The Trial of Innocence: Adam, Eve and the Yahwist

by André LaCocque

Wipf & Stock, Eugene, Ore., 2006. 299 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-1-59752-620-3.

IF THERE IS A TEXT IN THE OT that has shaped the Christian understanding of the beginning of humankind more than any other, it would certainly be the story of Adam and Eve. This text, strangely enough, has little or no intertextual con­nections with other texts of the HB and is a linguistic arti­fact. It has been called a mythopoetic reflection on the relationship between God and humankind, woman and man, and their life in the contrasting environments of God’s garden and the ground from which they were made and to
which they are destined to return in death.

In this book that bears the telling title The Trial of Innocence, André LaCocque, Professor Emeritus of OT at Chicago Theological Seminary, explores not only the text of Gen 2–3, but also its history of interpretation in both Christianity and Judaism. This remarkable study distinguishes itself from the heap of books published every year on Gen 2–3, because it is neither a strictly historical exegesis nor an attempt to defend or establish a particular dogma about evil and human sin. LaCocque engages the text for what it is in the first place, a mythic tale that provides the reader with a symbolic space in which she can address some of the abiding questions of human existence: Is there a purpose and a direction to human life? Are we in our present state what we are supposed to be, and do the choices we make affect our place in the world and before God? Or is it all blind fate that starts with birth and comes to a petty end in death? What makes LaCocque’s book a page turner is the fact that he discusses these questions within the symbolic space of Gen 2–3. While the book does not fall short of explor­ing the literary design of the text and the intentions of its supposed author, the famous Yahwist (“J”), LaCocque seems to accept quite deliberately the text’s own invitation to enter its imaginative world.

According to LaCocque, the Eden narrative conveys as its principal insight that human beings are created to live in relationship with God. God fashions Adam and puts him in the garden as a companion equipped with a free will like God’s own, which enables Adam to respond to the one who created him. Here LaCocque sees important similarities with the priestly account (“P”) of humans as the imago Dei. And as in P, God also creates a world in which Adam can thrive; however, in Gen 2 this is not the entire world but only that portion of it nearest and dearest to God, the paradise garden. The human pair receives the task of caring for God’s garden, which LaCocque again interprets along the lines of the priestly creation report, where God charges humankind to rule the world. LaCocque separates himself from a line of inter­pretation that sees the garden of Eden as a place in which humans lead a life of “dreaming inno­cence” (Paul Tillich), from which they emerge only when they have to leave the garden to be finally on their own. Genesis 2:15 (“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it”) becomes the verse on which LaCocque’s interpretation of the entire narrative hinges to a major extent: that the humans are supposed to work the garden describes the transition from “stasis to dynamis” (p. 273). The keeping of the garden becomes a symbol for the humans taking possession of the world.

This transition to an active life is ambivalent, however, for it means that humans now become susceptible to the evil that is also a part of their world: “Evil as analyzed by J is the result of the confluence of ‘outside’ and ‘inside.’ From the outside comes evil as nature’s declaration of autonomy; from inside comes human acquiescence to nature’s rebellion against God. Evil is stealth. What had been received from God at the outset is snatched from God and paraded as one’s independent achievement” (p. 153). This of courses raises the question if and to what extent Gen 2–3 is, in LaCocque’s view, a story about the human “fall.” One may summarize his answer as a yes and no: yes, because human beings proved themselves unable to pass the trial of innocence and put themselves outside the boundaries of the life that God pro­vided for them. Nonetheless, Gen 2–3 is more than a myth that depicts the downward spiraling of humankind at the beginning of history from which it never recovered. J’s intention is not only to show what was lost “in the beginning,” but more importantly to describe what was promised and to what human beings should aspire in the present: “As a matter of fact, evoking life in Eden is not to be confused with a nostalgia for the good old past. The Yahwist’s point of view is less retrospective than prospective. There is no ‘paradise lost,’ for in truth of the matter, paradise is offered. Peace and harmony, love and goodness, belong to universal human ‘crea­tureliness’” (p. 269). LaCocque reads Gen 2–3 as a deeply humanistic text that zeros in on what humans lost in order to highlight what they need to regain.

