The consequences of disobedience start with exile from the garden of God and the Tree of Yahweh, but they do not end there. They cascade down through the structure of the dynastic order. Everything which had previously been given in the Kingdom of Elohim is either taken back or curtailed when the man and the woman commit treason against that kingdom:

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Gen. 3:12-19 KJV).

The decay of the relationship between the man and the woman peaks in this passage. He failed to guard her from the serpent, and she failed to be a helper who faces him and repeats back to him the commands of God. Instead, he stands by passively while his wife is infected by deceit, and after that she in turn infects him by turning back towards her husband and handing him the spiritually poisoned fruit. They then turn away from each other, hiding their most private parts from one another behind loincloths of leaves. Then when the King appears, they scatter.

They lack solidarity, the attribute of being invested in one another’s good. Instead, they calculate their interests separately. Finally, he turns fully against her interest, blaming her before their mutual Judge for his own treason. He offers her up as a scapegoat, a human sacrifice to God in order to save himself. And Adam takes the blaming of his wife to the next logical conclusion, that is the scapegoating of God Himself. If it’s not Adam’s fault but rather his wife’s, then who gave Adam his wife?

Adam’s treason is to invert the order of the kingdom: The Prince hides behind the damsel; the Prince judges the King. The woman’s rebellion is less complete. She actually tells the truth about her disobedience. According to St. Paul, the serpent really did deceive her: For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety (1 Tim. 2:13-3:1 KJV)

Interestingly, virtually the same word which St. Paul uses to describe the deception of the woman in the New Testament is used in the Septuagint translation of Adam’s defense before Yahweh. The principle difference is that St. Paul’s word choice intensifies the word through the addition of a prefix, that is he intensifies the deception itself. To St. Paul, the serpent is at least as deceptive to Eve as she claimed originally, and probably more so. If anything, she played down the degree to which the serpent deceived her, at least in contrast to St. Paul’s later evaluation. Of course, Paul had thousands of years of additional knowledge about just how deceitful the serpent’s ways could be.: καὶ εἶπεν κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῇ γυναικί τί τοῦτο ἐποίησας καὶ εἶπεν ἡ γυνή ὁ ὄφις ἠπάτησέν με καὶ ἔφαγον (Gen. 3:13 BGT). καὶ Ἀδὰμ οὐκ ἠπατήθη, ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ἐξαπατηθεῖσα ἐν παραβάσει γέγονεν· (1 Tim. 2:14 BGT) Also, to her credit, the woman acknowledged that she had acted, “and I ate,” though her confession is not complete: she does not fess up to having given the fruit to her husband.

So Woman comes out looking as the better of the two in this account – or more accurately the lesser of evils. Perhaps that’s why God gives a promise that it is the heir of the woman Who will defeat the serpent by crushing its head. There will be two kingdoms now. The original kingdom of Elohim has been subverted by the serpent, but Yahweh reasserts His kingdom—not only in Heaven but on earth and not only on earth, but within the human race. Yahweh does not concede His kingdom but rather reclaims both it and its chief officers, Adam and his bride. This means that there will be a division in the human race going forward. The “seed of the woman” will be in contradistinction to the work of the serpent. It will be a community of life in contrast with the work of the serpent which brought a cursed death.

Please note that it is not until after this promise has been given, the promise of the defeat of the serpent, that the woman is named Eve. Commentators sloppily refer to Adam and Eve as innocents in the garden, but that is anachronistic. She had not yet been called Eve at that time. At her creation, Adam named her ʾišāh, not Eve. In keeping with the pattern which we see throughout the creation account, deeds of naming are associated first with deeds of dividing. Something is divided, and then names are distributed, the light and dark are divided and then one is called day and the other night, etc. 

When God brought Woman to Adam after her creation, she had just been divided from the man by being drawn out of his side. God, the great High Priest gave names in Genesis 1, whenever a division occurred. Just so, in Genesis 3, after another division was put by God into the human race, Adam named his wife again. God divides Adam in two, and Adam gives her the name Woman. Now, because of sin, in the proto-evangelium, God introduces a new separation into the world between good and evil, between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. This is a newly divided humanity. Humanity is once again cut in half.

With the new division comes a need for a new name. But what name? Eve, Havāh, means “life” or “community” or better yet, both: Living Community or Community of Life. In the Hebrew, the name Eve and the name Yahweh look very similar. Do not get confused by the interchangeability of the “v” sound and the “w” sound in the common English transliterations of Eve and Yahweh: this comes from variation of pronunciation between different dialects of spoken Hebrew. It is the same letter in both Eve’s name and in Yahweh’s name (Jehovah’s). Eve (who was deceived), not Adam (who self-consciously disobeyed) will bear life into the world, by bearing into the world the undoer of death. This is how she becomes the mother of life. She is the mother of all living from henceforth because only through her Seed will life for humanity be possible.

The chapter ends with the exile from the garden so that Adam will not reach out his hand to the Tree of Life. This is not because the Living One does not wish life for his erring children, but because the only way to life left for Adam is to go forward, not to go back. Adam has already died to the garden by eating the fruit of maturity; he ceremonially, spiritually and emotionally graduated himself from the school of Yahweh. The only way towards life for him from thenceforth was by looking forward to the promise from the Living One Himself, that He would crush the head of the serpent: that is, The Life Himself would eventually kill death.

She’s not named Eve because she is the bearer of children. If that were the intent she would have been named Eve from the beginning when the mandate is given to go forth and multiply and fill the earth. No, she is named Eve because she is the bearer of the promise which is why she receives that name immediately after the promise is given.

Now during Advent we put ourselves in the position of all believing humanity, from the giving of the promise to the fulfilling of the promise – watching Eve, being part of a “living community” waiting for the coming of the Seed. Advent starts on the seventh day, the very first seventh day, when Yahweh comes, judges, and promises to restore. I guess in that sense, and only in that sense, we are ‘seventh day adventists’.

Jerry Bowyer is Editor of Town Hall Finance, serves on the Editorial Board of Salem Communications, is Resident Economist with Kingdom Advisors and President of Bowyer Research. He holds a Sacred Theology Licentiate from the Collegium Augustinianum and a Bachelor’s degree from Robert Morris University.