Readers that only know Shinie Antony for her witty, often whimsical, pieces in the national newspapers would be amazed at her expertise in the Old Testament, Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible, the Synoptic Gospels and Apocryphal, Jewish magical and Kabbalistic sources that did not find their way into the Biblical canon, apart from her striking eloquence for female assertion and empowerment.  Her learning is combined here with an evocative and vigorous, even uncompromising, writing style.

Adam and Eve are God’s creations as the first man and woman according to Abrahamic religions. However, in Eden Abandoned, Lilith is drawn from Jewish folklore, such as the Alphabet of Sirach (c. 700–1000 AD), as Adam’s first wife, created at the same time and from the same clay as Adam, and therefore antecedent to Eve as the First Woman.

The narration is in the first person. Lilith wanted equality which threatened Adam; he emphasised duty “day and night”, and wanted to be “the leader in our pack of two”. “You think too much,” Adam complained, and she talked too much – “it came down to that.” He thought she blasphemed, and pleaded with God for forgiveness, “always atoning”. She held him in contempt, as “the man cannot say to my face that he likes me no more”. Adam felt he was right even when he did Lilith wrong.

Adam asks Lilith to leave Paradise due to her defiance ‘that finished off his ardour for me.’ She complies, “agreeing to part with no word officially spoken…without my trademark drama.”  Once expelled from paradise, Lilith was “filled with mean thoughts” and entered the state of demon hood and every excess, “to take pleasure out of others hands and into my own,” though Adam remained lodged in her confused memories. She weds Samael, a fallen angel and arch-demon, and bears and destroys numerous of her own and others’ babies.

Lilith has contempt for Eve being born as a subordinate from Adam’s rib. In the guise of a serpent, she tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit while deploring Eve’s passivity, and notes wryly that Adam barks his orders at Eve. She recalls “his limited intelligence, his general lack of hygiene, the silent treatment, and the drying up of endearments.” Eve however seemed happy enough, Lilith was momentarily ashamed of herself, and thought she could in other circumstances have forged sisterly relations with her, but unsure whether to feel derisive or jealous, Lilith reverts to her demonic lack of sympathy and scorn for her rival and enemy who “absolutely believed in her inferiority… accepting of a secondary position.” After the forbidden fruit had been eaten due to Lilith’s wily temptations, original sin, opposites, ageing and death came into being.

Lilith states that her demonic husband Samael tried to accept the blame for Adam and Eve’s downfall in disobeying God, but Lilith was yet unable to beg the Almighty for repentance because she still asserted her right to gender equality. Lilith visits Adam, her first love, on his deathbed. In a few moving pages she states that even if God forgave traitors, she and Adam would be in separate heavens because Adam represented an extreme of goodness, while she, Lilith, an experiment with evil.

The principle of feminine assertion and equality are central to this novel’s theme. Hence, we read some vigorous assertions; Adam had no questions, “it would always be up to me to ask them” though “curiosity was never a virtue in the wrong gender,” “We were, I thought, at par…second not secondary,” “Servitude is labelled love and glorified in marriages; human trafficking begins at home,” “Women are born in survival mode,” “Those who crave a slave come find us,” and “men will merge into women and women into men; that alone will save the human race.”

Males are accordingly viewed unsparingly; “Men in love tend to make a toy out of you, this is right after the pedestal stage,” “if there is a downhill route to take, he (Adam) will crawl along it on all fours,” and “Women occupy a non-man’s land…women without men, that’s a leper colony.”

The story is characterised by robust and challenging prose and numerous learned Biblical and Apocryphal references. Though subjectively written, some passages are both dramatic and poignant. One does not need to be a polemicist to understand and appreciate the logic of the principle of gender equality; a few of the several telling phrases have been quoted above. There is some humour in the text but of the sardonic kind and the male of the species tends to be the object of ridicule.

There is some deliberate over-writing, though excusable as an indication of a florid and fertile imagination in the context of a mythical subject. The book has an original and attractive jacket cover by the publisher, while the conceit of the backward numbering of the chapters 13 to 00 is allegorically to explore the pathways of embarking on something generally considered unacceptable.

The reviewer is a former foreign secretary

Spotlight

Eden Abandoned: The Story of Lilith

By Shinie Antony

Hachette, 2024

144 pages, Rs 499/-