in Hebrew. So if they wanted to say Nile, they could have said Nile. Number four could be significant. This is typically the way that you understand the entirety of the world is the four quarters. And so Tigris Euphrates would be Assyria, Babylon. Gihon connects it to Jerusalem in the temple. And then that just leaves Pichion without a clear reference. But I think what the text is getting at there is saying that the garden is, it's the wellspring of the whole world, that all the important. points of the world are connected to it.

So is it going down a false trail trying to say, or maybe it's the Oxus, or maybe it's the Indus or something like that. It might not be linked to a actual river. It might not be. And if it is, but usually mythic geography and real geography are connected. And the fact that the other three are known leads me to think that the writers knew where this would have been. It's like the cedar forest of Gilgamesh.

It's at once mythical, but it's also a real place. Lebanon area. Yeah, it's Lebanon area. So I think to the biblical writers, they would have known the association. But the point is it's a way to describe the totality of the known world, which is all connected together by this original source that is the garden. So I think that's the important point. So we have these rivers.

We have these two trees, and we have paradise, essentially. This garden is idyllic. The trees bear fruit, and this is how humanity survives. and the man and the woman are more or less presented as purely innocent, almost childlike in their outlook. They're instructed to eat of all the trees, but never these two, specifically the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And more or less, everything's going fine.

They are tending the garden. They are fulfilling the purpose for which they were created, which is to work, and things are fine until something arrives, what's known as a room in Hebrew, which we translate as a snake. And a snake shows up, and this snake entices the woman. And this is where we'll get into this idea of the original sin. The snake explains to the woman, is it true that God said to you,

do not eat from this tree of knowledge of good and evil, or else you will surely die, which is, especially what God had told the woman, And the woman says yes. And the snake explains, that's not true. If you eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you will not die. So saying the exact inverse of what God said. Surely you will not die.

So for centuries, scholars, theologians have interpreted this snake as nothing less than Satan. The first instance of Satan in a serpentine form enticing humanity to sin. and the idea here is that what the snake is saying is a lie. The snake is lying and God was telling the truth. He's deceiving. He's deceiving them. He's leading them down a dangerous path. And ultimately the woman believes the snake.

She eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And the quotation is that their eyes were opened and they realized that they were naked. And this is very clearly a play on words here because the word for nakedness is arumim. And the word for snake is a room. the snake and nakedness are playing off of each other at a grammatical linguistic level there. So they realize that they're naked. They create loing cloths out of the trees of the trees of the garden. And we get the scene, which is, it's very unique in the way that God has depicted.

God has said to have been walking around the garden in the cool breeze. So he's very anthropomorphic here, right? Again, we're in anti-deluvian times when God and humanity interacted in different ways. And so we get this very human exchange between Eve, Adam, or I should say the man, and God, and God's, why are you wearing clothes only to realize that, of course, they've eaten from this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And what the tree gives them, or what the fruit gives them, which is not an apple, what the fruit gives them is essentially consciousness. They're aware of themselves, and they're aware, they become aware of shame, they become aware, aware of humility, whatever you want to. to describe why they clothe themselves, but it's consciousness, essentially.

And this is the running theme throughout the whole story, wisdom, knowledge, awareness. This is what the tree, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil gives them, consciousness, which we should note is not necessarily a bad thing, right?

We leave that childlike state behind and become sentient beings. And so the story goes on. Of course, humanity is punished for this, quote unquote original sin for eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and we get collectively reciprocal punishments, and it's very poetic, the punishments that we receive. So the snake has to crawl on its belly, it has no longer has arms and legs, it must eat the dust.

