Serpent Slanders God Beside the Forbidden Tree

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The Argument Under the Branches

The serpent did not begin with the fruit, because the fruit was the easy part. It began with God's motives. "He ate from this tree Himself," it told Eve, "and afterward He stood over nothing and made a world out of it. Every craftsman hates the craftsman who opens a bench beside his own." The command had nothing to do with her, the serpent said. The command was a tradesman guarding a trade.

Nobody had ever given Eve a reason for the rule. Now she had one, and it fit the shape of the silence around that tree.

Then the serpent went from motive to order. "Count what was made and when," it said. "The firmament came after the heavens and holds them up. The plants came after the firmament and drink from it. The lights came after the plants and make them grow. Whatever comes later stands over what came earlier, and you came last of all, which is why the whole garden answers to you." It let that sit in her a moment. Then it said the part that mattered. "Unless He makes something after you."

That was the hook, since everything before it had only flattered her. This frightened her. Somewhere out past the tree line, where she was not permitted to go, a newer creature could already be taking shape, and it would stand over her the way she stood over the grass. "Hurry," the serpent said. "Eat, before He makes another world and it rules you."

What She Understood

The verse would say afterward that the woman saw the tree was good, but what she saw had nothing to do with the color of the fruit. She stood there while the argument stopped being a voice outside her and became the way she herself read the garden. The rule went from strange to mean. The gardener went from generous to careful. In the time it takes to lift an arm, the tree in front of her turned from forbidden into withheld, and there is no wanting like the wanting for something kept back on purpose.

She took it and ate it. She gave it to Adam, and whatever she said to him, he did not put it down.

Their eyes opened, though not onto a bench beside God's. They opened onto their own skin. No rival world came up out of the ground that afternoon, and no craft arrived in their hands, only a knowledge they could not set down again, and the first thing it told them was that they were naked. They sewed leaves together, and then they heard Him walking in the garden in the cool of the day, so they went in among the trees, because hiding was the one new skill the fruit had actually taught them.

Adam blamed the woman, and Eve blamed the serpent, and the serpent had nobody left to hand it to.

The Sentence That Went Past Him

Adam stood and waited to hear his own name.

The serpent was sentenced first, and the sentence went into its body: belly, dust, an argument folded down into a shape that could never stand up to make it again. Then the woman. Then God turned to the man, and the words went past Adam and into the dirt he was standing on. "Cursed is the earth for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee. In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread."

It took Adam a breath to work out what had happened, since the ground had no part in the eating and had taken the wound anyway. He was not going to be finished where he stood. The field was going to be finished instead, and he was going to live in the field.

He had reached for the fruit to keep from being ruled by something made after him. Now he was going to spend his life bent over something made before him, asking it for bread.

Thorns for the Rest of It

East of the garden the serpent's theory about jealous craftsmen was worth nothing, because no competitor ever came. Nothing was made after them that needed watching. There was only the field, which did not know them and did not care, and which gave up nothing it was not forced to give.

Adam broke the crust with a stick and turned it, and what came up first were the thistles, exactly as promised, ahead of anything he had put in. He pulled them and they cut him, so he learned to pull them differently. The sweat ran into his eyes by the middle of the morning. By the second season he knew the weather the way he had once known the names of animals, and he no longer expected the ground to be generous, though he still worked it as if it might be.

Eve pressed seed into a furrow and covered it and then waited, and the waiting was the strangest part, since nothing in the garden had ever made anyone wait for anything.

The first bread came late and cost them a whole season. Adam sat in the dirt that had been sentenced in his place and ate it there, and it was the first thing he had ever eaten that had been late.