It took the rest of society three thousand years to catch up with this insight into being human. In contemporary thought, Freud was among the first to write about the perils of feeling isolated and alone. Half a century later, pioneering psychologist Erich Fromm made it the centerpiece of his work. “We are social creatures, made anxious by our separateness,” he wrote. Being separate means being cut off, he said; it means losing our capacity to be human.

  Today, these simmering fears have become an outright plague. We are awash in divisive rhetoric and overwhelmed by the collapse of familiar institutions. The percentage of Americans living alone is higher than at any time in history. The number of seniors living alone has grown; the number of parents going it alone has soared; even the number of young people who say they feel alone has spiked. We have fewer friends, studies have shown, fewer people we can confide in, fewer people we can turn to in times of trouble. Depression rates have surged; unhappiness is rampant; suicide is at an all-time high.

  A key question of modern life has become how to overcome this separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one’s individual life and live in concert with another. How to connect. It’s the same question Adam and Eve faced, and I believe their answer still holds.

  That answer is the third and final reason Adam and Eve still matter. They were the first to contend—sometimes successfully, other times not—with the central mystery of being un-alone: being in love. Their lives are a testament to the power of relationships and to the idea that the greatest bulwark to the forces of isolation and division that threaten us every day is the even stronger force of relatedness. Confronted with chaos, God answers with connection. His message: The only thing more powerful than separateness is togetherness. The only thing more forceful than hate is love.

  Over the last century, during the time that Adam and Eve and other biblical luminaries were losing favor, a new way of engaging the world was gaining popularity. It involved using social science, DNA, and big data to explain human behavior. Whereas once we quoted preachers or theologians, now we quote TED Talks or Nobel laureates. That God-shaped hole in the universe? It’s been filled with brain scans.

  While our instinct is to believe that this cutting-edge knowledge has rendered moot insights from the past, in the arena of relationships, at least, the inverse is true. The two show remarkable convergence. Social scientists are now saying what the Bible’s been saying all along. A central finding of modern psychology, for instance, is that our well-being depends on our interactions with others. To be happy is to be connected. And that includes the most central connection of all: a romantic attachment to another person.

  One of the most effective things you can do to improve your quality of life is to succeed in the one aspect of life that’s most difficult to pull off—love. Viktor Frankl, in his postwar classic Man’s Search for Meaning, called love “the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.” Even in a Holocaust camp, Frankl said, love was the only thing that could bring peace. “I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

  Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, published in 1956, linked the drive for love directly with the drive to overcome aloneness. “The desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man,” he said. “It is the force which keeps the human race together.” Famed twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton went even further. He said love is so powerful that even those who claim not to be interested in it are bound up in its tentacles from the moment they’re born. “Because love is not just something that happens to you: it is a certain special way of being alive.” Love, he continues, is “an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life.”

  This line of thinking is hardly new, of course. It emerged out of a centuries-long tradition of trying to fathom what Joseph Campbell called the “universal mystery” of human bonding. Across history, our deepest thinkers have explored the notion that life is built around the merging of two souls. That life is lived more deeply and experienced more fully if it’s a narrative of shared identity. Being alive is too overwhelming to be done by yourself; we can only fully be ourselves when we are with another. Philosopher Robert Solomon summed it up well: “Love is fundamentally the experience of redefining one’s self in terms of the other.”

  In recent years, as romantic love has once more become a fashionable thing to discuss, any number of sources in the West have been credited with giving birth to the idea: European Romantics, Enlightenment thinkers, medieval courtiers, Roman poets, Greek philosophers, the Gospels. I believe all these are wrong and that they overlook the real source of this insight. Conditioned to think that any enduring idea must have its roots in the cradle of Western thinking, we have failed to see that this enduring idea actually came from the cradle of Western belief.

  The Greeks did not invent love as we know it, nor did the Romans, the Persians, the Europeans, or the Americans. The Israelites did. The earliest model of a robust, resilient, long-lasting relationship appears in the Hebrew Bible.

  It is the fundamental premise of this book that the greatest chronicle of human life in the ancient Near East introduced the idea of love into the world. And not in the psalms, the prophets, or even the patriarchs, as is sometimes claimed. But in the first story of human interaction.

  It is my further conviction that this story speaks in profound and unexpected ways to the deepest yearnings of human beings today. How we lost sight of this achievement is a remarkable, rarely told story. How we can revive it is a vital challenge. I believe we can and we must meet this challenge, because to restore the idea of cocreation to the heart of our lives is to create the strongest bulwark we know against the forces of alienation and self-indulgence that risk tearing us apart.

  “O tell me the truth about love,” Auden wrote. The truth is it began with Adam and Eve. They are our civilization’s first couple. Their story is the one we need to reclaim.

