Genesis 3 - The Fall of Man (Part 6)
…continued from Genesis 3 - The Fall of Man (Part 5)
 20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
I happened upon an interesting commentary on this vers at Accuracy In Genesis. How Big is All? Here is the beginning of that article:
For a first example look at Genesis 3:20 where per the King James Version Adam pronounces Eve as
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“the mother of all living” How big is this all ? Is it totally inclusive of all living matter, plants, bacteria, aquatic life, bugs, fowl, and all the mammals and all primates?Was she “mother nature” ? Or on a slightly smaller scale lets rule out plants and just assign her as mother of all non-plant life, does this seem more reasonable ? But we know that per chapter 1 all plant life and all the animals were created before Eve!So how about only the primates ? Just by a straight translation of the Hebrew of this verse only, we are not really exactly sure what is the true meaning and therefore James Moffatt decided to translate it as
Or how about only the humanoids ?
Or how about only Adam’s offspring ?Â
“all living persons“ A small subset of “all living matter” and the word “persons” is not in the Hebrew!And our preferred translation considering the context and the total creation record is only all of Adam’s offspring.
The author makes an excellent point. After all, Eve is clearly not the mother of ***aaaallllll**** the living. Or is she? I suspect the problem in this formulation of the problem is in the words “would become” and “living”.
First of all, there is the word for “would become”. Depending on the translation, the verb is translated as both forward and backward looking:
- would become - NIV
- was - NAS
- would be - NLT
- was - KJV
- was - NKJV
Next, there is the Hebrew word for “living”, which chay. It basically refers to any kind of life, figurative or real, animal or vegetable.
To resolve this, I believe the key is to realize that a mother precedes her offspring, suggesting that the “living” she was to be mother of would come after her. Whether “would be” or “was” is more accurate only depends on what the verb is qualifying. If you qualify her motherhood, then “was”; if you qualify who she to be mother of, then “would be”. Conclusion: “all the living” refers to the people coming after Eve. Eve “was” the person who “would be” their mother.Â
So are they who would have Eve as their mother?
Because there were animals and plants, and for that matter, Adam, who were alive before Eve, something about these were not alive before Eve. What could that be?
Eve has a unique place in history as being the first person to have her eyes opened to right and wrong, good and evil, disobedience to God. She was the first to find out that eating of the fruit meant not physical death, but spiritual death. God also death with her disobedience before He dealt with Adam’s. There is a way in which she was “alive”, even before Adam. Adam and Eve had now become like God in her ability to distinguish good from evil. The ability had always been there, but now it was awake. It was alive. Eve was now alive, in some respect, and she was the first one. Adam, in that regard, came second. And so while Eve died in Adam, Adam was alive in Eve… though both needed to be made alive in Christ!
And so we see, that Eve was even the mother of Adam in this sense.
And we also see that this verse does not require her to be the first or only woman alive at her time… according to scripture, she need only be the first to eat of the forbidden fruit.
Therefore, if we are not talking about being a physical mother of the living, it resolves the existence of all other living animals and plants that came before Eve or after her. It even resolves the problem of whether all people henceforth would be descended from Eve. Cain’s wife for example. The answer: she wasn’t. Because of their knowledge of good and evil, Eve is the mother of all who learn of good and evil. She is their mother in the respect that she was even Adam’s mother… the first one made alive in the knowledge of good and evil. In His humanity, she was even Christ’s mother, for He had the ultimate knowledge of good and evil on this world! And so we see that because living refers not to physical birth, but awareness of sin, “all” really does mean “all”.