and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of
existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert
and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way
that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
The Garden of Eden
Remember, as discussed earlier, that the Genesis stories were amalgamated
from several sources. After the newer Priestly story (Genesis 1), recounting
the emergence of order from chaos, comes the second, even more ancient,
“Jahwist” part, beginning, essentially, with Genesis 2. The Jahwist account,
which uses the name YHWH or Jahweh to represent God, contains the story
of Adam and Eve, along with a much fuller explication of the events of the
sixth day alluded to in the previous “Priestly” story. The continuity between
the stories appears to be the result of careful editing by the person or persons
known singly to biblical scholars as the “Redactor,” who wove the stories
together. This may have occurred when the peoples of two traditions united,
for one reason or another, and the subsequent illogic of their melded stories,
growing together over time in an ungainly fashion, bothered someone
conscious, courageous, and obsessed with coherence.
According to the Jahwist creation story, God first created a bounded space,
known as Eden (which, in Aramaic—Jesus’s putative language—means well-
watered place) or Paradise (pairidaeza in old Iranian or Avestan, which
means walled or protected enclosure or garden). God placed Adam in there,
along with all manner of fruit-bearing trees, two of which were marked out.
One of these was the Tree of Life; the other, the Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil. God then told Adam to have his fill of fruit, as he wished, but added
that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden.
After that, He created Eve as a partner for Adam.fn2
Adam and Eve don’t seem very conscious, at the beginning, when they are
first placed in Paradise, and they were certainly not self-conscious. As the
story insists, the original parents were naked, but not ashamed. Such phrasing
implies first that it’s perfectly natural and normal for people to be ashamed of
their nakedness (otherwise nothing would have to be said about its absence)
and second that there was something amiss, for better or worse, with our first
parents. Although there are exceptions, the only people around now who