ALSO BY

  BRUCE FEILER

  The Secrets of Happy Families

  The Council of Dads

  America’s Prophet

  Where God Was Born

  Abraham

  Walking the Bible

  Dreaming Out Loud

  Under the Big Top

  Looking for Class

  Learning to Bow

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Bruce Feiler

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA AVAILABLE

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698409958

  Version_1

  For Andrew and Laura

  Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.

  —THOMAS MERTON

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY BRUCE FEILER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION: THE FIRST COUPLE:

  Why Adam and Eve Still Matter

  1. FIRST COMES LOVE:

  How Adam and Eve Invented Love

  2. MEET CUTE:

  Who Was Present at the Creation?

  3. THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT:

  What We Do for Love

  4. CHORE WARS:

  Who Needs Love?

  5. THAT LOOK IN THEIR EYES:

  How Sex Became Evil, Then Unbecame It

  6. THE OTHER WOMAN:

  The Dark Side of Love

  7. FAMILY AFFAIR:

  Are We Our Children’s Keepers?

  8. THE LOVE YOU MAKE:

  Bless the Broken Road

  CONCLUSION: AFTERLIFE:

  What Adam and Eve Can Teach Us About Relationships

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FIRST COUPLE

  Why Adam and Eve Still Matter

  WE HEAR A LOT of stories about individuals these days. One person. One hero. One genius. One gunman.

  This is not one of those stories.

  This is the story about two people. Learning to be together. Learning to live as one.

  And it’s the story, it seems, we were meant to hear first. Because if you go back to the very beginning—we’re talking Garden of Eden beginning—the story you’ll find there doesn’t begin with one person. It begins with two.

  Yet that story of togetherness is not what we usually remember. Because of all the things we’re told were present in that garden—man, woman, serpent, sex, temptation, deception, sin, death—the thing that’s most important usually doesn’t make the list.

  Yet it’s the thing that’s most critical for us to survive. It’s the antidote to all the suffering the story says plagued us then—loneliness, isolation, anxiety, fear—and that plagues us even more today. It’s the essence, the story insists, of what it means to be human.

  It’s love.

  Yes, love—mysterious, lustful, painful, beautiful, exhausted, strained, resilient, triumphant.

  That’s the real story of the Garden of Eden, yet it’s the story we somehow neglect to hear.

  This book is the story of how we forgot that message, and the story of how we can reclaim it again.

  This is the story of Adam and Eve.

  The first love story.

  The story we never tell.

  • • •

  WHEN MY IDENTICAL TWIN DAUGHTERS were a few years old, I went to a nursery to buy some plants for the front stoop of our home in Brooklyn. The attendant was a man with driftwood-coarse skin, white stubble, a widow’s peak, and a black hole where his canine tooth was supposed to be, out of which stuck a gnawed toothpick. He had once been a groundskeeper at Yankee Stadium. When I described the blustery conditions of our neighborhood, he perked up.

  “What you need is a holly!” he said, and began wending me through the thicket.

  Remembering my grandfather leading me through similar underbrush in Pin Point, Georgia, when I was a boy, looking for sexually compatible wisteria, I said, “But with hollies, don’t you need a male and a female to berry?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “One male can take care of seven females.”

  “That’s perfect,” I said. “I have two daughters, a wife, a sister, a sitter, a mother, and a mother-in-law. I’m a holly!”

  For more than a decade, I have lived largely in the company of women. At least in my house, that means certain conversations come up over and over again: girls and math, girls and coding, girls and body image, girls and bullying. (I’m ignoring the conversations about the deficiencies of dads.) In many ways, these topics reflect the larger conversations that my wife and I have every night and that most couples I know have in one way or another—men, women, and work; men, women, and power; men, women, and sex. But there’s one conversation that I rarely hear about.

  Men, women, and God.

  As a father—especially one who cares about such old-fashioned things as values, service, and spirituality—the subject of faith is particularly fraught. On one hand, I would love nothing more than for my daughters to grow up with a healthy interest in spirituality, the freedom to explore what they really believe, and the sensitivity to live alongside others with whom they might disagree. On the other hand, given how organized religion has systematically, deliberately, often violently discriminated against women for centuries, can I rightly encourage them to find their voice in a world that has long tried to blot them out? Even more radical, can I possibly suggest to them—or to myself, for that matter—that something as staunchly lopsided toward the sexes as religion has anything to say about relationships today?

  And yet we need all the help we can get. It’s hardly daring to suggest that we live in a time of great confusion over how we relate to others. We’re all so busy looking at our screens 24-7 that we’ve forgotten how to look at the people directly in front of us. Instead of being drawn closer together by the advances of modern life, we seem to be being pulled further apart. Our most basic bonds of community, family, even civility appear to be fraying. In our hyperconnected world we have a crisis of connection.

