The Mother of All Living

"Eve, first woman of earthly creation, companion of Adam and mother and matriarch of the human race, is honored by Latter-day Saints as one of the most important, righteous, and heroic of all the human family." 

Beverly Campbell

Artwork: Mother Eve by Brooklyn Swenson

President Nelson has put a great deal of focus the last few years on encouraging members of the Church to attend the temple regularly, worship more fully while there, and gain a more complete understanding about the covenants we make within temple walls. I love this instruction because I’ve long felt that we can’t keep our covenants well if we don’t know what they are. And if we are to be representatives of Jesus Christ, having taken His name upon us, we ought to know exactly what we promised Him we’ll do so we can ensure we’re living up to those promises.

One thing that has always distracted me from spiritual temple worship, however, is the circumstance surrounding the forbidden fruit. I’ve always struggled to understand why God would give Adam and Eve two contradictory commandments in the Garden of Eden and instruct them to keep both: don’t eat of the fruit of the tree, but multiply and replenish the earth (which they couldn’t do unless they ate the fruit and fell from the garden). To this day, I haven’t found an explanation that resonates. But I did recently gain some insight about another part of the Garden of Eden story I’ve always found baffling.

In this part of the story, God has just put His newly minted man, whom He calls Adam (Moses 1:34), into a deep sleep so he could pull a rib from his side and create woman (Genesis 2:21-23). God then asks Adam what he’d like to call the woman they’ve just created. In Genesis chapter 3 verse 2, we learn that “Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20).

This sentence has always struck me as odd. It doesn’t seem to make any sense, which makes it feel like such a strange detail to include in the narrative.

My answer came in my recent study of the Hebrew bible, from which we get the English King James translation that’s studied by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The name Eve is not necessarily a mistranslation of the original text, but it does abandon the poetry of the verse. In Hebrew, Eve’s name is Hava, which shares a linguistic root to the Hebrew word for living, Hai. So, if we were to retranslate Genesis 3:20 in a way that better preserves the poeticism of the original text, it would read something more like, “And Adam called his wife’s name Liv; because she is the mother of all living.”

This transliterary insight has made my temple worship much less distracting.

But, regardless of what we choose to call her, the mother of all living, and her experience with the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, symbolizes something incredibly important: that people aren’t all good or all bad. We’re all a little of both.

We live in a social world that encourages the construction of rigid boxes around each other’s character. The social world today has made us believe that if a person is not all good, they are bad. Even if a person is unanimously believed to be good, but then publicly expresses one bad perspective (as deemed so by the general social consensus), they’re swiftly thrown from community’s good graces and abandoned to the ruthless wiles of cancel culture. Their name tainted forevermore, rarely to be considered “good” again.

The concept that a person can be both good and bad simultaneously is foreign to most of us. And yet, as members of the human family, that’s almost always the case (Jesus Christ is the single exception, a perfect mortal).

Humans are complicated creatures. We all believe and behave in ways that are simultaneously good and bad. Our own scriptures are full of examples. Consider Nephi killing Laban so he could steal back the plates of brass (1 Nephi 4:12), Moroni urging chief Judge Pahoran to take up arms against his own people, the people of Zarahemla, because they’d grown too wicked (Alma 61:19-20), or Esther approaching King Ahasuerus in a completely inappropriate social manner to protect the Jewish people from destruction (Esther 2:15-16). And these examples barely scratch the surface of how often we see “good” characters in the scriptures doing “bad” things.

I often wonder if these are not examples of good people doing bad things for righteous reasons, but rather of people doing things out of principled reason.

Eve is arguably the most important symbol of this idea in our theology. Eve is often considered a good person who did a bad thing by eating the fruit and consequently getting herself and Adam banished from the Garden of Eden. But Eve is a good character in the story, not bad one, so the narrative is sometimes contorted in a way that makes her seem more like a hero and less like a villain. But the truth is, she doesn’t have to be one or the other. We don’t need to assign her a binary label of “good” or “bad,” because she—the mother of all living—is both. As we all are, as human beings. Eve does not become bad by doing a bad thing. Rather, she becomes fully human.

