Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Forum on Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination

On February 5, 2002, Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions and its Department of Old Testament and Hebrew Bible sponsored a panel discussion of The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Westminster John Knox Press), a new book by Gary A. Anderson, Professor of Old Testament at HDS and assistant director of the center. After introductory remarks by Lawrence Sullivan, director of the center, four other scholars presented responses to the book, and the event concluded with a reply from Professor Anderson. The four panelists were Michael Stone of Hebrew University, Paula Fredriksen of Boston University, Richard Clifford of Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and Jon Levenson of Harvard Divinity School. Following are excerpts from each participant's comments; you may also click on a name above to jump directly to that participant's commentary.

Lawrence Sullivan
The book is not only a learned presentation of scripture and apocrypha and their reception through time, but also an interpretation that tackles central human questions with a certain passion of its own. And why not? After all, the story of Adam and Eve, as Gary Anderson demonstrates so clearly, is centered over the genuinely passionate issues, including especially sex, lies, and death, sin, love, and perfection. And about these passionate issues Gary raises key questions, a few of which I was very struck by and would like to include in my opening remarks.

How does the liturgical experience of the people of Israel map holiness onto space and time, even onto the primordial space of Eden and onto the time of the first narratives about what links sexual renunciation with married love, lust, and impotence? Because they are clothed in flesh, humans know God the way they do and take their place in relation to the angels in the way that they do. What do humans' skin and clothing signify about when Adam knew Eve and where, and what bearing has this for us today? And what do distinctive human garments, including skin, help us understand about the nature of death and its overcoming? Above all, how does a story about primordial failure and expulsion reshape itself in the very first place to become the tale of the origins of human perfection?

In addressing these and other fascinating questions Gary helps us see how the story of Adam and Eve is both a universal story and also a story that tells the separate, if intertwined, tales of two particular faiths, revealing distinctive features of the Jewish and Christian imaginations. He is committed to the notion that there are intellectual and theological gains in examining these stories in combination with each other, just as there is in examining the canonical scriptures with apocryphal retellings. Perhaps the most important retelling Gary points to is the one unfolding in the lives of those in each generation who live lives faithful to the God made known through these texts. As he puts it: "Religious texts are not just for reading and rereading. They are meant to be lived. How we perform the scriptures, be it in liturgy, prayer, or almsgiving, is just as important a vehicle for understanding as how we read them."

Michael Stone
The Genesis of Perfection, I think, is a most unusually significant work. Gary Anderson says at the end, "This book has been almost entirely about the reception of Genesis 2 and 3 in early Judaism and Christianity." Indeed, it is about that, but it does not look at the history of that perception from the disengaged position; that is one of its unique perspectives.

Professor Anderson's scholarly credentials don't need to be established. Jon Levenson comments in his statement on the cover of the book that Gary "wears his impressive erudition lightly." But it doesn't hurt to recall the credentials. Anderson has shown his conventional scholarly mettle in a number of fields of learning, through articles in learned journals, in books, and in lectures. And thus he's a highly qualified scholar of the Hebrew Bible. As he says, "I received the best historical and philological training one can get, under the tutelage of Frank Cross."

Early in his scholarly career he started to combine this training with an interest in the history of interpretation of the Bible by Judaism and by the Christian church, particularly with the Greek, Latin, and Syriac traditions. But in order to do this responsibly he had to qualify himself to read rabbinic texts, Syriac, and the Eastern and Western fathers, and so he set about in very typical way and just did that. And this combination of skills and fields of knowledge has given his latest work its very solid underpinnings. Here is an important aspect of the book: Anderson is a scholar who learns and controls his sources firsthand in the original language. That is a great virtue for one who would trace the history of biblical exegesis over so broad a segment of the human past.

Gary and I worked together on Adam and Eve materials for more than a decade, as some of you probably know. It's been a good time for both of us, and I wish to express here publicly my indebtedness to him for his learning, his insights, and his deep friendship. Those of you who have happened to have seen my own work know that my cast of mind is rather different from Gary's, and that, of course, has been an extremely fruitful factor for both of us in our work together.

As I read The Genesis of Perfection I found a number of sections that dealt with material I was already familiar with, such as the idea of the garments of glory and the issue of Adam and Eve's food. But there is a large amount that is new—either completely new, because Gary has gone beyond where I was or we were, or new because of the orientation and the formulation of the book. Since I can't talk about all of this very rich book, I'm going to talk just about this last aspect, the orientation.

It's plain to me that in The Genesis of Perfection Gary is doing something innovative. One part of the new thing is the comparative study of Jewish and Christian reception and interpretation of the paradigmatic and foundational story of Adam and Eve. To have this done competently and by a responsible scholar is rare enough. Another and perhaps even more intriguing part of the new thing, however, is the polyvalent understanding of context that typifies his presentation. On page 136 he says, "Though I knew the significance of context at the theoretical level, at the practical level of my own research I had not given it serious enough consideration."

At its most simple level, understanding a piece of ancient biblical exegesis in context involves understanding exegesis in the time and place in which it was written and the literary context in which it's preserved. Anderson always does this. And his interpretation of Adam and Eve's diet at the preliminary level emerges from the search both for its biblical anchor and from his careful reading of the apocryphal life of Adam and Eve. In this sort of activity there's nothing methodologically new, though it's very gratifying to have it done so well. Where Anderson goes beyond this is in the broader contextualizing of the exegesis and the ideas that are driving them.

Repeatedly his insights lead him on the reciprocal path between the understanding of the biblical text by its later interpreter and the influence of the biblical text on the interpreter's reading. And in a deeper way, between the interpreter's understanding of his or her own tradition and the influence of that tradition on the interpreter's understanding of the biblical text. And this is a very complex set of interrelations, and it requires a very delicate scalpel to separate the strands, and I think it's been done very admirably.

It is in this dimension—the realization of the role played by tradition in the creation of the interpretation, and of the interpretation in creation of the tradition—that Anderson goes beyond. I suppose we were both drawn to the Adam stories not just because they are fun—and that they are—but because Adam and Eve are paradigms of human beings, and how their story is told reflects central understandings of the human condition, of sin and redemption, of life and death, of all those things that are human.

Anderson is profoundly sensitive to the religious dimension of the exegesis he's laying before us and to the cultural ramifications. Boldly he gathers these threads together and weaves them into a textured and nuanced tapestry. He's asserting that to write the history of interpretation is an important activity for those who would understand the creations of the human spirit. He's also asserting that this segment of the human path, that of his exegetes, set patterns for Christianity as it developed and modified. Those patterns remain significant to this day, and he does not hold back from hitting the modern significance of the patterns of exegesis.

