| Eden |
| Fall of man |
| Anthropology |
| Eve (Biblical figure) |
| Adam (Biblical figure) |
| חוה (Biblical figure) |
| Ḥaṿah (Biblical figure) |
| Ḥawwāh (Biblical figure) |
| Khavah (Biblical figure) |
| حواء (Biblical figure) |
| Ḥawwāʼ (Biblical figure) |
| אדם (Biblical figure) |
| آدم (Biblical figure) |
| Адам (Biblical figure) |
| Adem (Biblical figure) |
| Adda (Biblical figure) |
| Aadam (Biblical figure) |
| Αδάμ (Biblical figure) |
| Adán (Biblical figure) |
| Adamo (Biblical figure) |
|  (Biblical figure) |
| Adamu (Biblical figure) |
| Ādams (Biblical figure) |
| アダム (Biblical figure) |
| Adami (Biblical figure) |
| Addamu (Biblical figure) |
| Aatami (Biblical figure) |
| Aadama (Biblical figure) |
| 亞當 (Biblical figure) |
| Yadang (Biblical figure) |
| Garden of Eden |
| Man, Fall of |
| Primitive societies |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Attleboro Public Library | 233.14 GRE | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... East Bridgewater Public Library | 233.14 GRE 2017 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent | 233 GRE 2017 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | 233.14 GREENBLATT | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mansfield Public Library | 233 G | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Norton Public Library | 201 GRE 2017 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Somerset Public Library | 201 GRE 2017 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Taunton Public Library | 222.1109505 G829R | 2ND FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Bolder, even, than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is already renowned, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the enduring story of humanity's first parents. Comprising only a few ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness.
Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and, finally, so very "real" to millions of people even in the present. With the uncanny brilliance he previously brought to his depictions of William Shakespeare and Poggio Bracciolini (the humanist monk who is the protagonist of The Swerve), Greenblatt explores the intensely personal engagement of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in this mammoth project of collective creation, while he also limns the diversity of the story's offspring: rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature.
The biblical origin story, Greenblatt argues, is a model for what the humanities still have to offer: not the scientific nature of things, but rather a deep encounter with problems that have gripped our species for as long as we can recall and that continue to fascinate and trouble us today.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this fascinating exploration, Greenblatt (The Swerve), a Harvard humanities professor and Pulitzer-winning author, probes the "beauty, power, and influence" that the Adam and Eve story has held through millennia. Utilizing recent archaeological discoveries, Greenblatt compares the Genesis account, first written as a "counternarrative to the Babylonian creation story" by Hebrews returning to Jerusalem from exile, to both the ancient Gilgamesh legend and long-forgotten alternative narratives recently discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, such as "The Life of Adam and Eve." Greenblatt undertakes an in-depth analysis of key historical figures whose obsession wielded enormous impact on religion and culture: Augustine's insistence on the story's literal truth led to the concept of original sin; Albrecht Dürer's engraving The Fall of Man captured "the sheer unconstrained beauty of... our first parents"; John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost realized them as "flesh-and-blood people." Greenblatt then explores how the European discovery of New World natives, Voltaire's insistence on the story's allegorical nature, and, finally, Darwin's evolutionary theory led to today's widespread acceptance of the story as myth. In a beautiful closing chapter, Greenblatt studies Ugandan chimpanzees for "traces of the Bible story... [in] the actual origins of our species." This is an erudite yet accessible page-turner. