Neither Cursed nor Punished: Natural Law in Genesis 2–3 and J

Abstract

Gendered criticism of Eve and general criticism of Eve and Adam are rooted in the idea of their moral failing when they disobey Yahweh. Two lenses bring a more ancient understanding of the text into focus. The first lens is reading the story in the context of the J source of the Pentateuch. The second lens is that of natural law as understood by Greco-Roman philosophers. These lenses provide new clarity, showing how Eve and Adam’s decision to eat from the tree of knowledge violates a non-moral norm: they transgress the boundary between humanity and divinity. It is this ontological transgression to which Yahweh responds. Mortality, many labors, and many pregnancies reflect the natural consequences of this ontological violation, not an arbitrary punishment for a moral failing. This alternative understanding of Genesis 2–3 allows us to understand that Eve and Adam are neither cursed nor punished.

1. Introduction

Eve does not fare well among Jewish and Christian writers early in the common era. For example, both Philo and an early Christian writing as the apostle Paul blame Eve for the “sin” in the garden of Eden. She, not Adam, is “deceived” in the garden, which these authors regard as an inherent weakness among women more generally. They see this idea reinforced by how Yahweh “punishes” Eve when he subjects her to the desire and rule of her husband in Genesis 3:16, an authoritative social hierarchy they believe is divinely ordained for perpetuity.1 This interpretive tradition has dominated the Western intellectual tradition ever since, with terrible consequences.

Where does this interpretive tradition originate? As Abi Doukhan has demonstrated, it reflects the socio-cultural context of Hellenism from which it emerged, specifically Aristotelian views on gender (Doukhan 2020). But it does not appear to be the only way ancient authors could interpret the events in the garden. The apostle Paul identifies Adam—not Eve—as the perpetrator of the sin that brings death to all humanity (Rom 5:12–14; 1 Cor 15:21–22). Blaming Adam for the sin in the garden and passing on an inheritance of death is also present in an earlier Jewish work (4 Ez 3:21; 7:116–119)2. But whether these authors blame Eve or Adam, they share the view that the couple are perpetrators of moral wrongdoing.

Despite the tendency of many to assume some kind of interpretation of moral wrongdoing (focusing on either Eve, Adam, or the couple together) is native to Genesis, the text contains considerable ambiguity. The earliest documented history of interpreting the text is several centuries removed from when this story was first committed to writing. Unlike other figures from Genesis like Noah, Abraham, or Jacob, who appear throughout the Hebrew Bible, some of them repeatedly so, we lack commentary within the Hebrew Bible on Eve, Adam, or the events in the garden3. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the idea that Yahweh commands the humans, that the humans disobey Yahweh, and that Yahweh punishes them for their disobedience does not come directly from the text of Genesis but from interpretations of certain semantic and narrative ambiguities in the text (Kelly 2022). In this article, I demonstrate that Eve and Adam are not guilty of moral wrongdoing but rather transgress an ontological natural law: the boundary between humanity and divinity. Yahweh imposes on them the logical consequences of this ontological transgression. These consequences are distinct from the punishments that Yahweh imposes on humans elsewhere in J for their transgressions of moral natural laws.

2. Two Lenses for Reimagining Genesis 3

Interpreters since the Enlightenment have made various attempts to reinterpret Genesis 3 in ways that are less critical of the human pursuit of knowledge (Lang 2014). More recently, interpreters have become interested in reevaluating the problematic views of gender that persist in the dominant interpretive tradition (Trible 1978, pp. 72–143, esp. pp. 126–32). But these attempts have not yet produced a compelling alternative. My proposal for such an alternative involves approaching the texts through two lenses. The first lens, source criticism, allows us to imagine the story in an alternative literary context. Rather than read the story in light of the broader Hebrew Bible, a context unavailable to the story’s earliest audiences, source critical theories of composition invite us to imagine the kind of literary context for Genesis 3 with which ancient Israelites and Judahites would have been more familiar. As for the second lens, I want to return to Greco-Roman philosophy. While Aristotle’s views of gender may be culpable in helping blame Eve for the wrongdoing that interpreters at the turn of the common era identified in Genesis 3, Greco-Roman philosophical reflection on natural law helps us reimagine how ancient Israelite and Judahites may have interpreted this significant chapter of the Bible.

