Eve Ate First and the Sentences Fell in Order

Eve ate first. She chewed and swallowed and went on standing there, and Adam watched her not die.

Click for full size

That was what he could not get past. He had been told what the tree cost, and he had believed it, and here she was with the juice on her chin and her color ordinary and her breathing ordinary, holding the rest of it out toward him. The command had been one sentence long and it had been spoken to him directly, before she existed. She was alive in front of him and the sentence was only a sentence.

He reached, and the reach was less a decision than a leaning, the way a man leans toward whoever has just spoken to him. His hand closed on the fruit while the words he had been given were still perfectly legible in his memory. He took her inclination over the commandment, and the whole thing took about as long as it takes to put out an arm.

The One Who Spoke First

None of it had begun with either of them. The serpent had gotten there first, and the serpent had worked in the correct order, because there is an order to this and it does not start with the part of a person that argues.

It went to the eyes. It got her looking at the tree as a thing to be looked at, and then as a thing to be wanted, and then as a thing already halfway into her hand, until by the time she was tasting it there was nothing left awake in her that was still weighing what she had been told. Desire came in through what she could see and smell and touch. Then what she could see and smell and touch carried it inward and took the part of her that reasons.

The same road ran through Adam a step behind her, though it did not have to bother with the tree at all, since by then it had her.

Three Voices Called in Order

The Voice came through the garden at the wind of the day, and it did not gather the three of them into a crowd and scold the crowd.

Adam answered first and handed it sideways. The woman gave it to me, he said, and then he handed it upward as well, since it was the woman You put here with me. Eve pointed at the serpent, which was the truth as far as it went. The serpent had nothing underneath it left to point at.

So the sentences fell in the order the offenses had been committed rather than the order the confessions had been made. The serpent went first, because it had gone first, and it got the belly and the dust and the enmity forever. The woman went second, because she had gone second, and she got the pain and the wanting and the being ruled over. Adam was called third.

Named Last

He had been standing there the entire time expecting to be called first.

He was the one who had heard the command with his own ears. He was the one the garden had been handed to and the one who was supposed to guard it. But when the reckoning came he had to stand through two other sentences before his own arrived, and it was not because he was being spared. He was third in the chain and the chain was being read out in the order it had actually run. Desire had opened the thing, the senses had carried it, and the mind had gone last and had gone anyway.

What he got was ground that would fight him, sweat on his face for his bread, and dust at the far end of it. He had not been made the way the animals were made, by a word said outward into the world. He had been made after a word said inward, "let us make," and what was set inside him was a soul in the image of the Presence, and that is the thing that had just been used to select a piece of fruit off a branch.

A Letter Closed on Three Sides

Outside the gate there was exactly one direction available.

The world had been started with a letter that is closed on three of its sides, shut above and shut below and shut behind, with only the front of it left open, and that had been the arrangement since the first word of the first verse. A man may ask about the days from the day human beings were set on the earth, and forward from there (Deuteronomy 4:32). He may not ask what is over the ceiling, or under the floor, or what was going on before the first morning. The wall is not a punishment. The wall is only the wall.

Adam turned around once. Behind him were the cherubim and the sword turning every way, and behind the sword was the tree and the shade and the hour before he put out his arm, and not one of those was a question he was permitted to put to anybody. So he faced forward, since forward was open, and the ground he would fight for the rest of his life began at his feet.

Eve walked out beside him with the taste still in her mouth. Behind them the gate made no sound whatsoever.