Five Ancient Near Eastern Stories Behind Three Biblical Creation Stories

Every semester, before my students open the Bible, I ask them to tell me the story of Adam and Eve. And every semester, I get the same answer:

Eve takes an apple from a tree because a serpent (who is really the devil) tempts her; she and Adam eat it; God punishes them for original sin and expels them from paradise.

It is a remarkably stable set of responses, regardless of whether the students have ever read the Bible, because everyone knows the Eden story—it is simply part of the cultural atmosphere.

Then we open our Bibles and read through the story together, only to discover that virtually nothing in that summary shows up in Genesis 2–3. There is no apple.[1] There is no devil. The word “sin” does not appear in the Bible until the next chapter.^[2] It turns out that what my students “know” is not the biblical text but its long history of interpretation, so thoroughly absorbed into Western culture that it can be difficult to see what the text itself actually says—let alone what it would have meant to its original authors and audiences.

This is why we spend several weeks reading ancient Near Eastern texts, before we open Genesis again. As I explain and demonstrate retroactively, in order to avoid reading the text in light of what came later, we need to understand what came before בְּרֵאשִׁית, “in the beginning” (Gen 1:1): stories from Mesopotamia and Canaan that the biblical authors and their audiences knew because they were the literary and cultural inheritance of the entire region.

The Bible as Midrash on ANE Literature

Reading Genesis 1–3 without the ancient Near Eastern background is a bit like reading a midrash without the verse it is commenting on. You can follow the story the midrash is telling, but you lose the question it is answering and the interpretive move it is making. The point of a midrash is always partly what it does with its source. The same is true here—except the sources the biblical authors were working with are the older traditions of their world—stories that in some cases predate the Torah by well over a thousand years.

The parallels between these texts and Genesis are striking. But it is the differences—the deliberate departures, the inversions, the polemical reframings—that are most revealing. The biblical authors borrowed a shared vocabulary of primordial waters, wisdom, immortality, serpents, and divine combat; and then they used it to make arguments. Understanding what those arguments were requires knowing what they were arguing against.^[3]

The Mesopotamian Background

Mesopotamia, the civilization of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys in modern Iraq, was a literary superpower in the ancient world. Its cuneiform literature, inscribed on clay tablets, extends back to the 4^th millennium B.C.E. and includes some of the oldest narratives we possess.

Many Israelites were likely familiar with this tradition, through centuries of trade, imperialism and colonial exploitation, diplomacy, and eventually through the direct experience of exile: the Assyrian deportations of the northern kingdom beginning in the late 8^th century B.C.E., and the Babylonian exile of the 6^th century, placed significant portions of the Israelite and Judean population directly inside Mesopotamian culture.

Four Mesopotamian texts are particularly important for reading Genesis: Atrahasis, Enuma Elish, the myth of Adapa, and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Atrahasis: Why Do Humans Exist?

The myth that we call Atrahasis survives in several versions; the most complete dates to around 1700 B.C.E., though it draws on even older traditions.^[4] The focus of the story is a flood—during which the eponymous hero (whose name means “extra wise”^[5]), upon direction from Ea, the god of wisdom, builds a large floating box and saves his family and pairs of each animal species—but the story begins with the question of why humans exist.

The junior gods—the worker-gods—have been doing the heavy labor of maintaining the world: digging irrigation canals and performing agricultural work. After forty double-years, they have had enough and decide to go on strike. They burn their tools, march on the palace of the chief god Enlil, and threaten revolt. The council of gods devises a solution: create a lower class of beings to do the work instead. The mother-goddess Mami (also called Nintu) takes clay, mixes it with the blood of a slaughtered god, and fashions humanity. The purpose of the creation is stated explicitly by Ea:

^{Atrahasis II ll.69–70} “Let the mother goddess create humanity,
Let man bear the drudgery of god.”^[6]

The point: people exist to serve the gods—to provide their food offerings, tend their temples, and work their land. This is a Mesopotamian answer to the question of human purpose.

The logic behind this creation story also reflects a set of assumptions that will run through all of the Mesopotamian texts that we examine. In the worldview of ancient Mesopotamia, two things separated gods from humans: wisdom—divine knowledge and the secrets of the cosmos—and immortality. The gods possessed both; humans were designed to possess neither.^[7] The literature returns again and again to what happens when humans approach one or both of these divine attributes.