Remember, the dust is out of which man is first created, so that's the snake's punishment. The woman's punishment is childbirth. Childbirth is going to be particularly painful, and to suffer from her husband, who will hold dominion over you. And remember, the woman is created from man, so her punishment is to suffer from man, and then man's punishment is to suffer from the earth from which he springs, so to toil the earth forever. And now he's no longer working in the garden. He must toil, bear the toil of the land. And so all of the characters in the garden receive these punishments, and then we get this very interesting notice at the end, that they are driven from Eden, lest they reach out their hand,

take from the fruit from the tree of life and live forever, from the other tree and live forever. And then we get these strange plurals and become like one of us, like a God. So the fear, the rejection or the expulsion from Eden is not just a punishment, but a real concern of God, who's apparently up there with some other divine beings, that by gaining immortality, human beings will become God. So there is, because they've now got the knowledge, there is that almost a fear within God that if they're allowed to stay any longer that they could get from that other

tree and become immortal. Exactly. So from this story's perspective, and it's not just this story, the two criteria for what is a God is number one, consciousness, sentience, knowledge, and the other is immortality. And we humans get one of the two, but not both. So we're not like the animals. We have sentience, but we're not like the gods either because we must die. That's the story.

And that's the story. And so I'm sure there are many different meanings to it, but the central purpose when people are relaying this story, is it to explain how this idea of original sin entered the world? So for, especially if you're part of the Catholic religious tradition, this has been the dominant interpretation of the garden story basically since the third century CE. It's not invented, but it's heavily attributed to Augustine of Hippo. So this is a major church father early in the history of Christian thought. And his interpretation of the garden story is exactly this, that before eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, humanity was essentially guiltless, sinless. And that by eating of the tree, we all, as descendants of the man and the woman whose name

is revealed to be Eve, we all inherit this original sin. So as we are brought into this world, we possess sin. And this is why we have baptisms and there's various denominational disagreements on exactly whether baptism expunges that original sin, what the influence of Christianity and Jesus had to do with that original sin. But this is the very Christian interpretation of that passage and really Catholic interpretation of it, because you get disagreements in Eastern Orthodox tradition. You get disagreements even among Luther.

Luther had major disagreements with Catholic Church fathers about this. And what I say is that's a legitimate interpretation of this text, because ultimately, there is punishment involved. It's not devoid from the narrative, but there's other elements that I want to talk about. And I will mention that for a story that seems to be so focused on sin, the word sin doesn't actually appear anywhere in it. In fact, it doesn't appear until chapter 4. So another chapter later after Cain and Abel, we're there.

We're very clear. It's about sin. So historical, critical scholars, we've gone in different directions in interpreting this story, and we focus on a couple of themes. One is wisdom, because again, that's a key theme mentioned many times in the text. The other is life or eternal life. And the other is the interface, the relationship, and the difference between being human and being divine.

And that's what the story is about. Well, let's go through those three, one by one then, and then we'll explore many of the other topics and parts of the story, and we can look at parallels with other societies and cultures in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. But let's start with wisdom then. Okay. Because this is a central part of the story, this whole idea of wisdom and the gaining of wisdom. Right.

So if we start from the perspective of wisdom, when we first encounter, the man and the woman. She's not named Eve yet. As I said, they are essentially childlike in their description in the garden. They don't understand, and we often interpret the knowledge of good and evil as morality. But in other descriptions that use the exact same phrasing, such as the Book of Deuteronomy, it's clear that when you come to a certain age, you gain that knowledge. So they really are childlike before that knowledge arrives to them. So that's one level. The other people who are typically described as possessing the knowledge of good and evil are kings specifically.

And there's a certain theme, I think, running through this as well, that Adam and Eve or the man in Eve are royal figures in certain respects. Because, first off, they're in a garden. gardens are typically associated with palaces and to a much lesser extent temples. Really gardens are architectural features of palaces. Of course, the man and the woman are king and queen in theory. But this wisdom is very special in biblical tradition. Outside of the Eden narrative, it's associated with activities that are normally attributed to kings such as building like the temple and law giving something very close to my heart.

when kings act like lawgivers, not only they described as knowing the difference between good and evil being exceedingly wise, Solomon being the paragon example, but also emulating the divine. So in places David is called like a messenger of God in his wisdom. So the king David and his son Solomon similarly, when he has his famous judgment between the two prostitutes, the people are fearful and usually you're fearful of gods because the wisdom. of God was in him to execute justice. So these wisdom themes that are bound up in a creation story are, I think, almost certainly drawing on royal ideology. But it's been democratized in this story. No longer is this about kings being exceedingly wise. This is the fundamental feature of being human. And how does it align with Mesopotamian literature at the time, and in particular of the thing called wisdom literature?

