Original
(Prelapsarian) Glory
The glorification of human beings in the early Jewish
literature has often been read in relation to the putative original glory of
the first humans. In New Testament scholarship, principally in relation to the
Pauline letters, both the glory of Christ and the glory of believers have been
presented as “Adamic” (see Macaskill 2013a, 128– 44). Such claims reflect the
programmatic significance that the figure of Adam seems to have at points in
Paul’s writing, with this frequently related to a range of texts associated
with Early Judaism that represent the first humans as glorious (although it
should be noted that attention is usually focused on Adam, with Eve somewhat
neglected). There are some references to this in the Dead Sea Scrolls, notably
in 4Q504, fragment 8, where Adam is made “in the image of [your] glory” and in
the Community Rule, where the promise of glorification is made to those God has
chosen for an eternal covenant, to whom “will belong all of the glory of Adam/
humanity” (qōl qavōd adam, 1QS IV 23). There are also traditions in the
pseudepigrapha and rabbinic writings that represent the prelapsarian Adam
variously as numinous (Genesis Rabbah 20:12), huge (b.Ḥagigah 12a), and garbed in
glorious robes (Apocalypse of Moses 20:2), with these qualities linked to the
human status as the image of God (see further Anderson 2001, 124– 34).
My own sense is that we need to be careful in how we
invoke Adamic material in relation to Early Judaism. We should be careful not
to read the significance of Adam in later Christian accounts of fall and
salvation back into the early Jewish texts, including those that we have noted
from Qumran. As we have already seen, other human figures embody divine glory
in the early Jewish literature and the glory traditions associated with Adam
may simply be particular iterations of a more widespread trope of the human
embodiment of divine glory. If we admit some evidence from the targums, which
are later but probably preserve some old traditions, we find these other
glorified figures sometimes designated as eikōns of God (as with Jacob
in Targum Ps- Jonathan Gen. 28:12). Adam is just one image of God and the
significance of the others is not derived from Adam, but from God.
The significance of this is developed further if we
acknowledge that the Eden stories are often (though not always) read
paradigmatically rather than etiologically within Judaism. Rather than
describing the etiology of original sin, they can describe the paradigm of
sin’s operation and its inglorious consequences. Read paradigmatically, the stories
are remarkably elastic, bending to the particular interests of the authors. One
fragment of 4QInstruction (4Q423 fragment 2, lines 2– 3) describes the “thorns
and thistles” that will grow whenever one acts in disobedience to the raz
niyheh, “mystery of existence,” revealed to the reader (see Macaskill
2007). By this mystery, the reader has been “sanctified,” but they must be
careful not to glorify themselves more than God and thus become cursed again
(lines 6– 7). For his part, Philo maps each of the elements within it onto
universal (though also gendered) human experience. Thus, the serpent is described
as more cunning than other beasts, “on account of the natural proneness of mankind
to vice, of which he is the symbol.” Both here and in his On the Creation of
the World (esp. 69– 72), he places the human likeness of God within
a framework of corruptibility and incorruptibility, the former associated with
the inglorious earth and the latter with glorious divine being, particularly
identified with reason and the mind. Human glorification, then, is particularly
associated with virtue, with the ordering of the self and its passions by
divine reason, and thereby participating in God’s perfections and immortality.
In these indisputably Jewish texts, then, the Eden story
is used figurally rather than etiologically, although the figuration at work is
quite different in each. The principal significance of this is that glory is
not definitively associated with Adam and Eve, such that human glorification is
essentially “Adamic” and other examples are understood to evoke the first
couple (or the first man, since Eve is often neglected). Rather, glory is
properly divine and heavenly, experienced by all who participate in these
realities; Adam figurally exemplifies both glory and its loss, but as one among
many who do so. The neglect of such figuration in many modern readings, I
suspect, reflects the loss of figural categories for modern interpreters and
the dominance of certain models of salvation- history.
We also need to acknowledge the uncertain provenance of
many pseudepigraphical works that are cited in support of Adamic glory and to
recognize that they may reflect later developments in thought. There is an
extensive body of pseudepigraphical literature that is particularly devoted to
fresh retellings of the Garden story and the narratives that follow it (Stone
1992). The provenance of these texts is a matter of debate, however, and even
if they preserve some originally early Jewish content, this is entangled with Christian
theological traditions which became increasingly interested in the figures of Adam,
Eve, and Satan during the early centuries of the Common Era. The Adam and Eve
literature became immensely popular during this period, transmitted in a range
of languages and exhibiting energetic growth and development as functionally
Christian writing.
This does not mean that the Adam and Eve works, and
parallels to them in other pseudepigrapha of debated origin (such as 2 Enoch),
should be kept out of our discussion of deification, but these need to be
treated carefully and read in the light of the material we know unquestionably
to be Jewish, such as the Scrolls and Philo. (Grant Macaskill, “The ‘Non-Biblical’
Writings of Early Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deification, ed.
Paul L. Gravrilyuk, Andrew Hofer, and Matthew Levering; Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2024], 53-54)
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