Later, after this first couple had eaten the forbidden fruit, but before they had been driven out of the garden, God came to them in the garden and cursed them -- the serpent to go on its belly and eat dust, the woman to suffer painful childbirth and be ruled by her husband, and the man to eat bread in the sweat of his face till he return unto the ground.
Immediately after these cursings -- but still before receiving coats of skins, being driven out of the garden, or "knowing" his wife and begetting a son -- Adam changed his wife's name: "And Adam called his wife's name Eve [chavvah], because she was the mother of all living [chay]" (Gen. 3:20).
Consider how strange this is. Certainly now we would say that Eve is the mother of all living -- that all living human beings are her descendants -- but what could it have meant to Adam when he said it then? Eve had not yet become the mother of anyone at all, and of "all living" at that time -- the plants, the animals, the man, and herself -- she was the very last to have been created. In fact one could almost say that Adam was her "mother," since she had been "taken out of Man."
(A minority of Bible translations try to elide the difficulty with such renditions as "she is," "she was to be," or "she would become"; but I can see no justification for this in the Hebrew, which uses the perfect aspect.)
Later, when Cain was cursed by the Lord for the murder he had committed, he whined, "My punishment is greater than I can bear" (Gen. 4:13). We see no such reaction from Adam -- no reaction at all, in fact. As the Lord laid out all the ways in which Adam was to be cursed "because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife," Adam seems to have been thinking of something else entirely; and when the Lord had finally finished, instead of expressing sorrow or begging for mercy or anything like that, Adam said, "I think I'm going to call my wife the Mother of All Living."
In Dante, there is an "ante-hell" and an "ante-purgatory" before one enters each of those realms; one is almost in hell or purgatory, but not quite, not fully. The garden had been a sort of "ante-Earth," where Adam and Ishshah were existing, surviving, but not yet fully living. Without knowledge of good and evil, possibly without fully physical bodies (if that is what "coats of skins" means), they had not yet fully embarked on the adventure of mortality. Living -- real living -- Eve was the mother of that.
1 comment:
"In Dante, there is an "ante-hell" and an "ante-purgatory" before one enters each of those realms; one is almost in hell or purgatory, but not quite, not fully. The garden had been a sort of "ante-Earth," where Adam and Ishshah were existing, surviving, but not yet fully living. Without knowledge of good and evil, possibly without fully physical bodies (if that is what "coats of skins" means), they had not yet fully embarked on the adventure of mortality. Living -- real living -- Eve was the mother of that."
Good post. I did not know about the linguistic aspects of the name Eve.
I agree with your supposition about the Garden of Eden being an ante-Earth. My view is that Pardise was situated in a higher level of reality than the material universe. What you have written makes sense with that because then the Garden of Eden would be a specific part of that realm. Walled off from the rest of it, as befits a garden. And then perhaps the original goal was to leave the Garden, but not down to Earth, rather to stay at the same level.
A few months ago, I read something a Catholic visionary Anne Catherine Emmerich wrote in the same vein (https://tandfspi.org/ACE_vol_01/ACE_1_0001_out.html#ACE_1_0000027):
"Paradise is still in existence, but it is utterly impossible for man to reach it. I have seen that it still exists in all its splendor. It is high above the earth and in an oblique direction from it,"
which sounds like a symbolic description of another level of reality.
Here is something interesting that she said about Cain:
"Of Cain himself, I have never seen anything more that was sinful. His punishment appeared to consist in hard, but fruitless labor. Nothing in which he was personally engaged succeeded. I saw that he was mocked and reviled by his children and grandchildren, treated badly in every way. And yet they followed him as their leader, though as one accursed. I saw that Cain was severely punished, but not damned."
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