Renaming and Reclaiming Eve

This is my plea to give biblical Eve her due. To credit the fullness of her being. To call her by her proper name.

Names carry meaning. Sometimes they derive from definitions or translations from another language. Think “Hope” in English or “Or,” which is Hebrew for “light.”

Names can be derived from personal or family associations. We named our child after my grandmother and my spouse’s father to create connections across generations and to honor our forbearers. These names also invoke biblical characters whose strength I hoped my child would carry. Sometimes, a parent creates a whole new name, perhaps to embody the wish that their child will explore and become fully their own person.

Often when I hear a name, I hear it only as the title of a person or a place—and not even its most obvious meaning. For example, “White Plains” invokes for me a local city with a train station and tall buildings, but not an image of open lands. Sadly, meanings that could enrich our understanding of the world are lost. Remember that in many stories, especially culturally significant ones, the names given to characters bring intentional meaning and deepen a reader’s understanding of the text.

Which brings me to Adam and Eve and name-giving in the Hebrew Bible.

Adam’s name describes his essence. Genesis 2:7 recounts that God fashioned a being, a human min-ha-adamah (מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה), from “humus from the soil,” alternatively translatable as an earthling fashioned of “dust from the earth.” The alliterations of humus à human and earth à earthling capture the relationship between this new being and the material from which it was formed.

Later, after the exile from the Garden of Eden, the word for dirt/earth/soil, adamah, morphs into the proper name for the male of the first couple in God’s creation. Min-ha-adamah both describes and names Adam.

And what about the woman? In English, Adam’s wife is referred to as “Eve.” It’s a name but it misses her essence.

In the Bible’s telling, God delegates the naming process to the earthling. To wit: “God formed from the ground all the wildlife of the field and all the birds of the heavens and brought [each] to the human, to see what he would call it; and whatever the human called it as a living being, that became its name. The human called out names for all the herd-animals and for the birds of the heavens and for all the wildlife of the field. . .” (Genesis 2:19-20).

Continuing this task, shortly after being expelled from Eden, “The human called his wife’s name: Havva/Life-giver [חַוָּ֑ה], for she became the mother of all the living.” (Genesis 3:20).

The full etymology of Havva (חוה), sometimes transliterated as Chavah, is uncertain. But, based on the text’s explanation that “she became the mother of all the living” and the name’s similarity to Haiyah (חיה) or Chaiyah, from the Hebrew word for life, Eve’s given name translates as “lively” or “life giving.”

In Hebrew, Chavah (חוה) contains only one letter that is different from Chaiyah  (חיה); visually, they are almost identical. In addition, the two letters that distinguish the differences between these names are visually similar which may have contributed to possible scribal errors in the millennia before printed type. The center letter of Chavah is vav (ו), which looks like a long version of yud (י), the central letter of Chaiyah.

Apparently, Latin translations of the Hebrew bible used Eva for Chavah. Through the ages, that name, in turn, came down through the English-language King James Bible as “Eve.”

So, when English speakers hear the name Eve, they might think of Adam’s partner, but not likely her essence nor her role in creation. Yet Chavah became the first mother, bearing at least three sons. (We have no information as to daughters, but that’s a conundrum for another day.)

While Adam is rooted in soil, Chavah brings liveliness, the breath of life, to the new couple.

How about we start referring to the first, first couple as “Adam and Chavah.”  Earthling and Life-giver.  Now, that’s a tribute!

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