Samlai Answered the Heretics With One Verb

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How Many Made the World

They came in without greeting anyone. Rabbi Samlai was sitting where he always sat, and the heretics walked the length of the room and put the question down in front of him like a stone. "How many deities created the world?"

The students along the wall stopped writing. Samlai did not stand and he did not raise his voice. "Let you and I inquire into the early days," he said, and he took them back to the verse that tells a man to ask about the day God created humankind upon the earth. The verb sitting in that verse is singular. One subject, one act, and no room in the grammar for a second pair of hands.

The heretics had come with more than one verse.

A Plural Name and a Single Verb

They opened at the beginning. "In the beginning God created." Elohim, they said, and let the word stand there, because Elohim wears a plural shape the way a crowd wears one name, and if the name is a crowd then the dark was shaped by a committee.

Samlai went nowhere near their poetry. He went at the verb. Baru Elohim is not written there, he told them, but bara Elohim, one verb, singular, doing the entire work of creation under a name that only sounds like many. A plural hat does not put a second head under it.

Then they brought the line that still takes the air out of a study house. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Us. Our. Seats enough at that table for several thrones.

"Read what is written thereafter," Samlai said. And God created man in His image. Vayivra, singular, and His image, singular, so the verse that opens with consultation shuts with one craftsman alone. The heretics took that answer and carried it out the door, and the scrape of their sandals on the threshold was the last thing anybody in the room enjoyed.

A Reed Is Not a Pillar

The students were on him before the door had finished swinging.

"Rabbi, you pushed those men off with a reed." The one who said it was not being clever. He had watched the whole exchange and had counted the same verbs his teacher counted, and he knew that a grammar point clears a room without holding a roof up. "What will you answer us?"

Samlai looked at him for a while. He could have said the answer was good enough for the men it was aimed at, which was true, and he could have sent the boy back to his bench, which he had every right to do. Instead he pulled the scroll back toward himself, because the question was better than the one the heretics had brought, and it had earned the thing he was not willing to spend in front of enemies.

Two Went Up and Seven Came Down

The "us" is not a council of gods, he told them. It is the arrangement the world has run on ever since. Adam was made out of earth and Eve was made out of Adam, but nobody has been made either of those ways since. A man does not bring a child into the world without a woman, and a woman does not without a man, and neither of them does it without the Divine Presence standing in the room. Three parties to every birth. One of them God, and the other two dust with names on it.

Then he took the students out of the garden to watch it happen. And the man knew Eve his wife. Nothing alive had known cohabitation before Adam, so he was the first at it, and he taught the rest of the world how it was done. The word for knowing does double work in that verse, since what Adam knew that day was also what he had lost, the quiet of the garden and the gate shut behind him, and what his wife had done to get them both put out. Rav Aha, generations later, leaned across the centuries to say it to her face. "The serpent was your serpent, and you were Adam's."

Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya counted three miracles crowded into that one day, creation still warm, then cohabitation, then a child. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korha counted heads instead. Two went up into the bed and seven came down: Cain with a twin sister, Abel with two of them.

I Have Acquired a Man With the Lord

Eve did the naming, and she put the entire argument into one sentence without being asked for it. "I have acquired a man with the Lord."

Rabbi Akiva heard the small word et (את) in there as a fence. In Hebrew, et marks a verb's object and often vanishes in English; he read it here to stop the sentence sounding as if she had acquired God Himself. Rabbi Yishmael would not take that. "If a word looks empty to you," he said, "the emptiness is yours." Adam came from earth and Eve came from Adam, but this one came the new way, through a man and a woman and the Presence between them, and et means with. She had acquired a man with the Lord, since there was no other way left to acquire one.

The lamps were low by then. Somewhere on the road the heretics had one verb to show for their evening, and the students were still in their seats, looking at a woman sitting outside a locked garden with a newborn on her arm, counting up the three who had made him and getting the number right.