Atrahasis itself illustrates the boundary. Enlil’s decision to destroy humanity is a secret of the divine council, and the gods bind themselves by oath not to reveal it. Atrahasis survives only because Ea circumvents that oath—speaking the plan to a reed wall where Atrahasis can overhear him, so as to keep the letter of his promise while breaking its substance.

When Enlil discovers that a human has escaped death by deluge, his fury is directed at the breach itself: a mortal has obtained knowledge that was not his to have. The hero’s name, “exceedingly wise,” is the point of the story. And notably, wisdom is as far as it goes. In the surviving text, the gods respond by negotiating new limits on human life—infant mortality, infertility, classes of women forbidden to bear children. Humanity survives, but the boundary is redrawn rather than crossed.^[8]

Enuma Elish: How Did the Cosmos Come to Be?

Enuma Elish, named for its opening words, “when on high/ above,” is the great Babylonian cosmogonic myth, probably reaching its current form sometime in the late 2^nd millennium B.C.E.^[9] While it ends with the creation of humans in a manner similar to Atrahasis (from the blood of a slain god, to do the gods’ labor), its distinctive contribution is its account of how the cosmos itself came to exist. In the beginning, there are only two primordial entities, personified as a divine couple: Apsu, the freshwaters, and Tiamat, the saltwater ocean:

^{Enuma Elish 1 ll.1–5} When on high no word was used for heaven
Nor below was firm ground called by name
Primeval Apsu was their progenitor
Matrix-Tiamat was she who bore them all
They were mingling their waters together….^[10]

They mingle their waters,^[11] and within this watery chaos, generations of gods are born, representing various elements of nature. The younger gods become noisy and disruptive. Apsu resolves to destroy them so he can get some rest; Tiamat objects, but the god of wisdom, Ea, acts first, killing Apsu and confining the fresh waters under his own control. Tiamat, enraged, forms an army of monsters and threatens war. It is Ea’s son Marduk, the storm god, who defeats her:

^{Enuma Elish IV.96–104} The ill wind he was holding behind him he released in her face…
The raging winds bloated her belly
Her insides were stopped up, she gaped her mouth wide
He shot off an arrow, it ruptured her belly
It cut to her innards, it pierced the heart.
He subdued her and snuffed out her life,
He flung down her carcass, he took a stand upon it.

From Tiamat’s corpse, Marduk fashions the cosmos. The story culminates with the creation of Bab-Ilim, “the gate of the gods” (in English: “Babylon”), the place where heaven and earth meet.

Adapa: Wisdom vs. Immortality

The myth of Adapa is attested in fragments from the early 2^nd millennium onward, including versions in Sumerian as well as Akkadian from the 15^th or 14^th century B.C.E. at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt—evidence of how widely this story circulated.^[12] It introduces a theme that will reverberate directly through the Eden narrative.

Adapa is a human being, but an extraordinary one: created by the god Ea with exceptional intelligence and insight. As the first of the seven sages, he brings the arts of civilization to humans and serves as Ea’s priest. His wisdom gives him nearly divine power, including the capacity to act in the cosmic order, not just within the human one.

One day, while fishing, he is capsized by the south wind. In his fury, Adapa curses the south wind and breaks its wing, disabling it. He is summoned to heaven by the sky-god Anu to answer for his transgression. Before he ascends, Ea—the god of wisdom and Adapa’s divine patron—coaches him not to eat or drink anything offered to him in heaven, because it will be the food and drink of death:

^{Adapa B.33–38} “When you come before Anu
They will proffer you food of death, do not eat!
They [will] proffer you water of death, do not drink!…
Do not neglect the instructions I give you,
Hold fast to the words that I have spoken.”^[13]

Upon meeting Adapa, however, Anu instead offers him the bread and water of life—immortality itself. But Adapa, following Ea’s instructions to the letter, refuses, and thus outsmarts himself and forfeits the one thing that would have made him divine. He descends from heaven still mortal, and the entire human race loses its chance at immortality, because of the very wisdom of its wisest member and the counsel of the god of wisdom himself.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Serpent and the Plant of Life

The Epic of Gilgamesh (2^nd millennium B.C.E.) was widely popular across the ancient Near East and is known from versions and translations discovered in scribal centers across the region.^[14] Gilgamesh is not a creation story—it is an epic about a king’s quest for immortality following the death of his beloved companion Enkidu. But two episodes in the epic are almost impossible to read without thinking of the story of the Garden of Eden (Gen 2–3).

