I have written so many things about Genesis 1 and 2 that it might just be my favourite book apart from the book of Revelation.
As Butler would say, Plato sees intersubjectivity as the foundation of a Cosmos of agents[1]. The most famous example is the Demiurge-Paradigm relationship, which has led me to ask: In the Semitic worldview of the peoples that produced Genesis, what would be the Paradigm to their Demiurge? Now, there are many demiurges, but there is also the first Demiurge of a theology, from whom the function first acquires concreteness. This is Zeus for the dominant stream of Hellenic theology (and might have been Poseidon or Aphrodite for some others). But what about Semitic, specifically Israelite, theology?
The answer may seem somewhat obvious: YHWH. I agree with this, as it has been my default interpretation for a while. But, what if it were not YHWH per se? What if it were the one called Adam? What if an alternative reading were possible?
The purpose of the experiments with this methodology for interpreting these texts is to show their boundlessness as revelation, and to see this boundlessness in the ways one might be able to find even contradictory but true interpretations of them. This idea is not original to me. It is actually thanks to this comment by Paul Joseph Rovelli about the Kabbalistic concept of “Adam Kadmon”. Then, thinking about a recent class with Butler on Kronos as “ankylomētis” that it occurred to me that YHWH does exhibit some of this “crooked wisdom” in Genesis, which might elaborate a way of reading it that reveals the Israelite Paradigm (which was, in hindsight, there all along).
I don’t have extensive details, but to start, Genesis One describes an “ideal world”, what is “repeatable” and “intelligible” in the actual world the Israelites were supposed to live and co-constitute. Like the Greek conception, the world described is a “shrine” or “temple” to the God and his cohort of Gods. That this is “internal” to the God, in his “mind”, is seen in the very identity of his words and the manifestation of his words, especially in the way this world construct “returns” to him in the Sabbath.
These are all the signs of the God as “pure intellect”. One then has to ask whether this “Elohim”, the “multiply single” God, is YHWH or not. My reading is that even if there was a time when this God was not identified with YHWH, the repurposing of the myth in conjunction with what we call “Genesis 2” should at least allow us to make this identification for this revelation. What Genesis 2 reveals is the declension of this ideality into materiality. But such a declension can be symbolized as the failure of the ideal to materialize as the ideal. This is represented well in Adam’s disobedience. But this is not my focus. My focus is on that tree at the centre of the Garden.
There are two broad functions of “Trees” in the books of the Bible. One is as a source of food, the other is as an aesthetic object. It is interesting in this connection that the Garden of Eden is a Temple, something that’s represented as a building, and a symbol for the Cosmos. In other words, the ideal model of the Cosmos is a community of living things united as one living thing. In short, what you see is the Paradigm, the “living thing itself” we have been looking for, and given the associations and widespread representation of her as a Tree, the Tree, we can say with some degree of certainty that either one of the Goddesses Asherah or Ashteroth (not sure if they are the same) is in fact the Paradigm here (see the connection to Moses and his encounter here too. Moses is a Demiurge). In fact, her association with and personification of both Wisdom and Life lends credence to the interpretation of both the Tree of Life and Tree of Wisdom as one and the same tree seen differently, and we can see how this perfectly fits the Tree as Paradigm for Adam as Demiurge. It goes as follows:
YHWH “planting” the tree in the Garden of his “sated mind” is his mediation of the intelligible paradigm itself, expressed in the first intellective form as the Garden itself. There is no demiurgy because this is not engineering, but reproduction, or “rational reproduction”. YHWH’s primary relationship to the Paradigm is not as an aesthetic object (although one cannot rule it out), but as a source of nourishment, as the Paradigm qua Tree of Life is what feeds the Gods in the Garden. This is similar to the Procline interpretation of the Gods’ common feast[2]. Cronus joins the Intelligible-Intellective, with its feasting Gods (whose food is from the paradigm), to the Intellective, where the Demiurge’s primary relationship with the Paradigm is visual. What is weird here is that it is Eve (who is not yet named) who sees fruit of the tree as desirable. That the woman is not yet named displays her still lack of independence from the (divine) man[3]. They are “one flesh”, still one (complex) entity. Both “man” and “woman” are still dispositions of the one Human, her revelation as an independent entity will emerge “after” the incident. She is the power of the human to “connect” to the tree visually. In this vein, one can see why the serpent and the woman are often thought of as akin or even identical in certain interpretations; at least, if you remove the misogynistic reasons behind it and try to give a more dignified interpretation for ourselves. I do not know how to parse that yet, but the point is the role visual encounters have in the joining of the vaguely androgynous human complex and the Paradigm. It also leans into the complex relationship between the “knowing” of the trees products (eating) and (symbolically) heterosexual encounters (sexual encounters in the bible are described as “knowing”). Overall, we are seeing here an encounter between the human and the Paradigm that both unites them to it and separates them from it. The “wisdom” gained will build a world but the world built is still an image, one with far more moving parts and a propensity to disintegration, which is its “exile”. This human doesn’t eat the Intelligible life, he receives it as intellective knowledge, fragmented into a minimum duality (“good” and “evil”) which will spawn a more fragmented multiplicity.