  1

  FIRST COMES LOVE

  How Adam and Eve Invented Love

  IN THE WINTER OF 2004, less than a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drove south of Baghdad, deep into the Mesopotamian valley of southern Iraq, toward the tribal town of Qurnah, at the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The jubilation that followed the toppling of one of the region’s bloodiest dictators had been replaced by a feeling of chaos and fear. Roadside bombings were on the rise; a wave of kidnappings of American journalists and contract workers had shattered any sense of order. I was accompanied by a driver, a security guard, and a fixer named Hikmat, a jocular English professor with a dense, Saddam-like moustache.

  Our intention was to fulfill a decadelong dream of mine and visit the confluence of the two rivers at the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. It was in this vicinity, the Bible suggests, that God, after creating the world, planted a garden filled with flora and placed within it his triumphal creation, man and woman. The Bible says Eden is located at the crossroads of four rivers. Two are unknown; but two are the Tigris and Euphrates. For as long as these stories have been told, Eden has been linked with this watery terrain.

  The highway was filled with the aftereffects of war: bombed-out bridges, scorched tanks, looted oil tankers. Every few feet was a fruit vendor hawking the spoils of lifted sanctions: apples, oranges, and bunches and bunches of bananas. Once embargoed, bananas were a status symbol of freedom.

  Another side effect of that freedom was the complete absence of law and order. I was wearing Kejo Level III Rapid Response body armor, made with Kevlar HT 1100 and containing two ceramic plates capable of stopping 7.62x39mm ammunition from an AK-47 assault rifle. I was also wearing a scarf wrapped around my head and black pants. Everyone disagreed about proper precautions—drive an SUV, don’t drive an SUV; tint your windows, don’t tint your windows—but everyone agreed on one thing: Don’t wear blue jeans. Only Americans wear blue jeans.

  An hour south of Baghdad the scenery changed, from dusty, open plains to greener, more watery marshland. Date palms projected from the ground in a hundred different directions; rivulets and tributaries lapped at the road. More like a desert oasis than an English garden, the landscape reminded me how much our vision of the Garden of Eden is filtered through European art. But it’s this marshy reality that is reflected in the opening passages of Genesis, with God creating an expanse in the midst of the watery morass, separating the waters above from the waters below, then drawing land from the water. Water is the one thing God doesn’t create; it’s just there, at the beginning, as it’s here, where that beginning was inspired.

  Qurnah was a parking lot. A long, dense traffic jam of cars was waiting in line for petrol. We maneuvered around the congestion and arrived at the spot where the rivers merged—two wide boulevards of silver that converged on the horizon. It would be easy to romanticize this confluence as the birthplace of Mesopotamia, but the truth is Saddam diverted the rivers slightly and they’ve only met in this specific location since 1993.

  Still, that didn’t stop the locals. A few blocks away was a small public park about the size of a basketball court. Residents call it Janat Adan, the Garden of Eden. It contained two living olive trees and one dead one, and was covered in concrete. Joni Mitchell was right. They paved paradise. A few children were playing when I arrived, and soon more hurried over. They tugged on my coat and asked for coins. The scene was joyful and full of life.

  But minutes later Hikmat came rushing to my side. “Mr. Bruce,” he said, “do you see those men over there?” He pointed to a small band of what looked like hooligans, dressed in dark pants and leather jackets. They certainly weren’t wearing blue jeans. “They want to rob you,” he said. “They even offered to give me ten percent of everything they stole off you.”

  We hurried to the car, and I tossed my backpack into the trunk. The men stepped forward, flashing guns. My mind was racing, and I barely had time to register the irony of the moment. We’re being kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Not since Adam and Eve . . . I was just about to hop into the backseat when suddenly a little girl pushed through the crowd of men and offered me a small token of my visit.

  An olive branch.

  Humans might spoil the garden, but Eden never dies.

  • • •

  BEFORE WE TALK about what Adam and Eve might mean for today, we have to talk about what Adam and Eve meant in the ancient world. Though we tend to imagine the story as taking place in the fog of prehistory, it actually grew out of a distinct time and place at the dawn of human civilization in the Fertile Crescent. And more than just growing out of that era, the story of Adam and Eve represents a radical break from that era in a number of critical ways.

  First, the story has one god.

  Second, the story has two people.

  Third, those two people are in a relationship built on love.

  In order to unpack those coded messages hiding in plain sight, I decided to begin my journey in a place that we don’t often associate with Adam and Eve but that is central to their legacy, Jerusalem. A little more than a decade after my visit to Iraq, I flew to Israel in early fall, during the week when the opening chapters of Genesis are read in synagogues around the world. In Hebrew, this portion of the Torah is known as Bereshit, from the opening word of the Bible, which was indelibly rendered into English by the King James translators as “In the beginning.”

  And what a beginning it is.