The first involves Enkidu’s origin. Before his encounter with the human world, Enkidu lives in the wild with the animals, without cultural knowledge or human socialization. His transformation into a fully human being is mediated by a woman, the priestess Shamhat: she has sex with him, and then the animals run from him, no longer accepting him in their ranks. The Standard Babylonian Version (ca. 13^th–10^th century B.C.E.) describes his rejection thus:

^{Gilgamesh I.199–200} Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before,
but he had reason, he [was] wide of understanding.^[15]

Enkidu has gained “reason,” and Shamhat tells him that he has become “just like a god.”^[16] Shamhat teaches him to eat bread, drink beer, and wear clothing—the markers of civilized life. In other words: a woman mediates the transition from wild man to human, from nature to culture, from innocence to knowledge. This crossing is irreversible.

The second episode comes near the end of the epic. After his long quest, Gilgamesh obtains the plant of eternal life, a plant that grows at the bottom of the Apsu, the deep realm of the wisdom god Ea. He has it in his hands. But while he pauses to bathe a serpent steals the plant:

^{Gilgamesh XI.305–307} A snake smelled the fragrance of the plant,
[silently] it came up and bore the plant off;
as it turned away it sloughed a skin.^[17]

The serpent slithers away, shedding its skin in a demonstration that the plant works to rejuvenate its consumer, and Gilgamesh is left weeping on the shore. Humanity remains mortal.

The clustering of imagery in Gilgamesh—a woman who mediates knowledge, a plant of life, a serpent—appears in a text that predates the Eden narrative by hundreds of years. From its age and its wide popularity across the region (including a copy found at Megiddo in northern Israel^[18]) it seems beyond doubt that the authors of Genesis 2–3 knew this and/or related traditions.

The Canaanite Baal Cycle

The Mesopotamian texts originated in a place geographically distant from ancient Israel, though versions and literary influence traveled widely. The Canaanite texts are a different matter: Canaan was Israel’s immediate cultural environment—and in many important ways, its point of origin.

The major Canaanite mythological texts come down to us from the city of Ugarit, on the coast of modern Syria, and date to the 14^th and 13^th centuries B.C.E.^[19]—before the emergence of Israel as a distinct people, usually dated to the end of the 13^th century.^[20] They are written in Ugaritic, a language so closely related to Hebrew that scholars routinely use these texts to clarify obscure Hebrew passages.^[21]

The central Canaanite creation myth, the story of how cosmic order was established, is known to scholars as the Baal Cycle. Like Enuma Elish, it is structured around what scholars call a “combat myth”: a divine warrior defeats the forces of primordial chaos and creates the inhabitable cosmos by organizing the chaos into the world order. In the Baal Cycle, the storm god Baal must fight to establish his kingship over the gods against two challengers.

His first opponent is Yam—literally, “Sea.” Baal defeats Yam in battle with two magical clubs, establishing order over the chaotic waters:

^{Baal I.4.24–28} The club swooped in Baal’s hands,
like a vulture from his fingers.
It struck Prince Sea on the skull,
Judge River between the eyes.
Sea stumbled;
he fell to the ground;
his joints shook;
his frame collapsed.
Baal captured and pierced Sea;
he finished off Judge River.^[22]

But then he faces an even more dangerous challenger: Mot, Death itself.^[23] Baal dies and descends to the underworld. Baal’s warrior-sister Anat goes looking for him, and Mot tells her of his encounter with Baal:

^{Baal V.2.20–23} “I arrived at my pleasant place, the desert pasture,
the lovely fields on Death’s shore.
I approached Baal the Conqueror;
I put him in my mouth like a lamb;
he was crushed like a kid in my jaws.”

Anat avenges Baal, and he is resurrected. His death and revival are tied to the agricultural cycle: the dying and renewal of vegetation with the seasons.

The word baʿal in Hebrew and Canaanite simply means “lord” or “master.”^[24] It is a common noun, and in the case of the Ugaritic texts, would have been the title of the storm god, Baal Haddad, but could equally be used as a title for other gods. When the prophets rail against Israelites for worshipping the baʿalim, they are talking about regional Canaanite deities whose stories were not exotic foreign myths, but the immediately recognizable religious tradition of the surrounding culture. The Baal Cycle did not need to travel to reach the biblical authors. It was already there.

