Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 23:2 (Spring 2009)
Article: Editor’s Reflections
Author: William David Spencer

PP 23:2 (Spring 2008) p. 2

Editor’s Reflections

William David Spencer

Among the most beautiful passages in the Bible are those precious glimpses of life before the fall, when God plants a garden in the eastern land called “Eden,” graces it with flowering fruit-bearing trees, and waters it all with a river that flows out of Eden and winds through lands of gold, onyx, and pearls (Gen. 2:8-14).1 Into this natural paradise, placed as the central jewel in a setting of green and gold and black and white, God settles the first humans, entrusting them with its care (Gen. 1:26; 2:15, 22), blessing them (Gen. 1:28), and delighting both in their company and in strolling through the exquisite, pristine orchards in the airy (ruah) part of the day (Gen. 3:8). This last phrase is often translated “the cool” of the day, and I assume it means dusk, when our first parents’ daily work was done and their heavenly Parent visited them and enjoyed their reports of what they had done. Some of us might think of our own families, as we look forward to arriving home and catching up in the evening with our children. This primal image is a beautiful one to savor, the last pure moment, as it is, before the night of misery falls and humanity suffers through the consequences of the curse, longing down the ages for what was lost, as millennia pile upon millennia. For now, just as the Lord God, we sometimes arrive at home to our children and find instead not sweet communion, but the need to mete out punishment.

In the early church, the plight of our first parents was of particular interest to the extra-canonical writers of pseudepigraphical books, so popular as so many of these became with early Christians. One well distributed example was called The Book of Adam and Eve. We find it in several versions in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic, with some scholars supposing a lost Hebrew original. None of the extant versions invests time in the pre-fall state of bliss of our progenitors, but begin right with the expulsion:

It came to pass, when Adam went forth from the Garden with his wife, outside, to the east of the Garden, they made themselves a hut to live in and went inside. Their tears fell ceaselessly and they spent their days in unison of mind, weeping and saddened, and they said to one another, “We are far from life.”2

While it is pathetically commendable that our first parents finally recovered their unity after its dissolution in their battle of accusations at t...