Part II of The Flower and The Nettle (in 3 Parts)

Seek not outside yourself, heaven is within – Mary Lou Cook

Happiness is a living emotion. It was in the Garden of Eden with its magnificent vegetation, plentiful fauna, and teeming population of many other species wherein Adam, his woman and the animals happily occupied the same plane of existence. It was in this garden that the Creator, who is the foundation of all good, established the union of those first two human beings – which occasioned the beginning of the human family and birth of society. It was in this garden where, both Adam and the woman ate only the abundant fruits of the trees and lived in their state of pristine innocence.

This is also where the first punishment for disobedience was meted out against these two frail creatures who had sinned through pride – for by consuming the forbidden fruit man knew the good he had fallen from, and the evil he had fallen into.

As regards the vexed question of banishment from Eden as a consequence, the respective punishments enforced on Adam and his woman, the couple who originally enjoyed immortality and “walked with God”, brought upon them sickness and death; with the necessity of working for a living, Adam will struggle in pain so much of his further earthly span to prepare the ground fertile to cultivate; and the woman, who was every way perfect and bearer of life, is to suffer multiplied pain during childbirth.  

God always intended for human beings to work for a living and for work to be a joy. In the beginning, work was meant as a gift. In the beautiful garden where Adam lived with the woman, no doubt, they didn’t fritter their life away but oft-times occupied themselves tending to that garden. One could think of the time when Adam studied all living things and engaged in the act of naming them – something more than a passing notice but a very important symbol.

The chastisements imposed by God also made them discover their nakedness and awakened in them a sense of shame in contrast to their prevailing state wherein they were unashamed of being naked.  

They hid behind the loincloths made of fig-leaves gathered probably from the tree whose forbidden fruit Adam and the woman had eaten (1) in defiance of the commandment of their God the Creator.

The fact remained that, the mixture of mercy and wrath and expulsion from the Garden of Eden they had incurred was the aftereffect of the crafty exploit of a devious sinner in a serpent’s form. That demonic sinner was none other than the devil. As the Prince of Evil, he is also called Satan, the fallen and lost, but a hero of his own story, who had employed jealousy as a seductive weapon with the utmost subtlety to entice the guileless and unsuspecting woman by praising the alluring beauty of the tree and the seeming benefits which it might confer.

The devil had accosted the woman in the absence of Adam. Perhaps she had only heard the terms of the covenant from Adam. To seduce the woman into disobedience, the evil one had made use of the serpent (chivja). If anything, by his prevarication, the first man Adam not only sinned himself by his disobedience to God and obedience to the devil, but entailed misery on his whole posterity as the blood of the first human stock flows in the veins of every living human being.

The spell of trustworthiness the devil created to seduce the woman into disobedience was no simple feat but craftily attained by him by employing a methodical and deceitful approach for which this evil creature would later become world renowned for.

From the earliest years, painters around the world, while depicting the Fall of Man, have illustrated the devil’s impersonation as a serpent and accentuated the cunningness of this evil snake creature when it engaged Adam’s woman (2) in conversation that led to the Fall of Man, an episode which formed part of the inspired history of the great events of 2369 years depicted in the Book of Genesis of the Old Testament which started with the first ten words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Jo                                                            (Continued in Part III: Lessons from The Garden)

Note: (1) A fable would later on gather popularity as “Adam’s apple” (Latin: Pomum Adami) in relation to the protuberance in the forepart of the throat, so called from the supposition that a piece of the forbidden fruit stuck in Adam’s throat. 

(2) Later, Adam would call his woman Eve – the word Eve is “Chavah/Hawwah” in Hebrew, means “Life, lifegiving“)

 (© Joseph Sébastine/Manningtree Archive)