His use of rabbinic exegesis as a counterpoint and a complement to the Christian sources is sensitive, intriguing, and sometimes profoundly illuminating. There is much to be learned from the ways—sometimes remarkably similar and sometimes strikingly different—in which Judaism and Christianity face the same exegetical issues and the same cruxes of human existence. Anderson speaks of Judaism with sensitivity and perception and casts much light on it.

The work, then, is an important one, and brings the history of biblical interpretation into the center stage for historians of the human spirit. Readers will discuss whether this activity should be seen as part of biblical studies or part of the history of Christianity and Judaism—a question Anderson himself raises in his preface. I am not sure the question has been answered. It probably won't be answered ever, satisfactorily. But we're very grateful for the book.

Richard Clifford
It is a pleasure to take part in this panel on The Genesis of Perfection. To quote one of the few biblical books not cited in the book, the Gospel of Matthew, "The author is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old." What is old in the treasure are neglected Jewish and Christian traditions that are held up lovingly for our contemplation and admiration. What is new are the book's method and tone. Among the new methods, as Michael has suggested, is the systematic parallel study of Jewish and Christian traditions, and I'd say of Protestant and Catholic traditions, when it comes to Michelangelo and Milton.

Another one is the chronological range of texts examined: ancient to modern, and the analysis of iconography as well as text. The new tone is respect and reverence for ancient interpretative strategies, even when they seem a bit odd to twentieth-century minds. Gary Anderson shows us how the Adam and Eve traditions in Jewish and Christian literature deal with perennially important issues in human life, especially the nature and claims of the sacred: sacred space and sacred time, marriage and sexuality, and the problem of evil.

Equally important, he makes us admire ancient scribes for their close reading and existential questions, and he does so without yielding to the temptation to play our study of the reception of biblical texts against the study of the origin, the goal of historical critical scholarship. The author himself is quite capable of historical critical work on the original texts. And just in case anyone doubts that, he gives a virtuoso performance of the same in Appendix A. It would be easy to go on praising this interesting, bold, and innovative yet conservative book. My only reservation perhaps is whether the popular style might disguise for some readers the seriousness of the matters discussed.

It is time, however, to move into frictionality, which is a word that Gary introduced me to, and I'll use now. The Genesis of Perfection is an essay on interpretation, and I would like to continue the author's reflections on interpretation in two areas. First I'll mention attempts parallel to his in recent Roman Catholic documents on biblical interpretation, which I find interesting. And secondly, I will develop a few ideas from his Appendix A, on original sin, and go in what I hope is a parallel direction.

As to the first, the book is a critical retrieval of traditional interpretation of the Bible, and the same concerns appear in official Roman Catholic documents on biblical interpretation of the last century and a half; and it may be of interest to sketch their struggle with modernity and tradition.

Modernity was slow in gaining entry into Roman Catholic biblical studies, at least in official documents. It is even fair to speak of a fortress mentality among Roman Catholic biblicists, especially in the Enlightenment and periods of revolution that followed in Europe. The Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII Providentissimus Deus, in 1893, was the first extended official attempt to respond to the effect on biblical studies of new archaeological data, texts, and methods. The encyclical was cautiously open to the new data, condemning only the use made of it by some, and it reiterated the importance for Catholic exegesis of the church fathers, traditions, and the magisterium. The modernist movement in the next decade, however, dampened this cautious openness. Modernism's attempt to align Catholic doctrine with the modern outlook in philosophy and the historical disciplines included a thoroughly critical view of the Bible, and the defensive Roman reaction included the creation of the Biblical Commission as a kind of watchdog.

It is important to note that the major issue, or at least a major issue here, was whether the adoption of a historical critical method would have a deleterious effect on traditional interpretation and the role of the magisterium. Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943 marked the definitive acceptance of modern historical critical method, though the language used of that was adopting and accepting different genres. The Biblical Commission was reformed and became an advisory committee of professional scholars. It seemed that the historical critical method had completely won the day. Not quite. In 1993, just a few years ago, the Pontifical Biblical Commission produced a document called "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church." It's a fairly extensive thing. It's in big print, small pages; it's about 130 pages. Part I assesses the critical methods of the last couple of centuries, and does so in a very fair and judicious way. Part II, the more interesting part, attempts to integrate hermeneutics with traditional readings of the Bible, and it deals with philosophical hermeneutics as it attempts to reinterpret the literal and spiritual sense, and talk about the unity of the Christian Bible.

Interpretation of the Bible in the Church," I think, marks a major change from earlier concern with either accepting or not accepting critical methods. It has a new concern with hermeneutics and interpretation. And I could not help thinking of the interpretation of the Bible of the Church when reading The Genesis of Perfection. And a question occurred to me: Does Gary intend to influence future study of the Bible by this book? Is his intricate and demanding study of biblical texts and the reception of those texts meant as a model of future study? And another question is: Are there traditions similar to the Adam and Eve traditions that are comprehensive enough to serve as the basis of such a study?

There is only one person in the room who can answer these questions, and we await his answer.

My second point is suggested by Gary's treatment of original sin in his appendix "Biblical Origins and the Fall." And this chapter, as you will recall, unlike others in the book, is not about the reception of the story of the sin of Adam and Eve but its meaning within the Bible. So it steps out, a little bit, from the thrust of the book. At the outset of the chapter Gary faces up to the problematic meaning of the fall in modern times, modern interpretation. One has the impression here and as well elsewhere in the book that he delights in dealing with unfashionable, problematic themes.

Does the Book of Genesis really talk about the fall of man, asks Gary Anderson? Is not its prominence due only to Paul in Romans 5, that is, in the Christian Bible? In answer, Gary shows that the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, elsewhere deals with original sin in the sense of the human disposition to rebel. The priestly source does so in Leviticus 9-10 in the story of the lighting of the sacrificial fire that is sanctified by fire and then immediately profaned. And the Yahwehist source does something similar in its story of the golden calf in Exodus 32-34, which occurs in the midst of the account of the construction of the tabernacle.

So the teaching that there is something fundamentally amiss in human beings is part and parcel of the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 1-3, therefore, is not unique in so dealing with it. And when Paul makes the sin of Adam and Eve into a universal statement—all human beings stand in need of God's grace—he is not inventing, but furthering, a teaching of the scriptures that he inherited. In Appendix A, Gary implicitly recognizes, though these are not his words, that the Bible, in a sense, is self-organizing. That is, biblical authors do not hesitate to reweave their material, to organize it—even the most venerable and fixed traditions—into creative stories. There is ancient precedent for this, as Jeffrey Tigay has shown us in his 1982 study of the evolution of the Gilgamesh epic.

