2. Pollution In Paradise: A Snake In the Garden of Perfection
A Snake in the Garden of Perfection
So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair that ever since in love’s embraces met—Adam, the goodliest man of men since born his sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve.
JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
My attraction to the story of Adam and Eve has found its habitation in the heart of imagination and among questions rather than answers. As a gardener, I close my eyes and wonder about a garden without blight, without tomato hornworm, and trees without emerald ash borer. But I wonder most about the man and the woman. How do two individuals communicate when there is no memory, when there is no past, when there are no parents or siblings? Did they invent their own language, or were they created with words?
When I contemplate this Garden of Eden, this Paradise, I wonder if it is appropriate to see it as a metaphor for falling in love. It has all the elements. The perfect setting is created just for that perfectly created male and female.
They are in love, and they need no words. Everything between them is perfect in that perfect garden. They know nothing about thunder and hail, arguments, frustrations, hard work, pain, and old age. They know nothing of violence and death and the land of Nod, the region where a firstborn son—a murderer—will live out the remainder of his life. They have little awareness of anything else going on around them except their own love. They hang on each other like succulent drops of sweet wine dripping from pregnant clusters of luscious grapes. They lie together and sleep at night, entwined like a vine around a tree.
Perhaps like the lady lover in Song of Songs, Eve teases with erotic sensuality: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—for your love is more delightful than wine” (1:2). She describes herself almost as we might imagine evocative phrases on a dating site: “Dark am I, yet lovely . . . dark like the tents of Kedar” (1:5). This lady lover is just like the dazzling, dark Eve.
Her steamy style, when whispered by Eve, is sure to excite Adam: “My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts . . . Our bed is verdant” (1:13, 16). No erotic craving is left unspoken between either one of this Song of Songs pair, even as we imagine Adam responding:
I slept but my heart was awake.
Listen! My beloved is knocking:
“Open to me, my sister, my darling,
my dove, my flawless one.” (5:2)
If we were to continue to allow Eve to whisper the words of the lady lover, her paraphrase would be equally erotic:
I belong to my beloved,
and his desire is for me.
Come, my beloved, let us wander through the garden;
let us spend the night lying in the moonlit moss.
Let us go early to the vineyards
to see if the vines have budded,
if their blossoms have opened,
and if the pomegranates are in bloom—
there I will give you my love. (7:10–12)
Adam and Eve are naked. The perfect undress for this infinitely romantic setting. One restriction, yes. But everything else is for their pleasure—as near to perfect as male and female could ever enjoy. They wander hand in hand along rippling streams, picking succulent, ripened mangos the size of her breasts, an offering to each other’s lips, titillating their taste buds.
There is never a cross word between them as they stroll beneath the live oaks and palms, pushing aside blueberry bushes bowed down with juicy, plump delicacies. They recite poetry in the language of love. Romance, sweet nothings, breathless touching. Perfection. Perfection all around them, perfection in each other.
I was once in Eden, and I fell in love. “Found in the heart of the Adirondacks, in the middle of the 9-mile Schroon Lake sits a 49-acre Island where excitement and life change happen.”1 Word of Life Island was for me in 1967 a place of excitement where life change happened, oh yes.
The most dangerous circumstance in any woman’s life is not walking, as I once did to the rhythm of heart-pounding fear, south on Giddings Avenue in the dark. It is the heart-pounding thrill of falling in love. Senseless infatuation. Tall, dark, and handsome, a perfect creature, an Adam, appearing almost out of nowhere. The setting on this island paradise was a large, screened meeting room above the boathouse. It was an informal gathering of college-and-career-age campers. The MC announced a little game. He called out Bible verse references, and anyone could stand and quote the verse. As a camp counselor, I waited for others. When no one stood, I took my turn. Finally, it was just me, and when I didn’t know the verse, this six-foot-two stranger nailed it every time.
How romantic is that!