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alive in the painting of van Eyck, the etching of Dürer, and the poetry of Milton, Adam and Eve fascinate Greenblatt, who marvels at how much this primal pair have shaped Western culture. Probing the history of the biblical account of human origins, readers learn how sharply it differs from the Mesopotamian creation myth that Hebrew exiles encountered during their time in Babylon. Unlike the Mesopotamian myth, which depicts Gilgamesh and Enkidu's triumph over adversity, Genesis chronicles the universal human fall consequent to Adam and Eve's partaking of forbidden fruit. Readers see how the shadows of the fallen Adam and Eve persisted in Judeo-Christian theology as well as Western philosophy, art, politics, and sexual ethics. But Greenblatt persuasively argues that Adam and Eve would look different if Origen had persuaded the early church to accept his allegorical understanding of the pair. Instead, Augustine impressed on the Christian mind a sternly literal understanding of Adam and Eve, leaving later believers unprepared for Darwin's scientific explanation of human beginnings. Though not a believer himself, Greenblatt worries that the imaginative and narrative aridity of Darwin's explanation of the first hominids has made it a problematic substitute for the scriptural account of Adam and Eve. An impressively wide-ranging inquiry.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
STEPHEN GREENBLATT FOLLOWS Adam and Eve through a long arc of Western history. He begins at the beginning, with paleoanthropology, then moves on to the Babylonian epics, which influenced the early chapters of Genesis, and on to a sketch of the life of St. Augustine. From there, he arrives at the Renaissance and its depictions of the first and perfect man and woman, then Milton, of course, the age of discovery and the rationalist rejection of Adamic creation, which was a rejection as well of the belief that, as St. Augustine said, "God willed to create all men out of one, in order that they might be held in their society not only by likeness of kind, but also by bond of kindred." Europeans found that the great world teemed with people toward whom they felt little likeness and less kindred. Then Darwin emerged, upending everything all over again. And Greenblatt finally lands in his last pages at a fairly disheartening account of mating among the chimpanzees. This is the march of progress, tinged with melancholy, as always. There is, however, a complicating factor here, having to do with the question of truth. Greenblatt, an English professor at Harvard University and author of the National Book Award-winning "The Swerve," frames his inquiry in terms of truth or fiction. For him truth means plausibility, and by that measure the story of Adam and Eve is no more than a miracle of storytelling. But science tells us that Homo sapiens does indeed roughly share a single lineage, in some sense a common origin, just as ancient Genesis says it does. In the Hebrew Bible the word adam often means all humankind, mortals. Greenblatt never seems to consider why the myth might have felt so true to those who found their religious and humanist values affirmed by it - and their own deepest intuitions, which science has partly borne out. It is interesting that those who claim to defend the creation narrative from rationalist critiques ignore the fact that its deepest moral implications, a profound human bond and likeness, have been scientifically demonstrated. Greenblatt writes that the Genesis narratives of the Creation and Flood were written in contradistinction to the Babylonian narratives they resemble, to assert and preserve Hebrew religious culture. The changes made are profound. In the "Enuma Elish," the Mesopotamian origin story, warfare among the gods ends in penal servitude for the losing side. They weary of the drudgery, so, as an act of conciliation, humans are created to toil in their place. A goddess fashions them of clay, seven male and seven female, all nameless. Compare this to the solicitude the Lord shows his Adam and Eve, their freedom even to disobey and the absolute importance of their choice, dire as it is. The Genesis text grants the difficulties of human life and at the same time evokes an essential dignity, beauty and autonomy. These ancient narratives, even in their differences, are part of a genre whose insight and power are no doubt beyond the full understanding of our modern minds. They generally agree that people came late into the world, and that the world had a beginning. Accustomed as we are to knowing these things, we forget that neither is obvious. In any case, it is a tendentious reading of any ancient text that would apply modern standards of plausibility to myth. Flavius Josephus, in his "Antiquities of the Jews," written in the first