I would like to show some organizing or reweaving around the topic of original sin in Genesis 2-11, and not just 1-3, and I'm not sure how what I am doing coincides with what Gary has set out to do, at least in Appendix A. But let me go on. Genesis 1 I will not delay on. It is a cosmogony that serves as the preface to the Pentateuch, as we can see from the themes that are echoed in later books: the Exodus account of the building of the tabernacle, the institution of the Sabbath, and the recurrence in later passages of its themes that define human beings: progeny ("be fruitful and multiply") and land ("fill the earth and subdue it"). I focus on Genesis 2-11. Its genre is an important clue to its meaning. It is a creation flood story. And genre considerations indicate the relevant biblical unit is not Genesis 1-3, but Genesis 2-11.

Genesis 1 is the preface to the whole. Other instances of the creation flood story, for example, display the plot that is displayed by Genesis 2-11. The human race is created to serve the gods; there is a fault in the system; the gods are disturbed, and inflict a flood that brings the world to an end; one god helps his client, variously named, to ride out the storm safely in a boat; and after the flood there is a new beginning for the human race. The story line suggests that ending matters in Genesis 3 is therefore premature, for the plot has not yet come to its end.

Much is lost, in fact, by ending the story with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden. These include the replay of the parents' sin in one of their children, the transmission of crafts and culture to the human race, the pre-flood world of heroes, the corruption of earth and society that comes to a climax just before the flood. The flood comes to annihilate all but the chosen hero, his family, and representative animals. In the post-flood settlement, God reaffirms the rightness of the original design, but things, nonetheless, will be different in the future. The human race is differentiated into ethnic groups, there is diversity in culture, and one ethnic group is chosen to have a special relationship to God.

Contemporary readings of Genesis 1-3 derive in large part from Paul's new Adam christology in Romans 5 and I Corinthians 15. It is Paul's favorite christological narrative, I think. Because of Paul's focus on Genesis 1-3 on the individual sin of Adam, the corresponding redemptive act of Christ is also focused on individual sin narrowly. If the full Genesis story were taken into account, however, the corresponding act of Christ would redeem a broader spectrum of sin: systemic sin, culture in its limits, corruption of the earth, and so on, and bring to completion a more diverse and rich world. Perhaps Paul had these factors in mind. I don't know.

What I tried to do just now is to engage in what French scholars might call resourcement: to critique a present viewpoint by holding it up to its ancient source. It's similar to what Gary was doing, but not identical, and I raise it as a kind of contrast. The interpretation is comparable to Gary's holistic suggestions in Appendix A: within the Bible, that is, there are possibilities for revisiting our hallowed interpretations.

In conclusion, I would like to thank Gary Anderson for a book that is rich in insight, and a wonderful example of patient listening to hard-to-decipher voices. It fully respects the turn to the subject but does not fall into reductionism or use dismissal of past interpretations. I end with one infallible test of a good book: will I have to change my lecture notes? The answer, in this case, alas, is yes.

Paula Fredriksen
Westminster John Knox Press got in touch with me a while ago and asked if I'd be willing to look at Gary Anderson's book on Genesis for a blurb. I thought, "No problem," and they sent me this huge package of unbound xeroxes. And I calmly sat down to give the 20 to 45 minutes that it usually takes to—when you blurb something you sort of do a ouija board method until you find what you want to say: you lift up, you showcase, and, blurb; that's it. Three days later, after I finally pulled myself away from this text, I phoned Gary and, even though I was raised in a generation where girls still didn't ask for the date, called and demanded a rendezvous at the café. And then we ended up talking that much more about it. This book is symphonic. The main metaphor I think of when I read it is actually listening. It's musical, and it has just the right number of notes.

I also appreciated Gary's self-conscious and autobiographical discussion of the orientation—I'll put it in Augustinian language—the orientation of his affection—how you think and how you feel at the same time. He mentioned that he entered Duke to do historical work as a Protestant and came out as a Roman Catholic studying Judaism. I—do not try this at home—I'm an Italian pre-Vatican II Catholic convert to Orthodox Judaism, raised in a Protestant discipline, which is New Testament, but I also do Augustine. So yeah, it sort of helps—the affection you can get for all these texts is wonderful because if you open up to them, they open up to you, and Gary has been wonderfully open to the melody that all these things can play together.

I'm constantly surprised, given that I work in antiquity, on how similar Rabbinic Judaism and the church fathers can end up sounding, and being, in some of their intellectual and exegetical orientations, considering how different their methods and their languages actually were. Rabbinic Midrash can proceed by punning, by word games—you can change the vowels and end up with something else. When the church fathers do their exegesis, they're drawing on a very important philosophical system of Greco-Roman learned culture that determines a lot of how they can read a biblical text. And one of the issues is the theological status of matter: is matter intrinsically evil? Is matter, because it's the substratum of everything, but particularly the human body in the instance when you think of Genesis, is there something with it that is irredeemable? Is there something with it that explains the problem of evil? And then you get different ranges of Christian answers, Gnostics to one extreme and other people coming up with other things.

This concept of the evilness of matter, or the problematic moral status of matter as a substance, enters into Christian tradition in part because pagan intellectuals are the ones who were converting to become church fathers, and secondly, because if you look at early Christianity as an extreme case of Judaism, it's a religion of redemption, and thinking with the idea of matter as evil gives you a sharp focus on what it is you're being saved from and how salvation works. In this sense it's both like and not like Judaism, and I wanted to break down my intellectual response, as opposed to my aesthetic response, to Gary's wonderful book by concentrating on three things. And as I look at them now, it is sex, sex, and sex; I'll begin with sex.

The first issue—and it's Gary's first chapter—is the way that sexual activity relates to purity. In Jewish exegesis—and he mentions Jubilees, particularly—Adam and Eve have sex outside of the Garden, and when they are moved into the Garden they do not have sex, because the Garden is imagined on the type of the Temple, where you eschew sexual relations. The issues of Jewish purity have to do with the type of cultic etiquette that becomes attached to any kind of ancient religion that is tied up with protocols of animal sacrifice. Purity in Jewish tradition has to do—and did when the Temple still stood—with involuntary bodily effluvia. And also, of course, corpse pollution is a very important form of pollution. But purity is not a metaphor for sexual—how shall I put this?—if you do not have sexual activity you are in a state of purity, but you're also in a state of purity if you are not menstruating or if you have not buried a corpse, or if you do not have a certain kind of skin disease. So there isn't that kind of immediate sexual connotation to the concept that enters into formal Christian theology. When Christians use their mimetic sacrifice, which is the Eucharist, to define Christian liturgical space in mass, what they draw on is naturally the first part of their canon, which is the Old Testament, and they are faced with the bulk of the legislation having to do with Jewish purity and what that can mean within a Christian context.