The source-critical lens I adopt is the documentary hypothesis, particularly as outlined by Joel Baden (Baden 2012). Specifically, I understand Genesis 2–3 to belong to the J source of the Pentateuch, “a coherent, continuous, virtually complete account of Israel’s history from creation through the death of Moses” (Baden 2012, p. 45). That said, I acknowledge that issues of Pentateuchal source criticism remain hotly disputed. While I frame my argument in relation to the documentary hypothesis, not all aspects of my argument require acceptance of this theory of Pentateuchal origins. First, the part of my argument that examines a theme within J’s primeval history will not differ in any significant way from how non-documentarian scholars understand the non-P primeval history.4 Second, my observations about natural law in J texts remain valid even if scholars do not identify these texts as belonging to a coherent, continuous, and complete source document. As my argument will demonstrate, a natural law tradition exists in the Pentateuch and there is no reason to assume that Genesis 2–3 could not belong to it, even if for reasons unrelated to the documentary hypothesis. I would argue, however, that the consistency of the natural law perspective in texts assigned to J can serve to support the claims about the coherence of the J texts and the current iteration of the documentary hypothesis espoused by Baden and others.5

The philosophical lens I adopt is natural law, especially as theorized by Greco-Roman philosophers who viewed natural law as identical to divine law. I have elsewhere documented a robust discussion among scholars of natural law within the Hebrew Bible (Kelly 2013, pp. 14–18).6 In her study of biblical discourses of divine law, Christine Hayes identifies two modalities of divine law in the Hebrew Bible, “the modality of a divinely revealed body of laws and instructions and the modality of a universal order that governs the universe,” the latter of which resembles the Greco-Roman natural law tradition (Hayes 2015, pp. 14–39, quote on p. 39).7 She documents how Jewish writings initially attempted to unite these two modalities, but tension between them became increasingly apparent, eventually leading to a “messy multi-dimensionality of biblical divine law discourse” about which post-biblical Jewish writers have found it difficult to find consensus (Hayes 2015, pp. 39–41, quote on p. 53). What her analysis of these discourses does not do is to look at independent sources of the Pentateuch to determine whether the tension she identifies is within or merely across these sources. Baden, however, distinguishes J from the other sources of the Pentateuch as distinctly rooted in natural law (Baden 2013, pp. 115–16, 148–50). What Baden is referencing is what Hayes identifies as one of two primary discourses associated with divine law in the Greco-Roman world, namely “divine law as natural law, a rational logos that is universal, immutable, and allied with truth” (Hayes 2015, pp. 54–60, quote on p. 87). As I will demonstrate, Yahweh upholds in J a kind of justice that belongs to this intellectual tradition, not a body of written positive law that applies to a particular group of people or particular period of time.

My argument unfolds in four parts. First, I examine instances in which Yahweh enforces justice in J, observing characteristics about when and why Yahweh intervenes in human affairs. Second, I examine the source of the norms violated when Yahweh intervenes, identifying them as instances of natural law as it would have been understood by Greco-Roman philosophers. Third, I examine the significance of J’s Sinai theophany, which lacks any tradition of lawgiving. Fourth, I reinterpret Genesis 2–3 through a natural law lens. In doing so, Eve and Adam are rescued from any guilt associated with moral wrongdoing in the garden. Furthermore, Eve is rescued from the unique guilt she and all womankind experience as a result of misogynistic interpretations of this text.