The Bible’s Hidden Third Creation Story

Most people with a passing knowledge of biblical studies have learned to recognize two distinct creation stories, written by different hands and with different interests, in Genesis 1:1–2:4a and Genesis 2:4b–3:24.^[25] But there is, in fact, a third creation story in ancient Israelite consciousness; it lurks in the background, fragmented, never recounted in full as a continuous narrative.^[26]

Invoked in poetry in Psalms and in the prophets, this story is a backdrop that multiple biblical authors assume as part of the general knowledge-base of their audiences, and invoke when they want to make a claim about YHWH’s supreme power. For example, the psalmist, speaking to God in a moment of crisis, declares His victory over Leviathan:

^{תהלים עד:יג} אַתָּה פוֹרַרְתָּ בְעׇזְּךָ יָם שִׁבַּרְתָּ רָאשֵׁי תַנִּינִים עַל הַמָּיִם. ^עד:יד אַתָּה רִצַּצְתָּ רָאשֵׁי לִוְיָתָן תִּתְּנֶנּוּ מַאֲכָל לְעָם לְצִיִּים.

^{Ps 74:13} You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons on the waters. ^74:14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan, you gave him as food for the people of the wilderness.

Proclaiming YHWH’s kingship, another psalm asserts that YHWH crushed the sea-monster Rahab:

^{תהלים פט:י} אַתָּה מוֹשֵׁל בְּגֵאוּת הַיָּם בְּשׂוֹא גַלָּיו אַתָּה תְשַׁבְּחֵם. ^פט:יא אַתָּה דִכִּאתָ כֶחָלָל רָהַב בִּזְרוֹעַ עֻזְּךָ פִּזַּרְתָּ אוֹיְבֶיךָ.

^{Ps 89:10} You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them. ^89:11 You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.

And Isaiah asks:

^{ישעיהו נא:ט} ...הֲלוֹא אַתְּ הִיא הַמַּחְצֶבֶת רַהַב מְחוֹלֶלֶת תַּנִּין. ^נא:י הֲלוֹא אַתְּ הִיא הַמַּחֲרֶבֶת יָם מֵי תְּהוֹם....

^{Isa 51:9b} Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? ^{Isa 51:10a} Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the tehom?

Rahab. Leviathan. The dragon.^[27] The primordial sea. God defeating a chaos monster at the moment of creation. This is the combat myth from the Baal Cycle and Enuma Elish in Israelite guise.^[28] The hidden creation account never disappeared from Israelite religion—it was managed, deployed selectively, pushed to the margins of the canon while the Torah offered two different, alternate kinds of creation stories: the cosmic account of Genesis 1, and the garden narrative of Genesis 2–3. Understanding the first two requires knowing all three: as the ancient authors and audiences of the biblical texts likely did, at least in some form.

Genesis 1: Creation Without Combat

With this background in mind, let us return to Genesis 1.

^{בראשית א:א} בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ.

The opening verse in Hebrew is grammatically ambiguous, leading to a longstanding standard (mostly Christian-influenced^[29]) translation of “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Today, however, based on a better understanding of Biblical Hebrew, most scholars prefer something like “When God began to create the skies and the earth….”

The second verse then describes what God finds as creation begins—tohu and vohu,^[30] “desolate chaos,” as well as tehom, “the deep,” the primordial, watery chaos:

^{בראשית א:ב} וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם.

^{Gen 1:2} And the earth was tohu and vohu, and darkness was over the face of tehom, and the wind of God was fluttering over the face of the waters.

This is not creatio ex nihilo, “creation from nothing,” a concept first articulated in Jewish and Christian literature in the 2^nd century C.E.).^[31] Rather, the story describes God bringing order to pre-existing chaos, which mirrors the basic structure of the Mesopotamian and Canaanite creation myths we have been examining.

Tiamat Becomes Tehom

The Hebrew word for the deep, tehom, is linguistically cognate with (etymologically related to) the name Tiamat, the chaos dragon whom Marduk defeats in Enuma Elish.^[32] Marduk splits her body in half “like a fish,” and makes the heavens from one half and the earth from the other, with the sky holding back the upper waters. The same cosmological picture of waters above and waters below, held apart by a physical barrier, appears in Genesis:

^{בראשית א:ז} וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת הָרָקִיעַ וַיַּבְדֵּל בֵּין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מִתַּחַת לָרָקִיעַ וּבֵין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מֵעַל לָרָקִיעַ וַיְהִי כֵן.

