The Real Eve & Adam
First, an important understanding of the difference between the word adam and the person Adam. Recall that the Old Testament Bible is a collection of old Hebrew documents. The Hebrew word adam is defined as humanity or the human race as a whole. The name Adam refers to an individual like the name John. To explain; in the end of the Garden of Eden phase of this earth’s history, Adam was a member of adam at the head of a royal bloodline, to have Priesthood authority, that would propagate and be documented through the future of the earth by members of that family. The adam was comprised of other family heads of other initial bloodlines that would continue also through the expulsion of mankind from the Garden to also people the earth also as mortals.
To start at the beginning of the story of humanity, once the earth was capable of sustaining complex, earth-bound animal life, mankind or adam was procreated to occupy a Garden prepared for them. In the Garden was all the vegetation necessary to sustain life along with two special trees. Once matured enough the adam were given their first job and one initial commandment as found in the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible.
Genesis 2: 18 – 22.
“And I, the Lord God, took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it, and to keep it. And I, the Lord God, commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; Nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee; but remember that I forbid it; For in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
What isn’t recorded or known is this: Was only one continuous community of adam on the earth from the very first that continued through several extinction events on the earth up to the exile, or if there were several different occurrences of adam between the first one and the exile event, or if one original community was removed from the earth from time to time and returned prior to the exile event? It should be remembered that while the Garden existed there was no time reckoning in effect and the adam were immortal, so many things were possible that we have no way of understanding without that specific information. The Garden was nothing like that with which we are familiar.
What can be known is that the Gods required a helper for adam and this is where things get interesting. Eventually, Adam was given an additional job. All the species of animal life were to be named by him as they were encountered.
Genesis 2: 23 – 25, reads, “And I, the Lord God, said unto mine Only Begotten, that it was not good that the man should be alone; Wherefore, I will make an help meet for him. And out of the ground, I the Lord God, formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and commanded that they should come unto Adam, to see what he would call them.”
There exists a common misstatement of the saying “help meet” and in this case common means virtually 100%. When every person I have ever heard reads this, refers to it, or states it as either one word, “helpmeet” or a hyphenated phrase like “help-meet.” Some people infer that, to mean just helper and some infer that to mean spouse. Neither is correct. Every editor who has ever corrected my work knows I’m an over user of commas but I would have put a comma between the word “help” and “meet.” To put it into modern vernacular it should be better said “I will make an help. Meet for him,” First of all there is no such word as helpmeet there is helpmate as a single word but in all authoritative translations of the Torah, the interpreter of the scripture keeps these two words separated and the word “mate”, though certainly familiar to the translators, is never used. But more importantly, the word “meet” has two definitions. The first is to encounter. The second is the one applicable here. It means suitable; fit; or proper; rendering the real meaning of the sentence in question as; Wherefore, I will make an helper or companion suitable for him.
In the meanwhile of Adam naming the species as he encounters them, God would prepare adam’s helper as in Genesis 2: 28 -29. “And I, the Lord God, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept, and I took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in the stead thereof; and the rib, which I, the Lord God had taken from man, made I a Woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This I know now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.”
So God harvests a rib from Adam. I wonder, could it be for some of the perfectly formed DNA it contained? One thing to note is that the comma between “made I a woman” and the following phrase, “and brought her unto the man” was likely an indeterminate period and passage of how we reckon time even though it is said in the same breath. It could have been anything, even 2 million years according to the way we currently reckon time, because as yet, to the immortal human inhabitants of the garden, there is no such thing as any kind of time reckoning. Adam’s response to this introduction is telling. The helper is first referred to as “this” not as a “they or them or any kind of person.” Adam clearly could tell she was female and looked like him and then true to his duty and his ongoing task of naming all the kinds of animals, named her a Woman. He was not naming a gender but rather a species as was his ongoing job that he was still in the process of doing. To us the word woman defines a female gender but Adam was defining the species of a creature that looked very much like him and which had been formed as the result of what was taken out of man namely, the harvested rib. Now before I’m relegated to the dust bin of crazy heretics, let’s just consider and compare some other translations of this event.
