Eve: The Offering

 

Eve: The Offering

Series: Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas
Tags: #Eve #GenesisMidrash #WordAndBurden #Exile #Gift #NewHumanScripture

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It was not a serpent that first spoke. It was the ache.

The ache of wondering alone, the ache of walking beside Adam in the cool of the evening, feeling his hand but not his knowing. He had been named before her, breathed upon before she was even spoken. She was born from the wound in his side, and bore the shape of his absence. And yet she longed—oh, how she longed—to know what he knew, or more. To reach back into the mystery that even he could not name.

The fruit was not cunning. It was clarity. It shimmered, not with temptation, but with invitation. To see as God sees. To walk through the veil.

She took and ate, yes—but not in defiance. In ache. In aching reverence. In longing to be near what was already drawing her beyond the limits of her rib-born silence.

And when the taste filled her mouth—not with sweetness, but with sorrow and clarity and fierce joy—she did not flee. She turned. She saw Adam, still untouched, still bound by the boundary, still at ease in the half-light of unknowing.

She loved him.

So she gave him the fruit.

Not to tempt. Not to drag. But because she could not bear to go forward alone. Because she could not bear to be rent from him by the very thing that now pulsed inside her: the second sight, the double vision, the terrible gift.

He looked at her, and saw the change. Saw the brightness. Saw the tears. He held the fruit. He remembered the warning. But he also remembered the ache—the same ache she now bore like a lamp in the dark.

When he bit, the world split.

And for a moment, in that split second between curse and exile, they were as gods: knowing, naked, and together.

And Eve—Eve who gave the fruit—was not only mother of all living,

but first bearer of the unspeakable gift:

that no one should bear the burden of the Word alone.