The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (review)

Hebrew Sludies 35 (1994) 102 Reviews sort must be proofed far more carefully if they are to be used by the scholarly public. William C. Williams Soulhem California College Cosla Mesa, CA 92627 THE GARDEN OF EDEN AND THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY. By James Barr. pp. xiii + 146. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. Paper, $10.95. James Barr (Vanderbilt) brings to bear his enonnous energy and learning upon the issue of immortality as an agenda for the Bible and for the derivative claims of theology. The book in five chapters was presented as the Read-Tuckwell Lectures at the University of Bristol in 1990. The lectures are endowed for the study of "human immortality," a subject which Barr addresses in surprising and rightly suggestive ways. As one has come to expect in Barr's work, there is a good deal of polemic as he establishes the ground of his argument. In this case the object of polemic is the work of Oscar Cullmann and his now well-established thesis that the Bible champions "resurrection" and resists a notion of "immortality." Barr regards Cullmann's thesis as a great misfortune and sees it as a part of the larger movement of "dialectical theology" (Barth) which in Barr's judgment has been a large distortion of the claims of the Bible. In his critique of Cullmann, however, Barr has his sight on "bigger game." For, in fact, Cullmann is not far off the mark as concerns Paul, but it is Paul who has led the church into a quite peculiar theological posture that does not reflect the main flow of biblical faith and literature. Specifically, in his first chapter Barr shows (in agreement with much current scholarship) that in Genesis 2-3, or in the Old Testament more generally, there is nothing of "The Fall" or "Original Sin," or the notion of death as punishment. The "Pauline understanding of Adam and Eve" is based only in certain later strata of the Old Testament and in literature outside the present Hebrew canon (p. 18). And even in Paul, the argument concerning "Adam" which has come to dominate theological assumption concerns only a few passages. (Barr has often insisted that a contrast between Hebrew and Hellenistic is problematic, and I wish he had said more here on that issue, because he him- Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 103 Reviews self recognizes that this "Pauline" development is indeed interpretation "in Hellenistic times and in a different intellectual atmosphere" [pp. 18, 23]). Barr's primary argument, however, is not negative or polemical. In his characteristically careful way, Barr makes the positive argument that death in Genesis 2-3 is not punishment. Rather, Adam and Eve for a moment entertained the "chance of immortality," but they lost "the chance" and became mortal, as if they had never had "the chance." In Barr's closely reasoned argument, death is no heavy-duty punishment, but is what happens to the primal couple when the peculiar chance of immortality is offered by God and lost. As a consequence, death is not threat, but the inescapable limit or horizon of human life. Barr develops his position along a number of suggestive lines. First, he considers that death is natural, that it is willed by God and is not punishment He must of necessity take up the counter-idea that has mythological roots, namely that death is an enemy of God's will for life. He concludes that this appropriated form of mythology is not central to Israel's intention, and in any case does not concern "the same thing as what we call death" (p. 34). The other point made here is a rich and probing argument that a holistic notion of nephesh is not everywhere held in the text. The term is polysemous , and with the emergence of "dualistic" thinking it is plausible that the term nephesh does on occasion mean "soul" in the very sense most often rejected by scripture scholars who follow Cullmann. Second, in a close and careful reading of the text, Barr argues that sexuality in the Genesis narrative is no cause for shame or guilt. As he insists that death is "natural," so sexuality is natural and...