It's connected, but not in the ways that wisdom literature has traditionally been treated. So wisdom literature actually would not include creation stories, for the most part. Wisdom literature is something more akin to proverbial axioms, fables, ways of teaching people moral right from wrong without prescribing, you know, legalistic language to them. So the way that we define the genre, which I think is a bit problematic, actually excludes these kinds of texts in certain respects. But they talk a lot about wisdom, which ironically doesn't make them wisdom literature, at least in the traditional definition of those categories. What it is, beyond a shadow of doubt, is cosmologies, cosmogony, stories of creation. And we kind of set those into a category unto themselves.

And not all creation stories deal with wisdom. I think that's actually a fairly unique feature of this biblical, of this particular creation story. But the themes and ideas, these genres are not completely siloed. There's a lot of overlap. And so from my perspective, the wisdom theme has more to do with the concept and less to do with a generic category of literature. And so is that one of the overarching themes? And it's the humans gaining wisdom, but being forced out of the Garden of Eden, which makes this creation story so unique in that wisdom plays such a big part of it

and is one of the main purposes that people now interpret being one of the main messages of this whole story. Yeah, unique but not without precedent as I'm going to go into. So there's quite a few stories, and I think it's good to open the discussion up to just creation stories in general across the ancient Near East, because ultimately that's what this text is, it's a creation story. And it's a creation story 100% at home in the Near East from its beginning to its end. And it's a story that really, at its core, I think, tries to define the relationship and the difference between humanity and the gods.

Plural is intentional there because the biblical text goes plural. And the question that it seeks to answer is, what is the difference? What's the difference between humanity and the gods? And was there ever a chance that humans could be gods? And we actually have plenty of parallels from the ancient areas. And we can just start from the very beginning with the formation of man, from the dust and the breath of life being breathed into them. We have texts from ancient Mesopotamia dating back to the early second millennium

and even older ones that talk about the creation of humanity from clay, so in the same kind of idea, a potter fashioning, some kind of a ceramic figurine. And there we don't have the breath of life. There we have the killing of a god and using the blood of that slain god to animate the human. This is in the story called Atrahasis. This is a very old creation myth from Babylon dating probably around 1800 BCE. So it would have been known, retold, incorporated to other creation myths like the Enuma Ailish, which is about a thousand years later.

So that story there has so many parallels to what's going on in the Eden narrative. First off, we have two generations of gods, one older generation who's in charge, and these other gods who have to toil. They have to do the work. And in fact, the story begins when gods were men. And what did they do? They dug canals because they're Mesopotamians. They did canals.

And the canals they dug, though, are much bigger. And their canals were the river Euphrates and the River Tigris. So just as in the Eden narrative that this river springs up, however it forms. And they are both named. In both examples, they are named as the Euphrates and the Tigris. Yes, yes. And there, it's very explicit that the gods have to do this toil. That is their responsibility.

They get angry. They're about to cause a revolt until this older generation of God says, well, why don't we just create somebody else to take over the toil? Of course, which is exactly what the man does in the biblical narrative. And so, too, in the Atrahasis story. They create humanity for the purpose of doing the toil of the gods, to Shariqu in Acadian. So it's pretty bleak existence from the perspective of Mesopotamia.

What's the purpose of existence? To toil. Toil. To work. Kind of true, though, isn't it? So there's those similarities, very obvious. The important point there being that all of humanity is created at the same time, we have some essence of the gods within us, blood in the Mesopotamian tradition, breath in the biblical tradition.

no differentiation between gender, though, in the Mesopotamian. It's all humanity's created all at once. And the parallels don't stop there, but it's probably better to shift to a different narrative when we start to talk about kind of the second stage of creation. So once we exist in the biblical narrative, the next stage is gaining consciousness, becoming that kind of human. And there we have to jump to another very famous myth, that of Gilgamesh. and Gilgamesh, most people wouldn't associate as a creation story of any source, but there is a creation

in there. Enkidu. It's the creation of Enkidu, isn't it? Yes. And if you remember that story from the standard Babylonian version, Enkidu is also molded from clay and breath of life we can kind of steal from the biblical there. But in somehow, some way animated. So Enkidu is the wild man companion of Gilgamesh.

