Adam Wept All Night at the First Sunset Then Built an Altar

The Darkness He Had Never Seen

Adam had been alive for six days when the first sunset came, and in those six days the world had been uninterruptedly bright. He had been created on the sixth day in the full light of afternoon. The seventh day was the Sabbath, and the world had remained lit. He had not yet experienced the alternation of light and dark that God had built into the order of things on the first day of creation, the division between the light and the darkness that had been established before he existed.

When the sun sank below the horizon at the conclusion of that first Sabbath, Adam had no framework for it. He did not know what was happening. He did not know the word for night, or the concept of sleep as a daily return, or the idea that the sun had gone somewhere it would come back from. He only knew that the world was becoming dark, and the last thing he knew with certainty was that he had sinned.

The Fear That the World Was Ending

He sat down on the ground and said: Woe is me. For my sake, because I sinned, the world is darkened, and it will again become void and without form. He thought the darkness was the beginning of his punishment. The sentence God had spoken, the promise of death, was coming for him now, and it was coming as the return of the void that had existed before creation, the formless emptiness that the first act of God had pushed back to make room for the world. He had forfeited that world by his transgression, and now the world was being taken back.

Eve sat opposite him in the dark and wept too. They sat facing each other all night, the two of them weeping without stopping, watching the darkness that neither of them knew had an end. The first night that any human mind had ever tried to interpret was spent in grief and terror. Adam sat and waited for the punishment to complete itself.

The Dawn He Did Not Expect

When the sky began to lighten, he did not understand immediately what was happening. Then the sun rose, and it was the same sun it had always been, unchanged by the night, climbing the same sky it had crossed before. Adam understood. This was not punishment. This was the rhythm God had built into the world on the first day, before Adam had been formed from the clay, before Adam had sinned or failed or eaten anything at all. The alternation of light and darkness was older than human fault. The world was not being unmade. The world was moving through its cycle as it had always moved, as it would continue to move when Adam was gone.

The relief was enormous. He had spent a night believing the world was ending because of him, and the world had simply done what worlds do. He was not the cause of the darkness. He was only a man, mortal and frightened, learning something the creation had always known.

The Unicorn and the Altar

Adam made a sacrifice to mark the relief. He brought two objects to the altar: a unicorn, a beast with a single horn that walked in the world before it became what the world became, and an ox, the largest of the ordinary animals. The tradition notes the combination as significant: the unicorn was a creature of the first creation, an animal that belonged to the time before the transgression, and Adam brought it to the altar as a way of offering back what he had been given before he had understood the value of the gift.

The horn of the unicorn, the single spiraling point that made the animal unlike any other, became one of the instruments of praise in the tradition. The psalm that begins with My God, my God, why have You forsaken me is associated with the first dawn in some midrashic sources: Adam's cry in the night, and then the morning that answered it, and then the sacrifice offered in gratitude for the morning. The prayer of abandonment contains within it the expectation of a response.