Now Her Name is Eve

After the Fall, the man realizes he is naked, hides, and is found by God; then God questions him and reveals to him the consequences of his disobedience; the very next thing the man does is rename his now pregant wife the mother of all the living! She sought after a baby, and now she has conceived. Since she is now a mother and the first mother of the human race, the man names her as mother of all. From now on she is Eve.

Yesterday I gave some possible re-translations of Genesis 3:22-24. I don't know enough to properly re-translate, but by looking at my Hebrew resources, I hope these are possible ways to re-configure the text. I have no desire to just make up what I want the Bible to say; on the contrary, I want God's Holy Word to be translated and understood as correctly as possible. Translators have to make countless choices when they translate, especially when the words used have a multitude of meanings. The context of words and phrases plays an enormous role in obscure and chameleon-like words. Depending how the translator understands the sentence's surrounding context will determine how difficult passages are translated. Since most translators have never given much if any credance to my theory (which of course I see as correct), they will not arrive at a correct translation.

It makes no sense to me that God would guard the way to the tree of life to keep man from eating it and living forever. God wants nothing more of us but to eat of the tree of life and to live forever (with Him in heaven). Understanding the tree of life as the heart, God obviously still wants Adam and Eve to trust, obey and love Him and to be with Him forever in Heaven. Nothing would make Him happier.

One of the main points of the rest of the Old Testament is that we have hard hearts. Over and over again it becomes painfully clear that we don't trust, love, and obey God and that the problem the Fall caused was that we need new hearts. Ezekiel prophesies in 36:26: "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."

One way to keep the Genesis text as it is is to see the expelling from the garden as a symbol which shows how Adam and Eve were cast out of themselves and no longer knew or were true to themselves. It indicates how they were cut off from the tree of life, and that would be so because with their sin caused by lack of trust in God, they have lost their true heart and only have a dead, stoney heart remaining. The primary reason Jesus came to this earth and suffered, died, and rose again is to provide you and me with a new heart, a heart that believes, loves and obeys God. At every Eucharist, we receive that heart anew.

A final thought tonight is that Eve names her firstborn, Cain. "Cain" means "gotten." Since the woman was striving to get a child and that was what the whole Fall was about, when that child is born it would be normal to call his name "gotten," for now she has "got" him. As Planned Parenthood says, "Every child a wanted child," this was the first wanted child. It did not take long for this first person ever to be born to end up on "America's Most Wanted." This beginning of the human race's effort to bear children turned out horribly, for he was a murderer. The very first person born was a murderer, and of his own brother at that! The proper attitude toward children is openness and is expressed as this: "Every child a welcomed child."

I don't know if I mentioned an extremely important point. It is not that God did not want Adam and Eve to be like Him and to have children. Nothing could make God happier than for them to be like God and to have a child. After all, that is the reason why He created us. The problem is that they did not trust God to provide the child, nor did they trust His prohibition not to have relations. At some point in the future I will talk about how Abraham has a very similar test which he temporarily fails when he has Ishmael with Hagar and finally passes when he offers up Isaac, the one through whom descendants as many as the stars of the sky were promised.

Tomorrow I want to talk about, among other things, the element of wife stealing present here in the Fall.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.