  Add to that, the last generation has seen breathtaking shifts in what it means to be in a long-term relationship with another human being. The simplest rules of who we pair up with, who does what within our relationships, and how long we agree to stay together are being rewritten every day. That includes more women working outside the home, more men helping out inside the home, and more of everyone grappling with the definitions of togetherness, happiness, and a meaningful life. Marriage rates have plummeted; divorce rates have become entrenched; nothing seems fixed anymore.

  The Internet has made a complicated situation even more unsettled, with whole new ways to hook up, break up, or simply hole up by yourself. With sexting, infidelity apps, and online porn, once taboo subjects like polyamory, open relationships, and other types of “consensual nonmonogamy” are exploding. Sexuality has become so ubiquitous and nakedness so commonplace that even Playboy stopped publishing nudes.

  As a grown-up, I find these changes baffling enough. As a parent, I’m downright afraid. And like many, I can’t help wondering: Is there any wisdom from the past that can help us today? Has everything from the old days become outmoded? Or are there any values, lessons, or stories worth preserving?

  In my own family, I struggle with these issues every day. My wife, Linda, has a fabulous but demanding career, which means I’m proud of her and the example she sets for our daughters, but I don’t get to see her as much as I’d like. When we do get together, either by phone or at the end of a long day, we spend much of our time deciding who’s supervising homework, who’s taking the kids to their flu shots, and who’s making plans to get away for the weekend when we’ll all stare into devices in far more interesting places. And while I may be a statistical outlier in a world where women show greater interest in religion than men and take more responsibility for teaching values to their children, in my home I’m often the one who’s insisting we reenact some bygone ritual or discuss some dated text. Especially in an era of neuroscience and nanotechnology, I still believe there’s insight in timeworn truths. I tweet, but I Talmud, too.

  Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.

  All these issues came to a head unexpectedly one day when our eight-year-old girls and I tagged along with Linda on a business trip to Rome. On our first day, I had the brilliant idea to take our sleep-deprived daughters to the Vatican. See some art! Learn some culture! It didn’t go well. As I tugged the girls through the tapestry-lined hallways of the museum, filled with stunning Greek nudes and Raphael frescoes, they were in full-on rebellion. “We hate carpets! My feet
hurt. This is boooooring.”

  Finally we made it to the Sistine Chapel. I insisted they look down, led them to the center of the room, and finally said, “Look up.” One of my daughters took one glance at the magisterial image of God, flying superherolike through the air, reaching his index finger toward a listless Adam, and said, “Why is there only a man? Where am I in that picture?” Her sister, meanwhile, not to be undone, pointed out something I had never seen before. “Who’s that woman under God’s arm? Is that Eve?”

  And that’s when it hit me.

  At every stage of Western civilization for the last three thousand years, one story has stood at the center of every conversation about men and women. One story has served as the battleground for human relationships and sexual identity. One story has been both the ultimate source of division and a potential source of harmony in the history of the family. For some that story is a fantasy; for others it is a fact. But for everyone, it has enduring impact on how we live today.

  It’s the story of Adam and Eve.

  Created fully grown, Adam and Eve have no history; they create history. Born without precedent, they become precedent for generations of their descendants. Married with little road map, they generate the road map that nearly every couple in the West has wrestled with in one way or another ever since.

  And though few people acknowledge it, that wrestling continues. Many of today’s most enduring social tensions—from equal pay to diaper duty, from sexual assent to same-sex marriage—have their roots in the Garden of Eden. No matter if you’re a believer, a nonbeliever, a seeker, a meditator, an I-go-to-services-two-times-a-year-otherwise-leave-me-aloner, every part of your interaction with the opposite (or even the same) sex is shaped to an astonishing degree by a three-thousand-year-old story that has fewer than two thousand words.

  If you’re in a relationship with another person, you’re in a relationship with Adam and Eve. Even today you can’t understand your love life, your home life, your spiritual life, or your sex life without understanding what happened in that garden “in the east” among Adam, Eve, the serpent, and God. And then what happened when centuries of religious leaders—99 percent of them men—manipulated the tale to further their own perversions and preserve their own power. Followed by the revelation of how new generations of leaders—many of them women—reinterpreted the story to highlight its more egalitarian themes.

  I decided at that moment in the Sistine Chapel to revisit the tangled story of Adam and Eve. I would travel in the footsteps of the most famous couple in history—from the rivers of Mesopotamia to the birthplace of the women’s movement, from John Milton’s paradise to Mae West’s Hollywood—and try to answer the question: Are Adam and Eve merely the cause of sin, degradation, and distrust between the sexes or might they be a source of unity, resilience, and, dare I say it, inspiration?