And it's interesting because the other Augustine, Augustine of Canterbury—not Augustine of Hippo, whom I'll be mentioning shortly—as a missionary wrote back to Gregory the Great asking for some direction in the field about what to do when a person asked him, "If I'm menstruating, may I go to church?" And Gregory wrote back and said: "Yes. Menstruation is fine. There's no problem with that because we've been set free from the law," and so on. And yet there is still the tradition of not having sexual relations before receiving the Eucharist, which comes, again, in the text having to do with purity regulations—think Mary Douglas; don't think Augustine of Hippo—and yet will be interpreted within the tradition because of the morally problematic nature of human sexual activity as now realized outside of the Garden. Which brings us to Paul and Jesus, of course. I will now move on to sex.

Paul in I Corinthians 7 promotes the idea of—Paul has no self-esteem issues—he says frankly to his audience that he wishes they could be as good as he is but he realizes not everybody can be as good as he is, particularly those apostles back in Jerusalem. He talks about remaining chaste, or he talks about a rhythm of chastity within marriage, because of how late the hour is, because of the impending sense of things being about to change. The orientation of Paul's instruction to chastity has to do with the imminent coming of Christ, which Paul expects, and he says that specifically in I Corinthians 7.

The traditions around Jesus which we have, written some 20 to 40 years after Paul's letters—in Matthew, for example, when Jesus talks about being a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven—is again put into a context where the coming kingdom of God determines the time frame within which one is not supposed to have sexual relations. If you think of regular purity rituals as the protocol that pagans enacted in their temples—as Jews being also ancient Mediterranean people did for coming near their altar—purity is a state that you should be in to become in proximity with holiness. Not having sexual relations, when God arrives, that's proximity to holiness. Avoidance of sexual relations is one of the ways to achieve it. As a teacher of mine in graduate school, Paul Ramsey, a great Christian ethicist, put it, Paul and Jesus—Matthew's Jesus—are instructing Christians to hold their breath—and then Paul Ramsey would wink, smile, and say Augustine suggested they stop breathing.

The problem is when you let go of apocalyptic expectation, which frames so much of the earliest stratum of Christian tradition, what do you do with these traditions that are framed precisely by the expectation that the whole problem of evil is about to be wrapped up? This brings me to a final point that Gary's discussion triggered, and that is the issue of sex in the Garden.

One of the options interpretively that Origen of Alexandria—or the great way-not-taken for Christian theology—gave was that all not God was in the form of non-fleshly, pre-existent souls. Eventually those are instantiated in history and given fleshly bodies, but part of redemption is leaving that body and being gathered back up to God, so that you still have a body because everything has a body, but you have this process in I Corinthians 15 of a spiritual body when you're redeemed. This means that flesh itself, which is contingent, as far as Origen is concerned, doesn't have a place in the final redemption. So the way Origen looks at Genesis, he has the focus on the person who's really the spiritual self, and not on the flesh. It was in reaction to Origen and the turmoil of the post-Origenist controversy that the emphasis on fleshly bodies, and therefore gendered fleshly bodies, as the initial way that God created humans, not simply as fallen souls then getting skins when they're kicked out of the Garden—but with the emphasis on fleshly bodies, the question becomes what are you supposed to do with them? And that's what really puts the issue of sexual activity in the Garden.

Some different options were raised. Again with Origen, you don't get you flesh back; it's your soul that's redeemed. Other people said that women would be finally changed into men, and we'd have the perfect male body we've all been really wanting for all this time. Others thought that maybe bodies would be spheroid, because the sphere is a perfect form and the resurrection body would be this perfect form. One of the most interesting things as a way to track all these different theological thoughts, when thinking with Genesis, is also thinking about the endpoint of redemption, as Gary makes clear in his book.

But one question he didn't raise, even though he talks about paradisiacal sex, what sex would have been like in the Garden—is also the question raised by Christian soteriology: if there are gendered fleshly bodies in the beginning, and if we get back gendered fleshly bodies at the end—the question is obvious—is there sex after death? Is there dating after death? The question of sex after death is an obvious one, because gendered fleshly bodies, if that's what you get back, they're supposed to be doing something, they're supposed to have some kind of context. And Lactantius and other church fathers say yes, of course there is, there are feastings in the saints in the heavenly Jerusalem. They've got to redeem something for those thousand years when they're reigning with Christ.

Ultimately that issue was finessed by Augustine, who insists that—and if you haven't read Book 22 of The City of God you'll really want to after you read Gary's chapter on Augustine—Augustine insists that bodies will be raised gendered and fleshly, but they're going to be in heaven, not on earth. He cuts loose the traditions of the apocalyptic Jerusalem from traditions of bodily redemption, and he says that there will be no sexual activity because there will be no need for it. There will be the full number of the saved, and therefore sex can cease.

But Augustine had prescribed what sex would have been like in the Garden, which doesn't sound like much fun, which is exactly Augustine's point. As Gary again points out in this chapter, the way that sex in the Garden is imagined by Augustine as a late Latin theologian is that it would have been completely volitional. In other words, fertilization, sexual intercourse, and all the things necessary to that to achieve procreation, which is the point of having gendered fleshly bodies, would have been achieved as an act of will. The problem is the lack of control that generation now depends on. And for this reason, sexuality in particular is the mark of the fall and original sin, according to Augustine.

Of course Augustine doesn't think Augustine's constructing this. Augustine thinks he's just repeating what Paul said, which as Gary points out in his chapter is not the case. If we try to think historically about all of these things and put them in their individual contexts, which Gary has done, often it's impossible to get them together because these people are talking about different things. And I've tried to point out some of the differences in what they're talking about by thinking historically with you in this presentation.

What's lovely and what is the really aesthetic and intellectual accomplishment of this book is that Gary is able to place all these various traditions in their own context, respect them in their own integrity, and yet bring them all together in a wonderful kind of exegetical harmony, too. It's a good moral example for all of us.

Jon Levenson
Among the several strengths of Professor Gary Anderson's fine new volume, its handling of the multiple contexts of the story of Adam and Eve is surely one of the most noteworthy. To be sure, already in his preface the author acknowledges that he once saw things differently and privileged one of those contexts above the others. "Being raised Protestant and educated in the historical method of the Enlightenment," he tells us, "I believed that the Bible's essential message could be cracked open by recovering its original historical setting." "But a funny thing happened along the way," he goes on to say. "Already during my training as a Protestant seminarian at Duke, I was made aware of the immense importance of church and synagogue in shaping the very form of scripture . . . Eventually, I emerged a Roman Catholic with the deepest and most abiding love for Judaism and the Jews" (p. xv). In the book at hand, however, we see the evidence of more than simply the role of the successor communities in shaping the form their respective scriptures took. We also see a sustained exploration of the interpretations of the little narrative of Adam in Eve in post-biblical Christianity and Judaism, interpretations that are in some instances distant from any reading that historical critics have given the famous story. And here I must draw attention to another noteworthy aspect of Gary Anderson's treatment, his determination to be fair and balanced in his treatment of both those traditions. One of the endorsements on the jacket puts it well: "His powerful Christian commitment is evident throughout the book and so is his deep and sympathetic understanding of Judaism. Both Jews and Christians can gain important insight into their own and the other's religion by reading this important volume." I believe those highly astute and insightful words are as true now as they were when I wrote them. In fact, having heard these other speakers, I think they're probably even more true now than when I wrote them.