  The man and woman who become known as Adam and Eve make their first appearance in history in the first chapter of Genesis and almost from the outset a peculiarity surrounds their lives: There’s not one story about their origins in the Bible; there’s two. The second story is both longer and more famous. It begins in Genesis 2 and continues all the way into Genesis 5. This more detailed narrative contains many of the iconic episodes in Adam and Eve’s life. God forms Adam from the earth and places him in the Garden of Eden. Adam feels lonely, so God creates Eve from part of his torso. Adam is besotted with Eve, declares her “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” and the two are united.

  These joyful scenes are followed by the drama surrounding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A discontented Eve leaves Adam and ventures into the garden alone. She meets a talking serpent, who persuades her to eat a piece of fruit from the tree, which God has expressly forbidden. Eve offers the fruit to Adam, who also eats. The two open their eyes and discover they are naked.

  In the final act, God visits the couple, doles out consequences for their behavior, then banishes Adam and Eve from Eden. The couple heads into exile and quickly have two sons, Cain and Abel, one of whom murders the other. Adam and Eve then reunite to have a third son, Seth, who finally fulfills his parents’ destiny to be fruitful and populate the earth.

  One reason this second story is better known is that it contains many of the flash points that have caused such epic debate over the years: Who is superior, man or woman? Who is guiltier, Eve or Adam? In essence, which is God’s chosen sex, male or female? But when you consider the second story in light of the first, these questions take on starkly different meaning.

  The first story occupies the second half of Genesis 1 and is both shorter and less plot driven. More important, its message about the relationship between man and woman is almost the opposite of the second story. If the second story is about the shifting hierarchies between man and woman, the first is about their fundamental equality.

  On the sixth day of creation, God creates humanity in his image. This human creation has no identifiable gender or personality. God then divides this creation into male and female, gives these humans dominion over the animals, and enjoins them to have lots of children. The story ends with God declaring his new creations “very good.”

  Many explanations have been offered over the years as to why there are two stories that in key details are quite different. Traditional commentators stressed that the first account was more general and the second more specific. True, but not entirely satisfying. Beginning in the nineteenth century, historical criticism linked the first account with the more formal, priestly biblical author, known as P, and the second with the more narrative source, J. Also true, yet that doesn’t explain why the editor of the final text chose to include both versions.

  There’s another explanation that seems to grow out of the stories themselves. The narrative of Adam and Eve at its core is about the power of two. There are two people, two points of view, and, yes, two sides to the story. The fact that there are two versions of the narrative reinforces this notion that life is fundamentally about creative tension. Creation is cocreation. And this message is not accidental or ancillary. It is central to the entire Bible. Abraham has two wives who duel for his legacy and two sons who do the same; Isaac has twin sons who are also rivals; Jacob has two wives from the same family. Later, there are two tablets of law, two kingdoms, two exiles, and two temples. For Christians there are two testaments, old and new. In the biblical worldview, unity is the rarity; duality is the norm.

  There’s one more prominent duality at the heart of the Adam and Eve story and that may be the most radical of all: There’s only one God but there are two people. There’s a partnership between the divine and humans. In this detail alone, the biblical account is unlike any origin story that came before it. To understand the significance of that, I left Jerusalem one morning and headed south toward the city of Beer Sheva to meet one of the premier excavators in the ancient world.

  Yossi Garfinkel holds a chair of archaeology at Hebrew University and is an authority on the Neolithic world, the period that extended from around 12,000 B.C.E. until 2,000 B.C.E. This was the period when civilizations first emerged in the Fertile Crescent; it’s also the period when the Adam and Eve story was first told. Yossi is in his early sixties and nearly bald, with skin darkened from years in the sun. On this morning he was digging at a site believed to be connected to King David. He left a group of students, and we settled under a tree. He began by putting Adam and Eve into historical context.

  Scholars largely agree that the book of Genesis emerged through a series of oral stories that were passed down for centuries and written down beginning in the first millennium B.C.E. Robust city-states thrived in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley as early as 5000 B.C.E. These civilizations, among them Akkadian, Sumerian, and Babylonian, all used storytelling to explain their origins.

  “The earliest humans were hunter-gatherers,” Yossi said. Beginning around seventy thousand years ago, humans lived in small, tight-knit bands that moved around a lot. As anthropologist Yuval Harari said of these communities, “Members of a band knew each other very intimately, and were surrounded throughout their lives by friends and relatives. Loneliness and privacy were rare.” Men and women in these societies divided responsibilities more or less equally. Men did the hunting, while women did the gathering. Their gods reflected this diversification.

  “In hunter-gatherer societies, there were no central powers so there were no central deities,” Yossi said. “People had a god of the rain, a god of the wind, and so on.” Some of those gods had male characteristics; others female; many had both.

  Next came the period that Yossi studies closely, the birth of farming. “Around 12,000 B.C.E., people began to settle in permanent villages,” he said. “They started agriculture; they domesticated plants and animals; they began cultivating their own food. This is really when humans started raising themselves from nature.”