There certainly are elements in the complex texture of Gen 2–3 that do not easily fit into the interpretative framework that LaCocque provides. One wonders, for example, what he makes of the inclusio between Gen 2:5 and 3:23. The initial statement of the narrator that there was no human being yet to till the ground echoes in God’s charge for Adam and Eve to do precisely this. The inclusio suggests that the paradise garden may not have been the place for humankind to proceed from dreaming innocence to a vita activa. Also, there is certainly no textual support for LaCocque’s claim that Adam was “sent away from the presence of the Lord, that is, from the life-giving face to face with God” (pp. 252–53). Adam and Eve may not live in closest proximity to God, but they are still in God’s “sight.” One needs to read a little further to find that it is Cain who, after killing his brother, loses this connection: “Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (Gen 4:16). In the perception of the Yahwist, the one who sheds his neighbor’s blood is in fact the one who invites sin into the world (Gen 4:7). It seems that the Yahwist wishes to draw a distinction between the human aspiration for wisdom, which he never calls sin or evil, and the feeling of greed, hate, and despair that lead down the path of violence. At times, LaCocque seems to lose some of these important nuances. This may be because he focuses narrowly on Gen 2–3, which tends to marginalize other texts of J’s Primeval History, especially Gen 4—obviously another “Eden story”—and the “Tower of Babel” (Gen 11:1–9).

The Trial of Innocence is an immensely rich and clearly written book. It deserves the attention not only of professional exegetes but also of all those who wish to explore the seemingly familiar story of Adam and Eve for a fresh perspective.

Andreas Schuele
UNION-PSCE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA     

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The Ladder of Jacob: Ancient Interpretations of the Biblical Story of Jacob and His Children

by James L. Kugel

Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2006. 278 pp. $24.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-691-12122-2.

AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED The Bible As It Was (Belknap, 1999), and the expanded version, Traditions of the Bible (Harvard University Press, 1999), James Kugel is an expert on the subtle ways of early biblical interpreters. In this book, an offshoot of these earlier works, he collects and revises a series of studies on the early interpretation of the stories of Jacob and his children. The exegetical texts that Kugel explores include Jubilees, the Testaments of the Patriarchs, the Ladder of Jacob, the Aramaic Levi
Document (ALD), and other texts of the Second Temple period and beyond. He is not con­cerned to discuss these texts as individual documents; rather, he sees them as part of the multi­farious stream of early exegetical traditions. These early interpreters exercised their ingenuity and erudition to solve interpretive problems in the biblical text, and as a result, built new nar­rative elaborations grounded in the biblical stories. Many of their exegetical solutions came to circulate independently as “exegetical motifs,” which are often recombined in subsequent texts. Many of these texts belong to a vaguely defined genre often called “the rewritten Bible” (a term coined by Geza Vermes). Kugel does not use this term, but his work most elegantly and convincingly explores how this genre works and how early interpreters conceived of the Bible and of their hermeneutical task.

These interpreters operate by what Kugel calls “the four assumptions” (presumably a play on the traditional “four questions” of the Passover Seder.) The first assumption is that the Bible is always relevant. The second, which logically relates to the first, since the relevance is not always apparent, is that the Bible speaks cryptically. The third is that the Bible is perfect and harmonious. And the fourth is that the Bible is of divine origin. Since the relevance, harmony, and divine intent of the text are often obscure, the task of the interpreter is pri­marily to explore its secrets, its cryptic speech, in order to recuperate its divine and edifying per­fection. The result is a method that often combines great imagination with great erudition. These were exceedingly close readers, whose interpretive constructions are, to one degree or another, rooted in the details and “gaps” of the text. Kugel expertly reveals their trains of thought, tracing the logical paths from the curious or problematic details of the biblical stories to the exegetical motifs that restore the text’s divine plenitude. In the case of the stories of Jacob and his children, these exegetical motifs often also recuperate the characters’ ethical reputation.

