It’s clear from We Who Wrestle with God that Jordan Peterson has spent much of his academic life thinking about symbolism in the Bible. And it’s clear from the quality of his work that he has focused his considerable intellectual energy in this pursuit. Let’s examine just a few chapters in Peterson’s new book and what they portend for our understanding of the Old Testament, and for humanity itself while we’re at it.

Adam and Eve

Clearly the reason that life is difficult is because Eve ate the apple. But seriously, there is a lot going on in this Biblical story from Genesis. For one thing, it’s a rationalization for why an omnipotent God would also make life kind of suck. Considering that God is omniscient, you would think he would make life more pleasant. But the story explains that because of the fall of Adam and Eve, life is filled with hardship. 

In Peterson’s view, it wasn’t just that Eve ate the apple out of folly or carelessness. It was because of a kind of pathological empathy towards the snake. She thought that she could incorporate the snake into the community, so to speak.

When Eve follows the snake’s instructions, Peterson takes it as an example of feminine naivete: “It looks so harmless what could go wrong?” He makes an analogy between Eve’s stance towards the snake and issues we face today with “predators” or parasites as he puts it: 

“Could the gates not open for them too?”

It’s an example, as Peterson puts it, of “maternal benevolence,” which sounds like a good thing, but it can be prideful. Sometimes showing empathy can be, well, virtue signaling. It was certainly a big problem when Eve ate the apple.

It’s a fascinating metaphor from Peterson, but does the Old Testament actually say that? The rather sparse prose in the story of Adam and Eve doesn’t suggest, at least not explicitly, that Eve feels empathy for the snake. That doesn’t mean Peterson is wrong, it just means that he’s being a little creative. And that’s a good thing.

Genesis describes Eve’s thinking in deciding to eat the apple

“And when this woman saw that the tree was good for food and it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.”

According to the Bible, Eve ate the apple because of its perceived benefits, according to the snake– not necessarily because she had empathy for the snake itself. It doesn’t explicitly say that in Genesis. 

“Ye shall not surely die.”

Nonetheless, Peterson’s point is taken: This empathy, this pathological empathy is a big problem for Western Civilization; much of which is based on these myths or stories, if you like, from the Bible.

Eve tells the snake that they can’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil or they’re die. 

The snake tells Eve:

"Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."  

So that was his pitch. The worst you could say about Eve is that she was naive. 

The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel explains why there’s so many different languages in the world, different cultures and the lack of unity. That’s all thanks to our hubris.  But to bring the story to 2025, it’s a warning against a mishmash of cultures, different languages and people not understanding each other.  Sound familiar?

As Jordan Peterson explains in We Who wrestle with God, it’s also a lot more than that. The Old Testament story is a warning against a lack of reverence for God,  overreliance on technology, and moral relativism. Yeah, there’s a lot in there, I mean it’s Jordan Peterson..

I find the Tower of Babel story fairly mysterious. Why exactly God is so angry about the tower, we can only conjecture. At any rate, his displeasure is clear in Genesis:

“Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language, and this they begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

It’s as though God is upset that the people became too uppity, and life was apparently getting too easy for his tastes.

In response, God throws a wrench in this situation of everyone speaking the same language and instead makes life a lot more difficult

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” (Genesis 11.7)

Hubris. Of course if you build a tower which you purport will reach to Heaven, God is going to knock you down a peg.  As it says in Proverbs:

“Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

As Peterson puts it, “The pursuit of technology engaged in by these builders constitutes both a substitute for proper ethical driving and a form of worship of the intellect.”  

Perhaps they should have been focused on praying or something like that, instead of building this enormous tower.

By the way, Tower of Babel– what exactly is Babel? Again according to We Who wrestle with God, it’s etymologically related to the ancient city of Babylon which the Israelites would not have felt so keen about. So Babylon comes to represent basically everything bad.  “The terms Babble and Babylon are clearly related in terms of etymology and geography…”

To put it in context, this hubris to build the Tower of Babel, think about similar incidents: Eve ate the apple, Cain killed his brother. Are you starting to see the pattern?  Peterson writes, “The descendants of Cain are those who erect the doomed Tower.”  Likewise, the descendants of Cain are deemed responsible for the wickedness which causes the flood in the story of Noah’s Ark.

Let’s get political now: The Tower of Babel could be a warning against multilingualism and even multiculturalism. Peterson says of a shared culture:

“...it is easier for us to understand other people, who share the same position, tradition, who dream similar dreams, and who speak the same language.” 

 I dare say that speaks to some of the social realities transpiring in the United States and Canada too.  Now you might disagree that’s a problem. But what you can’t disagree with is that, at least according to Genesis, this creating of many tongues is not a desirable situation. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been a punishment from god.

The antidote? Peterson explains, “we need a shared rock of certainty under our feet so that we can all stand upon it while we talk.”

Personally, I don’t know why building a tower was such a big deal that it provoked the punishment of creating different languages, and I don’t even know if having different languages is a problem. Anyway, that’s the story and it certainly does raise some provocative questions.

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