Creation Needed Measuring Rods and Eve Made Her Fence Too Tall

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The Builder Who Could Not Skip the Reed

A rich builder can buy cedar, cut stone, and enough iron to raise a wall in a week, and he still cannot begin. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi counted out the six things every builder needs, quoting Rabbi Levi as he went. Water. Dirt. Wood. Stones. Reeds. Iron.

Reeds are the ones a wealthy man argues about. He has better material stacked in his yard already. But a reed is straight, and a straight thing laid against a crooked thing tells the truth about it. When Ezekiel saw a man standing in a gate with a linen cord in one hand and a measuring rod in the other, that was the whole trade held up in two objects.

Six tools for a house. Six words in Proverbs for the wisdom that stood before the world was made: of old, from earliest time, from ancient times, from the beginning, and from before, written in a plural that counts as two. Creation needed measuring rods before there was anything in it to measure.

God Took Adam Out to See Where Things Should Grow

God did not leave Adam standing in one place. He took him up and carried him across the whole earth, and as they went He pointed things out the way a man shows a son the family land. This is a good place to plant. This is a good place to sow.

Jeremiah would later describe a country no man had ever crossed and no person had ever settled in. Adam had stood on that ground and had not stayed. He was learning the measure of the world: what belongs where, and what will not hold.

Abba bar Korya gave a plainer answer for where Adam had gone. He had lain with his wife, and he was asleep.

Either way, he was not at the tree.

The Fence Eve Built Taller Than the Tree

The command had been short. Do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden. That was the line, and the line had an edge a person could see.

Eve repeated it to the serpent with something added. "God said, you shall not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, or you will die." Touching was not in the command. She had run a fence out in front of the prohibition, a little extra room between herself and the drop, a margin nobody had asked her for.

Rabbi Hiyya taught the rule she had broken, and it is a rule about orchards. Never build the fence higher than what it guards, because a tall fence falls, and when it comes down it snaps the saplings underneath. Proverbs puts it colder. Do not add to His words, or He will rebuke you and you will be found a liar.

The Serpent Put Its Weight Against Her Back

It waited until she walked close to the tree. Then it took hold of her and shoved.

She went into the trunk hard enough to feel bark through her hair. Nothing happened. No fire, no voice, no falling down dead in the grass. The serpent let her stand there in that silence for as long as it took.

"Look at you," it said. "You touched it and you did not die. You will not die from eating it either. He knows what happens on the day you eat. Your eyes open and you become like God, knowing good from evil."

Every word it said about touching was true. That was what carried the rest. The fence came down and took the tree with it, and Adam was somewhere out on the good ground, being shown where each thing ought to grow.

The Cage They Carried Lot Away In

Generations later four kings came west and halted at a spring called Ein Mishpat, the spring of judgment. Rabbi Aha said they had come for the eye of the world, and the eye was Abraham. They meant to put out the sight that had held judgment back from everyone else.

The valley they fought in was pitted with clay. The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah ran, and the ground swallowed them. The king of Sodom climbed back out. Idolaters who had heard that Abraham walked out of a furnace unburned, and who had refused to believe a word of it, watched a man drag himself out of a pit and believed the older story on the spot.

Then the four kings took the plunder. They took Lot too, and they did not march him out with the others. They shut him in a cage and carried him off in it. He had measured his own ground badly. He had chosen Sodom, and Proverbs had the sentence ready before he ever made the choice: walk with the wise and you grow wise, keep company with fools and you are broken.