Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

CHAPTER FIVE: Creation and the Meaning of Good and Evil

71 chapter five Creation and the Meaning of Good and Evil It is not possible to sustain, on the basis of the actual text of the Scripture, the ‘‘didactic’’ interpretation in any of the versions set forth in the preceding chapter. The Fall indeed begins to a√ord an education , but the lesson is more problematic or less coherent than we have thus far admitted. For nothing that has been said up till now explains the single most important feature of the story: God’s proclamation of terrible and genuinely retributive punishment.∞ As Luther stresses (LG, Werke, 42:136), ‘‘Nowhere else in Moses [the Pentateuch] does God speak in Person as extensively as he does here [3:9–22],’’ devoted ‘‘all to promising and threatening.’’ To the extent that Adam and Eve’s misdeed was the result of childish or more than childish ignorance—to the extent that they acted prior to being given the decisive education—their misdeed would seem to deserve no more than a rebuke or mild chastisement suited to innocent children. To be sure, an apparently harsh judgment was perhaps in order, to give the ‘‘children’’ a vivid, if benevolently false, experience of consequence, responsibility , and guilt. But the onlooker, and, as the lesson sank in, Adam and Eve themselves, within the story, would recognize that whatever the pair su√ered as a consequence of their failure to heed the commandment given in Eden was principally a means of helping them (and others) to understand the possibility and danger of future, no longer so innocent, sins, attended by future retributive, and not merely or chiefly educative, punishment. This kind of purely educative punishment is, of course, known to the Scriptures. The Hellenistic, deuterocanonical book of the Wisdom of Solomon argues that this is indeed the spirit in which God first chastised the pagan Canaanites, and the Egyptians—which peoples came only subsequently to deserve their eventual, crushing punishment, because they failed to heed the initial didactic discipline: Those who lived long ago in Your holy land You hated for their detestable practices. . . . Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham 72 But even these You spared, since they were but human, And judging them little by little, You gave them leeway to repent. . . . Being just, You manage all things justly: to condemn him who is not deserving of punishment You regard as alien to Your power. For Your strength is the source of justice, and Your mastery over all makes You spare all. . . . . . . it was as to children who do not reason that You sent Your judgment, as a mocking jest. But those who have not heeded the admonition of the playful punishment will make trial of the deserved judgment of God.≤ Now, this spirit of apparently stern but essentially playful, because educative, castigation is not what is conveyed by the lasting severity, and the sternly retributive character, of the punishments God in fact decrees— first and foremost for the serpent (whose retributive punishment is usually ignored in ‘‘progressive’’ readings; contrast Midrash Rabbah on Gen. 20:4– 5), and then for the man and woman, in whose nemesis are somehow implicated all subsequent men and women (and serpents).≥ At the heart of the horror, at the heart of the needy and dangerous struggle for survival with which man and woman are punished, is the alienation from the Tree of Life, entailing the condemnation of humanity to mortality—mortality that is thus clearly presented as an estrangement from, a contradiction of, life itself and in no way as a ‘‘natural’’ or necessary conclusion to human existence.∂ Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that when we reach Gen. 3:22–23, ‘‘it is now obvious that the whole story has really been about this tree [of life]’’ (Bonhoe√er, Creation and Fall, 92). The story of the Fall teaches that our mortality is not intrinsic to creaturely human existence but rather came about as the consequence of a punishment that cuts o√ access to our originally destined , everlasting earthly life. The genealogies in chapter 5 of the antediluvian generations in Seth’s line, marking with precision the enormous lifespan that each father in succession enjoyed until, in every case but one, ‘‘then he died’’—and also the subsequent still impressive lifespan of the patriarchs—constitute a lingering legacy of longevity that poignantly reminds the reader of the most terrible loss incurred by the awful divine punishment of the initial sin. One might go further...