The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages - Softcover

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Andrew Blauner is the editor of five anthologies: The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages; Coach; Brothers; Our Boston; Central Park, and In Their Lives: A Chorus of Writers Sing the Praises of Their Favorite Beatles Songs, and is the co-editor of For the Love of Baseball. His writing has been published in The New York Times, and he has appeared on NPR’s On Point, The Leonard Lopate Show, ABC, CBS, NBC, and other media outlets. He is the founder of Blauner Books Literary Agency; a graduate of Collegiate School, Brown University, and Columbia Business School; and a member of PEN American Center and National Book Critics Circle.

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The Good Book

Who Is the Snake in the Garden of Eden?
A Thought Experiment

Genesis 2–3

Avi Steinberg

There are many drawbacks to growing up in a community of religious fundamentalists. (Right-wing summer camps, for example, don’t tend to be quite as fun as liberal-minded ones.) But there are also some benefits to fundamentalism: reading the Bible as nonfiction is, in my experience, one of them.

At the Orthodox Jewish schools in which I was educated, we were taught that the Torah—that is, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Deuteronomy—was written by God himself (dictated to Moses). And, what’s more, those books were, we were taught, a sober factual report of history: every character in the story was a person who really lived and breathed, and every event described in the story, we were told, actually happened.

It’s hard to describe to people who didn’t grow up with these beliefs what it’s like to read the Bible in this odd way, what it’s like to believe that the accounts of Noah and Abraham and Moses are as fact-based as today’s New York Times.

To the uninitiated, this type of literal-minded reading can seem simplistic: Can’t a story be “true” even if it isn’t factually true? Is Moby-Dick less great because Ishmael is a fictional person and not a guy who actually lived and boarded a whaling ship in the nineteenth century? Doesn’t insistence on the historical realism of a text miss the point of a story?

Perhaps. But what if we could have it both ways, a powerful piece of literature that was also all factual? The Bible after all was intended to be taken as factual, and even though its literary worth may not depend on its historical accuracy, can we deny that it would be much more thrilling to the imagination if these sensational stories all turned out to be fact? Wouldn’t that make it a work of singular interest?

Even after I left the Orthodox fold, and read the text in a variety of different and less pious ways, I began to realize that there was something missing. Not believing in the realism of the story had created a kind of barrier between the text and me. Even though I could read Hebrew, it was as if I was no longer able to read the story in its original language; in losing faith, something was lost in translation. Even though I maintained that a critical approach to the biblical text was the intellectually honest position, I had to admit that something important had been lost in my personal experience of reading those stories: the energy, the drama, the electrifying sense of immediacy that comes from the knowledge that this really happened. All of that was gone. This wasn’t simply a loss of religious faith; it was a loss of literary faith. That paradise of true belief in a story was lost—or, at least, it seemed to be lost. Was it somehow possible to regain it?

•  •  •

During my former life as a religious reader, I’d learned that the text as nonfiction yielded the opposite of simplistic interpretations. On the contrary, the project of harmonizing religious faith with common sense and rationality required an obsessive degree of careful thought, a compulsive impulse to reread more deeply. One of the unique properties of reading a text in this manner is that it forces a reader to work a bit. A reader must actively mine the story for plausibility, for verisimilitude, where another reader wouldn’t bother. When reading the story of the Garden of Eden, most people are perfectly content to accept it as a fable, or an allegory. Just as nobody is bothered by the realism of Kafka’s talking dogs and chimps, or by Aesop’s tortoises and hares, no reader is bothered by the talking snake in the Garden. Why should it bother them? These things happen every day in the world of fiction.

Nor is a secular reader bothered that the creation story in general is riddled with contradictory details. In one chapter, Adam and Eve are described as having been created together. In the next chapter, Adam is created first and Eve is fashioned out of his surgically removed rib. To the secular reader, there’s a simple historical reason for this contradiction: when the Bible was being compiled there were different versions of the story floating around in different documents. A scribe, or group of scribes, simply cut two versions of the story from two documents and pasted them into the Bible (possibly as a clever effort to attract the fans of each version).

But to the religious reader, who believes that the text emerged more or less whole from the Cloud of Glory, the theory of multiple documents doesn’t quite suffice. To the religious reader, both narrative versions of the creation must somehow reflect a single set of facts, and the (apparent) contradiction was intentionally placed there for artistic purposes, to create the effect of layered meanings. In the case of the two dueling creation stories, the contradiction perhaps speaks to the contradictory nature of humans, how they were at odds with themselves from the moment they were created: sometimes they are coupled and sometimes they are individuals, sometimes their natures are in sync and sometimes they are in opposition to each other and to their surroundings. The human is a creature who wants to be a creator, a mortal who aspires to be a god. In short, if you believe that Adam isn’t just a character who appears in different literary documents but an actual person, with thoughts and emotions and clashing motivations, you are compelled to see him that way in the text. To the religious reader, the story’s inconsistencies show Adam and Eve as they really are: creatures of contradiction.

If you read the story as literally true, there is a greater need to account for strangeness, to puzzle out its mysteries. Religious reading, in my experience, demanded more of me. It required a great deal of clever literary maneuvering and creativity, an elevated degree of alertness and commitment and activity. It was an ambitious way to encounter a story, and it yielded results that were as brilliant and innovative as any secular reading. Ever since I left the fold, I’ve wondered if it was possible to recapture that unique mode of reading.

And so I decided to do a thought experiment: I would reread the story as though I believed in it. I would work on the premise that everything in the story has to make logical sense—as much as possible—and that it’s more than just a tall tale; it’s a chronicle of true events that happened in our world. Without actually becoming an Orthodox believer again, I could adopt the reading style of a believer.

•  •  •

In doing my thought experiment, it was only natural to begin with the story of the Garden of Eden—and not only because it’s the opening of the book. In a text whose story lines are deepened through the ceaseless repetition of themes, Eden is the Story of Stories, the narrative upon which every other story in Genesis, and beyond, is structurally modeled. It wasn’t an accident that the Gospels, that late addition to the biblical library, imagined its story as another rendition of the Genesis narrative and its protagonist, Jesus, as a second Adam. The story of Eden is the key to understanding many other stories in the Bible, and in western literature.

The challenge, however, is that Eden also happens to be one of the more notoriously difficult stories to imagine in realistic terms. Any thought experiment in literary realism must address the veracity problem posed generally by Genesis, with its...