Adam and Eve's Names

A little over a year ago I started studying Hebrew. Most of my study time has been spent on learning basic grammar and elementary vocabulary. In the fall of this year I decided it was time to actually go to the text and start reading, very slowly, making sure I understood each word and much of the gramatical structure. I have been at it for about 2 months, and I have only made it to Genesis chapter 3. As I have been going through the story of "The Fall" of Adam and Eve I have had some interesting realizations. Let's start with names.

The name Adam, האדם, is a word that comes from the word that means dirt or soil האדמה. It is also a word that means "the man". So all through Genesis 3 there are a bunch of word plays on the name of Adam. For example, the Lord tells Adam that "cursed is the ground (האדמה) for thy sake." In other words Adam is cursed because the ground (adamah) is cursed. Then later in verse 19, the Lord says "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the ground (האדמה) for out of it wast thou taken: for dust through art, and unto dust shalt thou return." It is interesting that the term that is translated "dust" here is not the "adamah" word. Adamah is most often used to signify tilled earth, where as the word that means "dust" here is more like dry dirt, i.e. dirt that can't bring forth crops. Calling Adam (tilled ground) dust (unfertile dirt) is quite a putdown.  Also, when the serpent is cursed, he is doomed to eat dust all the days of his life (3:14). If you see the serpent as a symbol of death and hell, death and hell is eating all the rebellious "dust" humans all the days of his life. 

Then there is Eve's name. All through the creation story, up to the fall, Eve has not yet been named. Instead, they refer to her as Adam's wife, or אשה, which is also the generic term for a woman. When Eve partakes of the fruit, the Lord curses her that she would "greatly multiply they sorrow and thy conception." This is a really loose translation. Hebrew doesn't have superlatives, so when they want to emphasize something they say it twice. In Genesis 3:16 it says that the woman will הרבּה .הרבּה ארבּה means to become great, or big. By saying it twice the Lord is saying she will get very big. So he wasn't necessarily mulitplying her "sorrow," just her belly. Some Christians believe that if Adam and Eve hadn't taken the fruit, they, and all their descendants, would have lived in the Garden forever and that woman would have been able to bear children without getting huge and having hard labor. However, I think it is significant that it wasn't until after the fall that Adam names his wife, חוה, The name in the King James is translated as Eve, but if you pronounce it in Hebrew, it is Chava (with a hard "h" sound, like at the end of the name "Bach"). Chava is a really early form of the Hebrew word that means "life" and she is called that because she is the mother of all חי (living things). The Pearl of Great Price (one of the four cannonized books of scripture for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) suggests that Adam and Eve, in their innocent state in the Garden, could not have children (Moses 5:11) and that by partaking of the fruit they were enabled to have "seed". The fact that Eve wasn't named "Life" until after the fall supports this idea.

I will save a discussion of the fall for another blog. I just wanted to point out that there is a lot of name symbolism going on here that is totally lost in the English translation.