I wonder if this experience is part of the reason for God’s contradictory commandment about the forbidden fruit. Because it’s an inevitable human experience to, at some point, act against the will of God, perhaps breaking God’s commandment by eating of the fruit was a necessary rite of passage for Adam and Eve, humanity’s first parents, to become fully mortal.

I want to add a word of clarity here. I am not suggesting that people who do bad things are good people. As covenant followers of Jesus Christ, we should always be striving to become more like Him and follow His examples of behavior and conduct: serve more effortlessly, love more purely, support others more fully as they navigate their personal challenges, fight discrimination more fiercely, and reject segregation more wholeheartedly.

But what I am suggesting is that we stop attempting to rewrite Eve’s story in a way that sterilizes her humanity, and ours by extension. Eve did not eat the fruit because she is a woman and women have weaker resolve than men; nor did she eat the fruit because, as a woman, she had a clearer understanding of God’s plan for them than did Adam. Eve, the mother of all living, ate the fruit because she was beguiled by the serpent (Genesis 3:1-6, 13). She was simply tricked. As we all can be, and often are.

Eve believed that eating the fruit was the right thing for her to do, but since that meant breaking one of God’s commandments, perhaps she was mistaken in that belief. Lawrence E. Corbridge once taught, “People say, ‘you should be true to your beliefs.’ While that is true, you cannot be better than what you know. Most of us act based on our beliefs, especially what we believe to be in our self-interest. The problem is, we are sometimes wrong.”

The serpent convincing Eve that eating the fruit was in her best interest doesn’t make her stupid, or weak, or even hyper-aware or ultra-righteous—it makes her human. As the mother of all living, what a beautiful example for each of us of the messiness of the human experience. What a perfect example of being a good, pure intentioned person, albeit with limited experience (as is ours), who was socially persuaded with seemingly sound reasoning into making a poor choice. What an extraordinary example of the non-binary way humans interact with the mortal world around us.

When we attempt to sterilize Eve’s actions and motivations so that they better fit our binary world view that good people only do good things, we erase her entire purpose and glory as our mother—that living beings are neither good nor bad, but both simultaneously. We are not good people who do bad things. We are people who do things. Hopefully, those things are informed by the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But when they aren’t, our Heavenly Parents have provided for us a Savior in our brother Jesus Christ whose atoning sacrifice can protect us from living forever in our sins, if we choose to repent (Genesis 3:22-24).

Our behaviors are informed by complicated webs of social, moral, and philosophical reasoning and decision-making practices. Our behaviors are inextricably tangled with both good and bad beliefs and motivations. The purpose of mortality is to use our agency to make decisions, guided by (and learning from) our personal experiences and the consequences of the decisions we choose to make. Our purpose here is to use the example and atoning sacrifice of our Savior Jesus Christ to untangle our personal believe systems so that we can better align with Him, and with what He has asked of us as His covenant children. And as Eve so beautifully modeled for us in the Garden of Eden.

As Elder Corbridge went on to teach, “When you act badly, you may think you are bad, when in truth you are usually mistaken. You are just wrong. The challenge is not so much closing the gap between our actions and our beliefs; rather, the challenge is closing the gap between our beliefs and the truth.”

So, let’s grant ourselves, and each other, a little more grace as we’re working through that.

Let’s stop putting people in binary boxes of good or bad. Let’s stop canceling people for their opinions that we don’t agree with. And rather than weaponizing the words of this message against someone with whom you disagree, or using them to justify your existing believe and behavior patterns, consider just sitting with this message for a while. Let the message meld into your mind, so it can, perhaps, act as a barrier the next time you’re tempted to make a person who means well out to be “bad.”

Because, more likely than not, they’re not a bad person. They’re just human.

And I, for one, am very grateful to be able to experience this mortality – messy as it is. I’m grateful for Eve, our first human mother, paving the way for each of us to “become as [God], knowing good and evil” (Genesis 1:22), simply by modeling exactly what it’s like to be human: doing our best with the information we have, and learning to do better in the future by experiencing the consequences of our choices.

And I’m grateful for my heavenly parents and my Savior Jesus Christ, whose name I’ve covenanted to take upon me, and whose commandments I’ve covenanted to uphold within the walls of the sacred temples. May we each strive to follow Eve’s example, make the best choices we can with the experience we have, and turn to our Savior when we fall.