Eve (64 page)

Your tears are as a flood, my child. There, now. Let me embrace
you, daughter of mine. Has life been so difficult, so tiresome to you? I wish, my love, that you could stay until Aya and Dara arrive. They will embrace you, give you solace, for your thoughts are not altogether wrong, I’m afraid. They will give credence to what you had to endure from me, and they would ask you to see, really see, how I have changed, how
they
have changed.

Dearest Naava, I see you have made the same mistakes I have. Oh, woe is me, if it were not for your quick flight, I would have had time to show you a different path. Know this, daughter of my heart, I am at peace now. My hands and feet and eyes and heart see Elohim every day, maybe not in the way I expect, but He
is
there, waiting to be discovered. Your father and I had our differences, true, but after that heartbreaking summer we came together again, like many strands of a rope plaited together, rendering it stronger, tougher.

Adam reminded me of an incident once, and I shall tell it to you now. You will find it funny and sad at the same time, I think.

Once, after a rainstorm in the Garden, we saw the need to repair our bower, for it had acquired a large gaping hole in one side. I handed Adam twig after twig, so he could weave them together in a way that he saw fit. Later, we would place palm fronds and fig leaves over the top, but first we had to secure a platform underneath, so that the leaves would endure, providing us with sufficient cover.

Well, I did not see that one of the twigs I handed him was afflicted with splinters. One of them lodged in your father’s finger, and as he cried out, he was not upset with the splinter or the twig. No, he was yelling, “Eve, you goat, you have handed me a bad branch. What were you thinking? Now I have this infernal—ow!—splinter, and I can’t get it out.” He danced about, with his finger in his mouth, trying to ease the pain. “Go away from here. I do not want to look at you.”

I protested, of course, saying that he was silly and that he should direct his anger at the twig, not at me.

We laughed about it later, when he reminded me of it, but I have thought upon it since and realized that I had been doing the same thing to Elohim all those years. I pointed my finger at Elohim, demanding an explanation for His absence and His punishment, when all along I did not see my own fault. It was not He who did not draw nigh to me; it was I who did not draw nigh to Him.

Elohim’s ears and eyes were not closed.

Mine
were.

Belief is not always easy.

It is equal parts doubt and astonishment and gratitude and confusion.

And then you see how deeply colored the sky is, how the grass is so sharply fragrant, how the fields are a dazzling gold, and you have to step back and breathe in this wild fabulous world. We live in the space of abundant questions and inadequate answers. How else can we live?

Open your heart, and all the uncertainty fills it—the dimpled earth, the generous sky, the shaking flowers—all of it crowding into your grateful heart. Don’t you see?

Everything ordinary is extraordinary and points to one luminous thing, to a love that has already given its response. You have only to receive it.

Eve: A Novel
is a work of fiction, inspired by the Genesis account and Mesopotamian history. As you might have already guessed, I had to answer many questions for myself, which for some in the religious community might be considered borderline blasphemous and somewhat sacrilegious. I will try to explain.

It has long been thought that the Torah—or the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuter onomy—was written by a handful of authors. Biblical scholars base this hypothesis on the divine names used, the diction and style, the comparison of accounts, the political agenda, and the personality of the writers. If you’re curious about this notion, look at the first two chapters of Genesis. You’ll find two separate creation accounts. The first is a lush, almost poetic rendering, in which man and woman are created together, at the same time. The second is a rather dry accounting of how things occurred and how Eve was created from Adam’s rib—you’ll hear more about the difficulties of this word
rib
later. Harold Bloom, a literary critic who’s not immune to controversy, proposed the radical idea, in his
Book of J,
that one of the writers may have been female. We can only speculate, of course.

Did Adam and Eve exist? Or were they part of a larger creation myth, whose traces are found even in Sumerian and Babylonian literature? Faithful readers of the Genesis account will insist Adam and Eve were real people. I, myself, am not so sure. They may have been characters placed in a moral tale. Or perhaps they were the first
Hebrew
people. As a side note to those of you who love history and would like to delve into this further, search out the creation story in Sumerian and Babylonian literature. They even have a flood story. Stephen Bertman’s
Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
has a nice summary of both.

As an aside, I have remained true to the Genesis accounting, in which Adam and Eve were made by God in a sudden and abrupt way. For the evolutionists—theistic or not—this will be disappointing because they want to know,
Couldn’t God have chosen to breathe spirit or breath into an apelike creature, at a certain point in time?
Yes, He could have. I have no problem with that. I do not want to limit God, for I believe He is capable of anything, so that was not my intention. I simply chose to stay close to the poetic Genesis story.

