At creation, humans and animals were alike—plant-eating, unclothed, and speaking the same language; God even brings the beasts to Adam to find a fitting companion. Everything changes when Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What kind of story is this? Remarkable parallels with the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic show how the biblical author crafted an Israelite wisdom story about the end of humankind’s infancy.
Read in light of the Sumerian King List, Adam’s genealogy (Genesis 5) reveals a gender-neutral line, conceived without a female counterpart. Noah, like the Mesopotamian flood survivor Ziusudra, emerges as the first “son,” inaugurating a new line of gendered humanity.
Already the editors of the Torah recognized the discrepancies between the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2–3 and made redactional alignments so the two stories would read better next to each other. Such awareness is also evident among the earliest interpreters of the Bible, including the book of Jubilees and the Septuagint.
The etrog tree, according to midrash, fulfilled God’s command in creation, such that the tree tasted like its fruit. It was also the tree of Knowledge from which Eve ate. By taking the etrog on Sukkot along with the other species, we atone for this primordial sin.
The primordial man and woman may believe they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, but they actually ate from the Life-Giving Tree. This causes a chain reaction leading to the emergence of sexuality, procreation, and continuity for the human species.
YHWH advises Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge but does not disclose that the reason they will die is because they will lose access to the Tree of Life. YHWH does not allow humans to become gods, both wise and immortal (Genesis 3:22), and thus expels them from the garden. Consequently, the woman must bear children to perpetuate the species, and the man must till the earth to produce food.
The expulsion from the garden of Eden is not a story about human error or sin. It is the inevitable result of the human desire for knowledge.
Wheat, grapes, citrons, figs, pomegranates, and olives have all been presented as the fruit that Adam and Eve ate, yet the apple, which only entered the scene in the 12th century C.E., became the most popular candidate.
Human perfection cannot be achieved only through intellectual and spiritual development, but requires companionship and physical intimacy.
Like many traditions with a long historical pedigree, Judaism has inherited its share of texts with racial bias. Failure to acknowledge this is one reason for prevalent conscious and subconscious racist views that can be found in the American Orthodox Jewish community—the community of which I am a part—which sometimes reveal themselves in overt statements and actions.
Feminist biblical interpretation is more than simply paying attention to texts about women. It is also a means of achieving a more accurate understanding of life in ancient Israel and of the composition of the Bible.
The bridge that enables the annual traversal from the ending of the Torah back to its beginning is the anticipation of new questions.
The golden calf is a Jewish version of the “fall” of Adam and Eve in Christian tradition.
Clothing functions both as a marker of distinction and as the source of undoing in the Joseph story. A midrash suggests that Joseph’s coat is the same garment made from the sloughed skin of the serpent that God gave to Adam and Eve, which was then worn by Nimrod, Esau, and Jacob. Another midrash claims it to be the (future) High Priest’s tunic.
A methodologically rigorous reading of the account of the Woman's creation reveals a fundamentally egalitarian view of the sexes that is both nuanced and psychologically sensitive.
God creates “the human... male and female” (Genesis 1), seemingly describing the first human couple. But a look at how the other species are created in the same chapter suggests otherwise.
