Genesis 2:18-25
Not good to be alone
The only thing called not good in the creation account is solitude. The answer to it is a companion who corresponds to the man rather than serving him.
People of the Bible
Eve
The mother of all the living, named for life on the day the sentence of death was spoken.
Eve is made from the man and brought to him, and his response is the first poetry in the Bible. She is the one the serpent speaks to, the one who looks at the tree and weighs what she has been told against what she has been shown, and the one who takes and shares. After the judgment she is given a name that means life, and she bears sons in a world that has already learned how to bury them.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Eve
- 01
- 02
Genesis 3:1-6
The conversation at the tree
The serpent does not command, it asks. What follows is a small, understandable reasoning that ends with a boundary crossed.
- 03
Genesis 3:15-20
The promise and the name
In the middle of the judgment comes a word about her offspring and the serpent. The man names her for life, not for what she has cost him.
- 04
Genesis 4:1-2, 25
The mother of the living
Cain, Abel and then Seth. She sees her first son kill her second, and receives a third in their place.
Why it matters
Eve carries the two halves of the human story at once. The promise that a descendant of hers will break the serpent is spoken over her before she has a single child, and the grief of what her children become is hers first. Every genealogy that follows runs through her.
6 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
