Adam Chose the Road of Death and the Sword Turned Every Way

Two old men stood over a single verse and could not agree on what it meant. Rabbi Pappias read it the way a courtier reads a king. "Behold, the man has become like one of Us," he said, and he meant it as praise. Adam had risen. Adam had climbed to the rank of the ministering angels, those burning servants who never tire and never die. He had eaten, and the eating had lifted him.

"Enough, Pappias." Rabbi Akiva cut him off before the flattery could finish. Enough. The man had not climbed. The man had been standing at a place where two roads opened, and he had chosen the worse one.

The Fork in the First Garden

This was what Akiva saw when he looked at the beginning. Before Adam there was a parting of ways, laid out by the Holy One like two paths cut through one field. One road ran with the angels. The other ran with the beasts that perish. The first road was life. The second was death. And the man, set down exactly where the roads divided, with the whole weight of the choice resting on him, abandoned the way of life and took the way of death for himself.

So the verse was no compliment. "Like one of Us" was a wound dressed as honor. When Adam stood alone, before the rib was taken, before the woman, he was simple and whole, "like one," undivided. Then the rib went out from him, and good and evil came into him together, and he could no longer be one thing. He had become a creature who knew both roads and walked the wrong one.

The Sword That Turned Every Way

What he lost was not a garden of pleasant trees. It was the spring.

For under one tree in that place a fountain rose, and the water in it was living water, mayim chayyim, the kind that does not run dry and does not let the drinker die. It split into four streams and ran under the Throne of Glory and looped the whole of Paradise, and where the righteous would one day sit there were four more rivers, one of honey, one of milk, one of wine, one of pure balsam that healed whatever it touched. At the center of it all stood the Etz Chayyim, the Tree of Life. A hand could have reached it. A mouth could have eaten and gone on forever.

That was the danger. A man who had already chosen death, left loose in the garden, might still stretch out his hand and take from the Tree of Life and live forever in his wrongness. So the gate had to close. "And He drove out the man." The word for driving out is hard, the same root used when a man hands his wife the writ that ends a marriage, and that is what it was. God divorced him from Eden and sent him out the eastern way, the way the wind itself moves, the way that would later carry Cain into the land of Nod and carry the killer to the cities of refuge.

At the threshold He set the cherubim, who had been made before everything else, older than the work of creation, ready for exactly this watch. And He set the flame: a sword of fire that turned every way at once so that no angle of approach was safe. The old men called that fire by its true name. It was Gehinnom, the burning, stationed at the road back to the tree so the road could not be walked.

The Door He Did Not See Close Behind Him

Generations later another man stood where the immortal water ran, and he was let in to look.

Moses came to the edge of the reward at the end of his life and saw what Adam had forfeited. He saw the spring of living water rising under the Tree of Life. He saw it divide into four and pour under the Throne. He saw the river of honey and the river of milk, the river of wine and the river of balsam, all of it kept for those who had kept the way. The sweetness of it, the smell of it, the sheer waste of abundance broke something open in him, and he cried out, "Oh, how great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee." Then his glimpse was over, and Moses turned and went back down to the earth and to his death, the way every son of Adam goes.

That was the difference between the two men at the tree. Moses was shown the water and could not stay. Adam had stood in the water and let it go.

An Opening Left in the Wall

And yet the same hand that drove him out left a crack in the verdict.

"And now," the verse said, and the rabbis heard a hinge in those two small words. The same "and now" begins the great call in Deuteronomy, "And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you." It is the word that opens the door of repentance. God had made Adam with two measures held together, the measure of justice and the measure of mercy, and when He banished him He used the gentler hand. He sent him from the garden in this world. He did not, one voice insisted, send him from it forever. When the man made in God's likeness wakes at the end, that decree will be lifted, and he will be set right.

So the flaming sword turns at the gate to this day, guarding the road to the tree. But a road that is guarded is a road that still exists. Adam reached once, in a single hour, and could not hold even that hour. His children stand outside the wall, watching the fruit of the first three years they may not eat, learning the patience he never had, waiting for the gate.