So What Should Adam Have Done?

Something. He should have done something.

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is familiar to many of us. We have a hard time imagining how it might have happened differently.

One way is retell the story in fiction. CS Lewis does this in his Ransom Trilogy, Perelandra, in which the hero, Elwin Ransom, travels to a planet where the Fall has not yet happened. The first lady on that planet, the Queen, is tempted to break a basic divine injunction by a demonic Professor Weston. Ransom discovers that his task is to protect the Queen and keep Weston at bay. Ransom plays Adam.

I highly recommend Perelandra, although I recommend reading Out of the Silent Planet first. And then That Hideous Strength will be a wonderful treat to read after Perelandra.

What’s so refreshing about Perelandra is that Lewis deals with the Fall of Man imaginatively. Can we take that approach with the Genesis account of Adam and Eve? I think we can, and are invited to do so by an account that is so beguilingly simple. And yet it’s hard to imagine a story with greater consequences.

A Spirit of Enquiry

The simplicity of the story of the Fall, like so much of the Bible, is inviting us to ask questions. God appears to like questions a lot more than we do, especially in our Enlightenment age. We want answers. Not more questions.

But in the story of the Fall, God doesn’t arrive in blazing vengeance because his divine command has been disobeyed. He comes with questions.

At first, this is even more puzzling since, being an omnipotent, omniscient creator in Chapters 1 and 2, we assume he knows the answers to his questions. And yet he wishes to dialogue with his image-bearers.

When you think about it, we do this all the time. A parent walks into a room saying ‘What’s happened here?’ when it’s very obvious what’s happened here. The desire is to create dialogue. Is the miscreant prepared to take responsibility for what’s happened? That’s the question behind the question.

God does something very similar in the Garden of Eden, giving Adam a chance to do something, or take responsibility.

God called to the man, “Where are you?” (Gen 3:9)

Adam is rather comically, and tragically, hiding behind a bush. Great plan, Adam. He’ll never look there. Adam replies that he hid because he was afraid because he was naked. God asks two more questions:

“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” (Gen 3:11)

When Adam blames the woman and God for creating the woman, the Lord turns to the woman asking yet another question.

“What is this you have done?” (Gen 3:13)

Questions, questions

So let’s ask this question (and one that cames up in our latest episode of Cooper and Cary Have Words with author Brant Hansen):

What was Adam supposed to have done?

After all, God goes to him first (Gen 3:9), implying that he is responsible. One could argue (I believe correctly) that this is about the implicit responsibility of the man in the marriage, which includes the conduct of his wife.

Either way, the man is given the injunction about not eating from the tree before Eve is created in Gen 2:16-17. Eve is only created once no suitable helper for Adam is found among the animals (although clearly God must have known that this would be the case).

This leaves us wondering whether Adam had already failed to explain this command to Eve, since in 3:2, she gets it wrong. She says to the serpent:

“You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.” (Gen 3:3)

Did Adam embellished the command and that’s how it was presented to her? Or has she misremembered it? Other scriptures are quite clear that Eve was deceived. Is that because Adam did not adequately explain the one rule? Did he tell her not to touch it, when that wasn’t the command? I’m not sure we’re supposed to know. I think we’re meant to think about it.

Man Up

But let’s return to the wider question. What was Adam supposed to do? Anything. Something. Be a man. In reality, he does nothing. He is utterly passive. He is revealed to be standing next to Eve when she takes the fruit. Why didn’t he stop her? Why didn’t he chase away the snake? Shouldn’t Gen 3 read like this:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” And Adam grabbed the snake, threw him to the ground and crushed the head of the snake with his heel. And then they enjoyed a fruit salad, with fruit from all the other trees in the garden. And it was good. Which is unusual for fruit salads which feel like they’re doing you good, but aren’t actually all that nice. (JCV¹)

What else could Adam have done? Not eaten the fruit himself, called out to God and said that we have a problem?

And if he’s eaten the fruit, he could have gone to God to say sorry, rather than hide.

Once confronted, he could have taken responsibility for what happened.

Adam did none of these things. None. He said nothing. Did nothing. He went along with it.

Then his brilliant plan was this: hide. Adam is passive. His job was to tend the garden and protect his wife from predators. He didn’t do that. He refused to do that. And he wasn’t even sorry about it.

In an era where we are rightly critical of overbearing, domineering masculinity, we need to be careful we don’t open the door to an even more fundamental, older sin – passivity or fecklessness. I fear we’ve very much already done that.

There’s so much more to be said on this, and we say it on the Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast. You can find links to Apple, Spotify and other players here, or watch the first part of the interview on Youtube here and see below. And pre-order Brant’s book, The Men We Need.

Encanto

You can also hear Nate Morgan Locke and I talk about Disney’s Encanto in the latest episode of Popcorn Parenting.

1. James Cary Version