and he's he's human but he's kind of a crow magnon he's he's he's a caveman he's very hairy he's animalistic he doesn't understand society he doesn't eat food he doesn't wear clothing he drinks from the rivers he's kind of childlike right so we're recalling this this this he's kind of a proto man and in fact the way that they describe enkidu is the same way that they described the first humans created in Atrohasis, and that's a very purposeful. He's what's called the Lulu Amelu, the primordial man. And in that story, it's through a woman, this time a prostitute named Shamhat, that Anki-Doo is brought into the world of civilization and explicitly through the act of sex that he gains consciousness. So in the biblical tradition, we don't have explicit

references to sex, but still the woman plays the role of that second stage of evolution, of consciousness, to take Enkidu or the man from that primordial state to one of consciousness. So again, we have these parallels. And in Adam and Dave, it's the giving of the fruit to the man. Exactly. Yeah, because it's the woman who takes the fruit, and man wouldn't gain consciousness were it not for the woman. So, again, we can kind of flip with more feminist interpretations.

the view on the fruit is it's not a negative thing, not necessarily, unless you view consciousness is inherently negative. And so, again, we have these very clear perils. Now, I'm not trying to make the case here that these texts were known to biblical authors in a direct way, but these ideas and variations would have been widely disseminated, both in Mesopotamia and texts that we don't have access to, but also all along the Levantine coast, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. There would have been versions of these creation stories. And then there's still another one that's really important. And this is the story

called Adapah and the South Wind. Not many people will know this story, but what's really important is early versions of this Adipah story, basically speak about him as he's this clever exorcist who plays a trick on the gods. But at some point in the Neo-Syrian period, so really close to when we think that Eden story is being written, his character changes. And his character in the opening lines is described as the exceedingly clever man who attained wisdom but not immortality. And that's the narrative, that's the story of Adapha. And there, he misses out on immortality by not eating food offered to him by the gods, because he doesn't understand what it would give him, which is immortality. So there, exactly you see in the, in the, inortality, in the

Eaton narrative too, this connection between wisdom is a characteristic shared by the divine and humanity, and it's that immortality, that missing out on immortality, that keeps us distinct. So again, all of these ideas are in circulation. These are why I really think this text is pre-exylic, because all of the texts I'm talking about are second millennium and continue to be copied into the first. So interesting, but with the Adam Adiv story, it's just, the narrative is changed in its own unique way, but the overarching themes are still there. Exactly.

Yeah, I think. And it's not that all the themes map onto one single text, so it's not that we can just say, oh, they read Adapah and the South Wind, and then they wrote Genesis. No, no, they're aware of these themes in Gilgamesh, in Atrahasis, in Adipa and the South Wind, and probably thought of all of them as their own stories, because there were Israelite creation myths, plural, probably. I mean, we have too. So again, it's a natural tendency when we see these perilous to assume direct relationships,

but just think in terms of more, these are the kinds of themes and knowledge that would have been circulating for centuries in the area. Well, with that knowledge, I always used to think that Adam and Eve, before their fruit, eating the fruit, that they were therefore initially immortal, like the primordial humans, like they were immortal. But it sounds like there that it's like the gaining of a. immortality is linked to another fruit and with the context of these other stories, is it actually the case that now people believe that in the story of Adam and Eve,

how people would have interpreted it, that Adam and Eve were never immortal? This is a matter of considerable debate. And it comes down to the two expressions of God and the snake, because in the onset of the story, what God tells the man and the woman is that if you take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. You will die. You will die. You will die.