To the extent that historical critical analysis of biblical texts is known to a wider public at all, it is probably known best for its atomizing the text, often into nearly microscopic units. The reason for this is not so well known, however, and has to do with the fact that the method understands the meaning of a passage to be the meaning that its author intended, so far as this can be recovered. Benjamin Jowett put it well in 1860: "Scripture has only one meaning—the meaning which it had to the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it" (HBOTHC, p. 78). What this really means, of course, is that scripture does not have only one meaning but as many meanings as it has authors and redactors. And since none of the authors or redactors of the Hebrew Bible practiced Christianity or Rabbinic Judaism, historical criticism inevitably has the effect (to some degree) of diminishing the utility of the scripture to post-biblical believers, including today's Christians and Jews—or at least of vastly complicating their appropriation of the scriptures that the historians have taken away from them.

To this Babylonian captivity of his Bible, Professor Anderson counterpoises a redemptive faith. Today, he maintains, "any reading of the Bible presuming a narrative integrity to the whole is a contested reading. It becomes an act of faith or even a Pascalian wager rather than a statement of objective fact." To be sure, he does not reject historical criticism in toto and refuses to associate himself with those who, in his words, "lament th[e] fact [that narrative integrity is not objective fact] and long for a return to yesteryear. I, on the other hand," he writes, "do not believe that recent developments need be considered a total loss for religious readers . . . My claim is not that faith should stand in place of historical method; rather, each type of inquiry should recognize its proper domain" (p. 11). I wonder, though, whether the affirmation of the narrative integrity of a work with multiple authors really requires religious faith as it foundation. One of the more interesting recent developments in the field has been the flourishing of the literary interpretation of the Bible—"literary" in the sense of the New Criticism that grew up in English studies after World War I. This generally a-historical, or at least synchronic, mode of reading (Meir Sternberg calls it "discourse analysis" rather than "source analysis") is quite comfortable with the disjunctions that attract the atomizing critics, like ants to honey or flies to a carcass. To be sure, this type of interpretation is far from presuppositionless and inevitably reflects some theology or another—even the choice of which collection to call the "Bible" ensures this—but it is a far cry from that disclaimer to Professor Anderson's claim that its acceptance of the finished Bible as a unity is grounded in religious faith or a Pascalian wager.

Professor Anderson's own preference is for readings of the story of Adam and Eve that find their home in the Christian drama of sin and salvation. I found him particularly illuminating on the way Christian liturgy enacts and even shapes biblical interpretation and in his point that the idea of Original Sin (so often seen as pessimistic) comes bundled with the joyful proclamation that the reign of Satan has been overthrown by Jesus and the baleful effects of the Fall cancelled, at least conditionally. Remembering Professor Anderson's point that "each type of inquiry should recognize its proper domain," however, I am led to wonder just how this highly soteriological interpretation interacts with other readings of the story of the primal parents, readings generated by other methods that are not informed by faith or reinforced by liturgy.

Historical criticism suggests a different interpretation of our story, one that finds its home in ancient Near Eastern culture and, specifically, in the worldview of the Pentateuchal source responsible for it, the "Yahwist" or J Source, rather than in the Judaism or the Christianity of Late Antiquity. This approach tends to stress etiological factors; stories give accounts for how things came to be the way they are, and they do not, in this reading, necessarily look forward to a reversal of the status quo in some future redemptive fulfillment. In short, historical critics, with their keen eye for historical placement and their revulsion from anachronism, would urge us not to retroject prophetic and apocalyptic thinking into J (unless, of course, J and his thought world can be shown to subscribe to this sort of thinking). By contrast, Christianity is very much an heir of prophetic and apocalyptic expectation (I think here of Ernst Kaesemann's remark that apocalyptic is "the mother of all Christian theology." JTC 6 [1969]: 40), and a highly Christian interpretation of this key passage, such as Professor Anderson's, will necessarily offend against the canons of historical critical investigation.

Let me ever so briefly outline the rudiments of the sort of historical critical reading of Genesis 2-3 that I have in mind. The focus would lie, as I have said, on etiological factors. The story explains how it is that we do not live like the fortunate children we once were or would like to have been, with all our needs met and nothing to make us ashamed or afraid. Young children do not understand death, or the need to work, or why if babies are a gift it should be so painful to bear them, nor do they comprehend sexuality even in its corporeal dimension. The story of Adam and Eve tells how humanity graduated from this Kindergarten, this children's garden, and came, through a painful process of growth and separation, to know the ambiguous things of which they had no clue in Eden or before. I mention the pain and the ambiguity because the story does not record a smooth process of maturation. Instead, the road to the world the hearers and readers of the tale know involves failure, loss, and estrangement, even though the road does not end at a place where these unfortunate realities of adult life are reversed, as they are in the later Jewish and Christian visions of redemption. Here one might profitably draw an analogy with the Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh, in which the hero fails in his frantic quest to avoid death, losing at the end almost by accident the elixir of life that was the goal of his journey. The point is that we must grow up; we must accept life with its limitations, live it productively and responsibly in the sure knowledge that it will end and that our individual immortality will be at best metaphorical, a matter of memory, not of deathlessness.

So interpreted, the story seems to me to have an additional etiological function. It explains the persistent human yearning for the lost world, a world in which immortality was available, moral accountability was unknown, sex involved no shame, and backbreaking work like that of a professor was unnecessary, etc. (If you think these considerations do not survive the ancient Near Eastern world, just consider the number of products and the amount of research intended to reverse or retard the aging process or to provide what are called "labor-saving devices"). We yearn for these things, the story says, because we once had them, but now "cherubim and the ever-turning sword" (Gen 3:24) bar our way back to them, and we must live our God-given lives without them.

