“Better Watch Your Back, Adam”: Another Adam and Eve Tradition in Second Temple Judaism

Lester L. Grabbe

Aficionados of the TV series, , will be familiar with the intro- ductory track,1 which begins, “When you walk through the garden, better watch your back,” and later on speaks of keeping the devil “way down in the hole.” John R. Levison has discussed one Adam tradition in an earlier monograph and in a paper in the present collection.2 In the conference presentation Levison made the statement, “Adam was a loser,” even sug- gesting that Adam would have lost his car keys. But of course Adam would lose his car keys—where can you keep your keys when you do not have a stitch on? (That was a rhetorical question, not an invitation for sugges- tions.) I shall argue, however, that there is another Adam tradition that Levison ignored in his monograph and in the initial version of his Naples paper.3

Ezekiel 28

Most accounts of Adam and Eve focus on the Adamic tradition in Genesis 1–3. Yet there is another tradition, often overlooked, which is the one in Ezekiel 28 (NRSV): [2] Mortal, say to the prince of Tyre, Thus says the Lord God: Because your heart is proud and you have said, “I am a god; i sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas,”

1 “Way Down in the Hole,” by from his album, “Franks Wild Years.” 2 See J. R. Levison, Portraits of Adam in Early Judaism, from Sirach to 2 Baruch, JSPSup 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988) and his article in the present volume. My paper here was originally read as a response to Levison’s paper. 3 I once had to teach a class on the history of Christian thought many years ago. At the time I was struck by how many early Christian doctrines had Jewish roots. But one that I was not able to investigate but hoped to do so in the future was the Christian doctrine of “the fall of man.” So, three decades later, I have finally had a chance to do this. 274 lester l. grabbe

yet you are but a mortal, and no god, though you compare your mind with the mind of the god. . . . [12] . . . You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. [13] You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering. . . . on the day that you were created they were prepared. [14] With an anointed cherub as guardian I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God; you walked among the stones of fire. [15] You were blameless in your ways from the day that you were created, until iniquity was found in you. [16] In the abundance of your trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned; so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God. and the guardian cherub drove you out from among the stones of fire. Here we have a figure in Eden, but it is a different sort of Eden, with pre- cious jewels and set on a mountain, and a different sort of primal man. This figure is referred to as the “king of Tyre” (28:11). Is he the same as the “prince of Tyre” in 28:1–10? Although the two sections potentially had separate origins, the present text seems to identify the two:4 Most readers would not have noticed the change from “prince” to “king” or would have seen it as insignificant. Levison does not even mention Ezekiel 28 in his monograph, and only briefly refers to it in his article, but it seems to me that we have in Ezekiel 28 an alternate Adam tradition. Or at least we have a text that could be taken to be another Eden story. It partly depends on how one reads the text. If we follow the Masoretic text, the Urmensch in this story is called a keruv (v. 14). Granted, the LXX reads “with the keruv I have placed you on the holy mountain of God” (μετὰ τοῦ χερουβ ἔθηκὰ σε ἐν ὄρει ἁγίῳ θεοῦ). Following the LXX and other versions, Ezekiel 28:14 is often emended to “with a keruv” (as if ’et-kerûv). It appears that the original reading is “you

4 So also P. M. Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary, LHBOTS 482 (London: T & T Clark, 2007), 178.