Mote tamut in Hebrew, which is actually the way that you express the death sentence in biblical legal texts. Usually in the third person, he will surely be killed or he will surely die. But this affirmative, you will surely die. And then, of course, as I mentioned earlier, what the snake says is, no, if you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely not die. Now, they can't both be telling the truth. they are. And here's, and I think, and this is still a matter of debate, and I think it has to do

with timing. So what obviously doesn't happen is the woman and the man who eat from the tree of knowledge good and evil don't die immediately. So it's not a snow white scenario here with the poison apple. They do not die immediately, but they do die eventually because they are mortal. The snake, I think, is channeling that immediacy, saying, if you eat from it right now, you won't die. It's not a poisoned apple. You will gain consciousness. So everything the snake says is true. But God is also telling the truth that if you eat from that, you will eventually die because you will be banished from this garden.

So the interpretation is, God's sentence there is not saying, I'm going to execute you, but rather you will lose out on this chance. for immortality, much like Adapha in the South Wind, to miss out on that chance for immortality. Because once they're banished from Eden, there's never again a chance to eat from the fruit of eternal life. And I should also cycle back to Gilgamesh again here. Gilgamesh also lost that on a chance for eternal life too. It's fragmentary, but at the end of that epic, he gains a plant. And the plant gives him eternal life. And do you know how he lost the plant? He loses it in a river, doesn't he? He loses in a river, but something took it.

Oh, is it the snake? It's a snake. Snake took it from him. So again, these themes just keep recurring. And there we have an edelgy, not about why snakes crawl on the ground, but why snake shed their skin. Yes. So again, this question of, were the original man and women immortal, I think in theory, they always had that potential. Right.

So long as they're in the garden, because there's no sign that they would die if they continue to exist in the garden. And then they also had that potential to always eat from the tree of eternal life. That God could have given them permission to eat from the tree of immortality if he wished, but that was only possible if they never ate from the tree of knowledge. Right, because they can have one but not two. One but not two. So, I mean, that's ultimately the question, because we don't have any story, really, we have one story, of anyone who did gain immortality.

The only story we have is Bhutna Pishhtim from Gilgamesh, the one human being who gains immortality. But there it's a problem again because the problem was the god had prescribed all humanity must die and either he's a liar or he makes the only living human into a god and therefore he wasn't wrong. So again, I think a lot of these stories have to do with these boundaries between mortality and immortality between being human and being divine. And you'll notice sin has not factored into any of the discussion up to this point because I don't think it's about that. about wisdom, about mortality, and about the nature of divinity. Yeah, and the nature of being human. And the nature of being human and how they contrast with each other.

Exactly. Is there anything else either should then mention on divinity itself in the story of Adam and Eve and how God is portrayed? Yeah, I think one thing, and this is what I try to emphasize in a book I've recently written on law-giving, so it has nothing to do with... Well, it has a little bit to do with Adam and Eve. I talk about the Eden story. It has to do with the fact that when we think about divinity, we often think really in terms of this binary, either you're divine, i.e. immortal, or you're not divine, and then mortal. But in the ancient Near East, including ancient Israel and Judah, divinity was a spectrum. So you could exist kind of along the

lines of the spectrum between mortal and between a god, especially when we talk about kings. kings, we have actually several creation stories from Mesopotamia where humanity is created to toil to dig the canals, kings are created separately. So in certain respects, they're not gods because the gods create them, but they're not human beings. And usually they're created either to provision the temples or to render justice. That's what my book was about rendering justice. So not only is divinity more of a spectrum, it also can be somewhat ephemeral. You can move in and out of divinity. And this is what I think of when I look at a little bit broader at other discussions about the Eden story we have in Ezekiel 28, one of this very important

text that actually describes in great detail the garden, really one of the most vibrant discussions of the garden outside of Genesis 2 and 3. And it has nothing to do with the man and the woman. It has to do with the king of Tyre. And the king of Tyre, who haughtily claims wisdom, again, wisdom being a fundamentally divine act. And there the text is explicitly clear that this king is claiming wisdom and simultaneously claiming to be a god. And the author of this prophetic text is trying to disabuse him of this view. You are not a god.

You are immortal. You will die. And then it starts talking about the Garden of Eden. So there we have an ancient reception of the Eden story saying exactly what I've been saying. It's not about sin. It's about the boundaries between mortality, immortality, between humanity and the gods.