^{Gen 1:7} And God made the raqia [firmament/expanse/vault^[33]] and separated between the waters which were below the raqia and the waters which were above the raqia. And it was so.

What is radically different is the mechanics: where Marduk defeats Tiamat in brutal combat, dismembers her, and fashions the cosmos from her body, God simply speaks. Tiamat, the powerful, monstrous, chaotic mother of the gods in Babylon, has become tehom, a common noun: a force instead of an indomitable personality, a backdrop for creation instead of an adversary.

Sea Monsters are Part of God’s Good Creation

The combat myth is present in the cosmological structure of Genesis 1, and then quietly set aside. What remains is a God who is sovereign over chaos without needing to do battle with it. The sea monsters do not disappear entirely, though. God makes them on Day Five:

^{בראשית א:כא} וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת הַתַּנִּינִם הַגְּדֹלִים וְאֵת כׇּל נֶפֶשׁ הַחַיָּה הָרֹמֶשֶׂת אֲשֶׁר שָׁרְצוּ הַמַּיִם לְמִינֵהֶם וְאֵת כׇּל עוֹף כָּנָף לְמִינֵהוּ וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי טוֹב.

^{Gen 1:21} And God created the great tanninim [dragons/sea monsters], and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good.

In the Baal Cycle and in Psalms 74 and 89, tannin is a chaos monster—God’s primordial adversary, the creature associated with Rahab and Leviathan.^[34] Here in Genesis 1, the tanninim are not rivals. They are not threats. They are simply part of creation and subservient to God—what God surveys on the fifth day and calls טוֹב, “good.”

All Humans in the Image of God

And then, on the sixth day, God creates humans:

^{בראשית א:כו} וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ וְיִרְדּוּ בִדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה וּבְכׇל הָאָרֶץ וּבְכׇל הָרֶמֶשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל הָאָרֶץ.

^{Gen 1:26} And God said: “Let us make the human in our tzelem [image], according to our demut [likeness]. They shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the animals, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.”

What does it mean to be made in the צֶלֶם (tzelem), “image,” of God? In the ancient Near East, the Akkadian word tsalmu was used for the statues or images a king would erect throughout his territory to project his own authority and presence—visible declarations of sovereignty that announced, “the king’s rule extends here.” Similarly, images of gods were understood as tsalmu, extending a divine presence.^[35]

In other words, to be someone’s tzelem was to be their authorized representative. Thus, the verse in Genesis continues directly into governance language: humans made in God’s tzelem are to “have dominion over” creation. The image-bearing and the ruling functions are inseparable, because that is what a tzelem does—it is a stand-in and extension of the rule of the (divine) king.

Genesis 1 takes this royal ideology and democratizes it. Every human being—not just the king, not just the priest, not just the Israelite—is the tselem of God, bearing divine dignity and called to a vocation of stewardship and rule. Compare this to Atrahasis, where humans are the gods’ servants, created from the blood of a slaughtered god to do the labor the lesser gods refuse. The same cultural vocabulary is put to a radically different use.

Genesis 2–3: The Garden and Its Mesopotamian Neighbors

Genesis 2 opens a different story, with different vocabulary, a different divine name—יְ־הֹוָה אֱלֹהִים (YHWH Elohim) rather than אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) alone—and has as a conversation partner a different set of Mesopotamian themes. Instead of engaging the combat myth, the Eden narrative works with the themes of wisdom and immortality that we met in Atrahasis, Adapa, and Gilgamesh.

The story begins with the creation of הָאָדָם (haʾadam), “the earthling,” from הָאֲדָמָה (haʾadamah), “the earth.” The reason given for why there were as yet no plants or grasses on the earth connects the human being, from the beginning, to agricultural labor:

^{בראשית ב:ה} וְכֹל שִׂיחַ הַשָּׂדֶה טֶרֶם יִהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ וְכׇל עֵשֶׂב הַשָּׂדֶה טֶרֶם יִצְמָח כִּי לֹא הִמְטִיר יְ־הֹוָה אֱלֹהִים עַל הָאָרֶץ וְאָדָם אַיִן לַעֲבֹד אֶת הָאֲדָמָה.