3. Fire, Brimstone, and Other Ways to Die

Ancient people feared the wrath of the gods, who meted out punishment to wrongdoers. In this respect, J’s understanding of Yahweh is unexceptional among the writings of ancient Southwest Asia (van der Toorn 1985).8 Yahweh is perhaps most well known—infamous even?—for nearly destroying all life on Earth with a flood in response to human wickedness. In J, the flood generation’s wickedness is generic, unlike in P where all the creatures (not just humans) engage in violence against one another. That the human mind is inclined toward wickedness particularly troubles Yahweh, who regrets having made humanity and decides to destroy it (along with the innocent animal kingdom). In contrast to the generically wicked flood generation, Noah is generically righteous. Yahweh preserves the righteous Noah and his family through the flood, for which Noah offers Yahweh burnt offerings. In response to Noah’s sacrifice, Yahweh changes his mind about humanity despite recognizing that the human condition has not changed. Yahweh commits to never again punishing all of humanity at one time. The purpose of this story in J is not to explore the nature of wickedness or righteousness but to explore the change that takes place in the mind of Yahweh, one that tolerates wickedness in humanity and subsequently more selectively intervenes in human affairs.

J’s stories contain other significant examples of divine justice against moral wrongdoing that reveal characteristics of Yahweh’s intervention in human affairs. When Isaac lies to Abimelech, King of Gerar, claiming that his wife Rebekah is merely his sister, he creates a dangerous situation for the men of Gerar (Gen 26). To take another man’s wife and sleep with her would bring guilt (and, by implication, divine wrath) upon the city, as Abimelech explains when he discovers the true nature of Rebekah’s relationship to Isaac. What Abimelech fears could have happened in Gerar happens in Egypt when Isaac’s father, Abraham, first fabricates this same lie about his wife Sarah (Gen 12:10–20). In this case, Pharaoh takes Abraham’s so-called sister as his wife, and Yahweh afflicts Pharaoh and his house with plagues. Both stories, implicitly or explicitly, illustrate how Yahweh metes out punishment against the guilty. Unlike in the case of the flood earlier in J’s narrative, the one bearing (or nearly bearing) guilt in these stories is an unwitting participant in the wrongdoing, a victim of the patriarch’s lies.9 From these stories, we learn that an individual in J need not have intended wrongdoing or erred knowingly to be culpable and subject to divine wrath.10

The fallout from the lies Abraham and Isaac tell Pharaoh and Abimelech illustrate another characteristic of Yahweh, namely that he punishes inconspicuous wrongdoing. Abraham’s lies prevent Pharaoh’s guilt from exposure to any civic entity capable of carrying out justice. Given Abraham and Sarah’s persistent silence, only Yahweh could expose Pharaoh’s guilt and hold him accountable. This characteristic of Yahweh is prominent in another, somewhat peculiar, story in J found in Genesis (38:1–11). Jacob’s son Judah, Isaac’s grandson, fathers three sons. The narrator tells us that Yahweh kills Er, the firstborn, because of his wickedness. Er’s death introduces a complication into the story because he had just married Tamar. Judah’s family (and the audience of the J narrative) considered it a brother’s duty to marry the widow of one’s childless brother in order to provide offspring for that brother. Onan, the second son of Judah, disliked the idea that he should father a child who would not be considered his own. To avoid becoming the uncle of his own biological child, Onan pulls out before climaxing and ejaculates on the ground whenever he has sex with Tamar. Onan practices an early form of birth control—coitus interruptus—to disregard his customary duty to his brother. He violates an ancient social norm in a way that avoids human scrutiny. Yahweh, however, sees Onan’s wickedness, just as he saw the wickedness of his older brother Er, and he kills Onan. As the stories of Onan, Pharaoh, and Abimelech illustrate, Yahweh’s agency surfaces in particular instances where society itself is incapable of adjudicating otherwise inconspicuous acts of wrongdoing. When crimes are public and subject to social control, Yahweh’s agency typically recedes from the story.11

The exception, of course, is society-wide wickedness. J’s flood story demonstrates Yahweh’s intolerance toward a generically wicked society, but it is not the only such instance in J’s broader narrative. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah likewise illustrates a divine impetus for addressing community-scale moral collapse (Genesis 19). When Yahweh’s emissaries enter the city of Sodom, they confirm Yahweh’s suspicions about the depravity of the city. Despite the hospitality that Abraham’s nephew Lot provides them—offering them food and lodging for the night—the two emissaries are subject to profound inhospitality from the rest of the city’s men, who attempt to gang rape them. These divine emissaries blind their would-be rapists. Next, they usher Lot and his two daughters out of the region before Yahweh himself rains down fire and sulfur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their inhabitants.

