Adam Was Charged to Keep What Needed No Hoe

Adam stood in the middle of a garden looking for something to do.

Click for full size

The order had been plain enough. Work it, and keep it (Genesis 2:15). He had walked the whole plot that morning with his hands open and found no weed to pull, no branch snapped in a storm, no gap in any hedge. Fruit hung at the height of a man's mouth. The soil lay dark and already loose. He had not been given a hoe, and there was nothing here a hoe would have improved.

The Two Ways a Plot Goes Bad

Anyone who works land knows there are exactly two jobs and that both are required. The first is the working: ground has to be handled or it goes to ruin out of plain neglect. The second is the watching: whatever grows has to be defended or something walks in and strips it. Skip either and the year is gone. A lazy man loses a field as surely as a raided man does.

So the charge had come in two halves, work and keep, because a charge over land always does. The strange part was that this ground appeared to need neither.

The Pattern for Everyone Who Came After

Adam was the first person ever handed the care of ground. Whatever he did here, in a plot that asked nothing of him, would stand as the shape of the work for every man after him who took up ground that asked everything.

He was not being kept busy. He was being written down. Somebody had to be the first to bend at the waist over a row, and whatever that first man did with his hands would become the law of what hands do.

So he bent.

There Was Work in It After All

The garden was full, and full is not the same as finished. He dug around the roots and broke the crust until the soil went soft again. He cut trenches, small ones, following the fall of the land. He let water into them and watched it walk down the rows and stop where he had told it to stop.

The keeping turned out to be real as well. No man was coming to raid the place, but animals lived here, and an animal has no interest in a boundary. More than beasts, the danger came out of the air and the water. Let a dry spell settle in and the trenches had to run full. Let the weather turn heavy and the same trenches had to be cut away and the streams sent off somewhere else before the roots stood in it and rotted.

The work had not been invented to give him something to do. It was the work. There was simply nobody to blame yet when it went undone.

The Sound in the Cool of the Day

Then there was fruit, and a mouth, and a second mouth, and their own skin looked wrong to them for the first time. They sewed leaves together with hands that would not hold still.

Toward evening the air went cool, and they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden (Genesis 3:8). Adam took Eve by the arm and pulled her back off the open path into the thick growth, and they crouched there with damp leaves against their ribs while the sound came on between the trunks, unhurried, the way something moves when it knows every path in the place.

Nobody Was Walking

The lights in the sky travel. They go round and round on a track and never leave it, and anyone standing in a field can watch them do it. The one above them does not travel at all. He is fixed. He does not cross a garden, because there is nowhere he is not already standing.

And still there was a sound, and the sound was real. He is heard without a mouth opening. Later men would stand in open country and hear him plainly with nothing in the air to carry it, a voice arriving inside the ear by some power that needs no throat. If he can be heard without sound, he can give the sense of walking without taking a step.

There was another reason the two of them heard feet that evening, and it had nothing to do with him.

That morning they had been steady. Constant, quiet, of one piece the whole way through, and while they were like that they had known him for what he is, unmoving. By evening there was cunning in them, and a man measures with whatever ruler he happens to be holding. They had turned into things that shift, so they handed him the shifting. They heard a walk because they had just learned how to wander, and they hid from a God who had not moved an inch.

"Where are you?" he said. Adam answered from the bushes, and the answer was about a fig leaf and a fear, and the garden that had never needed a guard now had two people hiding in it from the one who set them there.