Now, of course, nothing in the historical critical approach to the Bible requires this interpretation, and others can be proposed. And I do not mean to suggest that reading the story of Adam and Eve as a self-contained unit, informed only by ancient Near Eastern parallels like Gilgamesh, does full justice to its placement within the J document of the Pentateuch. Michael Fishbane has observed, for example, that the promises to Abraham in Genesis 12—blessing, land, and offspring—"are, in fact, a typological reversal of the primordial curses in Eden: directed against the earth, human generativity, and human labour" (BI, 372-73). The people Israel's very existence—only a most unlikely promise in Abraham's time—is an antidote, perhaps even the antidote, to the poison of what Milton termed "Man's first disobedience." Notice also that the Masoretes, the scholars responsible for the accurate annotation of Jewish biblical manuscripts in the early Middle Ages, note that the phrase harba 'arbeh ("I will greatly multiply [your descendants]" in Genesis 22:17 occurs only three times. There it serves to renew the original promise to the first patriarch of Israel on the basis of his willingness to give up his beloved son, Isaac. Earlier, it was invoked to Abraham's secondary wife Hagar to describe the multitude of descendants she would have, despite Sarah's oppression of her (Gen 16:10). But the first appearance of this rare phrase lies in Gen 3:16, where it is not at all positive or promissory. For there it communicates God's curse on Eve, "I will make most severe (harba 'arbeh)/Your pangs in childbearing." Perhaps the diction is intended to suggest that childbearing within the Abrahamic family of peoples is a different thing altogether, a matter of blessing and not of curse. If so, here again we find that even within the pre-apocalyptic theology of J, there is a kind of redemption from the baleful consequences of "Man's first disobedience." But even if this is the case, the redemption still does not altogether cancel the curses. Immortality pertains to the indestructible people of Israel—that ever-dying, ever-reviving people—but it is not available to the individual seeking to avoid death or to triumph over it. It comes through the natural processes of human procreation, even if those processes are miraculously blessed, and not in spite of them. And the Promised Land of the Hebrew Bible is Edenic only in a highly poetic sense. It exacts work and sacrifice from those who live there, and they are ever in danger of losing it.

I am happy to have left the discussion of the Christian interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve, the center of Professor Anderson's book, to my colleagues on the panel. I do want to say, however, that I found his analysis highly insightful and engaging, especially in its treatment of Mary as the positive antipode to Eve. This last discussion made me wonder whether some of the grimness with many Christians read the story of Eden is owing to their retention of Eve without Mary, whom many Christian churches have in recent centuries drastically minimized. What happens to the Christian appropriation of this text, so central the Church, when the co-sinner remains but the co-redemptrix is marginalized?

I should like now to draw attention anew to another question raised by Gary Anderson's concentration on those classic Christian interpreters. How should we who accept historical criticism, we who do not "long for a return to yesteryear," relate to the techniques of reading in the church fathers for which Professor Anderson has such affinity? I am thinking, for example, of the contradiction between Paul, who blames Adam for the Fall and never mentions Eve (Rom 5:12-21), and 1 Timothy, which blames Eve and may even exonerate Adam (2:14). Professor Anderson approaches this blatant contradiction through Origen's allegorical reading, in which Adam represents Christ, and Eve, the Church, so that all Christians, male and female, stand in the role of the deceived transgressor, and the historical Adam is presumably still at fault, as in Romans (p. 103). My question relates to the interaction of these senses of scripture, the one (historical criticism) deriving from a contextual reading and allergic to harmonization, the other (Patristic allegory) assuming the unity of the scriptural message in a way that no historical critic can accept. The answer, many would say, lies in Paul Ricoeur's idea of a "second naivete," in which the modern person reappropriates the religious power of the traditional readings without denying the historical development and all too human history that lie behind them. But it is one thing to be able to maintain one's faith despite the findings of modern historical thinking and quite another to see the new methods as uncovering spiritual depths that the older exegesis missed. I wonder, in other words, whether Professor Anderson would see a positive religious value in the historical critical readings, a value of importance not only to the pluralistic academy but also to the Church. Or is it the case that the allegorists were right all along that the plain sense, though valid at its own level, represents a spiritually inferior dimension to the Bible? When he writes that "each type of inquiry should recognize its proper domain," he prompts me to ask whether he means to rule out the classic notion of a hierarchy of domains—and thus a hierarchy of interpretations. If so, his approach remains indebted to those Enlightenment presuppositions that he brought with him to Duke Divinity School to a high degree.

Now a word about the handling of Jewish sources. Gary Anderson's "deepest and most abiding love for Judaism" that I mentioned earlier doubtless accounts for his attention to Jewish readings and his sensitivity in probing them. This is, needless to say, rare in a Christian scholar, although perhaps not so rare as it used to be. His analysis extends over a variety of sects (remember, Jews in the Second Temple period differed from Jews today in having more sects) and recognizes, as so many other discussions do not, that Judaism remained vibrant and productive after the rise of Christianity. His attention to Sinai as the restoration of Eden develops an important dimension of Rabbinic Judaism that has consequences for Jewish-Christian relations to this day. The Book of Proverbs had already identified wisdom with the Tree of Life (3:13-18), and once some Jewish circles had identified wisdom with Torah, the notion that the Torah is a Tree of Life, followed logically, as did the idea, still vital today in observant Jewish circles, that the study and practice of Torah cancels the lethal consequences of Eden and inducts one into the world-to-come. But it is an overstatement to say, as Professor Anderson does, that "the rabbis had no interest in restoring Adam to the glory of Eden. Such a restoration would have to wait till Sinai" (p. 146). I think, for example, of a midrash in which Adam's trial results not in expulsion, as one would expect in all forms of ancient Judaism, but in forgiveness. Occurring on the primordial Rosh Ha-Shanah, it thus serves as an omen that through repentance guilty people may attain divine forgiveness on that solemn New Year's festival over the generations (Lev. Rab. 29:1; PRK 23:1). Here, one finds a revealing contrast with Paul's view that Adam represents only disobedience, sin, condemnation, and death (Rom 5:12-15), to which allusion has been made. To be sure, the literature about the Harrowing of Hell, which Professor Anderson analyzes, mitigates this by having Jesus rescue Adam first. But this is still very different from the view that reconciliation can occur through repentance, and without an apocalyptic reversal or even an atoning sacrifice—or, for that matter, the gift of the Torah. Yet that idea can be found in Rabbinic Judaism.

Professor Anderson's exploration of the episode of the Golden Calf as a kind of analogy in the Hebrew Bible to original sin is also creative and enlightening. In rabbinic literature, in fact, the Golden Calf receives far more weight than does the episode in Eden (this is, by the way, also the case in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament itself, wherein one is hard-pressed to find a single allusion to the catastrophe in Eden). I do regret, however, that this discussion was relegated to an appendix. Had it been included in the body of the book, it would have strengthened what I take to be one of the author's chief objectives—to show that the theology of sin and redemption underlying the Christian interpretation of Adam and Eve has deep roots in the Hebrew Bible itself.

Some of the analogies in the Hebrew Bible to an Augustinian notion of original sin strike me as less apposite and less convincing. There are also some differences between early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism that might receive more attention. The idea of sin as a condition, a stain upon the soul, is generally foreign to the ancient rabbis. For them, sin is an act, a deed, although one prompted by the evil impulse (yetzer hara`) with which we are all born and against which we all must engage in a lifelong struggle, the righteous emphatically included. But the newborn baby is innocent and immaculate; there is thus no rite in Judaism that washes away the baby's sin or breaks the grip of the Devil upon him or her, like the Christian rite of baptism.