century A.D., says of the second of Genesis's two creation narratives, "Moses, after the seventh day was over [that is, in the creation of Adam and Eve], begins to talk philosophically." His 18th-century editor, William Whiston, notes that, according to Josephus, "Moses wrote some things enigmatically, some allegorically, and the rest in plain words," and therefore it is possible that Josephus understood the entire story of human creation "in some enigmatical, or allegorical or philosophical sense." The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria made a straightforward translation for his Hellenized readers - in the creation of Eve, "Moses is describing nothing else on this occasion except the formation of the external sense, according to energy and according to reason." These commentaries are late on the time scale, but they show just how differently meaning can be found in texts, and therefore how differently meaning can be invested in them. With all due respect to the Enlightenment, rationalist worry about who Cain's wife could have been is naive. Greenblatt respects his subject, and still he assumes that the rationalist reading offers up the true meaning of the story. Greenblatt imposes this kind of reasoning on John Milton, no less. He writes that Milton "was convinced that everything had to spring from and return to the literal truth of the Bible's words. In the absence of that truth, Milton's Christian faith and all the positions he had taken on the basis of that faith would be robbed of their meaning." There is a special problem with the phrase "literal truth." Milton knew Hebrew. A serious student of Scripture is aware that neither English nor Latin versions can be described as "literal." When Milton's devils can sing so beautifully that their listeners forget they are in hell, when the devil Belial rejects extinction, "for who would lose, / Though full of pain, this intellectual being, / Those thoughts that wander through eternity," the poet may have in mind the Hebrew merism "good and bad," which encompasses both and all that lies between, complicating the stark English binary "good and evil." In any case, precisely his devotion to Scripture would have made his understanding of it nuanced and rich, and not in the least "literal." Milton was a major figure in the English Reformation. Scholars without a specialty in religious history are understandably reluctant to immerse themselves in all the varieties and phases of Christianity, so the pious are often all assumed to be "orthodox," as Greenblatt frequently refers to them. But Milton was among the robust and diverse part of the English population called "dissenters" or "nonconformists." He insisted on the sanctity of the individual's response to Scripture, a freedom of conscience that could never legitimately be coerced, or conformed to any orthodoxy, even willingly. Milton says it is "a general maxim of the Protestant religion" that "he who holds in religion that belief or those opinions which to his conscience and utmost understanding appear with most evidence or probability in the Scripture, though to others he seem erroneous, can no more be justly censured for a heretic than his censurers." An awareness of the religious movement that Milton identified with and championed would have also helped Greenblatt in his parsing of the poet's views on marriage. Rather than being based in hierarchy and submission, dissenters idealized marriage differently, interpreting the creation of Eve in terms like these: "Something was taken from Adam, in order that he might embrace, with greater benevolence, a part of himself. He lost, therefore, one of his ribs; but, instead of it, a far richer reward was granted him, since he obtained a faithful associate of life; for he now saw himself, who had before been imperfect, rendered complete in his wife." This is John Calvin, one of the most widely read theologians in England during Milton's lifetime and highly influential among those Milton calls Protestants. "The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve" is an ambitious attempt at an important cultural history. It is cursory, and, to the degree that its treatment of these influential texts and movements is uninformed, it is not a help in understanding them. MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the author of four novels, including "Gilead," which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her essay collection "The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought" was published in 1998.
