The First Adam Filled the World and Stood Alone in It

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The Body That Lay From One Edge of the World to the Other

Before there was a garden, before there was a man who could stand and walk, there was a shape with no shape. It lay across the raw earth, from the place where the light first came up to the place where it drained away. God had gathered it, and it filled everything. Reach toward the east, and it was already there. Reach toward the west, and it had gone ahead. North and south it ran the same, stretched from one end of the heavens to the other. Even the empty air between the edges was pressed full of it, as though a hand had been laid flat over the whole of creation and left resting there.

This was Adam. Not the Adam of dust, not yet. A formless mass, unfinished and enormous, whose substance God's eyes had already watched while it was still unwrought. He was a single living thing the size of the world, and nothing in the world had a name for what he was.

Stamped With a Likeness No Angel Carried

Two things had gone into the making of him, and they did not sit easily together. Part of him came from the ground, the part that could dry and crumble and go back to being dirt. But something else had been pressed onto him the way a seal is pressed into soft wax. A likeness. An image. The print of the One who had spoken over him, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." No beast wore that mark. No serving angel wore it either.

Because he had been formed behind and before, worthiness would let him hold two worlds at once, this one and the one standing behind it. Then the word would come down to him, "You came before the ministering angels." Fall short, and the smallest crawling things would throw his lateness in his face. "A fly came before you. A gnat came before you. This worm came before you." Everything in him hung between those two sentences, and which one he would earn was not yet settled.

Two Faces, and a World That Bent to Serve Him

He was male and female at once, two faces set back to back on the one body, a back on this side and a back on that. And the world he woke into ran to serve him. The earth held him up. The rivers moved close by. The far ocean, the air he drew in, the light that showed him the ground, the heavens turning overhead, all of it leaned toward his good. Every fruit swelled for him. Every plant grew toward his hand. The quiet cattle and the wild beasts alike bent their strength to his keeping. He was king over the whole of it, and it served him gladly and asked nothing back.

The King of Everything Who Had No One

And still something was wrong. In all that leaning and serving, in all those hosts of creatures pressing toward him, not one was like him. The cattle came near but could not answer. The rivers ran but could not know his name. The light touched him and told him nothing back. He was master of the entire world and alone inside it, because nothing that served him wore his own face. The likeness sat on him and on no other thing that breathed.

God looked at the aloneness of the world-sized man and did not leave it standing. Here was the thing to be set into the order of creation: that a being carrying this likeness is made to help another, fitted to be another's help, because two of them would share one form in body and one form in soul. A creature could serve Adam. Only another Adam could meet him.

God Set the Blade to the One Body

So God did not walk off and shape a second creature from a distance. He reached into the one enormous body and cut it through. The two faces came apart. The two backs divided, this one turning to become a man and that one turning to become a woman, and the single mass that had filled the earth from edge to edge was brought down to the size of a person who could be stood beside another person.

Long after, some would hear it said, "He took one of his ribs," and picture a plain white bone slipped out of a sleeping side. But the word was tzela, a side, the same word used for the side of the Tabernacle. What God had taken was a whole half of him.

The thing that had reached from one end of the heavens to the other now fit inside a single skin. The image was still on him, the mark no angel carried, but it no longer lay over the world. It stood at a human height, at the lip of a garden, small enough at last to be lonely in a smaller and more bearable way. And when this Adam turned, for the first time there was another face wearing the same likeness, turning to look back at him.