For a single male fundamentalist in the late 1960s, a single woman quoting Bible verses beats succulent, ripened mangos hands down. When the meeting was over, the stranger found me, and romance quickly blossomed in our very own little Eden. We managed to get off the island that week for long walks and talks. I hung on every word this most alluring specimen of humanity uttered. Here I was, an unsophisticated farm girl from northern Wisconsin, being held in the arms of a debonair gentleman from New York City. We were in the paradise of the Adirondack Mountains. It was the Garden of Eden.
(I know this because the great American artist and founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, painted Garden of Eden scenes. One such landscape, completed in the late 1830s, was titled simply Schroon Lake.)
The Garden of Eden is where beguiling romance is born. All it takes is two perfect people swooning, whispering sweet nothings, finding no fault. The deception of perfection. Suddenly a snake slithers in the grass and comes onto the scene. Oh, how crafty is this clever creature. Sure, there have been red flags and warnings, but the serpent casts doubts, soothes an uneasy conscience, dismisses an unsure query. Like Eve, I did not ask hard questions. Suspicions and uncertainties disappeared like blossoms in the breeze. The lure of the forbidden fruit was irresistible. I ate the apple.
Next to Jezebel, Eve is the most maligned woman of the Bible. She was the temptress. She brought her husband into sin. Or was she the first example of a woman suffering domestic violence, Adam the perpetrator? She was, according to Jocelyn Andersen, author of Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence and a domestic violence survivor herself. Author Kathryn Joyce highlights Andersen’s unique take on Adam and Eve:
The story of the Fall should not be seen as a prescription for marriage roles, [Andersen] argues, with women charged to follow men as punishment for acting outside the chain of command, but rather as the first chapter in a long history of domestic violence of husband against wife. In Andersen’s reading, the story of Adam and Eve is that of Adam’s deadly betrayal of his wife: offering her up for punishment—the wages of eating the apple were death—rather than owning his blame for sin. Women have been responding in a sort of biblical battered wife syndrome, the “Eve Syndrome,” ever since.2
I would not have come up with this interpretation myself, but that a man “ruling over” a woman (or a wife) would lead to domestic violence is not entirely off the mark, at least in many instances. On the other hand, the one does not necessarily follow the other. Parents “rule over” their children, making them do homework and forbidding them to play kickball in the street. But it does not follow that they also abuse this child. However, that a wife should be “ruled over” by a husband and punished if she does not obey (as a child is by parents) is surely not the message that comes from the creation account or any other biblical passage.
How, then, do we define domestic violence or abuse? Some writers, including sociologists and criminal justice experts, define the term broadly, as in “any act which contravenes the rights of another” or “the attempt of an individual or group to impose its will on others through any nonverbal, verbal, or physical means that inflict psychological or physical injury.”3
I find such definitions fuzzy. They have the potential to turn almost any strong disagreement into abuse. A husband or wife uses harsh language. The wife tries to impose her will on the husband, and vice versa. Tempers flare. Feelings are hurt. It happens in a marriage and among siblings and friends. It happens all the time in politics. But do we muddy the discussion if we call it abuse?
Violence is obviously abuse, whether the wife is throwing dinner plates or the husband is ripping off cabinet doors. A one-time push or shove may not be, unless the wife is slammed into a kitchen counter or onto the floor. Demeaning criticism (particularly when it happens repeatedly) is abuse and should not be tolerated in marriage or in any other setting.
If depicting Eve as a battered wife seems preposterous to some, so should be depicting Eve as a feminist. Yet that claim has sometimes been propounded by those holding a patriarchal position. In an online essay titled “Eve, the Original Feminist,” Bryce Laliberte writes:
The actual sins committed by Adam and Eve are also distinct. While both involved eating of the tree of life, Eve did so in order to “be as God, knowing good and evil” while Adam appears to have done so in order to please his woman. In other words, it appears that Eve was the first woman stricken by penis envy, and Adam was the first beta who failed to keep his woman in line by ruling over her . . . Patriarchy is a cultural response to the post-lapsarian state. Without the fall, men would still be head of the relationship, but would find no need to “rule” . . . just as we might imagine an unfallen world where wives did the will of their husbands on the sole basis of their position and mutual love.4
Long before Laliberte was calling Eve the first feminist, John Milton in Paradise Lost was doing so, though without using the term. Before Eve is tempted by the serpent, she makes a proposition to Adam: “Let us divide our labours, thou where choice leads thee . . . while I in yonder Spring of Roses intermixt with Myrtle” (IX. 214–19).
