Seth Builds Two Pillars and Saves Astronomy

Adam and Eve were separated for a hundred and thirty years after the murder of Abel. Grief does that. It does not only take what it takes directly. It takes the capacity to be present to what remains. Eve lost Abel. She also, in a different way, lost Adam. He withdrew from her, or perhaps they both withdrew from each other, in the silence that follows unbearable things.

Then, according to Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, the wives of Lamech the descendant of Cain came to Adam and urged him to return to Eve. What could they argue? Perhaps that grief without repair is its own kind of death. Perhaps that the world still needed what only that reunion could produce. Whatever they said, it worked. Adam returned to Eve, and the tradition says the love he bore her now was stronger than it had been before, because it had survived what had tried to destroy it.

The fruit of their reunion was Seth.

Seth was different from the beginning. He was born, the tradition teaches, in the likeness and image of Adam, the description that the Torah uses for Adam's own relationship to God. Cain had not been in Adam's likeness and image. Cain had been the first child of a couple still in Eden's aftermath, still shaped by the Fall, and something of that first disruption had entered him. Seth came from the other side of grief, and he came out whole. He was one of the thirteen men born already circumcised, already formed in a perfect state, requiring no ritual completion. From him descended the line of the righteous. The depraved and godless, the tradition says flatly, descend from Cain. The pious descend from Seth.

Seth was also the ancestor of the Messiah. This was not incidental. The tradition placed the thread of messianic hope inside the longest possible genealogy, running it from the second replacement for Abel all the way through the generations of the righteous to the ultimate redemption. History is not random accumulation. It has a spine, and Seth is close to its origin.

His descendants took a particular interest in the sky. They were, Josephus records in his Antiquities of the Jews, written around 93 CE, the inventors of the wisdom concerned with the heavenly bodies and their order, the first astronomers, the first systematic observers of the movements that govern time. And they were worried. Adam had prophesied that the world would be destroyed twice: once by fire and once by water. His descendants would need to preserve their discoveries through both catastrophes.

So they built two pillars. One of brick, one of stone. On both, they inscribed everything they had learned about the stars. The logic was simple: if the brick pillar was destroyed by flood, the stone pillar would survive. If the stone pillar was destroyed by fire, the brick would remain. One witness would always outlast the disaster. The Book of Jasher, compiled from earlier traditions, records that Cainan, son of Enosh and grandson of Seth, also wrote prophecies on tablets of stone, knowing from his wisdom that God would bring destruction and wanting to leave something behind.

But Seth's line could not hold forever. His grandson Enosh gave his name to the word for human being in Hebrew, enosh, and the Ginzberg tradition records that in Enosh's time something broke. Men began to make idols of gold, silver, gems, and pearls, a thousand parasangs high. Using the magic arts taught to them by the angels Uzzah and Azzael, they mastered the movements of the sun and moon and stars, subjecting the heavens to themselves rather than to God. They became, in effect, the inverse of the astronomers who had preceded them. Where Seth's children had studied the sky in order to understand God's order, Enosh's generation had used the knowledge of the sky to declare independence from that order.

The Shekhinah, the divine presence, which had remained on earth since the expulsion from Eden, resting above a cherub under the tree of life, began to withdraw. The angels came to God and asked: why do you remain among people who have turned the heavens against you? The Shekhinah rose from earth to the first heaven, and stayed there. It would take the accumulated righteousness of the coming generations to begin drawing it back down.

The two pillars remained. Stone outlasted everything. Josephus says one of them was still visible in the region of Syria in his own time. We do not know if he was right. We know that the impulse was right: when you have learned something worth knowing, find the most durable form you can and write it down, because the catastrophes your ancestors warned you about are real, and something should survive them.