God Braided Eve's Hair and Clothed Adam in Skin

Adam had named the animals and watched them pair off, and he was still short a rib. What happened to the rib took longer than it needed to.

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God did not shove the woman out at him from behind a carob tree or a sycamore. He took her somewhere else first.

He Braided Her Hair First

Twenty-four kinds of jewelry hung on her before anyone saw her. In the coastal towns they used the same word for building as for braiding hair. He braided her hair. Then He walked Eve over and gave her to the man, and stood there like a groomsman at a wedding, and blessed the pair of them.

She arrived finished. Nothing about her was left for Adam to fix. He had a name ready and no other gift. God had already done the dressing.

Garments of Skin After the Fruit

Then the fruit, and the sudden knowledge of what they looked like, and the fig leaves stitched into something that would not hold a day.

The Lord God made garments of skin for the man and his wife, and clothed them (Genesis 3:21). The same hands. First the braid, then the coat. He dressed them, and then He put them out, and they walked east wearing what He had made for them.

The leaves stayed on the ground behind them. Skin lasts. Fig does not. He did not send them out naked, even when He sent them out.

A Sick Call and an Oak of Weeping

Old Abraham sat in the mouth of his tent in the worst heat of the day with a knife wound three days old, and the Lord appeared to him in the plains of Mamre (Genesis 18:1). Nothing was asked of Abraham in that hour and nothing was announced. Someone came to sit with a man who was healing.

When Abraham died, God came to Isaac and blessed him. The blessing was the mourner's blessing. A son who had just buried a father got a visit, not a task.

Jacob got the same visit at the worst possible hour. Deborah, the nurse who had raised his mother, died on the road and was buried under an oak below Bethel. While he was still sitting in that grief, word arrived that Rebecca was dead too. He wept twice in one sitting, and the tree took its name from it, Allon Bakhut (אלון בכות), the oak of weepings. Then God appeared to Jacob and blessed him, and that blessing was the mourner's blessing as well.

Two Men Snatched the Burial

Jacob died in Egypt. By rights the burial belonged to the One who had told him on the way down, "I will go down with you into Egypt, and I will surely bring you up again" (Genesis 46:4). That is a promise about a body.

Joseph got there first and took it. Joseph went up to bury his father, and he took the funeral out of God's hands (Genesis 50:7).

Then Joseph died in Egypt, and his burial belonged to the tribes. He had made them swear it, standing over them: God will remember you, and you will carry my bones up out of here. That oath sat unclaimed for generations. The coffin waited. The tribes had other work, and then they had brick, and then they had no time.

Moses got there first. On the way out of Egypt he went and found the coffin and carried Joseph's bones out himself. He snatched the mitzvah (מצוה), the commandment, the way Joseph had snatched the one before it.

Nobody Left on the Mountain

Moses climbed a mountain in Moab, looked at a country he was not going to enter, and died there with no funeral party anywhere in sight. There was no one to snatch it. The whole camp was down on the plains of Moab, and not one of them was on that mountain.

So God buried him in the valley, and no one has ever been able to point at the spot (Deuteronomy 34:6).

Not everything gets mended that way. What is bent cannot be made straight. The waters turned salt during the six days of creation and have stayed salt ever since. God cut eleven days off the lunar year, and after all the cycles and all the leap months the moon has still not caught the sun. The generation of the Flood had their years shortened to a hundred and twenty and never got them back.

The sea is still salt. The moon still runs short. And the man who carried another man's bones out of Egypt lies somewhere in a valley in Moab, buried by the same hands that once braided a woman's hair in a garden and walked her over to a man who had nothing to offer her but a name.