Eve desires independence. Adam speaks against her reasoning, but she wins the argument: “And what is Faith, Love, Virtue unassayed [untried] alone, without exterior help sustained?” (IX. 335–36). So she goes off on her own, and that is where she meets the serpent. She sets the stage for all women after her to seek independence from their husbands.
In a chapter in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Raymond Ortlund Jr. interprets the passage more pointedly:
What actually happened is full of meaning. Eve usurped Adam’s headship and led the way into sin. And Adam . . . for his part, abandoned his post as head . . .
Isn’t it striking that we fell upon an occasion of sex role reversal? Are we to repeat this confusion forever? Are we to institutionalize it in evangelicalism in the name of the God who condemned it in the beginning?5
Here we find a curious twist—that of Adam and Eve sinning before the fall, perhaps only seconds before eating the fruit but nonetheless before they actually ate it. As Ortlund sets it up, sex role reversal was “condemned” by God “in the beginning.” So in his scenario, Adam and Eve sinned and fell under condemnation by reversing their roles before they sinned by disobeying God and eating the fruit. It is interesting that God does not bring up the matter of sex role reversal when he confronts them in the cool of the evening.
The biblical text itself speaks only of the sin of disobedience for eating the fruit, and God’s charge against them is for that very sin. Nothing is said to Eve about “usurping Adam’s headship” or to Adam about “abandoning his post as head.”
How do Bible interpreters come up with the idea that male headship was instituted in the garden before the fall? That Adam was created before Eve, that Eve was his helper, and that Adam named Eve are claims used to defend this position. In many respects, these matters are distractions and altogether less than significant. One matter, however, I cannot leave unchallenged—a matter I find to be no less than exegetical mischief. To claim that God created the woman as helper and placed her as subordinate to the man is simply not accurate. At stake is the proper rendering of the Hebrew word ēzer, translated “helper” (and the phrase ēzer kenegdo, translated “helpmate” or “helper suitable”). Far from a place of subordination, ēzer is used in Scripture most frequently when associated with God and with male names. In Exodus 18:4, we see that Moses’ son was named Eliezer because “my father’s God was my helper” (ēzer). How well I remember the plaque in the farmhouse kitchen where I grew up: “The Lord is my helper. Whom shall I fear?”
But at the end of the day, it’s tempting to call for a truce and plead with both sides to just leave Adam and Eve alone. Let them enjoy paradise for as long as it takes them to sin, and then let them have babies and till the soil. Sad news will come soon enough. For someone simply reading through the text, the murder of Abel at the hand of his brother, Cain, is what tears the heart out. Indeed, in a very real sense this account of murder, next to the crucifixion of Jesus, is the most searing story of the Bible. Garden romance all too quickly warps into homicidal reality.
For Adam and Eve, the giddy days of perfection and pure romance are barely a memory. So, too, for all of us. Troubles are only a temptation away. The garden is overrun with weeds, and the snake slithers through the grass. My Garden of Eden romance was filled with red flags, but that crafty serpent kept rational thinking at bay.
After the whirlwind romance in and around Schroon Lake, we waited a year to marry. It might seem like sufficient time to work out issues between us, but it wasn’t. He was in New Jersey; I was at Baylor University in graduate school. The 1,636 miles that separated us were figuratively light-years away in marriage preparation. He visited my family in Wisconsin at Christmas; I visited his parents on Long Island during my spring break. We were briefly together again in June prior to our August wedding.