Let me adduce a small example to show the scope and interest of Kugel’s discussions. In the story of Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob sees “angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Gen 28:12). This description has several potential obscurities for the interpreter. First, “ascending and descending” is not the obvious direction of movement for angels, who presumably start out in heaven—“descending and ascending” would be more natural. So some early interpreters inferred that the angels in question had been previously exiled on earth or, alternatively, had been accompanying Jacob on earth all along, and so had to “ascend” first (Gen. Rab. has both of these exegetical motifs). Other interpreters took “ascending and descending” to be cryptic symbolism in a dream-revelation that refers to the rise and fall of world empires, an inter­pretation that joins Jacob’s dream to the dreams and visions about the rise and fall of world empires in the book of Daniel (this exegetical motif is found in Gen. Rab.). Because it occurs in a dream, it made sense to these interpreters to apply Danielic techniques, which simulta­neously “decode” the text and serve to restore the harmony of various parts of the canon. (This may be seen as an early form of “canonical criticism”). By these means, the story grows in new and fascinating ways.

The second potential problem or ambiguity in this verse is the prepositional phrase “on it” (viz. the ladder), which can also be read to mean “on him” (viz. Jacob). Some interpreters inferred that the angels were ascending and descending on Jacob’s sleeping body (again, in Gen. Rab.). Notably, Kugel argues that this exegetical motif is assumed in the NT description of “the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (John 1:50–51). Commentators often recognize this as an allusion to Gen 28:12, but Kugel adds that the allusion presumes this particular interpretation of the text, that is, to the already richly interpreted “Bible As It Was.” Hence, we can see that Kugel’s discussion and topic have serious implications for NT studies as well as for other aspects of the Hebrew Bible’s history of reception.

This is an erudite and polished book, but there are some minor flaws as well. The first involves a question of audience. Kugel writes in a genial and accessible manner that seems to invite a scholarly and non-scholarly audience. Most of the interaction with scholarly literature is in footnotes at the back of the book. But occasionally he drifts into technical discussions that non-specialists will find wearisome or impenetrable. For example, he spends a dozen pages on the “historical relations” between the ALD (partially preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Geniza) and the book of Jubilees. He argues that the former is dependent on the latter, and that ALD can be dated confidently to “the latter half of the second century B.C.E.” (p. 161). But he previously states that the composition of ALD “must go back to before 125–100 B.C.E.”

(p. 151). So does Kugel really mean to say that ALD must date between 150–125 B.C.E.? This is a very narrow window of time for a text that has no obviously dateable features, except that it must have been written before the date of its earliest manuscript fragments. In any case, this is a technical and confusing argument that no doubt will lose many of its readers.

A second problem is a curious lack of attention to the subtleties and sophistication of the biblical text itself. Kugel is himself a very close reader of texts, and notes the many biblical cruxes that exercised early interpreters. But he does not tell us what he thinks (or what he thinks we ought to think) about these problems in the biblical stories. The views of the early interpreters are his sole focus. But is the Jacob narrative really just a series of perplexing stories about a dysfunctional family? In his conclusion Kugel states that “The stories of Jacob and his children recounted in Genesis are what they are: etiological narratives and old-time historiography, things rooted in the soil of ancient Israel and its people in biblical times”
(p. 221). Is that all they are—stories of blood and soil for simple folk? He suggests that it was the early interpreters who made these stories into profound and resonant religious literature, that they built “a single, ascendant structure,” a Jacob’s Ladder, that extends from the soil of the old stories up to heaven itself. Kugel seems, as the endorsement from Harold Bloom says on the back cover, to have “a poignant (yet wary) nostalgia” for the ways of the early interpreters. Kugel has done a magnificent job in restoring the conceptual world of these traditions. But the stories of the Bible have their own richness and complexity that cannot adequately be described as old-time historiography that the early interpreters improved. One does not need to deemphasize the sophistication of biblical narrative in order to emphasize the riches of early interpretation.

Despite this theoretical objection, I would emphasize that this book—and Kugel’s major oeuvre of recuperating early exegesis—is an important, fascinating, and often brilliant endeavor.

Ronald Hendel
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

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