How do you think this would then align with figures like Moses, you know, the big prophets who also then seem to be a bit more special in the fact that they are communicating with God and always have a divine element to them? Yeah, I think among all of the figures that are discussed in the Bible, Moses comes the closest to being attributed with certain divine features. David and Solomon also pretty close, but Moses is especially important because, number one,

he's the only individual said to have seen God face to face. No other human being was able to do that. And there's certain descriptions of him. Of course, he lives extraordinarily long life, not the longest in biblical tradition, but by that point in the narrative extremely long, 120 years, I think he dies at. He's, of course, the lawgiver.

And there's certain episodes, such as with our previous discussion, when Moses descends the mountain with the Ten Commandments, his face is shining like the sun. and so he gives off divine luminosity. So again, it's best to think of divinity not as a binary, but as a spectrum, and it's ephemeral. Moses doesn't stay a god.

Of course, he dies, right? And this is very important when we think of the ancient Near East, which is loaded with royal ideologies that are often presenting these kings as something more than human beings. It's embedded in the creation stories. They are not,

quite gods, but something more, and yet there's the fundamental dilemma that they die. And this has been a tradition that continues throughout all history, into the medieval period, and the king's two bodies. How can the king be a representative of God on earth? How do you perpetuate the idea of the state? These myths are created, and I think that's partially what we're getting in the Eden story. But again, it's been democratized. It's not about kings. It's about all humanity. I'm always going to ask a big question to summarize all those themes that we've talked about there, Dylan. So how would you argue someone who heard the Adam and Eve story in the first millennium BC? How would you think, and I appreciate it would differ depending on whether they were

a priest or a king and so on, or a scholar, a scribe, and so on? How do you think they would have primarily interpreted the narrative of the story of Adam and Eve if they're not going away, straight away, or this is about original sin entering the world? I think they would have interpreted it, or been told, that this is a story about being human, about the orders of creation, how we're different from the animals, from which we interact with every day, but also why do we worship the gods? Why are we here? I mean, isn't that just such a fundamental question that's, I mean, there's no shortage of creation stories out there. All creation stories. Why are we here? Why are we here? It's not a very,

nice answer. It's to toil. It's to do exactly what we've been doing every day. It's partially punishment, a loss of this paradise, in Milton's words, but it's not all negative, I think, also. Because for as much as we lost, I think it's also important to focus on what's gained in the narrative, which is, of course, we have consciousness, we have knowledge. We are partially divine. So I think there's, that would have been the takeaway in an ancient Israelite or ancient Judeite setting, just as I think the takeaway from Mesopotamian narratives in the same respect. Well, let's explore a few other key parts of the story and the amazing links they do have, because I've got a few more that I really want to ask about.

And the first one is this whole setting of a garden. So, Dylan, the Garden of Eden, how clear an influence is there from the gardens of ancient Mesopotamia of the Assyrian rulers, of the Babylonians? I might think of the hanging gardens of Babylon and so on. Yeah, I mean, there's absolutely a potential connection there. Now, there we would expect a really royal connection, because it's not everyone who gets to have a garden. These paradises, as they say, they're paradisos and stuff, isn't it?

Yeah, and it'd be great, because Pardace is a Hebrew word that we get from Persian. It's not there in the garden story. But again, the conception is. So what I would imagine here is kind of a royal estate. This is what the Garden of Butan. And even the name Eden, which for centuries, we had no idea what it meant. We didn't understand its etymology. It was actually only about 30 years ago that we found an Aramaic inscription that mentioned

an Eden, which just means a very well-watered place. But the people who are capable to have really well-wintered places in the ancient Near East were kings. I mean, because this is a highly arid landscape. And the way that Eden is described is, yes, these are rivers, but these are divinely. cultivated rivers. These are canals essentially. So I think in the mindset of the biblical authors, they're imagining these types of gardens. And in fact, we found royal gardens in the vicinity of Jerusalem at a site called Ramat Raquel, which is just to the northeast, I believe,

or northwest, excuse me, an Assyrian provincial palace probably. So dating to that time, about the 8th century. It's a little bit later, but not too long after. And there's no, there's no reason to doubt that gardens wouldn't have been also present in, earlier palatial structures. So, yeah, I think when we just imagine the garden, this is a very common, widespread near-eastern motif, definitely with connections to Assyria, lesser extent Babylon, because the Babylonians don't describe their guards, despite what the Greeks told us about their great city.

