The Five Silent Screams That Followed the First Sin

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The Voice Walking in the Cool of the Day

The juice was still wet on their fingers when they heard the walking.

Adam knew that sound. He had heard it every evening since the sixth day, the sound of God moving through the trees in the cool of the day. Every other evening it had drawn him forward. Tonight it drove him backward, into the deepest brush of the garden, dragging Eve by the wrist. They crouched behind trunks that had never before been a place to hide. Their hands were still full of stolen sweetness, and for the first time they knew they were naked.

"Where are you?" the voice asked, though the One who asked already knew.

Adam answered from the leaves. "I heard You in the garden, and I was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid myself."

"Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I commanded you not to touch?"

The Finger That Pointed at the Woman

Here was the moment the whole world would inherit.

Adam did not fall to his knees. He did not say, "I ate, and I am sorry." He lifted his hand and aimed it at the woman beside him. "The woman," he said. "The woman You gave to be with me. She gave me the fruit, and I ate." In one breath he accused two at once, the wife for handing it over and the One who had made her.

God turned to Eve. "What is this you have done?"

Eve did not fall either. She pointed lower, down toward the coils in the grass. "The serpent," she said. "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

The serpent had no finger to raise and no one left beneath it to blame. The guilt had recoiled through the whole of creation and found nothing at the bottom to hold it. No one would carry the blame. So each would carry a sentence instead.

The Ground Cursed for the Sake of Bread

God spoke to the serpent first. It would go on its belly now, its legs taken from it where it lay, and it would eat the dust of the ground it had crawled so proudly across. Between it and the woman's children there would be war without end, heel against head, forever.

Then God turned to the man, and the sentence was long, because Adam had listened to a voice that was not God's and obeyed it.

"Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree I forbade you, cursed is the ground for your sake." The earth itself would turn against the one who had been set as its master. "When you work it, it will not give you its strength. Thorns and thistles it will bring up for you, and in the sweat of your face you will eat bread."

It did not stop at hunger. God laid out the whole shape of the life to come, and it was a litany of effort that never pays. Adam would labor and grow weary and find no rest. He would be bitterly pressed and never taste sweetness. Heat would scorch him and cold would pinch him in the same day. He would toil greatly and gain no wealth. He would grow fat, and still he would die. And the animals he had named, the beasts over whom he had been made king, would rise against him, because he had not kept the one command he was given.

The gate closed behind them. But something had already slipped out ahead of them into the world.

Five Cries Loosed Into the World

The wound in Eden did not stay in Eden. From the moment the sentence was passed, five cries began to travel the earth, and not one of them could be heard by any ear made of flesh.

The first was the cry of a fruit tree at the instant the axe bites through its trunk. A tree that had fed the world screams as its life is severed, and the orchard around it stands silent as though nothing has happened.

The second belonged to the serpent again. When it drags itself out of its own skin, splitting the husk of the self it can no longer wear, it cries at the tearing, and the grass does not stir.

The third was the cry of a woman put out of her marriage, sent from the house that had been hers, her grief loud enough to crack the pillars of the world and heard by no one on the street she walks.

The fourth was the cry of an infant forced from the warm dark of the womb into the cold width of the world, screaming at a threshold it never asked to cross.

The Scream at the Edge of the Shekhinah

The fifth cry was the loudest, and the most hidden of all.

It is the scream of the soul at the instant it is torn from the body. The soul does not go quietly, and it does not go blind. At the very edge of leaving, it lifts its eyes and beholds the Shekhinah (שכינה), the Divine Presence it has hungered for since it first entered the flesh. In that seeing it screams, because no one can look upon that face and remain. "For man shall not see Me and live," God had said. The soul sees, and cries out, and is gone.

Five screams, loosed from one stolen mouthful. They circle the earth still, through the felling of trees and the shedding of skins, through broken houses and birthing rooms and deathbeds, a whole wounded creation wailing at a pitch no living ear was built to catch. The first pair aimed their fingers and passed the guilt down the line until it fell off the edge of the world. And the world has been screaming after them ever since, too high and too low for anyone to hear.