Adam Lived a Whole Life in His First Twelve Hours

Click for full size

Dust Gathered From the Whole World

The dust was taken from everywhere, red ground and black, scraped up out of countries that had nobody in them yet, and in the first hour of the sixth day it lay in a heap on the ground.

In the second hour the heap was worked into one mass, a body with no arms and no legs and no face, and it had a name in that state. Golem. Adam lay that way while the light climbed, the first thing in the world that looked like it ought to be doing something and was not.

In the third hour the limbs came out of him, two arms, two legs, a head with the mouth already cut into it. Still nothing moved.

In the fourth hour God put a soul in him.

The whole fifth hour went to standing up. He got a hand under his shoulder and pushed against the ground he had been part of that morning, and he rose, and the ground stayed where it was.

The Sixth Hour Was Names

The animals came past him in a line and he gave each one a word. He did not ask anybody whether the words were right. Every creature that walked away from him walked away carrying what he had called it, and the names held.

In the seventh hour he was given a wife.

He had been alive for six hours. He could speak, he could walk, he had named every living thing on the earth, and he had not yet been told that anything in the garden was forbidden.

Two Went Up and Four Came Down

The eighth hour is the one the old count refuses to soften. Two went up to the bed. Four came down from it. A son and a daughter, born inside the garden before the day was two thirds finished.

Eve held the boy up and said, "I have gotten a man, the angel of the Lord."

She had wanted the angel. The wanting came first, before there was any child to want, and she put it in the naming and let it stand there in front of her husband. She called the boy Cain.

Nobody in the garden had been forbidden anything yet. The first murderer was already breathing.

One Command in the Ninth Hour

Then the order came, and it was short. Eat from every tree here. Not that one.

Nine hours old. A wife, two children, a language, a garden with rivers in it, and one prohibition standing in the middle of it like a stake driven into the lawn.

He Ate in the Tenth

The reach is the part worth slowing down. The hand goes out, and for a moment it is still only a hand near a branch, and the command is still unbroken, and the day could still end the way it started. Then the fingers close. Then the stem gives. Then there is juice on his chin and the taste is ordinary, which is the worst part, and the thing that cannot be undone has already been done.

In the eleventh hour he was brought to judgment. He answered badly. He put it on his wife, and his wife put it on the serpent, and the leaves they had sewn together were coming apart while they talked.

By the twelfth hour it was over. He was driven out. The gate closed behind a man who was less than one day old, and the ground outside was the same ground he had been scraped up from, except that now it would ask for sweat before it gave him anything.

Out by Sunset, and Not Destroyed

A second count of the same twelve hours ends differently, and both counts were kept. In that one he does not simply go out. He goes out acquitted, sentence served, alive.

God said to him that this would be a sign for his children. As you stood in judgment before me today and walked out of it alive, so your children will stand before me in judgment on this day of the year, and they will walk out alive too.

He had lived a whole life between one sunrise and one sunset. Dust, then a body with nothing in it, then a namer of animals, then a husband, then a father, then a defendant, then a man walking east.

Behind him the garden held its rivers and its trees and the one he had eaten from. In front of him was the field where his son would take his other son out to talk.