And, of course, then the Persians as well, were great gardeners. But the Assyrians got there first, as you say, with those beautiful wool reliefs in the gardens and all that. We have the strongest evidence for the Assyrians, not to say they weren't elsewhere. It's just that's where we have the evidence for. Very much so. I think of those will release from Nineveh and so on of Ashabanapell. The Underground River as well, I know I'm bringing us back near the start, but I don't want

us to finish this episode without mentioning the Underground River, because that's startling in its own right. And what's interesting is that we'd mistranslated it for almost 2,000 years, until we rediscovered Kuneiform writing and the Sumerian language behind it, this word aid, we'd always translated it as mist, so we kind of thought of it as just. just, well, I live in Cardiff, so mist is a common reality of my existence. That moisture just settled on the ground. But actually, when you read the word more widely, it really does come from the Sumerian word id, which is, on the one hand, just the word for river, but it has

mythological connotations. It's also the word used to describe what's known as the river ordeal. So when you would submit litigants in the absence of witness testimony, you would submit them to the id, to the river, to the river ordeal. And the idea there is that, you know, the divine cleansing waters, the divine river itself would be able to figure out who's guilty, who's innocent. And so it stuck around in later languages like Acadian and maybe made its way into either Aramaic or directly into Hebrew. We don't know. It's, but it's very uncommon to find these Sumerian words, which is why we think, when we see that and so many connections to Mesopotamian creation stories. We really think there's a Mesopotamian link, maybe not directly to a text,

but to Mesopotamian ideas or shared ideas that are common across this area. And do you think this is also potentially be like an underworld link, a catholic link linking the underworld to the Garden of Eden at all? Yeah, possibly. It's not always clear because we have Western traditions that there is an idea that the path to the underworld is an underground river. Like the river sticks. Yeah, kind of like the river sticks. But in the Gilgamesh story, there's no river. There is an underground ocean called the waters of death.

But it's not a river. It's quite clearly a sea. And in fact, the path, it's a dry land path that the sun has to take. So again, this is always the challenge with creation stories. It's a lot of ideas, a lot of themes. There's not one common motif. But I think it's fairly clear to me, the way that it's described is this is some kind of subterranean water.

connected to the underworld in certain respects, which again, we connected to judgment in certain respects because we know that judgment occurs in the underworld too. Book of the Dead and so on, which actually is nice. I'm glad I said that to also ask about influences from ancient Egypt with the story of Adam and Eve, because you already mentioned earlier, the story of the snake linked to snatching the plant of eternal life from Gilgamesh. So a clear Mesopotamian link there. But when I think of snakes, I also think of them as a divine symbol of like,

peronic Egypt and the pharaoh. So could there be a link, a clear Egyptian link in the story of Adam and Eve? Yeah, I think, well, I mean, it's possible. I know much less about the Egyptian creation stories than about the Mesopotamian and biblical ones. And there, they do have distinctive traditions that look dissimilar. The symbol, the Uri symbol that adorns the Egyptian crown of pharaohs. time immoral, very distant, distant history, definitely could conjure up some kind of connection because we have so many royal connections already in the narrative. But remember, we also have

this idea of the snake as this very strange and unique preacher. I think most importantly, because it does shed its skin, it's kind of, it rejuvenates itself. And then those connections to life and rejuvenation. I mean, the possibilities are plenty. And if we go back to the fruit. I asked you right at the beginning to dismantle the apple idea. But of course, I didn't ask, are there any theories as to what the fruit could have been if it wasn't an apple? Yeah. I mean, I think there's plenty of theories. The best ones are based on what kind of trees grow in this part of the world. And we have date palms. And the possible, once again, that's Mesopotamia with thinking in the yeast. Just think the fertile crescent. Yeah.