^{Gen 2:5} Every shrub of the field was not yet in the earth, and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, for YHWH God had not yet sent rain upon the earth, and there was no human to work the ground.

In Atrahasis, humans are created specifically to perform this onerous labor for the gods—it is their reason for existing. By contrast, in the Bible, this agricultural work will not become difficult until it is pronounced as a punishment for the humans’ actions later in the story (Gen 3:17–18; more on this later). Initially, God simply plants the garden and places the human in it as its caretaker:

^{בראשית ב:טו} וַיִּקַּח יְ־הֹוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ בְגַן עֵדֶן לְעׇבְדָהּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָהּ.

^{Gen 2:15} YHWH God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to work it and to guard/keep it.

Divine immortality and divine wisdom—the two attributes the Mesopotamian texts consistently place out of human reach—sit side by side as trees in the garden, at the center of the human world:

^{בראשית ב:ט} וַיַּצְמַח יְ־הֹוָה אֱלֹהִים מִן הָאֲדָמָה כׇּל עֵץ נֶחְמָד לְמַרְאֶה וְטוֹב לְמַאֲכָל וְעֵץ הַחַיִּים בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן וְעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע.

^{Gen 2:9} And from the ground YHWH God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and bad.

The narrative tension is already present: we have met Adapa, who had divine wisdom and lost immortality because of it. We have met Gilgamesh, who, after gaining wisdom over the course of the epic,^[36] found the plant of life only to lose it to a serpent. We are now in a garden with both prizes.

The Serpent, the Woman, and the Crossing of a Threshold

Enter the serpent:

^{בראשית ג:א} וְהַנָּחָשׁ הָיָה עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהִים....

^{Gen 3:1} The serpent was the most arum of all the animals God had made....

Here is a prime example of how difficult it is to read this text without being influenced by later interpretations. Standard English translations render the word עָרוּם as “cunning,” “crafty,” “shrewd,” and “subtle”—all adjectives with negative connotations. While the same word does appear in two instances in the book of Job with a similar malign meaning (5:12; 15:5), it occurs eight times in the book of Proverbs as an antonym of foolishness and/or evil, and a synonym for a man of prudence or wisdom. For example:

^{משלי יג:טז} כׇּל עָרוּם יַעֲשֶׂה בְדָעַת וּכְסִיל יִפְרֹשׂ אִוֶּלֶת.

^{Prov 13:16} Every clever man acts knowledgeably, but a fool exposes his stupidity.^[37]

Which meaning should be invoked in Genesis 3? Most people familiar with the general outline of the story today would understand the serpent as the embodiment of evil, a tradition traceable back to 1 Enoch, a 3^rd century B.C.E. text that blames “an angel” who “led Eve astray.” But the conflation of the devil, Satan, and the serpent in the garden becomes full-blown only among the early Christian Church Fathers.^[38]

In the ancient Near East, however, the serpent was not generally a symbol of evil. It was a symbol of wisdom, healing, and—in iconographic traditions across Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt—of goddess imagery.^[39] Serpents appear alongside goddess figures throughout the ancient world, associated with fertility, divine knowledge, and renewal through the shedding of skin. And in Gilgamesh, the opportunistic serpent steals the hero’s plant of eternal life: the Epic assigns no moral valence to this theft, as it seems the point is rather that the serpent’s subsequent skin-shedding demonstrates that the plant works.

Back in Eden, the serpent approaches the woman and opens a conversation about the tree of knowledge, telling her that God had forbidden eating from the tree because:

^{בראשית ג:ה} כִּי יֹדֵעַ אֱלֹהִים כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכׇלְכֶם מִמֶּנּוּ וְנִפְקְחוּ עֵינֵיכֶם וִהְיִיתֶם כֵּאלֹהִים יֹדְעֵי טוֹב וָרָע.

^{Gen 3:5} God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and bad.

The woman reasons, considers, weighs, and makes the decision to eat:

^{בראשית ג:ו} וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה הוּא לָעֵינַיִם וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל.

^{Gen 3:6} And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a desire to the eyes, and the tree was attractive for gaining wisdom, and she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her man, who was with her, and he ate.

