What Happened to Us in Eden? - Psychology of the FallNäide

A PREPARATORY TASK

God created in Adam a sense of expectation by showing him that, so far in creation, no suitable helper had been found for him. Then she came—to fill a space that had until then remained empty. Adam was unaware of this until that moment, but woman was already in the heart of God. She was never a last-minute “patch,” so we should give this final creature the value she had—and still has—in the Creator’s plan.

• Could it be that Adam’s task of naming the animals before her creation was meant to help him sense that “someone” was missing? Was that the purpose of the assignment?
• Was the Lord, in a way, “preparing the soil” for Adam’s amazement when he would finally receive the woman?
• In what other sense could Adam, upon calling her “woman,” be recognizing: “She is like me, yet different—complementary in what I lacked”?
• And could it be that calling her “Eve” after the Fall was precisely an emphasis on the promise that through her, as the mother of all the living (for that is the meaning of her name), the ray of light they had just heard from God would come to pass?
• Might this also have been in her mind when, in Genesis 4, she said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man”? Maybe she wondered if that child would be the promised one… only to realize soon after that it was not.

Naming someone or something can sometimes be an act of authority, but it doesn’t always mean that, nor does it necessarily imply hierarchy. Adam named the animals, and he named the woman in two different moments—with very different emphases each time. That naming is more like an Eureka moment, just as Hagar named the Lord “the God who sees me”—clearly not an act of claiming authority over Him.

• When Adam called her “woman,” it was a powerful expression of awe: she was flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones. Equal, and yet distinct.
• When he called her “Eve,” mother of all the living, it was an emphasis on the promise of salvation that would one day come through her.