How Myth Differs from Simple Story
Humans hardly need an incentive to tell stories. Perhaps it’s bound up with the acquisition of language. <aybe it’s a product of our patterning instinct. Whatever it is, humans love to tell stories: funny stories, scary stories, erotic stories, inspiring stories. It seems our most “natural” way of understanding the universe around us and even ourselves is through story, and as that list of stories above infers, these stories have an ability to affect us emotionally, sometimes engendering emotional desire, at other times fulfilling emotional needs.
What we call “myths” can also be funny or scary or erotic or inspiring, but they serve a need distinct from kindling or satisfying emotional needs. One of the best-known myths in the Western world is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden that is found in the 3rd chapter of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. There’s the eros of naked adults running around in a beautiful garden, and the scary, mysterious talking snake. There’s even a little humor in a bad situation as Adam tries to blame Eve for his eating the apple, a scene often found in rom-coms. But there’s more at work here than an emotionally stimulating story. Things start out so perfect, but after Adam and Eve eat the apple, it all falls apart with horrific consequences extending far into the the future: food abundance becomes food scarcity; childbirth becomes painful, an oppressive patriarchy is established, and the biggest curse of all comes into the world: death. What sort of story is that with such a depressing ending?
The Origins of the Adam and Eve Myth
We have little to no idea about the origins of this story. All we do know is that they set the narrative for the Hebrew bible beginning in Genesis at the beginning of the Torah and continuing through the end of the historical book, II Kings. It’s a depressing tale in general, with some high points when David builds a temple for the Hebrews’ god, YHWH, but over and over again, the high points lead to hubris and rebellion against YHWH and that brings on destruction. At the end of the overarching story, Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed and many of the Hebrews are taken to exile in Babylon.
So if we don’t know anything about the creation of those Genesis stories, what do we know about the circumstances in which the Hebrew bible was put together, at least the first five books and the histories? Rabbinical tradition and most modern scholarship point to Ezra and the scribes who arrived with him under the decree of Artaxerxes found in Ezra 7. Cyrus, King of Persia and conqueror of Babylon, had issued a decree a hundred years earlier (559 BCE) allowing the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild YHWH’s temple that had been destroyed by the Babylonians. With few exiles returning and little progress on the temple restoration after decades had passed, Persian King Artaxerxes sent the Jew Ezra, still in exile, to Jerusalem to establish order, advance YHWHism in the area and get the temple rebuilding project going again.
Upon arrival, Ezra found a city with no walls, a temple still in ruins and the worship of YHWH contaminated by the “people of the land,” those who were not taken into exile the Babylonians, mostly the uneducated classes. Making his job even more difficult, the henotheism prevalent in the Ancient Near East, a theology that identified each nation with a different god, would evaluate YHWH as a loser god whose defeat by the god of Babylon in the heavenly realms paralleled the defeat of Judah by Babylon on Earth. Second Isaiah, a prophet in the tradition of Isaiah living in exile in Bablylon, had made a bold move to restore YHWH’s reputation even as he sat in exile in Babylon well before Ezra’s return to Jerusalem. Rather than defending YHWH’s honor as a god among many, Second Isaiah, an early monotheist, proclaimed that YHWH was the one and only God. If Ezra was aware of Second Isaiah’s preaching, could it help him to, in essence, create a new religion that would bring together the returnees from exile and the people of the land into a united people, all worshiping YHWH according to the traditions of the pre-exilic ancestors?
Myth as the Answer to Hard Questions
With this historical context, the role played by the Adam and Eve myth in the overall proto-Hebrew bible becomes clearer. The Adam and Eve myth is preceded in Genesis by the Hebrew bible’s creation myth wherein YHWH creates the Earth and its creatures in six days. Creation myths are common to almost all cultures. They answer a question that occurs naturally to the contemplative, curious mind: How did all this stuff get here. The bold move to monotheism of Second Isaiah is embedded in the Genesis Creation myth. YHWH is a god so transcendent, so omnipotent, that he was able to create the universe we see around us ex nihilo and in six days no less. And fitting for such a powerful god, YHWH pronounced his creation as
”good” several times in the text.
But as Ezra and his scribes looked around Jerusalem in the mid-5th century BCE, things were hardly good. If the one and only God, YHWH, is omnipotent, how could things be such a mess in Jerusalem? Even YHWH’s house is destroyed, a major embarrassment for gods in the old henotheistic worldview. The Adam and Eve myth is Ezra’s answer to the question: how did things get so screwed up? The answer does nothing to take away from YHWH’s power and majesty. Instead, the reason for this fall from perfection is to be found in human behavior and actions, a theme repeated throughout the proto Hebrew bible as the Hebrews’ kings and people repeatedly betray their God.
Myth as an answer to questions for which history or science do not have answers is a literary device found throughout the Hebrew bible. If humans have one origin, how did they get to speak so many different languages? (Tower of Babel, Genesis 11) Why do we circumcise our male children? (Abraham’s covenant, Genesis 17) How are we related to the other peoples of the world? (Noah’s family, Genesis 6-9)
In subsequent essays, we’re going to examine in more detail how myths have been answering humans’ deepest and most mysterious questions for millennia, and how they continue to be created to answer new questions as they arise. The goal of all this is to consider whether our circumstances in this age of polycrisis have given rise to new questions for which science or history are currently unable to provide answers. Is it time for us to create new myths for our time that can reorient and restabilize our worldview and society?