Guardian Review
This thrilling work charts the slow process, from Augustine to Milton to Darwin, by which the Genesis story became no longer tenable When they were young, my children reflected on where they came from. At different stages in their lives, they came up with three different kinds of answer. Their first answer was biological: "I come from mummy. No, Mummy and Daddy. And they're made out of Granny and Grandpa, and Grandma and Grandad." The second was geographical: "I come from Exeter. But I was born in Cambridge. And I live in Yorkshire. And Oxford." The third was more sophisticated, and came after a few years of science: "I come from African hominids. Or fish, if you trace it all back far enough." One of the earliest lessons children take to heart is that they have not always been around. There was a time "before me". Trying to work out what that was, what that means, takes up much of the intellectual labour of childhood. And as the examples above show, there are no easy answers: everything comes from something else. The existential horror of an infinite regress of origins strikes early on in life. Theories about the big questions of human culture -- what are storytelling, art and religion for? -- are not, in the main, generated by children. The professors to whom we owe our big theories are typically less worried by "where did I come from?" than "where am I going?" Most modern theories of human civilisation are, fundamentally, about the need to deal with mortality. Stephen Greenblatt's thrilling new book, however, on the peregrinations of the story of Adam and Eve -- the world's most influential attempt to arrest the infinite regress of creation -- shows just how central the question of human origins has been to pre-scientific conceptions of humanity. This is not a comprehensive account of the reception of the biblical story: there is little on rabbinical Judaism, and next to nothing on Islam. Greenblatt is a specialist in the culture of early modern England, and it is westward from the deserts of Israel to Europe and ultimately the New World that the narrative weaves its path. The protagonists are the north African Christian bishop Augustine, who turned the story into one of sex and sin; the artist Albrecht Durer, whose copperplate engraving and paintings on the topic revolutionised European art ; John Milton, who transformed the entire biblical story of creation into an emotionally complex portrait of human values (emerging in part from his reflections on his tragic, inept and thoughtless treatment of his wife); Isaac La Peyrere, the French theologian whose thoughts on the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas led him to posit that humanity pre-existed Adam and Eve; the French Enlightenment philosopher Pierre Bayle, who could not accept the Genesis account as literally true; and Charles Darwin. Sex and sexual difference, paradise and exile -- Adam and Eve's narrative explains its enduring appeal This is, then, a book about the historical shaping of the Christian west's attitudes to human origins. It is also a parable for the modern Christian west, in an era when creationism is apparently on the rise. When Greenblatt refers in his title to the "fall" of Adam and Eve, he means not the fall from grace of the mythical characters but the rapid decline in authority of biblical explanations that took place from the 18th century onwards. Greenblatt leaves the reader in no doubt that science has won the intellectual debate. He is an Enlightenment realist: the steady accumulation of philological, anthropological, biological and geological knowledge has made the Genesis story no longer tenable, except as a story. Augustine became history's most passionate defender of the literal truth of the biblical account: he even suggested that Eve's transgression consisted precisely in not taking God's commands literally enough (so woe betide you if you follow suit!). But even he could not reconcile all of its oddities: "However much one tries, not every word can be taken literally, and Augustine could find no simple, reliable rule for the appropriate degree of literal-mindedness." Was Adam actually made from mud? When we are told that God spoke to Adam, are we to imagine he used human language issuing from physical vocal cords? When the Bible says that eating the fruit meant the eyes of the two proto-humans were opened, are we to imagine that they had been sealed shut so far? Greenblatt has many such stories of pious readers trying and failing to come to terms with the implications of a complete surrender to biblical authority. Perhaps the most entertaining is the case of the lay preacher and naturalist Philip Gosse, who (among other things) created the world's first seawater aquarium. Like many others in Victorian Britain, Gosse had been disturbed by the findings of the geologist Charles Lyell, whose pioneering work in rock stratigraphy indicated that the world is many millions of years old. Gosse thus set about reconciling the evidence of the Bible with that of the physical world, and came up with an ingenious theory. The world, he argued, is indeed recent in origin; but it was created by God with a geological backstory in place. The argumentation for his theory was as masterfully inventive as it was absurdly contorted. Gosse invited his readers to consider the analogy of Adam himself: the Bible says he was created as a fully formed adult, of (Gosse speculated) some 25 to 30 years old. Like the