The severity of the punishment that Yahweh inflicts upon Sodom is often (mis)understood in relation to Western debates about human sexuality. By contrast, the sixth-century prophet Ezekiel compares the people of Judah to Sodom, specifically accusing them of pride, abundance, and the failure to aid the poor and needy (Ezek 16:49–50). Sex was not at the core of how ancient people understood Sodom’s wickedness and would not have shaped their understanding of the severity of Yahweh’s punishment. Rather, Sodom’s wickedness—what turns it into a byword for prophets and later writers of the New Testament—is in the pervasiveness of the crime, not the nature of it. Like the flood story earlier in Genesis, everyone in the story is implicated.12 When entire communities give themselves over to wickedness, nothing short of divine intervention can restore justice in the world.

4. Justice According to Whom?

The justice that Yahweh restores deserves further attention. From where do the norms that Yahweh enforces come? Are these Yahweh’s rules or are they rules created by humans? J is not particularly eager to answer these questions for us. In each of these stories where Yahweh metes out punishment, we never encounter formal laws, human or divine, prescribing how humans ought to behave or proscribing actions they ought to avoid.13 Take, for example, J’s flood. Yahweh regards humanity as wicked. The flood story itself does not say what exactly the humans did that was wrong, and the story prior to the flood is mostly silent about how humans ought to behave. The closest we come to moral instruction prior to the flood is the counsel Yahweh provides to Cain, who becomes upset when Yahweh favors his brother Abel’s offering over that of his own. Yahweh, quite succinctly, exhorts the sullen Cain to “do good.” Furthermore, Yahweh describes sin as a lurking predator that Cain must attempt to master (Gen 4:7). This counsel assumes Cain already knows the difference between right and wrong. Yahweh encourages Cain to do what he already knows is good and to avoid what he already knows is not good. At the beginning of the narrative, it seems as though right and wrong simply exist; they are neither laid down nor altered by what Yahweh says.14

As the narrative progresses, the crimes become more explicit; yet, the narrative is no more forthcoming about why these actions are deemed wrong. The guilt Abimelech fears and the guilt Pharoah brings upon his house results from an action that is never explicitly proscribed anywhere in the narrative. To make sense of the story, we must assume that not sleeping with another man’s wife is a norm broadly known and accepted by the humans in the story. But the narrative never explains to its audience why humans consider this action to be wrong. Likewise, when Judah instructs his son to “perform the duty of a brother-in-law” and impregnate Tamar, his dead brother’s wife, the duty he refers to has not been introduced prior in the narrative. We must assume this duty was broadly known and accepted by other humans, once again without knowing why humans recognized this duty. Finally, the inhabitants of Sodom violate norms of hospitality prominent throughout the ancient world but never explained in the narrative world of J. All these stories of divine punishment depict Yahweh punishing humans for crimes that are never explicitly legislated.

While these stories do not endeavor to explain where these norms originate, we can use insights developed by Greco-Roman philosophers to analyze the implicit ideas about right and wrong in the J source. Do these characters violate norms laid down by authorities with an alterable will, are they exclusive to a specific group of people, are they written laws to be strictly obeyed, and are they imperfect and ultimately in conflict with higher norms? Such ideas reflect the category of positive law that can exist alongside, but distinct from and potentially in conflict with, natural law (Hayes 2015, pp. 62–89). If they possess the opposite qualities—if the norms are laid down by authorities with an unalterable will, if they are held in common across diverse people-groups, if they are unwritten norms to be adaptively applied, or if they reflect a singular, universal standard—then Greco-Roman philosophers would have classified these norms as natural law (Hayes 2015, pp. 54–61).15 Analyzing these narratives with these categories in mind reveals a consistent pattern in J.

