Adam's Whole Life From Bridal Canopy to Grave in One Day

The whole life of the first man fit inside one daylight, and the sun did not rest once while it happened.

The Dust Was Gathered From Every Corner

In the first hour the dust came in. Not from one field, not from one hill, but from every corner of the earth at once, red and black and pale, swept together so that no nation could ever stand over the grave of Adam and say he was theirs and no one else's. In the second hour the dust was kneaded into a single formless lump, heavy and shapeless on the ground. In the third hour the lump found its edges. Limbs stretched out of it. A spine, a skull, two open hands.

In the fourth hour the soul went in. The body, which had lain there like wet clay, shuddered. In the fifth hour Adam stood for the first time, swaying on new legs, the tallest thing in the garden. In the sixth hour the animals came before him in pairs, and he opened his mouth and named them, one after another, calling each creature the thing it actually was. A prophet on his first afternoon, reading the world out loud.

Thirteen Canopies of Gold and Jewels

In the seventh hour he was not alone. Eve stood beside him, and the garden became a wedding.

The Holy One did not leave the first marriage bare. He raised canopies over the couple in Eden, and the rabbis could not agree how many, only that the number was extravagant. Rabbi Levi, in the name of Rabbi Hama bar Hanina, counted thirteen. Resh Lakish counted eleven. Others counted ten. They read the count out of one verse about Eden, every precious stone your covering, and they divided that covering differently, but none of them made it small. Carbuncle, topaz, emerald, sapphire, every gem named over the king of Tyre was hung above two newlyweds who had been alive, between them, for a single hour. The walls of the canopies were stones that threw light. God Himself tied the knots.

It was the most lavish wedding the world would ever hold, and it was over before dark.

By Nightfall, Out the Gate

In the eighth hour there were children. According to the Tosafot, Cain was born in that hour with a twin sister at his side. In the ninth hour the command came, plain and short, not to eat from the one tree. In the tenth hour Adam ate.

In the eleventh hour the judgment opened. God asked, and Adam answered with his hand pointed sideways at his wife. "The woman whom You gave to be with me," he said, "she gave me of the tree, and I ate." The boldness drained out of his face as he said it. And the face of the Holy One changed too, the way a host's face changes when the guest has fouled the feast. In the twelfth hour, before the first Sabbath had begun, God sent him out of the garden. The same hands that had gathered his dust and tied his canopies now closed the gate behind him. He had been made, married, judged, and exiled, and the sun that watched his creation in the morning had not yet finished setting.

The Earth Refused to Hold the Murdered Boy

Outside the gate the years finally began to move at the ordinary pace, and they ran long. Generations rose from the exiled couple. Abel was born and grew and was killed by his own brother in a field, and that is where the second strangeness waited.

Abel would not stay buried. Cain covered the body and the ground heaved it back up. He covered it again and the earth spat it out again, and a voice came up through the soil with the corpse. "No creature shall rest in the earth," it said, "until the first one of all has returned the dust to me of which it was formed." The dirt that had given up its red and black grains to make Adam wanted Adam back before it would take anyone else. So Abel lay unburied on a stone, set there by angels, year after year, waiting for the first man to die.

Three Archangels Carry the First Man Home

At last Adam died.

God did not leave the body to mortals. He sent three of the greatest archangels down into the world of the dead, and they came as undertakers. They washed the first man. They wrapped him in linen and rubbed him with fragrant oil, the way the living honor the dead, except the hands doing it had never been born and would never die. Then they walked to the stone where Abel had waited all those generations and lifted him too, the boy whose blood the ground had cried out, and they prepared him beside his father.

They carried both bodies into Paradise. And there, in the garden Adam had been driven from on the day he was made, they dug. They laid him down in the exact place the dust had been taken from in the first hour of the first day, the spot the earth had been holding open ever since. The corners of the earth that had been swept together to raise him came apart again to receive him. The first wedding and the first grave stood on the same ground. Beside him they buried Abel, and the soil that had refused every other body closed at last over the two of them, and was quiet.