The King Who Stole Adam's Power in Jewish Legend

The Garments God Made

When God expelled Adam and Eve from Eden, He did not send them out naked. He made for them coats of skin, real garments, sewn by the divine hand, carrying within them something of the original human dignity. Those clothes passed from Adam to Enoch, from Enoch to Methuselah, from Methuselah to Noah, who carried them into the ark and out the other side of the flood. They had been in the world since the first morning outside Paradise. They were the oldest thing still existing.

Then Ham stole them. And Ham gave them to his son Cush. And Cush, when his own son reached the age of twenty, gave them to Nimrod.

What the Garments Did

The beasts of the field fell prostrate the moment they saw someone wearing those garments. The animals could not help it. The coats that God had sewn for Adam carried the authority of Adam's dominion, the command that had been given to the first human being over every creature. When Nimrod put them on and walked into the wilderness to hunt, the animals that saw him lying down, waiting. He did not have to pursue them. They came to him.

Men fell in a different way. They could not see the garments for what they were. They saw only that Nimrod was irresistible, that his hunts succeeded where others failed, that the animals obeyed him as if some agreement existed between him and the natural world that other men were not party to. They assumed the power was his own. When people assume a man's power is his own, they make him king.

The Architecture of an Empire

Nimrod chose Shinar as his capital and spread outward from there. He chose Babel and Erech and Akkad and Calneh, four cities that became the core of a kingdom. Then he moved north into Assyria and built Nineveh. The cities accumulated around him the way the animals had accumulated in the wilderness: not because he had earned them through ordinary effort but because the garments made him appear to be something other than what he was.

He was a man wearing another man's inheritance. The dominion that those garments represented had been given to Adam before there were cities, before there was a distinction between the wilderness and the settled world, before any human being had thought to draw a line around land and call it his. Adam's dominion was over the creatures. Nimrod took it and turned it into a theology of himself.

The First Tyrant After the Flood

The world had not yet had a tyrant of Nimrod's kind. The flood had reset everything. The civilization before the flood had its own catastrophic failures, but they ended in water and silence. Nimrod was the first figure after the reset to find a way to concentrate power, and the method he used was inherited from before the flood, carried by Ham out of the ark, passed down a single line of men until it reached someone who understood what it could be used for.

He taught his people to hunt. He taught them warfare. He organized the tribute and the tribute produced the throne and the throne produced the religion that required the throne to be worshipped. The garments at the bottom of this were invisible by now, buried under the weight of the edifice he had built on top of them. Nobody remembered that the man who could not be resisted was wearing the clothes of someone else's authority.