The Fall: Understanding the Hebrew Myth

The illustration to the Shakespeare Glossary is a famous mural by Masaccio called The Expulsion from the Garden (in Italian, "La cacciata dei progenitori dal Paradiso Terrestre").*
Masaccio painted it on the wall of the Brancacci Chapel in the Santa Maria del Carmine church in Florence around 1425.
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The Biblical story of human disobedience and banishment from Eden -- accompanied by sin, death, and labor (male and female) -- can be understood from many perspectives. One is in terms of knowledge.

In this founding Judaeo-Christian myth, the forbidden fruit offers "the knowledge of Good and Evil." Rather than consider the content of these two cosmic terms, consider their structure of (binary) difference, like other primal distinctions in the Book of Genesis between darkness and light, earth and heaven, male and female. The Fall thus represents the knowledge of difference: of human from divine, man from woman, or one hour from another. For we "fall" into time, into awareness of mortality, into history. The myth narrates the genesis of human consciousness, whereby human beings come to terms with their distinct relation to a world previously merely inhabited in a pre-lapserian (before the fall), paradisal state: without labor or time. Among these new terms of relation are language, or tools, or other modes of re-presentation (such as art). These are instruments of post-lapserian alienation that offer intellectual and imaginative modes to recover or reconstruct our "paradise lost."

From this perspective, the tragic yet fortunate result of the Fall is the origin of symbolic language: of invented and negotiated relations between people and cultures, of science and the arts, of gradually finer distinctions in the large human project of differentiation. The Shakespeare Glossary is an instance of such distinctions. It offers terms that are tools to think with. Thinking, after all, is the human curse and blessing. For instance, it can translate expulsion into wonder.

Milton describes the banishment of Adam and Eve at the very end of Paradise Lost (1667):


Gustave Doré, The Expulsion from Paradise
illustration to Book 12 of Paradise Lost
 (1866 edition)

 

                                    High in front advanc'd,
The brandished sword of God before them blaz'd
Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapor as the Libyan air adust,
Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat
In either hand the hast'ning angel caught
Our lingring parents, and to th' eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappear'd.
They looking back, all th' eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropp'd, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

* cacciare = drive away, chase, hunt
progenitori = first parents
Paradiso Terrestre = earthly paradise
(the Archangel who expels Adam and Eve is Michael)

© David Willbern 2001