  Can Adam and Eve be role models for relationships today?

  • • •

  AT FIRST GLANCE, the idea that Adam and Eve are still relevant today seems absurd. For starters, many people simply dismiss the story. It’s made up! It’s a fairy tale! We’re smarter now. We know better. And who can blame them? The story seems to take place in a fog of history. Despite centuries of searching, there is no evidence that any of the events in the Garden of Eden—or the rest of Genesis, for that matter—took place. And despite centuries of denial, there is overwhelming evidence that humans evolved in a way contrary to how Genesis describes. We know a lot more today about how the world was created, the origins of humanity, and the biological roots of being male and female. Who needs Adam and Eve anymore? We’ve moved on.

  Even in the world of deeply religious believers, where I’ve spent a lot of time in recent decades, many view the story as allegorical. No less an authority than the fourth-century bishop St. Augustine, who built an entire theology around Adam and Eve, said that to view the story as verbatim was “childish.” While he may have been ahead of his peers, the world eventually caught up. Over time, Adam and Eve became the forgotten patriarch and matriarch, having ceded the stage to their upstart descendants Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. They are civilization’s doddering grandparents, taxidermied in some old-age home in Boca, rolled out a few times a year for family occasions, where they sit in the corner, ignored.

  And it gets worse. Even those stalwarts who still acknowledge Adam and Eve have never forgiven them for ruining life for the rest of us. Adam and Eve are the opposite of role models; they’re the first antiheroes. For thousands of years, they’ve been almost universally blamed for being selfish, unfaithful, lustful, disgraceful, and for single-handedly bringing shame, sin, immorality, even death into the world. Theirs was the original trial of the century, and the court of public opinion has been brutal. It’s been conviction by sermon; death by a thousand midrash.

  Actually, it’s the biggest case of character assassination in the history of the world. As the modern plaint goes, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”

  Well, let’s start here.

  There are three principal reasons why Adam and Eve still matter and why they deserve our respect, even accolades.

  First, they’re part of who we are. The same modern learning that has taught us about biology, psychology, and the power of the human mind has taught us that certain ideas, tropes, and symbols, what Jung called “anima,” live deep within cultures and express themselves in powerful and unexpected ways. Stories are the chief ingredient of this shared tradition. Told and retold, stories are our social glue, our means of understanding the world, and our way of changing the world when we reinterpret them. Woven together, these shared stories become memes that form our cultural DNA.

  Adam and Eve are the ultimate meme. For as long as our species has left traces, our most enduring stories have revolved around births, weddings, journeys, deaths—events associated with the beginnings and endings of social bonds. We are irredeemably connected to Adam and Eve because they constitute our earliest bond. Our family tree begins with them. They are the big bang of humanity. And that’s true even if we don’t happen to believe they existed exactly as the Bible says. We don’t have to believe in Greek myths, for example, to believe they teach us something vital.

  Certainly in the arena of relationships, thirty centuries of humanity have grappled with this story—that’s a hundred and fifty generations. Think of nearly any major creative or intellectual figure in the last two thousand years; odds are good that they interacted with Adam and Eve in a meaningful way. That includes Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Milton, Mary Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Bob Dylan, Beyoncé. The list goes on and on and on. It would take nothing less than complete arrogance to believe that our generation could simply erase this story from our mind like a massive cultural lobotomy.

  As the dean of biblical archaeologists, Avraham Biran, once told me about Abraham, “I don’t know if he existed then, but I know he exists now.” The same applies to Adam and Eve. I don’t know if they were alive in the Garden of Eden, but I know they’ve been alive outside of there for the last three millennia. To ignore them—to confine them to the curio closet or Creation Museum—is to ignore something vital about who we are.

  Second, Adam and Eve still matter because they capture what remains a fundamental truth about being alive: Our biggest threat as individuals is feeling left out, isolated, fearful, alone; our biggest threat as a society is succumbing to similar forces of disunion, disharmony, fear, hate. Look around, and by any measure our daily conversations are dominated by anxiety and confusion about the risk of disconnection and drifting apart, about the challenge of maintaining strong societal bonds; about concerns over the decay of our social fabric. Is our communal whole dissolving? Are we forgetting who we are?

  The deep-seated human need for connectedness is the theme—maybe even the dominant theme—that runs throughout the story of Adam and Eve: from the very beginning, when God looks at Adam and says, “It’s not right for humans to be alone”; to Eve’s decision to share the fruit with Adam rather than risk living without him; to the first couple’s painful choice about how to react to the unimaginable pain of having one of their children die at the hand of the other. Adam and Eve are constantly wrestling with whether they should remain together or break apart. God clearly wants them to find refuge in each other. The aching question of their story is whether they can find a way.