The problem for me became: Where in history do I place Adam and Eve? Again, readers of the Genesis account will insist, “Well, at the very beginning of time, of course!” but what makes this difficult is that scientists and archaeologists disagree on
when
the beginning of humankind actually was, anywhere from fifteen thousand years ago to hundreds of thousands of years ago. Biblical researchers have placed Adam and Eve’s creation at about 4000 BC, but other researchers and archaeologists date the Sumerians even earlier, based on archaeological excavations by J. E. Taylor, R. Campbell Thompson, Dr. H. R. Hall, and Sir Leonard Woolley, among myriad other archaeologists. I am not an expert on prehistoric times. All I know is that scientists seem to agree that the Fertile Crescent was where civilization rose up, where wheat was planted for the first time, and where cities were established. I know that the Genesis account has Cain building a city and naming it after his son, Enoch. So Mesopotamia is where I placed my Adam and Eve characters, after their “fall” in the Garden. Indeed, if you look closely at Genesis 4:17-22, within several generations of Adam and Eve’s family, there were skilled artisans working in musical instruments and bronze and iron, something that in history books takes eons of years to accomplish. History students will balk at how I’ve combined the Ubaid (4000-3500 BCE), and Uruk (3500-3000 BCE), and Jemdet Nasr (3000-2900 BCE) periods of civilization, based on developments in architecture, writing, seals, metal-working, and pottery. For this I apologize, but since so much is undecided about when and where things came from, I took a smidgen of literary license. What we
do
know, so far, is that originally there was no precious stone or timber or metal in the lower Mesopotamia regions. These things had to be imported from the north, either by land or by
keleks
or boats sailing down the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

As for the city people, you are probably asking, “If Adam and Eve are the universal father and mother, where are all these other people coming from?” Good question. You might find it fascinating to note that when Cain kills Abel, he is fearful of retaliation by other people. Look at Genesis 4:14 (quoting the NIV translation). Cain says, “… I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” I am assuming Cain was the oldest child of Adam and Eve, so what other people was he referring to? Is it possible that there were other people inhabiting the earth at the same time as Adam and Eve and their family?

One other curious thing along the same lines, which I have found no satisfactory answer for in all of the books I have read, is: Who are the Nephilim in Genesis 6:1-5? I quote from the NIV Bible:

When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal, his days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days— and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

This is important because, although the Nephilim are a quick mention, it somehow affected how evil men became and what they learned. Certainly there are people with theories, of which the Book of Enoch—a book not included in the Torah or the Old Testament—is one. Readers may want to look at
Forbidden Mysteries of Enoch: Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil
by Elizabeth Clare Prophet for further enlightenment.

So, all that said, it was with this information in mind that I let my imagination work. Suppose Adam and Eve were influenced by other people? Another culture? Whether or not these people were Nephilim—whoever they might be—or Sumerian-like people was not for me to answer. Having a city nearby gave me my much-needed conflict for an interesting story.

Another verse that influenced me—one that I had never noticed before—gets very little mention, at least in the sermons I’ve heard. Look at Genesis 4:26 (italics are mine): “Seth also had a son, and he named him Enoch.
At that time
men began to call on the name of the Lord.” When I read this, the first thing I wanted to know was: Didn’t Adam and Eve worship Elohim? Didn’t they teach their children about Elohim? Or did they not know
how?
Better yet: Did they
struggle
with their expulsion and their loyalty to Elohim? I went with the latter.

I am grateful to the authors I used to help me answer important and necessary questions, such as: Did Adam and Eve have sex in the Garden or was the Garden too sacred for such a thing? For this, I turned to
The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination
by Gary A. Anderson and
The Life Story of Adam and Havah: A New Targum of Genesis 1:26-5:5
by Shira Halevi. Anderson’s book also discusses the varying opinions—touted by some rabbis, and only partly used by me—regarding the “garments of skin” Adam and Eve were given by Elohim to cover their nakedness. For those who believe that no animals were slaughtered until after the flood (Genesis 9:1-7), this presents a problem, so they have come up with an alternative meaning. What if Adam and Eve had a garment of light about them in the Garden, and upon their expulsion, Elohim clothed them in garments of skin—their own
human,
mortal skin?