A review by grayola
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

3.0

A far longer slog than I anticipated, I teetered between divine revelation and bored frustration at Greenblatt’s dense theology—which I acknowledge is something I could have been better versed in going into this. Still, there are so many fascinating insights made on the back half of the book: the literary symmetry of the creation and redemption stories, the allegorical theories of creation, the literal interpretations of holes in the creation story’s logic, and so on. The most striking to me was the first; that to “correct” the original sin of woman from man’s womb, a woman instead bore man to redeem humanity after years of conflict between lord and people.