Women and Men - Wrapping Up the Garden Story

I just want to finish up the story of the Garden of Eden with the last few details that happened after God gave the serpent, the woman, and the man a good talking to. You might have noticed in my previous post that I always referred to the woman as "the woman" or "ishsha". That's because up to that point, the "unto dust you shall return" point, ishsha was the only word used to refer to her. Now, in the very next verse (Genesis 3:20) Adam gives her a personal name, "Eve", that means "living", because she was to be the mother of all living people. In Hebrew it sounds more like "heva". She is one of very few people in the Bible who is named, not for something that has happened, but for something that is going to happen. The only other person I can think of like that is Jesus, whose name means victory.

God hasn't quite left the scene yet. In the next verse, he makes them coats of animal skin and clothes them. Now in the movies, these clothes are depicted as minimal (especially for the pretty actress playing Eve) primitive leathery things; but don't you think God could be a better tailor than that? I'm not suggesting a black leather Harley Davidson outfit: I'm suggesting that before the ground was cursed it was not the kind of threat it is now to our health. I think this is when Adam and Eve got covered with skin. Fits great, doesn't it? I remember a long time ago a dermatologist telling me that the skin layer really doesn't do anything except protect the innards from dust and germs and abrasions, etc.

This skin may moderate our nakedness, but it's clear from other scriptures that it does not completely hide it; and so we fashion other clothes and cover ourselves more. I am not very uncomfortable with nudity, but as I said before, this nakedness has something to do with the intimacy of the godhead and by extension, with our own dignity. I cover my nakedness, not because I'm embarrassed by my appearance, but because I think the sight of my sexual parts somehow rubs the noses of my fellow sinners in the fact of their sinfulness. And I think it sort of exposes God in a way he did not intend originally. This is all highly speculative, so take it for what it's worth. By the way, that word "make" is the same word he used to describe making Adam and Eve.

So the last thing that happens in this story is that Yahweh Elohim says, "Look, the Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he get a hold of the fruit of the tree of life and live forever..." The Lord God boots them out of the garden and puts some Cherubim on guard with a flaming sword to keep them away. Thanks, God, for keeping Adam and Eve from having to live forever in their sins! As bad as things are, they would have been far worse. Adam did indeed die and return to the adama from which he came.

So why is it a problem for Adam and Eva to be like God in knowing good and evil? After all, they were made in His image, right? I believe that the answer lies in image-making. When you make an image of something, a symbol of something, you are making an abstraction of that something. In other words, an image is like the something that it's an image of - but only in certain ways. If you are a java programmer like me, you may have heard this definition of abstraction: the process of simplifying something by ignoring certain details.

God created the Adam-image of Himself and deliberately designed it to not include the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe that was why (or at least one reason) He planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the Garden, as an artistically contrasting theme. In that tree, and in the tree of life, he abstracted two qualities of Himself that were not present in Adam. Well, honestly, it is not clear whether Adam would have lived forever if he had remained as originally constituted.

Anyway, it may have been that He felt the requirements of artistic composition in planting the Garden to include those trees and the Adam. Adam was designed to demonstrate fellowship and loving intimacy. So it really bent the design for the knowledge of good and evil to get into them. God was more than ready for this, as I've already outlined. It was a very robust design, as it turns out.