In "Northrop Frye's Bible," Steven Marx identifies sex as the primary human concern associated with the Garden of Eden creation myth in Genesis (4). He writes: "The sexual union of male and female is an analogy for the human union with God" (4). The garden is centered about two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2:9). God, as we all know, forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As noted by Frazer on page 16 of Folklore in the Old Testament, the fruit of the tree of life is not forbidden until after the man and woman eat of the tree of knowledge. Frazer states that God does not want the humans to attain god-like qualities through immortality and possession of the special knowledge. This notion is backed up by Frye who writes on page 194 of Words With Power, "...God seems to be addressing other gods in a spirit of something very much like panic (GC 109), we seem to be back to this fear, associated this time with the mysterious 'knowledge of good and evil,' and, still more, with the fact that humanity may now reach for the tree of life. As the tree of life was not forbidden to Adam and Eve before, it seems to be only the possession of the new knowledge that makes it dangerous." Frye describes the fear of which he speaks as a common theme found in pre-Biblical Near Eastern Religions, in which the gods feel "threatened by man's rapid advance, with a particular fear of his becoming immortal" (194). Frye then proceeds to examine the "nature of the knowledge acquired." He describes it as "a repressive morality founded on a sexual neurosis." He goes on to say: "The moral knowledge was disastrous when attached to a sense of shame and concealment about sex, and was forbidden because in that situation it ceases to be a genuine knowledge of anything, even of good and evil." This is what caused the loss of sexual innocence which is essentially what constitutes the Fall.
Previously in the chapter, Frye says that the original adam may have been androgynous, so it stands to reason that the monotheistic God of Genesis is also androgynous. That is, He contains both masculine and feminine traits. God is creative as well as androgynous and monotheistic and wants to infuse these traits in His adam; but the adam is not God and is unable to express creativity in the same way. To rectify this, God, leaving the masculine traits in the adam, draws out the feminine traits and imparts them onto His new creation, the isshah. The act of sex is for enjoyment (Marx), expression of love, and creation. The fruit of the tree of life was not forbidden because it functions as the axis mundi in the Garden of Eden myth. It represents a bod between God and Adam and Eve which is withdrawn when they betray God's trust and strive for that which is forbidden them. On page 155 Frye writes: "This tree is not said to reach heaven, but it obviously is linked to a connection between earth and heaven broken at the Fall."
"The real issue involved here," Frye writes on page 198, "is not one of simple prudery, but of the difference between a poetic and metaphorical structure, founded among other things on the primary concern of sex, and the transformation of this structure into a form of ideological authority." In other words, a weak reading of the Garden myth not only literally assigns men a more esteemed status to lord over women, but also renders the Bible a misogynistic text. Woman, or that which symbolizes the feminine attributes of monotheism, initiated the Fall and patriarchy was meted out as one of her punishments. Man, or that which symbolizes the masculine, received his own set of punishments, as he was not blameless in the fiasco. "The sexual bias, however frequent, is certainly reversible, even if the history of literary imagery is not" (Frye 201). The point is not that woman caused expulsion from Eden; the myth very well could have been written with man taking the lead in the events which culminated in the Fall. The point is that Adam and Eve disrupted the balance of God's creation, their paradise, when they partook of the forbidden fruit and fell from God's grace. The result is not only (supposedly) our life on earth outside of the Garden, but also the "perversion of sex at the Fall." That perversion includes both the sexual act, condemned as impure, but also the way in which the male and female sexes relate to one another.
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