The man is present throughout the encounter—the text takes pains to note that he “was with her”—but he is passive. The woman gives the fruit to him and he eats without comment or deliberation, a blatant statement by the author that she is the protagonist, the one who moves the drama forward by bringing forbidden divine wisdom to humanity.^[40]

After the eating, the serpent is proven correct, and humanity crosses a threshold from which there is no return:

^{בראשית ג:ז} וַתִּפָּקַחְנָה עֵינֵי שְׁנֵיהֶם וַיֵּדְעוּ כִּי עֵירֻמִּם הֵם וַיִּתְפְּרוּ עֲלֵה תְאֵנָה וַיַּעֲשׂוּ לָהֶם חֲגֹרֹת.

^{Gen 3:7} And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.

What kind of knowledge is this divine wisdom? Many interpreters over the years have offered meanings from sexual knowledge to the origin of yetzer hara, the “evil inclination” of humans.^[41]

In the story, however the immediate recognition that they are naked prompts the humans to take the first step outside of the animal kingdom and toward civilization—which is exactly what happens to Enkidu in Gilgamesh after his encounter with the woman Shamhat.^[42] In both texts, this transition toward civilization is mediated by a woman, it involves divine knowledge, and it is permanent.

The cost in Genesis 3 is the foreclosure of immortality. The tree of life is still there, and it had never before been forbidden, but the humans are expelled before they can eat from it:

^{בראשית ג:כב} וַיֹּאמֶר יְ־הֹוָה אֱלֹהִים הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע וְעַתָּה פֶּן יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם.

^{Gen 3:22} And YHWH God said, “The human has become like one of us, knowing good and bad; and now, lest he stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever...”

As in Gilgamesh, wisdom and immortality are placed in human proximity, but the acquisition of one forecloses the other. Notice also the structural inversion with Adapa: Ea instructs Adapa not to accept the food and water offered in heaven, and Adapa’s obedience costs him immortality. In the Eden story, God instructs the humans not to eat from the tree of knowledge, and their disobedience costs them immortality. Making a strong theological point about obedience to the divine, the mechanism is precisely reversed, but the outcome—and the boundary between human and divine—remains the same.

The Etiologies: Why Things Are the Way They Are

The story ends with what are, in the logic of origin myth, etiologies—from Greek aitiologia, “giving a reason for”—explanations for why the world is the way it is. Why is childbirth painful? Why is farming hard? Why do snakes crawl on their bellies? Why do humans die? The text answers all of these questions, and the questions themselves reveal the concerns of the author’s world.^[43]

But equally as significant as the questions is the structure of the explanation. In Atrahasis and Enuma Elish, labor and mortality are baked into the design. Humans are created to work; humans are created to die. There is no Eden, no before-and-after. There is just the structure of things as they are.

In Genesis, hard labor and mortality require an etiology—an explanation.^[44] They are not the design. They are a consequence. Something happened. The world as we experience it, with all its pain and difficulty, is not the world as it was meant to be. That is a fundamentally different theological claim. It insists that the suffering of human life was not God’s intention but the result of a rupture in the relationship between the human and the divine that was the consequence of a human choice to disobey God and to grasp divine wisdom.

The Wisdom & Immortality of Bereshit (Genesis)

What strikes me, having spent years with these texts, is not that the biblical authors were influenced by the world around them—of course they were. What strikes me is the deliberateness of what they changed. They knew what they were doing when they took Tiamat and turned her into a common noun, when they made every human being the image of God, and when they put wisdom and immortality in the same garden and staged a story in which grasping one forecloses the other.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the humans in Genesis 3 reach for wisdom and lose immortality, because the story they inhabit has achieved exactly the opposite.^[45] These texts have outlasted every empire that produced the earlier myths that inspired them. The scribal schools that copied Atrahasis and Enuma Elish onto clay tablets are long gone, along with the gods those tablets honored.

Yet here we are, still reading בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים (bereshit baraʾ ʾElohim)—still arguing about what it means, still finding in it resources for thinking about creation, human dignity, and the nature of suffering. The biblical authors reached for wisdom and got immortality too—not despite the fact that they were in conversation with the older stories of their world, but because of what they did with them: borrowing the vocabulary, rewriting the argument, and in doing so producing something that turned out to be inexhaustible.

This means that reading Genesis 1–3 against its ancient Near Eastern background is not an act of reduction, diminishing the biblical versions by pointing out the ways in which they borrowed from their predecessors. Understanding where biblical stories came from, what the authors borrowed and what they deliberately changed, makes their choices, their arguments, their understandings of humanity’s place in God’s world visible. And those are the choices that became immortal.