Yeah, anything. Apple trees tend to be more conducive to cooler climates and more rain-fed climates as well. So if we look at the arboreal repertoire of the Southern Levant, I think we find olive trees, date trees. Fig trees is a good option, I think. A fig. Yeah. But again. The forbidden fig.

The forbidden fig. Exactly. And figs are delicious. So I could also see that being, that would probably be my choice, a fig. I had to ask that. We've covered so many themes from the story of Adam and Eve, but are there any other particular mentions, parts of the story that have clear links to Mesopotamia or other places in the early first millennium BC that we haven't covered yet? I think we've covered the main points. I mean, the only other connection that really gets established is Eden as a stand-in for the temple.

Ah, okay. Because in Ezekiel, the author of Ezekiel starts to make very explicit connections between the temple being another Eden. And there are the rivers that we talked about earlier, not the underground river, the one that splits into four, is more explicitly identified as flowing out of the temple. And this becomes very important in later reception tradition in synagogues in other places of worship where we start to get Eden scenes very prominently displayed because in some senses, Eden is the first. temple. It's the first place where humanity really contacted the divine. And so lots of temples, lots of churches, lots of synagogues, you can go down the list, are very interested in those kinds of motifs and adorning them in association with the architecture. That leads me nice into what I was going to ask, which was the legacy of the Adam and Eve story, does it remain very important into

the Roman period where you have, like the first Christians and you have apostles like Paul spreading the word? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it, It obviously factors incredibly powerfully in early church father interpretations with Augustine because of its association with sin in that interpretive tradition. Again, as a proximate experience of humanities encounter with the divine, it's going to figure prominently in mosaics, it's going to figure prominently in wall paintings, in churches, in synagogues. It's actually a very commonly shared motif, especially in Turkey, in, in Judea, later to be Palestinian. And that's what I can speak on specifically, is its incorporation

into the artistic world of late antique Judaism and Christianity. I guess it's more visual, it's a much more recognizable story than the other creation story of Genesis 1, of God, and how would you depict, of course, you know, kind of creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh. The Adam and Eve creation story, or those you highlighted early on, like they almost kind of contradicted. each other with the story of the creation of man and woman. It's easier for these artists to depict for people to recognize as time goes on. Yeah, I mean, I think it's because the Genesis 1 creation story, it's very much, I think it's partially, it's an evolution of the religion in some respects.

This is a cosmic world god, impossible to really fathom capture through image. This isn't the god walking around a garden in the cool breeze anymore, right? This is someone who's stretches out the heavens. And so I think at that scale, it works great for poetry. I think it works less well for images and imagery in the iconographic register. And so again, there's obviously ways to do it. But the imagery is so much more vivid, I think, in the Eden story, which is why it's really stood the test of time in the artistic repertoire of not just the West, but really globally. And also the Garden of Eden and this meaning today, you know, for any beautiful place that you enter. The Eden project in Britain today, you know, for the plants and everything that's there.

It's a phrase that has endured down to the present day, like Sodom and Gomorrah, which we've done in the past, a simpler destruction. It's one that if someone mentions, oh, this is a Garden of Eden, you know exactly what they're talking about. Right, exactly. And what's interesting is it's kind of a universal theme, not expressed through the medium of the Garden of Eden, but this this lost golden age, right? That cuts across all, not all, but many world cultural traditions, this idea that at one point in our past, everything was great. And if we could only just get back there, then everything would be fine again.

And so, yeah, the Eden narrative is just so translatable, I think. Something desirable, but not within your grasp idea, kind of thing, handing back to a pastime, and your own fictional idea of it. This has been absolutely fantastic. anything else that you'd like to mention about the Garden of Eden before we finish? I think that covers it. We've covered everything. Well, it has been an absolutely fantastic interview, and it just goes for me to say,

thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. It's been great. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Dylan Johnson returning to the show to talk through the story of Adam and Eve and the many different themes linked to this well-known creation story, whether that be the theme of immortality or wisdom. and of course the links to Mesopotamia. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

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