Eve and Pandora, and where the puzzle piece fits

This post is slightly off my usual topics, but Father Stephen's post this week touches on Pandora -- so this seems an opportune moment to explore some connections about ancient narratives and ancient worldviews. 

For anyone who wouldn't mind a refresher, Pandora is a character in Greek mythology who lets evil loose in the world. She does this by opening a box that is forbidden to open, desiring to know what is inside it. Though the details are different, the outline has similarities to the Bible's account of Eve bringing evil into the world by reaching out for knowledge that was forbidden. I am not planning to compare and contrast Eve and Pandora here. My point is that both the Greeks and Hebrews had either revelation or primal instinct that human misery was in part due to human pursuit of knowledge -- perhaps without enough wisdom. 

I know that there are some legitimate reasons why people might object to comparing Eve with Pandora. I do not intend to try to change anyone's thoughts. My own reason for the comparison is this: the Greek and Hebrew people shared a world, after a certain point in history -- though it may be that the Greek sense of national identity began later than the Hebrew one. Their worldviews had some things in common. Consider another aspect of the Biblical creation account: the wind / breath of God moved over the water, the man was made from the dust of the earth. We see the classical "elements" of earth, air, and water in that, with the Spirit of God consistently associated with air and water. As for humanity, "Dust you are, and to dust you will return" -- we are creatures of earth. It's not a story directly repeated in any Greek myth that I know, and still the ancient world's "elements" (which we tend to think of as Greek elements) are there in the background. Sure, their "elements" are more like what we now call "states of matter": solid, liquid, gas. While our knowledge of states of matter is more advanced than the ancient one, that original understanding still informs our own and is still taught as one of the early lessons in chemistry. 

A few years back I'd shared some thoughts on the ancient "element" of fire, contrasting the Greek myth of Prometheus -- in which a man stole the fire of the gods -- with Pentecost in its Christian meaning, in which the fire of God's Spirit is freely poured out on people. In the Bible, the holy fire is given as a gift to humanity. The breath of God is given as a gift to humanity. The purifying water is given as a gift to humanity. So all the other elements of fire, air, and water are given as gifts to the children of earth. 

Knowledge is not given as a gift. We value it: in every generation, a significant number of people devote time and focus to learning, to gaining understanding, to teaching. So it is easy to empathize with Eve. There is an old Jewish teaching that, when the time was right, Adam and Eve would have been given to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil -- that the problem was not with the knowledge itself, but with the (lack of) wisdom and maturity of the recipients, or their relationship with God, each other, and the world. On the view that God freely gives of himself to his people, that interpretation fits.