In the case of Onan, he wrongs his deceased brother, whose name will be erased from a patrilineal society without a patronymic offspring. He also wrongs Tamar, who deserves a husband with whom to sire children. Tamar’s father-in-law, Judah, similarly wrongs her when he deprives her of his third son, Shelah, after Onan’s death. (Because this wrongdoing is public, Tamar herself is able to rectify it. Yahweh does not involve himself.) In Judah’s case, only Tamar is presented as the victim of Judah’s wrongdoing, not her first husband and his oldest child, Er: “She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah” (Gen 38:26). When we consider the wrongdoing of Onan and Judah against Tamar, the norm involves her right to obtain a husband and children from him. In the book of Ruth, Naomi’s concern for securing a husband for the widowed Ruth appears to be about her “security” (Ruth 3:1), a universal concern that is not restricted (at least not in the book of Ruth) to in-group members. When Onan wrongs Er, by contrast, the norm concerns property inheritance and kinship concerns present in societies that frown upon exogamous marriages. Ultimately, the levirate marriage tradition is multifaceted within both the Hebrew Bible and Judaism more broadly (Weisberg 2009). The complexity of this tradition makes it more difficult to analyze than the other stories from J we are examining. The norm is unwritten in the context of Genesis 38, and the way the tradition is taken up in different ways throughout the Hebrew Bible demonstrates how ancient Israelites and Judahites were not inflexibly wedded to a single written version of the law but adapted it to different circumstances.16 At the same time, the concerns about kinship and property inheritance are less conducive to being understood as a universal standard since they reflect in-group anxieties concerning property, kinship relations, etc. While aspects of the story of Onan may not comfortably reflect in every way how Greco-Roman philosophers came to understand the natural law tradition, the story contains other aspects that better reflect the tradition. For the sake of this analysis, the clarity of the latter is more significant than the ambiguity of the former. The story of Onan nods in the direction of natural law as understood by Greco-Roman philosophers.

In the case of Pharaoh and of Abimelech, the wrongdoer more clearly violates a norm best understood through the lens of natural law. Even though Abraham merely sojourns in Egypt and Gerar, both Pharaoh and Abimelech scold Abraham for not warning them against taking his wife Sarah as their own. These leaders presume that the Hebrew foreigner is familiar with the guilt one would face from sleeping with another man’s wife. They assume the norm they violated, or nearly violated, is universal. This is not a local custom or law exclusive to a specific group of people but is held in common across different people-groups and accessible to any rational human being. As for the authority laying down this norm and whether it could potentially conflict with higher norms, the text does not reveal as much. To the extent that we can make judgments from the text, the norm in these two scenes reflects the characteristics that Greco-Roman philosophers associated with natural law.

In the case of the flood and of Sodom and Gomorrah, the violated norms must be a kind of natural law. The violated norms are not exclusive to a specific people-group in either story. The flood concerns all humanity, and the story of Sodom’s inhospitality in Genesis 19 contrasts with the hospitality Abraham shows Yahweh and his emissaries one chapter earlier, implying the universality of the norm.17 Because we do not know what crime the flood generation is guilty of, there is no reason to think the violated norm was laid down by an authority with an alterable will. The generic wickedness of the flood generation does not allow for the unstated norm they violated to be distinct from and inferior to a higher, natural law. Likewise, the hospitality Sodom denies Yahweh’s emissaries is not distinct from and inferior to some other kind of friendly behavior toward visitors. Both stories are classic examples of natural law as understood by Greco-Roman philosophers.

