God Braided Eve's Hair and Clothed Adam in Skin

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The Braid

Adam had spent his time naming animals and watching them pair off, and he was still short a rib. What happened to the rib took longer than it needed to.

God did not shove the woman out at him from behind a carob tree or a sycamore. He took her somewhere else first. Rabbi Abbahu counted twenty-four kinds of jewelry hung on her before anyone saw her. Rabbi Berekhya said the verb the verse uses, that God built her, is the word they use in the coastal towns 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.

Needlework 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. 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.

At the Tent Door and Under the Oak

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. That is a sick call. Nothing is asked of Abraham in that verse and nothing is announced. Someone came to sit with a man who was healing.

When Abraham died, God came to Isaac and blessed him, and the blessing was the one you give a mourner.

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, the oak of weepings. Then God appeared to Jacob and blessed him, and Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman says that blessing was the mourner's blessing as well.

Two Men Snatched the Job

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." That is a promise about a body.

Joseph got there first and took it. Joseph went up to bury his father, the verse says, and he took the funeral out of God's hands.

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.

Moses got there first. On the way out of Egypt he went and found the coffin and carried Joseph's bones out himself.

Nobody Left to Take It From Him

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.

Not everything gets mended that way. Kohelet says that what is bent cannot be made straight, and the sages read it as a list of the world's permanent damage. 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.