To conclude: I have sketched out three contexts in which the Hebrew Bible can be interpreted, though, of course, each of them is itself internally diverse to a high degree. Gary Anderson's volume seeks to do justice to two of them, the "Jewish and Christian Imagination," to quote its subtitle, though without returning to a naïve traditionalism that knows not the third and newest context, historical criticism. Although this last and most modern context is not the subject of The Genesis of Perfection, it provides more of a framework for the discussion than at first seems to be the case. For without the mitigating effect of modernity and its insistence on historical contextualization and historical distancing, how else can one explain a Christian scholar who has that "deepest and most abiding love for Judaism," as Gary Anderson puts it in his preface? To put it mildly, that is not the attitude of the early Christian writers on whose interpretation Professor Anderson concentrates and whom he also loves, certainly no less than he loves Judaism. Paul, for example, writes that "every time the Law of Moses is read, a veil lies over the minds of the hearers" (2 Cor 3:15). As for the matter at hand, the same apostle goes out of his way to tell his Roman correspondents that the Torah in no way disrupted the pattern of sin and death that Adam introduced and Jesus (Paul's new Adam) overturned (Rom 5:20). For Paul, the antidote to Eden is not Sinai, or Sinai and Jesus as equally valid options, but Jesus and Jesus alone. I have observed a tendency in contemporary society to define Judaism by a negative: it's the religion that does not believe in Jesus (in fact, there are Jews for whom Judaism is nothing more than that!). But historically, Christianity is also defined by a negative: it's the religion that thinks the Torah failed, or at least that the Torah has value only to the extent it points beyond itself or defines a problem that only Christian revelation can resolve. As modern historians of religion, we can see how both these traditions grow out of the Hebrew Bible and, more immediately, out of the rich exegetical culture of Second Temple Judaism. But classically, the traditions themselves have not viewed these matters through the lens of historical relativism and have tended to oppose rather than to revere the other community's characteristic interpretation of the scriptures held in common. Gary Anderson's extraordinary fairness in presenting Jewish sources in his fascinating and learned book owes more to "the historical method of the Enlightenment" than to the classic Christian exegetes who are the heart and focus of the volume.

Gary Anderson
Let me say that it is a real honor, as well as somewhat embarrassing, to be here and to be the subject of an evening like this. My first thought before entering the room was to pretend that I was ill, to maybe watch the tape afterward, and not have to parade myself in such a fashion. But having said all that, let me also express my thanks for the organizers and the opportunity to hear such close readings of the work and formidable reactions. There's a lot of ways to respond, and I certainly know I can't respond to all I've heard.

First of all, with respect to reading the story as a literary whole, and the claims that this makes on readers—an issue I addressed in the very first chapter of the book, and something that both Professor Clifford and Professor Levenson raised with respect to modern exegesis of the same: Certainly, I think, one can make a very good argument that one should set Genesis 1-3 against a broader background, that is, Genesis 1-11. And setting all of this material against the traditions of the ancient Near East is also a very useful exercise.

Here I would go in a slightly different direction than that charted by Professor Clifford and Professor Levenson. I'm very influenced—that is, one of my favorite articles on this material is actually by a student of Professor Clifford, a co-student of mine in graduate school, Robert DeVito, who shows in his own work, at least to my satisfaction, that one of the striking features of Genesis 3-11 is the fact that in Mesopotamian sources, every place we have a story of a culture founder, which Mesopotamian myth is full of, every culture founder becomes the subject of cultural reverence. Yes, Gilgamesh is supposed to accept his fate as a mortal born to die. Yet, in the context of the gods themselves of giving kingship, of giving the knowledge to build cities, metallurgy and the like, all of these moments of origin are moments of highest praise. And in fact, the Gilgamesh epic in its neo-Assyrian version opens with a paean of praise to the walls of Uruk and the knowledge that the gods have given to human beings to allow them to build such constructions.

Also, quite strikingly, in the Atrahasis flood epic, before he enters the ark, Atrahasis, like Noah in the Bible, he does many things that Noah does: taking the animals on board, preparing for the flood that will destroy all humanity, taking his family on board. But he does one thing that Noah doesn't do, and that is, he takes on board all of these artisans that the gods have brought down to earth to instruct human beings, to begin them up from the level of animals to cultured individuals. I mention all of this because DeVito shows that every instance in Genesis 1-11 that we have similar introductions of culture founders, they're all grounded in human sin and rebellion: midwifery in Genesis 3; agriculture in Genesis 3; musical instruments, forgery in Genesis 4; and the building of a city after the flood, of course, in Genesis 11. And strikingly, as DeVito shows, when Noah enters the ark, he takes none of the culture founders on board that were presented in Genesis 4.

And so in a very striking way, all of these activities that receive such praise in Mesopotamian sources are seen in Genesis 1-11 as subject to divine disapproval. It certainly isn't the point, I think, of our biblical author to make the claim for a primitivism, a return to human life bereft of these institutions. Rather it seems that what the biblical writer has in mind is that all of these institutions that define human culture are defined, their proper venue, through the mystery of the selection of Abraham and the culture of the people Israel that will follow in its wake.

So that larger frame of the narrative, at least presented by Robert DeVito, I find quite convincing and a quite deep and penetrating perspective on the nature of human sin and rebellion in Genesis 1-11 and setting it into a nice counterpart for Genesis 12, the selection of Abraham and what follows. What's interesting—and here I borrow on the work of James Sanders, and also following in his wake, Robert Childs—Genesis 12 with the introduction of the figure of Abraham is certainly meant to be construed, I think, in a very simple sense of the narrative as the reconstruction of the restoration of what's gone wrong in Genesis 1-11.

But what's striking, what follows in the narrative, is that Genesis 12 opens with the promise to Abraham that he will be given a land and great progeny. As critical scholars of the Bible noted way back in the nineteenth century, one would have expected that this story would have ended with the fulfillment of this promise made to Abraham. Ergo the notion of what critical scholars call the Hexateuch—in other words, the most natural literary division of the first books of the Bible would not have been the first five, Genesis through Deuteronomy, but Genesis through Judges, so that the story would end with the fulfillment of the promise listed in Genesis 12. And we have retellings of the Bible that notice elsewhere where this natural storyline is found: Deuteronomy 26, numerous historical Psalms—Psalm 78, Psalm 105—I Samuel 12. Many recitations of Israel's history proceed exactly in this fashion, where we have a very natural story of a promise, the peregrinations on the way to the promise, but the fulfillment of the promise in the end. Strikingly though, the way in which the Bible has been organized in its final form, that promise and its fulfillment is not realized. The reader stands at the end of the book of Deuteronomy and the end of the Book of Numbers peering toward the promised land but not entering in, a canonical decision that had enormous effect on the development of Judaism and, I would wish to argue as well, Christianity in the future.

