Eve Covered Her Shame Before She Offered the Fruit
The serpent promised more than knowledge: you will be like gods. Eve ate and covered herself with fig leaves. Only then did she hand the fruit to Adam.
Table of Contents
"You shall not surely die," the serpent said, and then it said the part that actually worked. God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Click for full size
The serpent had not offered Eve information. It had offered her rank.
She looked at the tree after that, and everything she saw in it was true. The tree was agreeable and pleasant to the eye, and its fruit was good for food, so she took some of it and she ate.
What She Did Before She Spoke
She did not turn around and call to Adam. Not first.
Her eyes had opened the way the serpent promised they would, and the first thing they opened onto was her own body. So she went and got fig leaves and covered her shame with them, and only when that was finished did she pick the fruit back up and go and find her husband.
The Longest Few Seconds in the Garden
She was covered and he was not. She knew what covering was for and he did not, and she stood in front of him holding the one thing that would close that gap, and she could have let it stay open. Nothing in the promise had required a second eater. The serpent had said your eyes will be opened, not both of you. She had eaten alone and dressed alone, and she could have walked out of the garden alone and clothed, carrying a piece of knowledge nobody else in the world had.
She held out the fruit.
The Man Who Was Late
He ate. His eyes opened, and he saw that he was naked, and he took fig-leaves and sewed them together and made an apron for himself and covered his shame.
He did more work than she had. She had covered herself with leaves and stopped there, because there was still a conversation waiting and she was in a hurry to have it. He sat down and sewed, since by the time his eyes came open there was nothing else left in the garden to do. He was working with the same leaves off the same tree, and he had watched her wear them first, and he never once asked her how she had known.
The order of it followed them out through the gate. One of them knew first. The other one spent the rest of the afternoon catching up, and that arrangement did not end with the fruit.
Weeks Counted, Children Named
Outside, time stopped being a blur. The years ran in jubilees of forty-nine, and inside each jubilee they ran in weeks, and the household that had learned about nakedness in the wrong order was set down week by week in a ledger.
In the third week of the second jubilee Eve gave birth to Cain. In the fourth she gave birth to Abel. In the fifth she gave birth to a daughter, and the daughter had a name, which was Awan.
Every one of them went down with a week attached. The girl got a name where the older count had left her a number, and after that nothing in the house was allowed to stay approximate. A family counted that closely cannot lose anybody quietly.
← All myths
