'...And So They Went Out': The Lives of Adam and Eve as Cultural Transformative Story

Description

The phrase "and so they went out" is often used to describe the departure of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Yet it also aptly describes the many versions of the stories of Adam and Eve as they began to circulate about the turn of the Common Era: they too "went out", and the appearance of these stories in multiple versions and languages attests both to their widespread popularity and to their ongoing appeal in the ancient world. Nor is their appeal confined to antiquity-these stories continue to fascinate, and the various versions of the apocryphal "Books of Adam and Eve" have begun to command considerable attention in the academic world. Thus far, the scholarly community has concentrated principally on the complex tradition-history of these texts, their date, provenance and language. But the process of the reshaping and transformation of the stories within the "Books of Adam and Eve" has not yet been thoroughly studied. This book sets out to redress this imbalance by focusing primarily upon conceptual, literary, and thematic issues. By making use contemporary critical methods such as literary-critical analysis, ritual theory, and social-scientific taxonomy, the book explores how these stories represent a profound transformation and reshaping of ancient attitudes to gender, body, sexuality, sin, social hierarchies, and human aspirations.

Vita Daphna Arbel is a Professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. J.R.C. Cousland is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Dietmar Neufeld was Associate Professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

There has been much recent work on the textual traditions of the Life of Adam and Eve. This book takes that work a step farther. Arbel, Neufeld and Cousland bring a variety of methods to bear on the story -- literary, folkloric, sociological. They treat the text as an artifact of cultural history. This is an original, ground-breaking study that brings new sophistication to the study of the Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha. -- John J. Collins, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT, USA The book ...AND SO THY WENT OUT contains challenging insights into the "Lives" of Adam and Eve (GLAE and LLAE) and offers an innovative exploration of literary theory, anthropological models, genre features. The authors analyse the expressive and transformative power of these narratives proposing a renewed multilateral approach to the texts. The book represents a major contribution to scholarship of multiple stories and their cultural and ideological environments. It is an admirably dense example of scholarly work that brings to light levels and nuances of meaning seldom to be found in one volume. -- Adriana Destro, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and of Anthropology of Religions, University of Bologna, Italy.