The Men Who Inherited Adam's Beauty and Died From It

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The First Man Was Too Bright to Look At

Before there were nations or kings, there was one body that filled the world. Adam stood so tall his head brushed the vault of heaven and his shoulders spanned the horizon, east to west, a single man laid across the whole width of creation. And he was beautiful. The soles of his feet threw off more light than the sun, so that the burning disk in the sky looked dull beside the skin of his heel.

The beauty that came after Adam was a slow diminishing. The loveliest woman set beside Sarah was an ape beside a human being. Sarah set beside Eve was the ape. Eve set beside Adam was the ape. Each generation held a smaller coin of the same gold, and the gold kept thinning, until what a man inherited of the first father was no longer a body of light but a single feature, one bright limb or organ where the old radiance still burned.

His Splendor Scattered Into Living Shards

When Adam fell, his glory did not vanish all at once. It broke. It broke as though the first man had been shattered and a single splinter of him lodged in the bodies of men not yet born, one shard of that first perfection to each. Samson caught his strength. Saul caught the height of his neck and stood a head above every other man in Israel. Asahel caught his speed and could run down a deer across open ground. Absalom caught his hair, thick and heavy and gleaming, the envy of Jerusalem. Uzziah caught the breadth of his forehead. Josiah caught the shape of his nostrils, where the breath of life had first been blown. Zedekiah caught the light of his eyes. Zerubbabel caught the power of his voice.

Each of them walked the world carrying a piece of the first man. Each of them, save one, was killed by the very piece he carried.

The Gift Turned on the Man Who Bore It

Samson's arms tore lions apart and brought down a temple, and those same arms were bound with fresh rope and his eyes were put out, until he set his hands to the pillars and pulled the roof down onto his own head. Saul stood tallest of all on the field at Gilboa, and when the battle broke against him he braced the hilt of his sword against the ground and fell forward onto the blade, that long neck the last of him to give. Asahel ran so fast he closed the gap on Abner across the plain, and Abner thrust the butt of a spear back through his belly, so that the swiftest man in Israel dropped in mid-stride and did not rise. Uzziah reached into the Temple to burn incense he had no right to burn, and the mark bloomed on that famous forehead, tzara'at spreading white across his skin, and he lived his last years shut away and unclean. Josiah rode into a war that was never his, and the arrows found him, and one went in through the nostrils, the breath-gate of the first man. Zedekiah watched his sons cut down in front of him, and that sight was the last his bright eyes ever held, for his captors blinded him on the spot and led him into the dark. Only Zerubbabel kept his shard whole. The great voice carried him home to build again, and the stories let him keep it.

Absalom Chose the Rope Over the Fire

Absalom was the proudest of them, and his pride was the hair on his head, so thick and so admired that all Jerusalem turned to watch him pass. He rode to war against his own father with a sword strapped to his side. Then his mule carried him under the low branches of a great oak, and the boughs took hold of that famous hair and lifted him clean out of the saddle. The mule ran on without him. He hung there, alive, swinging between heaven and earth, the pride of his whole life now the noose around his skull, every hair he had ever combed and oiled holding him fast to the wood.

He had a sword. One stroke would cut the hair or hack the branch and drop him to the ground and freedom. He never drew it. As he swung, Absalom looked down, and the earth under his feet opened. Gehinnom (the realm of judgment after death) yawned below him, the pit of fire waiting to swallow him the instant his feet touched the ground. So he made his choice, and he said it aloud. "It is better for me to hang by my hair and not to descend into the fire." He hung on. He was still hanging when Joab came through the wood and found him and drove three darts into his heart.

Eight men had worn a fragment of the first man's glory. Seven of them died where the glory sat, struck at the strength, the neck, the running feet, the forehead, the nostrils, the eyes, the beautiful hair. The brightness that made them remembered was the seam where they broke.