Greco-Roman philosophers, particularly the Stoics, equated natural and divine law (Hayes 2015, pp. 55–58).18 Thus, they would not share the ancient Israelite and Judahite belief that Israel received “divine” laws at Sinai. The Sinai legislation is not universal, as it is given distinctly to Israel and not to other nations. Moreover, the laws are written down and claim to be unalterable (Deut 4:2; 12:32), which starkly contrasts with the idea of an unwritten, flexible standard. It is also possible to understand the laws of Moses as inferior to an earlier/higher norm, as Jesus understands Moses’s commands concerning divorce to conflict with a norm concerning marriage established at creation (Mark 10:5–9). One might therefore conclude that the resemblance between the Greco-Roman characteristics of natural law and the norms in these J stories ultimately depart from the natural law tradition insofar as Israelite and Judahite thinking recognized a different relationship between natural and divine law. This conclusion, however, is unwarranted. While Sinai may be the location of a significant event in Israel’s wandering through the wilderness, its significance is unrelated to divine commandments when J is isolated from the other sources of the Pentateuch. Below, I isolate the wilderness narrative in J from the other sources of the Pentateuch to demonstrate how J’s understanding of Sinai does not undermine the observations made thus far about natural law.

5. Does Yahweh Command at Sinai?

After escaping from bondage in Egypt, the Israelites encounter the harsh wilderness. Yahweh is eager to provide the Israelites with what they need in the desert, but he also desires their trust. When they complain about the bitterness of the water, he makes it sweet, promising to heal the Israelites if only they would do as he says (Exod 15:23–36). Yahweh’s words consist not of moral council nor of laws by which to structure society but of advice for surviving in the wilderness. In the next episode, Yahweh tests the Israelites by providing them with bread for six days, including a double provision on the final day. They are to collect the surplus on the sixth day so that they can rest on the seventh day. (Since the Israelites in J do not receive laws like the Ten Commandments, this is J’s way of accounting for the origin of the sabbath.) Some Israelites fail Yahweh’s test when they attempt to gather food on the seventh day, and Yahweh verbally admonishes them for not listening to his instructions (Exod 16:4–5; 26–30). Thus begins the theme of testing in J: Yahweh tests the Israelites to see if they will trust him and follow his advice and the Israelites test Yahweh’s patience because they do not trust him and will not act as he instructs. In the next episode, the Israelites complain once again of thirst, this time raising the question, “Is Yahweh among us or not?” (Exod 17:7).

What transpires at Mount Sinai is Yahweh’s attempt to convince the Israelites that he is indeed among them. Yahweh instructs Moses to prepare the people because he intends to appear before them on top of Mount Sinai. Granted, the Israelites have seen great wonders performed by Moses in Yahweh’s name—some in Egypt and now some in the desert. But they have not seen Yahweh himself. Perhaps all the Israelites need is to see Yahweh. But for Yahweh to appear before the people, they must cleanse themselves of impurity and ensure they do not approach the mountain too closely. Yahweh’s presence is both attractive and dangerous; the story implies the people will want to approach the divine presence, a presence that regularly threatens to consume the Israelites throughout their wandering in the desert. (It even does so—consumes at least some of the Israelites—on one occasion.) Only Moses and some of the elders of Israel are permitted to ascend Mount Sinai when Yahweh descends upon it in fire and wrapped in smoke (Exod 19:10–16a, 18a, 20–25). Once the preparations have been made, Yahweh appears. What do the Israelites see? It is clearly a body of some sort.19 But the narrator does not describe Yahweh’s body, instead capturing the appearance of the ground below: “Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness” (Exod 24:1–2; 9–11a). While the Israelites see a brilliant vision, they hear no sound when Yahweh appears on Mount Sinai. He codifies no commandments, lays down no legislation. Without a single word, he answers the question posed by the Israelites, “Is Yahweh among us or not?”20 The Israelites have seen with their own eyes that, indeed, Yahweh is among them.