Earth, Adam was created mature; and again like the Earth, he must have carried with him traces of an earlier youth, even if he never lived through that. Specifically, Gosse pointed to Adam's navel -- surely he must have had one, as a perfect specimen of humanity -- as the trace of a birth that never took place. If Adam was created as an adult with a navel, why could not the Earth, by the same token, have been created along with complex layers of sedimentary rock, testimony to a past that never happened? The success of the Adam and Eve story for so long, however, was down to more than daft, devotional reflections on belly buttons. It is first and foremost a story rich with resonant motifs: utopia, command and transgression, duty and autonomy, sex and sexual difference, paradise and exile. It is this narrative power that explains its enduring appeal as a prompt for literary, artistic and philosophical creativity. Greenblatt is clearly attracted to the bolder creative responses that challenge dominant ideologies. One memorable highlight -- all the more memorable within a largely male-centred narrative -- is the wonderfully named 17th-century Italian nun Arcangela Tarabotti, the author of an uncompromising anti-patriarchal tract Paternal Tyranny. According to Tarabotti, Eden was free from discrimination between the sexes, and indeed Eve was made of nobler substance than Adam's clay; it is only the malicious defamation of Eve that has led to the subjugation of women. Another highlight is John Ball's iconic slogan for the English peasants' revolt (later taken up by the 17th-century Diggers): "When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?" For Ball, paradise was defined by the absence of class structure. This is a study of western disenchantment, of intellectual progress -- but it also an ode to human creativity It is Milton who represents the pinnacle of this creativity: Milton the vain, pious, puritanical literary genius who, in Greenblatt's phrase, made Adam and Eve "real". As a youth, Milton had been afflicted by a bizarre loathing of sexuality, which he paraded vaingloriously before his peers. At one point, he described male ejaculation as "the quintessence of excrement". His marriage was practically doomed from the start: not least because Mary Powell was a sophisticated, youthful urbanite from an Oxford family of royalists to whom Milton owed money, and so not the likeliest match for an austere parliamentarian. When the relationship broke down and Mary returned to her familial home, Milton responded with a tract proposing that divorce was morally justifiable. The scandalised ruckus that ensued drew a magnificent volley of insults from Milton's pen, including "brain-worm'', "cock-brained solicitor" and "presumptuous lozel". But when the tide of the Civil War turned to the Cromwellians, Mary returned to John in apparent repentance. Milton, whose vision was beginning to fail him, found his heart molten: he took her back, and they had four children before her premature death in the aftermath of the final labour. It was following this time of personal, financial and political trauma that Milton wrote Paradise Lost. The paradise that he envisioned was, Greenblatt argues, one of perfect human freedom from political and social constraints. It was the utopian model for an achievable state in which humans were free from tyrannies both literal (the king) and metaphorical (social convention). But that Edenic state was rapidly receding: not only was he now blind, but the Restoration of the monarchy was also accompanied by a predictably bloody series of recriminations against parliamentarians. Milton, however, was unbowed, and pressed ahead. At night, he claimed, he was visited by a mysterious figure he called Urania (after the Greek Muse of cosmology) who dictated lines of blank verse to him. In the morning he would dictate the lines. If the amanuensis was late, he would cry out: "I want to be milked!" His achievement, in Greenblatt's view, was not to create an allegory of politics, or of his own chaotic love life, but to draw on those experiences and create a cosmic drama that was true to life. Each of his characters -- Adam and Eve, but also God and Satan too -- responds in a way that real human beings do. This "realisation" of the biblical figures, Greenblatt argues, played a critical part in the desacralisation of the myth, even in spite of Milton's own theological commitments: "Adam and Eve had become so real in Milton's imagination that they began to crack open the whole theological apparatus that brought them into being." The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is undoubtedly what scholars used to call a "whiggish" book: a study of western disenchantment, of intellectual progress, of the fading powers of the myths of a simpler age. But it is a more complex study than that. It is also an ode to human creativity and to the powerful grip of narrative. Greenblatt concludes his story with an account of his own visit to a chimpanzee project in Kibale, Uganda. Evolution is, of course, modern science's answer to the question "where do we come from?" Evolution is a "myth", not (assuredly) in the sense that it is untrue or irrational, but in the sense that it provokes the same awesome, vertiginous sense of peering into the deep well of time that Genesis once did. Whether the 21st century will find its Milton to express the power and reality of its new mythology remains to be seen. - Tim Whitmarsh.