During our Texas–New Jersey separation, we talked frequently on the phone, and he sent letters that contained his own biblical commentaries on the subject of marriage—nothing that struck me as particularly controversial at the time. I saved all of his letters and packed them away in a box in our attic (that is, before his mother went into the trunk of my car parked in her driveway during our honeymoon, opened a large box, found the cache of letters, took them inside, opened every envelope, and read each one). That box (which I later retrieved from her) was one of the items that my ex-husband took, unbeknownst to me, at the time of our separation. Now as I am reflecting on our early relationship, I’m wondering if those letters were filled with warning signs of our future marriage breakdown.
During his visit at Christmas, he was determined to proceed with marriage plans. There was one major hurdle before us, however. Wifely obedience, you say? I don’t remember that this issue even arose. The hurdle was my failure to sign on to his belief in six twenty-four-hour days of creation some six thousand years ago. Was he really making that a prerequisite for our getting married? I was stunned. A year earlier, one of my brainy college friends, who happened to be a strong Calvinist, suddenly denied the theological premises she was so adept at defending and agreed to Arminian tenets so that her boyfriend would marry her. I was seriously troubled by her cave-in, and I told her so. Now I was being asked to do the same thing.
I told him point-blank that I had thought through my position and that I would not simply check my brain at the door to be carried over the threshold. Nor would I lie. The matter was nonnegotiable. He backed down, and I accepted his marriage proposal. When he was able to get my father alone the following evening to ask his permission, Dad told him that I make my own decisions and he wouldn’t commit himself. Mom, overhearing the conversation, had no hesitation about butting right in and denying her approval that hadn’t been asked for. Her final words were, “You’re trying to change her. We like Ruthie the way she is.” I had not revealed my misgivings to her, but I’ll never forget that warning.
Although he backed down by not making our getting married contingent on my belief in a six-day creation, he did insist (and I agreed) that I would read The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb. So convinced was he by the book’s arguments that he was certain I would change my mind, though he assured me that once I read the book, I was free to come to my own conclusions. I carried out my end of the bargain and read the book, but I found it unconvincing. Throughout our marriage, I simply wanted the matter dropped. He refused. Time and again, he tried to compel me, sometimes violently, to accept his “science” of six days. Black-and-white Bible, black-and-blue wife.
During our engagement, I discovered just how different our families were. I grew up in a farm family with four siblings. He was an only child, growing up in sight of New York City. If my mother rattled him by strongly opposing our planned marriage, his mother rattled me even more. She was demanding and critical from the moment I met her. Among other things, she insisted I wear her ornate, ivory-colored wedding gown, which would require major alterations. I told her I had a style in mind and that I was really looking forward to shopping for my own dress. She was upset and made the dress an issue the entire week of my visit.
I had already learned from my fiancé that he had been expelled from Wheaton College for cheating and for breaking into a faculty office in search of exam answers. Two years later, he had been forced to leave Miami Christian College for behavior he did not clearly explain. And he was arrested as a peeping Tom near his parents’ home on Long Island. All this, he had told me, had been cured through counseling. Knowing he had sought and been denied readmission to Wheaton, I was taken aback when his mother insisted that our marriage be held in a compromise location between my family’s home and hers—specifically in Wheaton at the college chapel. Wheaton? Unbelievably, this was not some sort of sick joke.
The marriage plans went forward, but the Schroon Lake paradise had lost its magic. How many weeks or months, I sometimes wonder, did Eve gaze at her perfect lover before her eyes were opened? I am her child; we are all her children. And through the centuries, we, too, have been forever building Edens.
We are the centuries . . .
We march in spite of Hell, we do—Atrophy,
Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy
jokes about a farm girl name of Eve and
a traveling salesman called Lucifer.
We bury your dead and their reputations.
We bury you. We are the centuries.
Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s
slap, seek manhood, taste a little godhood, feel
pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:
(Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)
Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a
ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn
hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam.
Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens . . .6