SOURCE: “Dream Form in Genesis 2.4b-3.24: Asleep in the Garden,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, No. 37, February, 1987, pp. 3-14.

[In the following essay, Burns analyzes the apparent inconsistencies in the Adam and Eve story, maintaining that such inconsistencies are only problematic when viewed from a logical, rather than literary, standpoint.]

The story of Adam and Eve as told in Gen. 2.4b-3.24 contains a number of apparent inconsistencies that challenge interpreters, and that draw the careful reader in for a closer look. The garden in Eden contains not one but two talismanic trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, yet the central part of the narrative knows nothing of the tree of life. Additionally, God warned Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge, ‘for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die’; nevertheless, Adam goes on to live nearly a thousand years. Gerhard von Rad, Jerome Walsh, John McKenzie, and more recently Crossan, Jobling, and Boomershine have attempted to resolve the apparent inconsistencies with varying degrees of success. There are, as Robert Alter has observed, ‘aspects of the composite nature of biblical narrative texts that we cannot confidently encompass in our own explanatory system’, a fact which leads to the nagging suspicion that ‘the Hebrew writer may have known what he was doing but we do not’ (p. 136).

Yet previous criticism points the way. Erich Auerbach's Mimesis contrasts two styles of narrative: the Homeric and the biblical. The Homeric style, says Auerbach, ‘leaves nothing it mentions in half darkness and unexternalized’; the biblical technique, on the other hand, with its much sparser narration, creates both a foreground and a background, ‘resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past’ (p. 7). The result, as in Hawthorne, is that the narrative is multilayered: the biblical authors ‘are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them’ (p. 13).

It seems to me that what Auerbach calls the hallmarks of the biblical tale—recurrence, parallels, analogy, and ‘backgrounding’—are similar to narrative devices characteristic of romance as well as modern fiction, particularly the modern short story: recursion, multivalence, nesting, isomorphism, self-reference, mirroring, and use of intrareferential motifs characteristic of Gogol Chekhov, Joyce, Hawthorne, Barth, Barthelme, Borges, Kafka, Nabokov. These techniques result in formal structures capable of symbolizing multiple and even contradictory levels of meaning. Whatever else it may be, Gen. 2.4b-3.24 is clearly a literary construct; its inconsistencies are problematic only if we expect the narrative to conform to logical standards, rather than literary ones. My approach is to use the tools, techniques, and critical vocabulary that have evolved to deal with fiction, especially modern and contemporary literature, applying those tools to an analysis and interpretation of Gen. 2.4b-3.24. I compare the story with later fictions that resemble it in structure, asking what Gen. 2.4b-3.24 might be saying when read through the conventions associated with what I have come to think of as dream form.

Gen. 2.4b-3.24 is similar to an ancient prototype of literature whose structure is invested in the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which has its roots in the Breton lay and in Germanic folklore, is triptych in form, consisting of panels that correspond to ‘before’, ‘during’, and ‘after’. Typically, the central part of the narrative—the central panel of the triptych, if you will—is numinous, and has the characteristics of dream, including transformation, sudden juxtaposition, paradox, riddle, and masking.¹ Motifs from the framing sections appear in the dream section transformed or disguised, just as, in ‘The Wizard of Oz’, the farm hands from the opening section appear to Dorothy in her dream as the tin woodsman, the straw man, and the lion (Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Little Red Ridinghood fit this pattern). We see a similar structure in James Joyce's short story ‘An Encounter’: motifs from the mundane setting of the school and neighborhood—the green eyes, the whipping, the Priest, the chase—reappear, transformed, in the marvelous dream-like section at the center.

Gen. 2.4b-3.24 partakes of this numinous structure. The text locates Eden at the hub of four rivers. Together, they encompass the Indo-European civilizations of the ancient world. Two of them, the Tigris and Euphrates, are identified with the rivers we know by those names, and commentators have linked the remaining two rivers with the Nile and the Indus, which in reality are nowhere closer than thousands of miles apart. Geographically speaking, then, as McKenzie has pointed out, Eden is nowhere. Rather, it is a never-never land located in a mythological landscape which, like the imaginary continents protrayed on an ancient cartographer's map, begins where the known world leaves off. Textual evidence suggests, furthermore, that Eden is located at the very center of that mythological world: the description of the garden as guarded by a cherub with sword ‘pointing in every direction’ implies that the angel is standing at the earth's pole.

Furthermore, the paradise story is triptych in form. The opening panel (2.4b-20) sets the stage. Then Adam is put to sleep (2.21). Events in the center of the narrative (2.22-3.6), which may be read as if it were Adam's dream, are characterized by numinous qualities, including transformation, juxtaposition, paradox, and disguise. Finally, after Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree, their eyes are opened (3.7), and the narrative concludes with an emergence of motifs from the opening section. Four of the major motifs in the story—Eve, the tree, and the serpent—may be traced throughout the triptych, where they evolve through the dream form. Reading Gen. 2.4b-3.24 in terms of its dream structure resolves the inconsistencies in the text, and leads to a new and revealing interpretation of this marvelous story—an interpretation that broadens and deepens the tradition and has important implications for us in the nuclear age, with our recently heightened awareness of good and evil.

EVE

Phyllis Trible has pointed out that grammatical gender (’ādām is a masculine word) is not sexual identification, and has argued that ‘the earth creature’, as she calls Adam, is in the opening section of the text sexually undifferentiated (p. 80). Though Trible's efforts to dispel notions of sex roles based on the myth seem to me to raise even more formidable questions, her close and skillful analysis of the text reveals some interesting patterns. She notes, for example, that the unit ’îš and ’iššâ (man and woman) functionally parallels hā-’ādām and hā’^adāmâ, highlighting the fact that dream woman is formed from Adam just as Adam was formed from earth.² Trible's analysis provides evidence which suggests that Eve appears in Adam's dream as a projection of his unconscious, that she acts out his prohibitions, and that she is externalized when his eyes are opened, at which point procreation can begin.

Analytical psychologists will recognize the process described here as a crucial step in what Jung called individuation: a transformation in which the center of the personality shifts from the conscious ego to a balancing point between the ego and a subconscious ‘shadow’, releasing, in the process, an inner figure. Individuation occurs in stages marked by dreams. If the dreamer is a man he will project the inner figure as a female personification of his unconscious (if the dreamer is a woman, the sex roles are reversed). The Jungian term for this dream woman is the anima—the woman within.

The dream figure and the dreamer, who are ‘bone of bone and flesh of flesh’, function here as if they were in fact united in one person: the serpent addresses the woman in plural verb forms (3.4); the woman knows the prohibition, though in the story no one tells her (3.3); Adam is silent and invisible during the dream section, yet we are told in 3.6 that he is ’immāh, ‘with her’ (Trible, p. 113). All in all, the textual evidence is consistent with the view that the woman is, in Jungian terms, a projection of Adam's inner self.

At the climax, however, the dream and the dreamer are both externalized. At that point, which corresponds to the birth of self-consciousness, individuation occurs. As evidence of the change, God addresses the man and the woman as separate persons, using singular verb forms. For the first time, the man and the woman use the pronoun ‘I’: four times, Adam speaks of himself: ‘I heard’; ‘I was afraid’; ‘I was naked’; ‘I hid’ (’iššâ's response parallels Adam's; self-centeredness prevails). As further evidence of the change, Adam renames the woman, using a verbal formula which, as Trible observes, ‘chillingly echoes the vocabulary of dominion of the animals’. He calls her name Eve, a Hebrew word which resembles in sound the word life, ‘because she was the mother of all living’ (3.20). Eve reflects the womb-like fertility of Eden itself, which in a sense gives birth to everything else. Thus we have a series of analogous plot segments whose ends touch, forming a circle: the earth, inspired by God, gives birth to Adam, who through his dream gives birth to Eve, who then as a result of verbal intercourse with the serpent becomes the mother of all living, while Adam goes forth to till (or bring fertility to) the barren earth.

The encompassing theme of the narrative, as von Rad has pointed out, is ’ādām/’^adāmâ: man/earth. It is a theme which begins and ends the narrative: first in the creation of man (from the earth), then in his return to it (dust to dust). Additionally, the narrative is circular in form. Man was formed of the ground outside the garden, was placed in the garden, and ended his life outside of it. The circular form raises the expectation of a return. Jobling has suggested that the program of the story, in structuralist terms, is to establish a race of human beings to till the soil, which at the beginning of the narrative is barren: ‘no bush of the field was yet on earth, no plant of the field had yet sprung up …’ (2.5). ‘“Inside”’, says Jobling, ‘there was one male, born autochthonously. “Outside”, there is a multiplicity of people, born sexually. The creation of the woman is both the cause of the transition and the ground of its possibility’ (p. 45). What Jobling is suggesting, it seems to me, is that Eve is a personification of the archetypal earth mother. Eliade has noted that the ancient Greeks and the Romans associated tilling the soil with the act of generation, and that, throughout Mediterranean folklore, the soil is identified with the uterus: ‘the earth produces living forms; it is a womb which never wearies of procreating’ (p. 261). Pushed far enough, the image of Eve as ‘mother earth’ gives us a picture of a cosmic marriage between God the Sky Father and Eve the earth mother, with Adam both as surrogate father and as son—a relationship which adumbrates the image of God the Father; the Virgin Mary, mother of God; and Christ, the divine son. (Jung's analytical psychology suggests that the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—implies a fourth figure, projected as Mary, who in some medieval representations contains all three.) Pushed even further, perhaps too far for orthodox Christianity, the image would yield a vision of the Godhead endlessly giving birth to itself through sexual reproduction, with the sexes containing each other.

TREES

In the opening section of the triptych, there are apparently two trees, for we are told that God caused to grow ‘the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (2.9). The numinous section, however, says nothing of the tree of life, speaking only of the tree of knowledge. In the final framing section, the missing tree reappears: God fears that Adam will ‘take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever’ (3.22).

The discrepancy is one of the ‘seams’ that trouble critics; it is evidence, some conclude, that the narrative is crafted imperfectly. Von Rad confesses that he can scarcely suppress the suspicion that the duality of trees is ‘the result of a subsequent combination of two traditions' (p. 78). The dream form, I think, explains the discrepancy: the two trees simply fuse in the numimous section to create what Clark has called ‘the tree of command’. The underlying question posed by the text, then, is not how many magic trees grow in Eden; it is, rather, how knowledge and immortality are related. ‘Is there an organic and necessary rapport between the theme of knowledge and that of immortality?’ asks Humbert. ‘The entire meaning of the myth hangs on that question’ (p. 21).

SERPENT

One detects in the pious criticism of Gen. 2.4b-3.24 a barely concealed nervousness about the role of the serpent. Brueggemann, for example, protests that the serpent has been excessively interpreted. ‘Whatever the serpent may have meant in earlier versions of the story’, he instructs us, ‘in the present narrative it has no independent significance. It is a technique to move the plot along’ (p. 47). But Brueggemann protests too much. The serpent is more than mere stage machinery; it is an indispensable member of the cast. Its job is to urge the woman to opt for knowledge (and implicitly for immortality), and to prophesy the result.

The serpent is admirably suited to its role. In folklore, as Gaster notes, the serpent is associated with wisdom: since it creeps into the earth and frequents tombstones, it is believed to embody the sapient dead. Moreover, because it sloughs its skin, the serpent is continually rejuvenated and therefore, like the gods, believed to be immortal. According to the beliefs of ancient Greeks and other Mediterranean people, the serpent is mantic. ‘Serpents were kept in Greek temples’, reports Gaster, ‘so that oracles might be sought from them’ (p. 36). Finally, if there are any doubts about the suitability of the serpent for its role as delator, Eliade's exhaustive study of Mesopotamian iconography and folklore should lay those doubts to rest. Eliade identifies the underlying archetype: the serpent, throughout the Near East, is frequently imaged as guardian of the sacred trees of spring, and is supposed to bestow fecundity, knowledge, and immortality (p. 164).

With these supernatural qualities in mind, it is interesting to note that the Hebrew word that names the serpent, nāhāš, is presumably related to the word meaning bewitchment or magic curse (Holladay, p. 235). The root affinity between the words is evidently the source of the nervousness displayed by such critics as Brueggemann. It has, as von Rad notes, ‘led to the supposition that at the basis of the narrative there is a very different older form, in which only two acting partners appear: a man and a serpent-deity’. (‘Nothing of the kind’, he hastens to add, ‘is evident now’.) What is evident now, I think, is much more interesting. In the numinous section of the narrative, Yahweh-Elohim does not appear; in his place, we have the nāhāš. The conventions of the dream genre, in which motifs from the waking section appear transformed in the numinous section, suggest that the serpent ‘is’ God, ‘in diguise’. John Crossan approaches a similar conclusion by very different means. Noting that the serpent does not speak to God, he reasons as follows: ‘When I speak within my own consciousness I can say to myself: “I think that You are wrong”. But if I wish to answer back and contradict myself, I can only do so by saying “I think that You are not wrong”. That is: there can be no mutual and reciprocal I-You spoken within the same consciousness’. Thus, when we consider the narrative as a whole, ‘The omnipresence of the Divine I and the complete absence of the Serpent I bespeak a common consciousness’ (pp. 108-109).

The central panel of the triptych has as its focus the temptation scene, and in the middle of that scene the serpent makes a statement that is central thematically as well. ‘Die, you will not die!’, it says, speaking of the consequences of eating from the forbidden tree. ‘Rather, God knows that on the day that you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil’ (3.4-5).

The structural outlines of the plot are thrown into relief when we recognize that the serpent's statement is an oracle—appropriately couched, as Walsh observes, in Delphic ambiguity. Eating from the tree is declared to be a capital offense, and the consequences are clear and immediate: ‘For on the day that you eat from it, you must die, yes, die’. But it is worth remembering, as nearly everyone notes, that no one dies in this text. From one point of view, then, the serpent is telling the truth: Adam and Eve do not die, their eyes are indeed opened (3.7) and they do become like gods, knowing good and evil (3.22). The apparent contradiction is resolved when we recognize that Gen. 2.4b-3.24 is the type of tale informed by an oracular pronouncement that is in fact an encryption of the plot (examples of this kind of narrative include Oedipus Rex, Tristan and Iseult, Chaucer's ‘Pardoner's Tale’, and Macbeth). In stories that share the dream form structure, the true and usually sinister meaning of the oracle, which typically takes the form of a riddle or engimatic divination concerning the fate of the protagonist, is hidden during the exposition and development, to be revealed in an ironic epiphany at the climax.

The serpent's oracle, in its ambiguity, appears in various permutations in all three panels of the triptych: as prohibition (‘on the day that you eat of it, you will die’), divination (‘Die, you will not die!’), and curse (‘dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return’). More important, it implies the key questions that echo beyond the narrative: what does it mean to have one's eyes opened? to ‘know good and evil’? to be ‘like God’?

To answer these questions, we must assume that the story is both paradoxical and multivalent, saying apparently contradictory things at different levels.³ Yet if we attempt to disengage the elements which may originally have been independent, the narrative falls apart. Perhaps the paradoxical nature of the story is a function of its duality: the fact that it is a potentially explosive package of myths wrapped together in the awesome and terrible cloak of God. If so, a new reading of the narrative based on an understanding of its structural principles could well transform our understanding of the story.

Consider the matter of being ‘like Elohim’. What is God like? His chief attribute, as revealed by example in the first two chapters of Genesis, is neither immortality nor omniscience, but creativity. In the text he plants a garden, causes trees to produce fruit, and brings forth living creatures. Similarly, after eating from the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve take up horticulture and childbearing (God's commandment to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is expressed negatively in Gen. 3.16 as a curse). They are not as good at creation as God is—they are not quite like God—but that was not predicted in the oracle.

Consider also the question of knowing good and evil. The meaning of the phrase ‘good and evil’ is the subject of a vast literature, which has failed to lay the question to rest. Bonhoeffer, however, strikes out in the right direction. He suggests that ‘tob and ra have a much wider meaning than “good and evil” in our terminology. … The essential thing about them is that they belong inseparably together’ (p. 53). It is possible, then, to read the words ‘good and evil’ as a pair meaning, in essence, ‘everything’. However, to focus attention exclusively on the meaning of ‘good and evil’ is to miss the mark. It is also important to consider the word ‘know’. The Hebrew verb yd‘, von Rad points out, never signifies purely intellectual knowing, but carries the much broader meaning of ‘to become acquainted with’ or ‘to experience’ (p. 81). To know good and evil, then, does not imply a new moral capacity but a new program for life. Freedom, like power, is something that cannot be given; it can only be taken. What Adam and Eve took was the one thing God could not build into his creatures: control, however imperfect, of their destinies. It seems at least arguable that Adam and Eve did not fail the tree test, but passed it—a possibility which suggests, to borrow the words of John Crossan, that Gen. 2.4b-3.24 ‘is in both senses of the word the first plot’.

Is there, then, in Humbert's terms, an organic rapport between the tree of knowledge and the tree of life? I believe so. Mythologically speaking, if Eden is at the center of the world, and the forbidden tree is at the center of Eden, it becomes, as Northrop Frye has suggested, an axis mundi, ‘the vertical perspective of the mythological universe’ (p. 149). The tree of knowledge in Gen. 2.4b-3.24 is, then, a manifestation of the tree in the German medieval conundrum which speaks of a tree whose roots are in hell, and whose summit is at the throne of God, and whose branches contain the whole world (Eliade, p. 294). Its function in the present context becomes clear when one considers the iconography of the tree in western culture: the cross, the Christmas tree, the burning bush. Christianity, the Son of God dying on the tree of life certainly one of its central images, could be categorized as a tree cult by a being innocent of our culture. Like the oracle, the tree has a double meaning: through the crucifixion Christ (the new Adam), the tree of life and the tree of death merge in the cross. Thus, the link between the tree of knowledge and the tree of life becomes explicit when we recognize that the Eden story is the germinal episode in an encyclopedic narrative that begins in Genesis and ends in Revelation. For the Eden story seems to be saying that man must have knowledge, with its attendant conditions sorrow and death, before he can achieve immortality: that man must die to be like God. Thus, Gen. 2.4b-3.24 tells the story of a liberating event in the guise of a restrictive or imprisoning one. It is as if, in Adam's fall (if that term is indeed appropriate) we fell not just into the world of imprisonment, but through it to a new dimension of freedom, like Virgil passing through Dante's hell to the world of grace beyond.

Schneidau notes that ‘When Shakespeare promises us that the “Great Globe itself”, the theater, the audience, and the world, will fade away and leave not a rack behind, he voices the fundamental Yahwist insight into the constructedness of created things. Not only the fictions but we ourselves are made, and something made is not real in its own right, but that of its maker; so that the easy distinction between real and fictional breaks down’ (p. 277). Gen. 2.4b-3.24 seems to be heading toward some such revelation. Form, content, and meaning are related in the sense that the dreamer is contained in his own dream. Furthermore the dream is nested inside a frame—the triptych—which expands when Adam and Eve's eyes open, and the dreamers awaken. God creates the earth; the earth gives birth to Adam; Adam gives birth to Eve who, breaking out of his dream, becomes the mother of all living. Each possibility is nested within the previous level of creation; each level is isomorphic to the next. But where does the process end?

As it stands, the Eden story is a systematic reversal of Eliade's ‘quest for the center’. Rather than winding inward toward a never-never land, man winds outward toward a broader world. We have, at the end, an image which suggests that Adam and Eve, literally disenchanted, leave the garden and go forth to experience the worst that life has to offer, and the best. The image suggests among other things, that interpreters have got their directions reversed. One ‘falls’ asleep, but one wakes ‘up’, and Gen. 2.4b-3.24 appears to be better understood not as a fall, but as an awakening. The future, and the imaginative experience of life which we call literature, lie before them.

Notes

1. ‘Images from the phenomenal world’, as Burns and Rohrberger have suggested, ‘are transposed to the numinous realm, where they are free to operate in the reader's mind metaphorically, as in dream’ (p. 6). See Dan Burns and Mary Rohrberger, ‘Short Fiction and the Numinous Realm’, Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982), pp. 5-12.

2. The word for Adam's ‘rib’ may be accurately translated as ‘side’, suggesting that the creation of ’iššâ occurs as the result of a process closer to meiosis or cell fission than to plastic surgery.

3. One way to look at the story is as a fusion of sources, with a Sumerian paradise story tucked into the central or numinous section. Thomas Boomershire has observed that ‘the underlying semantic code has been definitively shaped by the antinomies between Yahwism and the Canaanite fertility cult’ (p. 127). As McKenzie has pointed out, speaking of cultic practices which may have generated the central part of this tale, ‘The fertility rite was a mystic communion of the worshiper with his gods; by intercourse under the auspices of the rites he shared the divine prerogative of procreation; he became, in a sense, the master of the force of life’ (pp. 570-71). McKenzie goes on to say that ‘This mastery, this communion with Elohim, is what the serpent promises’.

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