Kirkus Review
The Pulitzer and National Book Award winner considers the enduring appeal and manifold interpretations of the biblical account of the first humans' expulsion from paradise."How does something made-up become so compellingly real?" asks Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, 2011, etc.), positioning himself as a secular-minded admirer of a story that religious thinkers for millennia have struggled to fit within a coherent theological framework. The author notes that this tale of humanity's origins was uncomfortably reminiscent for many early Christians of the pagan creation myths they scorned as absurd: the talking snake, the arbitrary deity, all those animals named in one day, etc. Some, like the Alexandrian scholar Origen Adamantius, tried to frame the story as an allegory about the evolution of the soul, but the interpretation that triumphed was that of St. Augustine, who insisted that the story of Adam and Eve was literally true. From that assertion flowed the concept of original sin, the denigration of sex, and the powerful strain of misogyny (it was all Eve's fault) that characterized the Catholic Church for centuries. During the RenaissanceGreenblatt's focus as a scholar and the subject of this book's best pagesartists like Albrecht Drer and writers such as John Milton sought to give the rebellious couple of Genesis a palpable human reality in images and literature, most thrillingly in Milton's great epic Paradise Lost. When Greenblatt moves on to the challenges to belief in the literal truth of the Bible posed by Enlightenment philosophers and 19th-century scientists (culminating with Darwin's The Origin of Species), his narrative speeds up and loses focus. The author seems to be making an argument for the enduring power of stories while decrying fundamentalism, but his point isn't clear, and a final chapter positing a chimpanzee pair in Uganda as a present-day Adam and Eve is simply odd. Many fine passages charged with Greenblatt's passion and talent for storytelling can't disguise the fact that he's not quite sure what story he's trying to tell here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Greenblatt (John Cogan Univ. Professor of the Humanities, Harvard Univ.; The Swerve) explores one of humanity's most extraordinary stories: the biblical account of Adam and Eve. Beginning with its written origins during the Hebrews' exile in Babylon surrounded by competing Mesopotamian creation myths, and continuing through Darwinian evolution, Greenblatt thoughtfully meanders through various understandings of this narrative over time. Two of the most prominent figures in the book are -Augustine, who set Western Christendom on a course away from an allegorical interpretation toward a more strictly literal one, and poet John Milton, whose Paradise Lost was, in many ways, the culmination of Augustine's vision. Ironically, the more real Adam and Eve appeared, the more problematic a literal interpretation became for many readers. In the end, Greenblatt hopes to rescue the story from the misogynistic and sexually oppressive consequences of an Augustinian interpretation and restore its creative and imaginative power as enduring literature. While readers with a special interest in one of the many subfields touched upon may wish for more, Greenblatt has shaped an enjoyable and well-paced narrative that effectively draws from many disciplines. -VERDICT Recommended for readers attentive to deep truths embedded in a good story. [See Prepub Alert, 3/13/17.]- Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: In the House of Worship | p. 1 |
| 1 Bake Bones | p. 5 |
| 2 By the Waters of Babylon | p. 21 |
| 3 Clay Tablets | p. 39 |
| 4 The Life of Adam and Eve | p. 64 |
| 5 In the Bathhouse | p. 81 |
| 6 Original Freedom, Original Sin | p. 98 |
| 7 Eve's Murder | p. 120 |
| 8 Embodiments | p. 139 |
| 9 Chastity and its Discontents | p. 163 |
| 10 The Politics of Paradise | p. 189 |
| 11 Becoming Real | p. 204 |
| 12 Men Before Adam | p. 231 |
| 13 Falling Away | p. 250 |
| 14 Darwin's Doubts | p. 269 |
| Epilogue: In the Forest of Eden | p. 285 |
| Appendix 1 A Sampling of Interpretations | p. 303 |
| Appendix 2 A Sampling of Origin Stories | p. 313 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 321 |
| Notes | p. 325 |
| Selected Bibliography | p. 367 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 393 |
| Index | p. 397 |