The Monkey in the Garden of Eden
So: Adam Clarke, an industrious and studious Wesleyan scholar of holy scripture, published, across the 1790s and 1800s, a multi-volume commentary on the Bible, ‘designed as a help to a better understanding of the sacred writings’. It was very widely read, not just among Methodists, and remains in print to this day.
Perhaps the most challenging theological perspective advanced in this lengthy and learned commentary was Clarke’s rebuttal of the doctrine of the eternal Sonship of Jesus — the idea that Jesus was coeveal with God the Father (and the Holy Spirit) from the dawn of time. Clarke’s reading of the Bible did not, he believed, support such a view: he argued it would mean Christ was subordinate to God and therefore not fully divine.
But a more immediate and heated controversy was generated by a very different and, we might think, rather more trivial point of interpetation. The subtle beast that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden: was it a kind of snake, a ‘serpent’? It is, after all, called in the Vulgate: serpens — and in the Septuagint ὄφις. Cut and dried, no?
Not so, says Clarke. The tempter of Eve was a monkey.
For his reasoning he returns to the original Hebrew: נחש, ‘nāḥāsh’. In Aramaic this word means ‘to divine, to prophesy’, and even in Hebrew, where it is usually translated snake, it carries the parallel meaning of ‘magic, sorcery, spell, enchantment, augury’. Etymologically it seems it’s related to a Proto-Semitic word *naḥaš- meaning lion, which may have come to be associated with snakes by calling the latter beasts ‘the lions of the ground’ or ‘the lions of the dirt’. There’s an Akkadian phrase nēšu-ša-qaqqari, which means snake, or perhaps chameleon, and which literally translates as ‘lion of the ground’.
This isn’t the same as apes of course, but Clarke has several reasons for thinking that 3000 years of Biblical exegesis has mischaracterised the nature of this creature. He starts by noting the semantic relationship between נחש and wisdom (‘at root it signifies to examine, to be curious, to search diligently, to be wise, &c’), noting that wisdom as such ‘is not characteristic of serpents’. Then he argues that a snake already goes about on his belly, which makes ‘his present mode of going no alteration, and therefore no curse’. Thirdly he notes that ‘there is not so much enmity between mankind and the serpent tribe, as between them and rats or magpies’, which weighs-against the mutual antagonism specified in the Bible. Then Clarke cites an Arabic word which sounds much like the Hebrew but which means ‘monkey’ rather than serpent. Then he picks out other places in the Old Testament where a נחש is described as a ‘babbler’, not (Clarke insists) a characteristic of snakes. He summarises his position:
1. That whatever this nachash was, he stood at the head of all inferior animals for wisdom and understanding. 2. That he walked erect, for this is necessarily implied in his punishment — on thy belly (i.e., on all fours) shalt thou go. 3. That he was endued with the gift of speech, for a conversation is here related between him and the woman. 4. That he was also endued with the gift of reason, for we find him reasoning and disputing with Eve. 5. That these things were common to this creature, the woman no doubt having often seen him walk erect, talk, and reason, and therefore she testifies no kind of surprise when he accosts her in the language related in the text; and indeed from the manner in which this is introduced it appears to be only a part of a conversation that had passed between them on the occasion.
Snakes, by contrast, never have walked erect (Clarke cites naturalists to confirm this fact) and can’t speak.
It’s a striking idea: the ape, or Orang Utan (Clarke is quite drawn to the idea that the Tempter was of this latter species) standing erect and proud — tempting Eve — being cursed by God and spending the rest of history stooped and cringing and ridiculous, stumbling along on its knuckles, lolling the dirt. But it’s also, of course, one of those moments when a strictly pedantic attention to the particularities of a text miss the dangers of replacing a figure with mythic heft and potency with an image that is, simply, ludicrous.
Clarke, at any rate, was widely mocked. John Bellamy published a furious rebuttal in 1811.
The Classical Journal for 1829 was more restrained, but just as emphatic: ‘Adam Clarke, in his notes on the passage of Genesis, supposes it to have been some kind of an ape, but foundations of these notions are laid on an erroneous principle.’ A letter to the Anti-Jacobin Review in the 1820s accused Clarke of disingenuously creating ‘novelty’ for the sake of it, by way of characterising his new ‘sect’ of Methodists as distinct and original:
Dear Sir — a friend, the other day, put into my hands, for a few minutes, Adam Clarke's new edition of Genesis, and directed my attention to his note on the serpent, Gen. iii. v. 1. Has A. C. taken Geddes for his proto-type? or are English Commentators about to imitate German literati, who, in their eagerness to say something new, have said many things the most absurd, nor seem to regard how ridiculous they make the scriptures, provided their own sagacity be established? Who would have believed it possible that a primate of Wesley's connection should hazard, in a volume intended for general use, too widely dispersed for suppression, and too extensive for recal, a conjecture so strange, so novel, and, if false, so indecorous, as that the animal which tempted Eve was a — Monkey? … I fear this publication, which is to be had of all the preachers in Mr. Wesley's connection, will be the means of teaching much absurdity to those misguided sectarists, and of giving rise finally to hypocrisy and infidelity among them, as among the Papists of old. [Anti-Jacobin 39 (1811), 107]
It’s not, we can say, a hypothesis that has achieved broader popularity. But I do wonder how far it reached into the 19th-century, and how much this controversy influenced and situated the later Darwinian brouhaha? Might one reason the thesis of The Descent of Man created such intense and widespread hostility is that there was, in some sense, a semiotic in which it was not just abasing and demeaning, but actually Satanic to link homo sapiens and the apes?
