The Courtship of Eve

The song i posted below is far and away my favorite song right now. I listen to it all the time. I love the word choices, like i do in Leonard Cohen songs. The words just feel right. Some of the lines are some of my all time favorites in *any* song.

I mean, "I think about you leaving now and the avalanche cascades, and my eyes get washed away in chain reactions". How perfect is that?

And don't even get me started on "You told me of your flash of inspiration, you said fusion was the broken heart that's lonely only thought, and all night long you drove me wild with your equations". Just brilliant.

But after all these listens something else came through the words. I started thinking about Adam and Eve.

Sometimes the most interesting parts of the Bible for me are the parts that aren't mentioned. After all, Jesus lived for 33 years and we have (aside from the birth narrative, and a few odds and ends) 3 years of it chronicled. And even then, of those three years we get a peek at maybe 75 days or so. There is ton about the most important person in the Bible that we never read about.

The life of Adam and Eve are no different, and in fact they most likely lived much longer lives, and have much less of their lives chronicled. We know almost nothing about them, when you think of them as real people.

Adam and Eve would have been the same kind of people as you or i, in a lot of ways, full of complexities and difficulties. Even before the fall i would think. Preferences, opinions, curiosities. At first i thought maybe they were "perfect" before the fall, not prone to doubt and confusion like we are today, but if that was the case the fall would have never happened. I think they would have been a lot like us today, even before the fall.

Their lives, especially together, are kind of glossed over in Genesis. Eve is created and the very next verse begins the story of the fall. Now i suppose it's possible that Eve was created and the fall happened the very same day, but I think it's more than likely that a lot of time passed between the two events. Maybe even years. After all, at this point Adam and Eve weren't getting older, they were enjoying an eternal existence in the garden.

I know it's kind of a preconceived notion that Adam and Eve would be become husband and wife, especially considering they were the only people at the time, but i think it misses something important to not think about how this happened. Like i said before, Adam and Eve were people just like us. Maybe i am colored irreversibly by the western concept of romantic love that pervades every aspect of our thoughts and culture, but is it that unusual to think that there may have been some courtship of Eve on Adam's part? Is it that unusual to think that Eve might need some time to get to know Adam before blindly loving him?

Granted it may not have been courtship in the sense that we know it today. Between the fact that these processes have changed drastically over time, and the fact that Eve *didn't really have any other options*, it may have been a bit of a forgone conclusions on some level, but stranger things have happened. How many times have we heard girls tell a guy that they wouldn't date them "even if they were the last man on earth"? If Adam didn't play his cards right, maybe he would have heard this too.

I thought of the end of Josh Ritter's song, where the narrator thinks about launching the missile and destroying the world, just to protect this little happiness he has built with the woman he loves, scared of it withering away without the unusual situation that has bound them together. I wonder if Adam thought this when he ate the apple? I don't know if he had the understanding of exactly what would happen after they ate of the tree, but surely he knew this: Whatever happened, it would happen to him and Eve *together*. For better or for worse, it would bind them tighter, make her his even more. I wonder if this is what he was thinking when he agreed to eat?

How many times have we thought it was a good idea to go down a bad road with the person we love, instead of going down a good road alone?