This is one reason for the centrality of the human figure in this theology. However, I would still see these entities (Adam, Eve, etc.) as themselves Gods of a different order (in this case, the intellective). There is a lot more to be said, but there is not the clarity of mind to say it. Hopefully, someone (me, or someone else) can seize on this later.
[1] “In the 4th c. BCE, Plato had already posited that the cosmos was basically composed of subjectivity, its object, motion and math. It is a great advance that in Plato's cosmogony, there is no role for primitive "stuffs". There is, however, as much as moderns like to wish it away, a major role for originary agents, namely the Gods. One can choose not to trouble oneself with Plato's theology. However, the subject/object relationship is fundamental. That is, there is no attempt to build up from scratch the positions of thinker (demiurge) and intelligible object (paradigm). These need not be Gods, but they must be at a minimum a thinkable idealization of persons, and personhood to that degree irreducible. There is also the receptacle, the ever-receding remainder of the object in its objectification by thought. But Plato does not choose to hypostatize this as a matter-stuff passive to form. Rather, "matter" is treated as the Dyad, i.e., as pure relativity, that which exists only in relation. Pushed to its furthest limits, the basic terms of Platonic ontology are haecceity and relativity.” From “Endymions_bower | April (and a Little Bit of May) Twitter Archive,” accessed February 25, 2023, https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/36782.html.
[2] “The Gods themselves also “feast” upon the intelligible, as we read in the description of the third triad of the intelligible-and-intellectual order, the “sub-celestial arch,” which represents the “perfective” class of Gods. That this is the site of the connection of the Gods to the intelligible “goods” rather than the supra-celestial place, which is nevertheless the place where these intelligibles – the Beautiful, the Wise, the Good – reside, indicates the reason why the Gods feast upon intelligibles, which are after all posterior to them ontologically; namely, in order to constitute the intellectual orders. It is not, that is, a question of sustenance for them qua Gods. Rather, it sustains the project of the constitution of Being. The intelligibles, as we have seen, essentially reflect the Gods; by taking this reflection back up into themselves, and feasting upon it, the Gods extend themselves to the direct causation of the hypostasis of Intellect, rather than the latter merely emerging as a secondary or tertiary diminution of divine potency.” - Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003), https://henadology.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/dissertation-revised-copy1.doc. Pg. 302-303.
[3] “In a pattern discernible in North-West Semitic religions, an abstract aspect of a male deity 'is hypostatized, personified, and worshiped as a goddess, who may then be thought of as the consort of the god'. This aspect that has been hypostatised is the cultically available presence of the god. Therefore, not the cult object itself, the asherah, but a token of Yahweh's "effective presence" is hypostatised.” - Marlene Elizabeth Mondriaan, “The Rise of Yahwism : Role of Marginalised Groups” (University of Pretoria, 2010). Pg 122. This is perhaps an example of the way one God can be the “power” of another, a perspective that can “switch”, the Goddess here being considered as her own person in such a “switch”.
I guess I could see why one would have a fondness for the beginning and the end.