Not Quite What We Thought

Now the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.  Genesis 3:20 NASB

Mother of all the living– Previous investigation of the crucial story (see Guardian Angel) helped us see that the name given to the woman by Adam was certainly not uplifting.  In fact, there are reasons to believe that the real Hebrew name (Hawwah) means something quite derogatory.[1]  The narrator suggests the meaning “mother of all living” as the alternative, but its derivation from the original Hawwah is a stretch at best.  If the original audience knew that Hawwah meant a connection to the verb hayah, the explanation of the name would not have been necessary.

Typically we think that “mother of all living” is a statement about procreation.  Eve is the mother of all living because, in the ultimate sense of the Genesis account, everyone who is ever born can trace the birth back to Eve, the first to give birth to human beings. This is undoubtedly the reason so many commentators try to link Hawwah to Hebrew words for life or living.  But perhaps in our attempts to give “Eve” a positive slant, we have overlooked something important about being “the mother of all living.”

We know that pre-natal experiences are registered in the fetus.  We know that the physical, psychological, and emotional trauma of the mother is transported to the child before it is born.  Therefore, we know that the trauma of “mother of all living” is handed down to all the subsequent generations.  The spin factor of the experience of Genesis 3 is buried in the collective unconscious of human beings.  In this sense, as progeny of the “mother of all living,” we inherit this fractured chaos.  We inherit emotional rejection, betrayal, expulsion, and abandonment. It’s part of our social DNA, bequeathed upon us by the mother of all living.  The trauma of the Garden did not stop when the couple was expelled.

Zornberg hints at this situation in her comment about God’s hiddenness in the world:

“He [God] appears incompletely in the world, whether in the unfathomable role of middat ha’din, or, equally, in the role of compassion—rachamim, that most human virtue, that womblike contains all the incompleteness of the world.”[2]

The womb of the mother of all living transports the incompleteness of the world to all who trace their origin back to this first woman.  As a result, we are born broken.  This is not a subtle reiteration of the idea of original sin. We are not born guilty of some infraction of the first commandment.  But we are born from that fracture, passed to us because the womb carries this deep sense of displacement, experienced by our primal mother.  That’s just how it is.

And what are we to do about it?  We have two choices: avoid the consequences in whatever way possible (flight) or recognize that fracture is an integral element of life as we know it, and embrace it (fight).  Zornberg, once again, makes a telling comment:

“To avoid despair is to diminish the possibilities of the self.  Courage is the name Tillich gives to the ability to struggle with the reality of nonbeing, to take it into oneself rather that to abject it. The opposite of courage is a habitual avoidance of passionate and troubling experience.”[3]

Born from the mother of all living means that we must face the primal displacement, the initial psychological wound, the beginning of anguish, the heartbreak of disunity.  We must face this if we are to grow toward reconciliation.  Or we can pretend.  It’s a matter of courage.

Topical Index: mother of all living, Hawwah, Havvah, hayah, trauma, Genesis 3:20

A LITTLE Fourth of July GIFT:

Here is the full text of a lecture I gave in Virginia Beach on JOY.  Seems like a good day for you to have this.

[1] “Like most of the explanations of names in Genesis, this is probably based on folk etymology or an imaginative playing with sound. … In the Hebrew here, the phonetic similarity is between hawah, ‘Eve,’ and the verbal root hayah, ‘to live.’ It has been proposed that Eve’s name conceals very different origins, for it sounds suspiciously like the Aramaic word for ‘serpent.'” [Robert Alter, “The Five Books of Moses,” 2004, commentary on Genesis iii.20] see https://www.etymonline.com/word/eve

[2]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg,  Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, p. 168.

[3]Ibid., p. 88.