After the Apple: Repentance in Genesis B and its Continental Context

The final episode of Genesis B, in which Adam and Eve repent of eating the forbidden fruit, has always presented an interpretive challenge. Until recently scholars have seen it as a reason to question the theological nature of the poem, or to supply it with extrareligious meaning. John M. Evans disputed any significant theological engagements, arguing that their behavior after their sin completely exonerates the sinners; for Evans, the text was to be understood in the context of secular Germanic narrative poetry.¹ For Ute Schwab, the repentance motif was part of an extratheological agenda, a didactic stratum encoding a political message about how Carolingian royal favor was lost and could be regained in ninth century Saxony.² Critics seeking to come to terms with the episode theologically have weighed the influence of Biblical apocrypha and Latin Biblical poetry. Beyond this, however, little headway has been made with the contrite protoplasts in the Genesis B. Recent scholarship, while reflecting deeply on the representation of will, sin, and psychology in the poem, has treated the scene of repentance summarily or as an afterthought.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of lay penance in the Frankish church at the time the Saxon poem originated, at least on the evidence of surviving texts. This was the first great age of penitentials, which proliferated in large numbers and were officially promoted by the church.³ Confessional formulae in Germanic languages surviving from this period, including one in Old Saxon, attest to the particular Carolingian interest in lay engagement with this practice (as with Christian ritual as a whole).⁴ It has also been authoritatively argued that forgiveness of sins through repentance formed the central theological and pastoral concern of leading churchmen such as Alcuin of York and Hrabanus Maurus.⁵ A sincerely repentant Adam and Eve, if that is indeed what they are, must loom very large in any interpretation seeking to locate the Genesis B within or close to contemporary ecclesiastical circles. Accordingly, this article places the repentance scene at front and center. I argue that certain features that make it so different from the Biblical story of the Fall—a psychologizing discourse of contrition and repentance, but without corresponding penitential acts, and a conclusion lacking both the traditional confrontation of the sinners by God in the garden and their condemnation and expulsion—can best be understood if we read the Genesis B in a very practical sense as a penitential text, such as this term would have been understood in the ninth-century Carolingian empire.

I assume here that the Old English Genesis B, found in lines 235–851 of the Junius 11 Manuscript, represents a translation of an older (mid-ninth century) and originally independent Old Saxon poem. That such a text existed we know from the Old Saxon fragment preserved in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Pal. lat. 1447, fol. 1r.⁶ That the Junius text is a direct translation, and not a product of several revisions in Old English effecting substantial changes in content to the original,⁷ is the philological consensus based on the comparison of the Vatican fragment to the Junius text.⁸ A reading from the Junius context, relevant to tenth century Britain, is not relevant to ninth century east Franconia—and vice versa.⁹ That the story of Adam and Eve can be treated independently from the other surviving Saxon fragments preserved in the Vatican manuscript (Cain/Abel and Abraham/Sodom) emerges from the fact that it was treated as such by the predecessors of the Junius compiler(s). I will have more to say on this last point at the end.

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The repentance episode contrasts strongly with the Biblical account of the behavior of the sinners after they eat the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:7–13). In the Bible Adam and Eve, their eyes now opened, become aware of their nakedness, hide from God, and when confronted, shift the blame:

And [God] said to him: And who hath told thee that thou wast naked, but that thou hast eaten of the...