Just in case any Higgaion readers don’t also read Stephen Cook’s blog Biblische Ausbildung, allow me to heartily recommend his recent series on Genesis 2–3, which consists (at the moment) of three posts:

While all three installments are well worth your while, I confess some disagreement with the third. In order to explain why, I need to expand just a bit on my strong agreement with the first post in Stephen’s series. In my view, Stephen’s explanation of the sense of the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” is entirely correct. But to the passages he cited (2 Samuel 14:17, from the speech of the “wise woman of Tekoa” to David, and 1 Kings 3:9, from Solomon’s prayer), I would like to add 2 Samuel 19:31–37 and Isaiah 7:13–17.

In 2 Samuel 19:31–37 (in English translations; it’s 19:32–38 in Hebrew), David is returning to Jerusalem after Absalom’s rebellion, and one of his aged supporters, Barzillai of Gilead, meets him on the road. David invites Barzillai back to Jerusalem with him, but Barzillai protests that he is too old. In his speech, he asks the rhetorical question, “Can I discern between good and evil?” (KJV) I don’t normally quote the KJV, but more recent translations tend to paraphrase Barzillai slightly:

  • Can I tell the difference between what is good and what is not? (NIV)
  • Can I discern what is pleasant and what is not? (NRSV)
  • Can I tell the difference between what is enjoyable and what is not? (TNIV)

A wooden, literalistic translation of Barzillai’s question would read, “Do I know between good and between evil?” That doesn’t make a lot of sense in English, hence the choice of other verbs than “know” in the translations cited above, and most other English translations that I’ve seen. But in Hebrew, we have here the collocation of the verb “to know” (ידע for you Hebraists) with the word-pair “good” (טוב) and “evil” (רעה), just as in Genesis 3:22. Barzillai’s syntax is slightly different, using “between” (בין) instead of a simple “and” (ו), but this only serves to highlight the accuracy of Stephen’s interpretation of what “knowing good and evil” means: a power of discrimination between these two (and shades in between). The point I would like to make here is that Barzillai says his inability to “know good and evil” is a result of his advanced age. His mental faculties are slipping (or so he says) due to age, just like his senses of taste and hearing.

Isaiah 7:13–17 contains Isaiah’s famous Immanuel sign. What I want to point out here is the time limit that is placed on the fulfillment of the sign. According to Isaiah’s prophecy, the Syro-Ephraimite coalition threatening Judah would be put down by the Assyrians before Immanuel “knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.” Here again the phrasing is not identical to that in Genesis 3:22, but as in the 2 Samuel passage, here the extra words (the verbs מאס, “refuse” and בחר, “choose,” along with the prepositions they require) clarify the sense of “knowing good and evil.” In this case, note that Immanuel must grow into the ability to “know how to refuse the evil and choose the good.” Immanuel’s initial inability to “know good and evil” is a result of his extreme youth: little babies don’t “know good and evil.”

Taking Barzillai and Immanuel into account suggests something interesting about “knowing good and evil”: it is a faculty normally experienced in the “prime of life,” one which babies don’t have but must acquire with age, and one which those of advanced age may lose due to the ravages of time. (Actually, it now seems to be the ravages of a cancer-fighting gene, but that’s not the point.) The ability to “know good and evil” is a mark of maturity in a human being. In the passage from 1 Kings 3 that Stephen cited, Solomon says as much:

And now, O LORD my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in. … Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people? (1 Kings 3:7, 9 NRSV)

Everything I have written thus far explains why I agree with the first of Stephen’s posts listed above. In the third post, however, Stephen answers the title question “Yes, there was sex in Eden.” While in a certain way I think the question could be thought of as a silly one to put to a literary construct, in another way I don’t think the question is silly at all. In either event, I would answer it differently from Stephen. To be blunt, I think the narrator implies there was no human sexual intercourse in Eden. I base this on the following considerations.

First, sex is not narrated in Eden, but is narrated immediately afterward. I do not subscribe to the old, misguided idea that the first biblical narration of a phenomenon describes the first occurrence of that phenomenon. When I was a child, I was taught in Sunday school that it had never rained before Noah, but that the “mist” or “stream” described in Genesis 2:4–7 persisted until that time. However, I think the narrator of Genesis 2 implies strongly that it rained in Eden. Genesis 2:4 starts with a problem: there are no plants. According to Genesis 2:5b, Two things are necessary for plants: rain and a gardener. The narrator explicitly describes the creation of the gardener, and the planting of the garden; the natural assumption is that the plants’ other need, rain, was also supplied by the creator. This kind of “gap-filling” goes on all the time whenever we read texts (see Meir Sternberg’s overly thick Poetics of Biblical Narrative [Indiana University Press, 1985], despite some problems with his actual interpretations of some texts). Therefore, I don’t think the question whether there was sex in Eden is out of bounds just because no sex is narrated in Eden. What I find striking, though, is that sexual intercourse resulting in procreation is the very first thing narrated after the expulsion from Eden. To me, that seems a significant contrast, especially when taken together with two other notions.

The second notion is the humans’ shameless nudity. Although the teenagers of Brattleboro, Vermont might disagree, the Tanakh never—even in the Eden story—praises shameless nudity. It is mentioned without explicit evaluation in Genesis 2–3, but everywhere else of which I am aware in the Tanakh, public nudity is considered shameful and humiliating. Yet I imagine that every parent can recall times when their children have run around the house stark naked without any sense of shame—usually when they are rather young. Shameless nudity is a childlike trait.

The third notion, despite Kinsey, is that sexual intercourse is an adult act. Certainly sexual intercourse that results in procreation requires at least a pubescent level of physical maturity.

Putting this all together with the idiom of “knowing good and evil” as “having the power of discernment and decision-making” suggests to me an implication that Adam and Eve did not have sex in Eden. They are almost comical figures: although we always imagine them to be adults, they act in some ways like children. I picture a couple of grown-ups running around naked not having sex and not having the ability to tell what’s good for them (like sex, or immortality) and bad for them (death), until they get a little “push” from outside—and then it’s too late.

There is one more thing to add: somewhere, many years ago, I read an interesting comment about the Garden of Eden story. I can no longer remember who wrote this or where I read it. The suggestion, however, was that by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve in effect (I’m not saying this was their motive) traded a shot at personal, individual immortality that they might have achieved by eating from the tree of life for communal, species immortality achieved through procreation. There is always a tension between the prolonging of individual lives and the multiplication of the number of human lives, when it comes to space and resource management. This idea of individual immortality vs. extending the species through procreation seems to me to bolster my impression of a “chaste” Eden.

Update: See Stephen Cook’s follow-up post for some additional considerations. (This is for those of you who don’t read the comments.)