Now what's my point? Well, my point would be this. If we understand the narrative of the Bible as a narrative, and we understand it having a beginning and a middle and an end, the Pentateuch is a striking narrative in the sense that it doesn't have the end. And readers ever since this narrative was brought to its final point of closure have been tempted to supply what is that end. Where does this story point to, and where do we understand its fulfillment residing? This issue was already struggled with in the biblical period, where the kingship of David or the founding of the Temple by Solomon were thought to be these moments of final closure.

Into the Second Temple period we have other moments of closure presented, but the Bible itself allows us no final purchase on that. But as interpreters, as readers, I think it's impossible to read the narrative without imagining where it points. And as soon as we enter into that project of imagining where it points, of trying to fill out where it ends, then we enter the question of correlating that imagined end with the nature of its beginning. And then I think if I was going to ground much of what I have outlined in this book, to try to ground it in some fashion in what we know about the Bible in a historical-critical fashion, I would ground there. I would not want to propound, as a result of my book, that the various interpretations that I have listed in the fathers or the rabbis are the simple sense of the narrative. But they are, by the same token, I think, responsible readings in the sense that most of them start off from the very presupposition I laid out, that the story requires some fulfillment or filling out of an ending; and having provided that ending, a correlation back to the beginning in light of that ending.

In almost every example—the sex in the garden, the notion of Satan's rebellion, the notion of the garments of Adam and Eve—all of these developments that we can trace in the history of exegesis, almost all of them are rooted in some way with how these readers saw this story coming to its close. Maybe to give just a slightly different example of this from a Jewish perspective—and it won't take me back to the Garden of Eden, but it will illustrate exactly this train of thought: I read a very interesting book this summer by a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University, Professor Aviezer Ravitzky on the notion of, prior to the rise of modern Zionism, the fear of entering the holy land as a collective body of people.

What was the fear that Ravitzky lines out? Well, according to the laws of the priestly narrative in Leviticus 18, the land of Israel is a holy land and the occupants who will occupy it must be a holy and moral people. If they are not, they don't act in accordance with the laws of the land, the land itself of its own volition "will vomit them out," to quote the language of the end of Leviticus 18. So what becomes one of the primal fears in this collection of writers that Ravitzky outlines? The fear becomes that of presumptuously entering the land before the end time. "To hasten the end" is the term Ravitzky mentions.

Now I mention that because the way he sets it out with a whole set of Jewish thinkers from the medieval period up to the eighteenth century is that they have great fear of being caught in this and of hastening the end, waiting instead for the ingathering of the Jewish people in God's own time. Well, having established that, as it were, as the focus of the story's end, this automatically shifts the focus of what we might want to call original sin to the moment of the sending of the spies in Numbers 13 and 14: the spies go forth and reconnoiter the promised land; they come back with stories of the riches of the promised land, but also of the inhabitants that dwell there. They strike fear in the hearts of the people Israel, and they decide they don't want to enter. Yet God says as a result nobody will enter, this whole generation must wander in the wilderness for 40 years, die off, and then I will bring in a new people—close of the narrative. Some regret what they did and decide they're going to enter anyways, on their own volition, and suffer greatly as a result of that act. This moment, which might strike a reader of the Torah as an incidental moment in the creation of the story, in this tradition that Ravitzky singles out becomes the story of great moment, a story of enormous development.

Now why does this particular story get such focus? Because it provides a very nice counterpoint to what is imagined to be how God plans to fulfill the story; so that the fulfillment of the story and why the story can't be fulfilled, grounding it in some primordial error, are very much natural to its development in this iteration as well. There are many iterations, I would want to say, of this pattern; Genesis 2-3 in Christian tradition would be simply one of many.

With respect to Professor Levenson's last remarks on why a Christian should be so interested in Jewish sources in the first place, and could one understand this interest outside the grounds of the Enlightenment itself? On that question I have no answer, but let me say this: I think it's very important for Christian readers to be attentive to these stories of the Jewish people for reasons of their self-illumination. Let me clarify. I mentioned in the appendix "Biblical Origins of the Fall" that in the narratives about the lighting of the sacrificial pyre in Leviticus 9-10, the story of the golden calf—and I could have listed others—we have moments in which a great benefaction is bestowed upon the people Israel, and immediately afterward that benefaction is in some fashion besmirched.

I remember on this same theme that during a lecture at Hebrew University Moshe Greenberg opened with this anecdote about traffic patterns in the city of Jerusalem—it'll work equally well in the city of Boston. He asked his listeners rhetorically, "What is the shortest interval in time that you can imagine?" And this was his answer: "You are parked in front of a traffic light. The light is red. It turns green. What's the moment between the time it turns green and the guy behind you honks?" That is the shortest amount of time imaginable. That, in a sense, is also the interval of time between the lighting of the sacrificial pyre, the making the covenant and its betrayal, and the building of the golden calf. We might also want to add here the story of the foundation of Solomon's kingdom, the close of what scholars call the court history of David. At the close of I Kings, Chapter 2, Solomon's kingdom is established, verse 46. What's the very next verse at the beginning of Chapter 3? It's the story of Solomon's inter-marriage with the daughter of Pharaoh, the very thing or sin that will be the cause of the downfall of his kingdom in I Kings 11. There's a nice midrash on this verse that says that on the very day of that intermarriage, between Pharaoh's daughter and King Solomon, the city of Rome was founded. In other words, the catastrophe of 70 AD was grounded in Solomon's inauspicious actions.

So we have two features that I would define very much at the heart of what Christians have called original sin: sin that occurs immediately after some benefaction, and sin that has consequences that endure over time. One could find many such examples in the midrash. If we look at the history of Christian exegesis on this matter—and I think this is what Professor Levenson was alluding to—we'll find a very sad history in that in all of these acts of Jewish rebellion there is seen a pattern for the rejection of the Jewish people as the people of God. In other words, what all of these stories illuminate is not something about human nature in general, but rather something special to the Jewish people and the grounds for which they were rejected as God's people and replaced by the church and the gospels themselves. However, here it's interesting to read closely the gospels, perhaps especially that of Mark, where we have, I would suggest, the same pattern we find time and again in the Hebrew Bible. That is, every one of the disciples to the very last person betrays Christ, and in the end, Mark's Gospel being the most bold in this respect, it's only a Roman centurion at the end of the story who recognizes in the end who this figure was and is.

In other words, on the grounds of the New Testament narrative itself, it seems to me, there is no argument for a Christian supercessionist claim that somehow this pattern of rebellion in face of a benefaction is the special property of the Jews. In fact, I would want to suggest that what we see in the Hebrew Bible in light of the Jewish people is simply a microcosm of what is the macrocosmic definer of all of our natures; what we see in the Hebrew Bible illustrated to the Jewish people is simply a brighter focus of what is at root in the nature of all human beings.