And that is it. Mount Sinai does not represent Yahweh’s authority as some kind of moral legislator (at least not in J). It is not where Yahweh recites his precepts; rather, it is where he reveals his presence. After Yahweh appears before Moses, the elders, and the Israelites, nothing else occurs on the mountain. Yahweh directs Moses to lead the people to the land he first promised to Abraham (Exod 33:1).21 Neither on the mountain nor in the episodes that follow does Yahweh issue any kind of extended legal code to the Israelites. All the legal traditions we encounter in the Pentateuch belong to its other sources.

6. Does Yahweh Command in Eden?

The discussion thus far clarifies how the J source consistently views human moral wrongdoing punished by Yahweh as a violation of natural law. The norms that humans violate throughout J are universal, timeless, and unwritten. But this consistency is called into question if we understand Eve and Adam in the garden of Eden as morally culpable for violating Yahweh’s command in Genesis 2:17. Yahweh’s words against eating from the tree of knowledge reflect the particular, time-bound, and written characteristics that Greco-Roman philosophers associated with positive law. The command applies to particular people, Eve and Adam, during a particular period of time, their residence in the garden of Eden. The command does not apply to all people at all times. Furthermore, insofar as it must be uttered in order for it to operate in the world, the command belongs to the category of written, positive law, not to unwritten, natural reason.22 The conflict between positive law in Genesis 2–3 and natural law elsewhere in J only exists if we interpret Genesis 2–3 according to the dominant interpretation first laid down by early Jews and Christians, as a human violation of a divine commandment and a narrative of moral failing. Can we credibly interpret it differently?23

After creating a human to live upon and work the land in Genesis 2, English Bibles credit Yahweh with imposing his will on the man by issuing a command (Gen 2:16–17).24 But the verb tsavah has a wider range of meaning, including advice giving. Is Yahweh commanding Adam or advising him? English translations tend to assume that, when Yahweh is performing the tsavah-ing anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, he must be commanding. They consistently translate tsavah as “command” regardless of the context, ignoring the verb’s wider range of meaning (Kelly 2022, pp. 613–16). Genesis 2:16 is the perfect text to interrogate this practice. What Yahweh supposedly “commands” Adam in the garden does not merely cover the prohibition—do not eat from the tree of knowledge—it also includes what comes before. Yahweh tsavahs Adam to eat from every other tree in the garden. Is it imperative for Adam to eat from every tree? No one seriously interprets these words in this way. Yahweh’s words here are permissive, not prescriptive. Yahweh is not saying that Adam must eat but that he may eat. When it comes to what Adam is invited to eat, the tsavah is advice about what the human can safely consume as food. It is information and not a command. So why should we assume that Yahweh’s words regarding the tree of the knowledge prohibit and not discourage? Could must not eat rather mean should not eat?

It makes it difficult to hear his words as cautioning and not commanding when Yahweh threatens to punish Adam with death. But it is not clear that Yahweh’s words portend some kind of punishment. Certainly, Yahweh could execute Adam as a punishment for disobedience, but the text says nothing about execution—it speaks of death generically. Neither does it speak about the death itself being a punishment. Death can be a punishment, but death can also be a consequence, as though Yahweh were advising Adam by saying, “You should know that if you do this you will die.” Some interpreters insist Yahweh is threatening to execute Adam. The underlying Hebrew expression, literally “dying you will die”, is similar to how legal texts in other sources of the Pentateuch describe capital punishment. But similar is not identical, and the expression ultimately speaks to the certainty of the event, not to the timing or the manner of it.25 Interpreters who favor the execution reading have long had to wrestle with the fact that Yahweh does not kill the couple when Eve and Adam eat the so-called forbidden fruit. In fact, Adam lives an uncharacteristically long life.26 But this problem goes away when we understand death as a fate rather than an event, as a consequence rather than a punishment. By exiling the couple and cutting off their access to the tree of life, the humans now face the certainty of mortality (Carr 2020, pp. 49–51). That mortal fate is a consequence of choosing to eat from the tree of knowledge, but why?