In the JPS (Jewish Publication Society)’s Tanakh, which is a Jew’s authoritative translation of the Bible from Hebrew into English, in Genesis Chapter 2 verse 23 it reads, “Then the man said, This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman, for from man was she taken.” This clearly implies the naming of a species as Adam had been commanded to perform.
In the Stone Tanac translation another jewish linguist translates Genesis 2: 23 this way, “And the man said, This time it is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This shall be called Woman, for from man was she taken.” All translations agree, including Joseph’s when he refers to Woman as “this” and “it” not them or they or any identifier as identical to himself. There is one more very interesting point to be made in this respect and it’s another translation of Joseph Smith found in the TPJS page 301 and reads, “The 7th verse of 2nd chapter of Genesis ought to read—God breathed into Adam his spirit [i.e., Adam’s spirit] or breath of life; but when the word “ruach” applies to Eve, it should be translated lives.” Joseph is clearly demonstrating that the creations of Adam and that of the Woman, are different. More could be explored and said about all this but it would be somewhat speculative, but up to this point we’re on pretty good footing.
The next thing to realize is that Woman was brought to Adam from either outside the Garden or at least from a distant part of it. Or it likely wouldn’t be said that she was “brought unto” man, which suggests that she was not already part of the edenic community of adam. So just what are we implying? Was the Woman a Neanderthal? Not likely. She was probably Cro-Magnon.
Now before our sisters start feeling slighted with the idea that because this female in the story is not created equal to Adam, and all females are therefore somehow diminished. Let me point out that none of us are born as adam or of the species Woman. We all are the product of the union of those two original species be we male or female. And in that respect we now are all truly equal in our genetic humanity. By the way, the species Woman no longer exists on the earth as distinctly separate from we homo-sapien-sapiens.
So, for what was this female of Woman suitable? To be a wife as now stated in the next verses of Genesis. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”
The next event was the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Verse 7 in Genesis 3 gives an insight into the idea that God was cleverly using Satan’s vengeful lust to cause the transgression that would kick start mortality for the adam. It reads, “And Satan put it into the heart of the serpent, for he had drawn away many after him; and he sought also to beguile Eve, for he knew not the mind of God; wherefore, he sought to destroy the world.”
Without going into a rather tortured dissection of the rest of the wording in this chapter, the result is that the Woman realized the fruit had many desirable qualities and ate some and afterward gave some to Adam. There is a point to be made now about the fruit. I’ve heard it said the fruit is a metaphor for sexual intercourse. Clearly that is carnal, sensual, and devilish thinking and not true. If the fruit meant sexual intimacy, then with whom did the Woman partake of it first, before she shared it with Adam? Care should be exercised not to slander the wife of the glorified being to whom you must report your activities in this dispensation and face in the resurrection as your grand progenitor who will rule over you for eternity. The fruit was just a fruit, but a fruit with some detrimental characteristics for the adam and likely not an apple as we know it today. God said if Adam ate the fruit he would surely die. God didn’t say if you eat the fruit I’ll then have to kill you. It was something automatic. It would change his body somehow and make him subject to death. And that meant that access to the fruit of the tree of life could no longer be allowed necessitating expulsion from the garden. Keep in mind the basis of the transgression was the simple disobedience of eating the fruit when commanded not to do so. Adam’s test of righteousness grows out of the decision to either refuse to eat the fruit and keep the one commandment and break a commandment to not separate from the Woman or visa versa. The transgression could have been disobeying any commandment as a reason for expulsion from the garden, but the eating of the fruit also allowed for the bodily changes to take place.
All this was simply the proper way to people an earth; Being only able to create and start with the immortal adam they must then be made able to die and procreate proper mortals with those of Woman. One thing that has intrigued me for many years is the idea that the mitochondria within human cells is only passed on by and through the mothers and that it might have something to do with the aging process.
Once all are evicted from the garden Adam names his wife with the proper name Eve. I strongly recommend reading Genesis chapters 2 and 3 in the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible as a coherent text instead of spliced-in snippets, along with this blog because this presentation is quite abbreviated and there is a great deal of subtle information to be realized from the actual text.