When Adam Died the Sun Went Dark and Every Angel Wept

The Body on the Ground

Seth rose from his father's body and went to his mother. "What is your trouble?" he asked. "Why are you weeping?"

Eve did not answer with words. She pointed up.

Seth looked. The seven heavens had opened, all of them, layer above layer, and somewhere in that opened sky Adam's soul lay prostrate before God. Every holy angel in creation was praying for him, their voices rising in intercession: "Pardon him, Father of All, for he is Your image."

Eve saw two shapes standing in the midst of all the prayers, dark and dimmed, not praying but present. She asked who they were. Seth told her: the sun and the moon had come to intercede for Adam. Even they had come to pray for the first man. Eve asked why they appeared so dark, so stripped of their usual fire. Seth answered: "their light has not left them. They cannot shine before the light of all things, before the face of God, before the Father of lights. In that presence, everything else goes dark."

The Six Days in Reverse

The curses had been real. God had looked at Adam and Eve in the garden and pronounced them one after another. For the man: the earth would be cursed because of him. Thorns and thistles would grow where before anything had grown at his request. He would work and sweat and labor and never find ease. The beasts that had once obeyed him would rise in rebellion. He would eat bread only by the skin of his effort, and at the end of all that effort his body would return to the dust it had come from.

Adam had lived under those curses for centuries. He had farmed the hard earth and watched it resist him. He had seen the animals turn away from his authority and stop answering his voice. He had watched Eve age beside him and felt his own body begin the long process of returning to the material from which God had shaped it.

Now the body was finally done. And the opening of the seven heavens at the moment of his death suggested that something about the curses had been within a larger frame the whole time.

God Descends

The chariot came first. A chariot of light, with four winds drawing it and six-winged seraphim attending it, flew down from the opened heavens and halted near Adam's body. Then came the voice that Seth and Eve had not heard since the garden: "Adam, where are you?" Not confusion. Not a question that needed an answer. The same call God had made in the garden when Adam was hiding among the trees.

God descended to attend to Adam's body personally. The angels, assembled in enormous number, sang over Adam. They sang while the archangels prepared to carry him to the third heaven, to a place of rest that God had already prepared. Michael came to Seth and told him how to prepare the body. No human hand was to touch it until the angels had completed what God commanded.

Six days was all the mourning God permitted. On the seventh, God said, the joy of the resurrection would begin, even for Adam. The pattern of creation, six days of work and then rest, ran through everything, even through death.

Abel's Body Waiting

When they carried Adam to the third heaven, they carried Abel with him. Abel, the first human to die, had been waiting. His body had remained unburied for years after Cain killed him, because Eve and Adam had never seen death before and did not know what to do with a body. A bird had shown them how to dig and cover, and they had learned burial from an animal.

Now father and son were carried together, Adam who had lived nearly a thousand years and Abel who had lived so few. God buried them together, wrapped in the first burial linens, in the place He had prepared. No human hands on the bodies. Only the angels, only the divine attending to its own creation at the moment of its first and greatest ending.

What Eve Was Told

After Adam was buried, Eve prayed. She prayed with the knowledge that she was next, that Adam had told her she would not long survive him. She asked God not to separate her body from his in death, to let her rest beside the man she had shared everything with since the garden.

She told her children what had happened. She told them about the seven heavens, about the sun and moon going dark, about God descending in the chariot of light. She told them what God had said about the sixth day and the seventh. She told them to guard themselves from transgressing against the good, which was the last teaching she had to give.

Then she died, six days after Adam, as he had said she would. Michael told Seth what to do with her body. The angel spoke, and Seth obeyed, and the first two people who had ever walked in the garden were laid together in the earth at last.