The J narrative begins with numerous stories that explore the boundary between humans and gods. Eve and Adam become godlike when they acquire divine-like knowledge (Gen 3:22). The sons of Elohim, a reference to divine beings, sleep with human women, who bear their hybrid offspring (Gen 6:1–4). Finally, the human race attempts to build a city that rises to the heavens—the domain of the gods—and to establish a name for themselves (Gen 11:1–9). In each of these stories, humans transgress the boundary between themselves and gods, and Yahweh intervenes to fortify that boundary. He confuses human language and scatters the people building the city. He limits the human lifespan to 120 years as divine beings breed with humans. And he exiles Eve and Adam from the garden, removing their access to the tree of life, which would make them more fully divine. These stories are not about people rejecting Yahweh’s authority by disobeying his commands. In two of the three stories, Yahweh says nothing even resembling a command. These stories are about Yahweh preserving the distinction between gods and humans (Carr 2020, pp. 34–35). We hear this concern directly from Yahweh in the garden, “Now that humankind has become like any of us, knowing good and bad, what if one should stretch out a hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” (Gen 3:22). Eve and Adam have acquired one divine trait—knowledge. Yahweh will not permit them to acquire another. In pursuing divine knowledge, they have sealed their mortal fate.

That the boundary between humans and gods must be preserved represents the natural law operating in our narrative, the law behind Yahweh’s advice to the humans to avoid the tree of knowledge and the violated norm that requires Yahweh to remove them from Eden, where they could yet access the tree of life and further transgress the human-divine boundary. It is this need to remove Eve and Adam from Eden and from access to the tree of life that explains the other two details in the story often understood as divine punishment: the toil Yahweh discloses to Adam and the many pregnancies he discloses to Eve (Gen 3:16–19). But these details are not punishments like the other punishments we examined in J. In transgressing the boundary between humans and gods, Eve and Adam commit an ontological transgression but not a moral one. They are not punished for disobedience but face the logical consequences of their actions. By cutting off their access to the tree of life, Yahweh fundamentally alters the way the humans will experience the world. Tending fruit trees in a divinely-planted river-fed garden presented the humans with no serious burden, no need for divine knowledge, and the tree of life precluded the need for human reproduction. But outside the garden, the humans confront a more toilsome agricultural reality where they will be forced to exercise their newly acquired intelligence. One significant consequence of this new environment is that women must bear many children to provide the labor necessary for subsistence (Meyers 2012, pp. 81–102; Meyers 2024). Childbearing additionally solves the problem created when humans no longer have access to the tree of life and the prospect of immortality. As mortals face aging and death, children tend their parents as they age and provide a means to perpetuate the human species. Agricultural toil and childbearing reflect the logical consequences the humans face when they choose divine-like knowledge and the mortal existence this knowledge brings with it. To argue they are arbitrary punishments for disobeying Yahweh requires us to introduce vocabulary and concepts that are not necessary to make sense of this story.

7. Neither Cursed nor Punished

When we interpret Genesis 2–3 through the lens of natural law present elsewhere in the J source of the Pentateuch, we encounter a fundamentally different story. No longer are we concerned about the abstract idea of obedience to Yahweh exemplified through the command not to eat from a particular fruit tree in Eden. Rather, we encounter a deity who instinctively guards the boundary between gods and humans and who warns humanity in Genesis 2 about the mortal consequence of transgressing that boundary. The consequences Eve and Adam face in Genesis 3, often misidentified as punishments for a moral failing, reflect Yahweh preserving the ontological distinction between humanity and divinity, which was regarded as the natural order in antiquity. The J source is consistent in its portrayal of humanity facing the consequences for wicked or otherwise consequential behavior, but it does not understand such behavior as a failure to obey Yahweh. In these stories, humanity violates natural law and, when necessary, Yahweh intervenes to restore justice or order to the world. Not only would ancient audiences of J’s narrative not have understood the early Jewish and Christian criticism of Eve and Adam as sinners for disobeying God, but they would also be perplexed by the unbalanced gendered criticism of Eve that took hold within that tradition.