Eve In Exile Quotes

We are Adam and Eve born out of chaos called creation Ribbing me gave you life yet you forget there will always be a part of me in you yes I taunted and tempted you with my forbidden fruit does that make me the serpent too? Believe what you will but if I am exiled alone I know we will be together again someday naked without shame in paradise My thanks to you for being in on my sin

what God has created us for is far more breathtaking, crazy, scary, and glorious than we have wanted to assume, and I don’t think any of us, if we throw ourselves into the roles that He sets for us, will find ourselves bored.

But a woman raising her children is not only shaping the next generation, she is also shaping little humans who are going to live forever. The souls she gave birth to are immortal. Immortal. And somehow, our culture looks at a woman who treats that as if it might be an important task and says, “It’s a shame she’s wasting herself. She could be doing something important—like filing paperwork for insurance claims.

But I am arguing that a sloppy, lazy, underachieving attitude is not glorifying to God and is not a joyful or fulfilling approach to life.

And women were created by God to run. To charge at things. To work like crazy.

Women need to stop being so offended about being asked to submit to an equal. Christ did not consider it robbery to humble Himself and submit to an equal, and neither should we, because when we picture that submission we are picturing the most potent form of glory that there is.

We can either copy Him in that, and attempt to use our homes to testify to God’s abundant and overwhelming delight in beauty, or we can use our homes to say the opposite—that nothing matters and it’s all stupid and nobody cares anyway.

The Hebrew word for a mother’s womb is raham—and the root of this word means “mercy.

Too often we just accept the premise that a homemaker drives carpool, gets the casserole in the oven, and organizes the closets. Once those things are done, we feel like we have ticked all the boxes and now our time is our own. It’s all too easy for us to work in order that we may have leisure, rather than working because we’re convinced that we’re building something phenomenal—and that mindset makes absolutely all the difference in the world. It is the difference between the employee and the boss, the hired help and the entrepreneur, the servant and the free man.

What impact would repentance have had on the role of women in the culture? If, in her misery and unhappiness, America had fallen to her knees instead of throwing herself into the pursuit of licentiousness, would there have been any resultant change in the way women were viewed? Absolutely there would have been. I would argue that one of the first things that we would have needed to chuck out the window would have been the idealistic, superficial, and incredibly shallow view of homemaking that was flourishing in the '50s.

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” said the ever-merciful God as he exiled Adam and Eve from Eden, and for most people throughout history, sweat they did.

God didn’t look at Adam in the garden and say, “It is not good for man to be alone, he needs something pretty to look at.

Food, fellowship, laughter, beauty—these form loyalties that run deep.

People, place, and presence. What humanity lost through Adam and Eve’s rebellion in the garden will be regained through the promise made to Abraham and his descendants.

Because we women are the glory, it makes sense that we tend to be preoccupied with glorifying. We do this innately and without even having to think about it, in the same way that our bodies can create another human inside of us without us having to stop and read a manual about how to do it. God created us for this purpose, and we beautify and we glorify constantly. Sometimes we do this in obedient ways, sometimes in rebellious ways; sometimes we revolt against our innate desire to do this at all, but this is a deeply ingrained trait that God has built into womankind, and it just can’t be completely smothered.

One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.

The battle is now so completely won that even many married Christians couples think of birth control almost as a sacrament, and many treat the idea of babies as an optional add-on to their relationship. We live in a society which despises fruitfulness, tolerating it only when it is a sort of self-conscious decision—a baby added on as a little garnish on top of a successful career like the small flourish of kale on the side of your dinner plate. Not really necessary, just decorative, and definitely not the point of the meal. Eve

So could a woman be faithfully keeping her house, in exactly the way Paul tells her to, but also have “a job”? Well, the Proverbs 31 woman was doing it—so it would be ludicrous of us to say that women may not engage in any business ventures. Of course the Bible doesn’t prohibit a woman making money. On the other hand, as I’ve written before, that’s not really the problem of our generation. We’ve got bigger questions to answer. We are a generation that needs to recover a sense of the importance of the home, and the importance of wives and mothers who are invested in their people.

It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth. ‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some think French fulfils this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, might.

The root of all sin goes back to the garden of Eden. The result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience was exile for them and all their descendants after them. Living in exile means living in a perpetual state of disconnection and separation that ultimately leads to death if not remedied. There are four aspects to exile: spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical.

Just as Prometheus delivered stolen fire to man, so Eve, and the serpent, delivered man into self-consciousness, setting him up, were it not for his short lifespan, as rival to God. At the same time, man’s self-consciousness removed him from nature into a life of toil, doubt, fear, guilt, shame, blame, enmity, loneliness, and frailty—and the product of this separation, the fruit and flower of this exile, is, of course, culture. ‘God,’ said the writer Victor Hugo, ‘made only water, but man made wine.

In the notorious passage in 1 Timothy 2 where Paul prohibits women from teaching, I think it’s quite striking that he also discusses how she should learn. Everyone gets wound up in a snarl about the fact that she should learn “in silence,” but what they fail to notice is that she’s learning. Paul is assuming that women are to be students of the Word, and there’s never a hint that it’s more important for the men to be educated in the faith than the women. Women are prohibited from preaching theology, but it’s never assumed that they shouldn’t know theology.

Enoch asked Adam about the name he had uttered earlier, Yahweh Elohim. Adam apologized, “It slips out too often. It is the covenant name of Elohim. It is reserved for only the most sacred of relationships. It expresses his essence as the foundation of existence itself. The divine council of heavenly host uses it.” He paused for a moment. “We used it in the Garden, but now with the Edenic exile…” his voice cracked for a moment. “It is a name that should remain secret until latter days. For what purpose, I do not know. Perhaps it has to do with the seed of Eve.

Buddhism offers a basic challenge to this cultural worldview. The Buddha taught that this human birth is a precious gift because it gives us the opportunity to realize the love and awareness that are our true nature. As the Dalai Lama pointed out so poignantly, we all have Buddha nature. Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion. In stark contrast to this trust in our inherent worth, our culture’s guiding myth is the story of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden. We may forget its power because it seems so worn and familiar, but this story shapes and reflects the deep psyche of the West. The message of “original sin” is unequivocal: Because of our basically flawed nature, we do not deserve to be happy, loved by others, at ease with life. We are outcasts, and if we are to reenter the garden, we must redeem our sinful selves. We must overcome our flaws by controlling our bodies, controlling our emotions, controlling our natural surroundings, controlling other people. And we must strive tirelessly—working, acquiring, consuming, achieving, e-mailing, overcommitting and rushing—in a never-ending quest to prove ourselves once and for all.

say that you were a woman living on a farm at the turn of the last century. You have a lot of kids and not a lot of money. Winter’s coming, and you’ve got to feed them all the way through it. When do you start planning? The split minute you get through the last winter, that’s when. You pull out the seeds you saved from last year’s crop, you start your seeds, you plant your garden (and no, you can’t rent a rototiller, so you probably have to fuss around with a hoe or a horse and plow or something). And don’t forget that if that garden is going to feed the family it’s going to have to be a rather massive—cute container gardening or interesting Pinterest-worthy novelty gardens would not cut it. You tend it all summer, and you harvest. You can, you dry, you preserve. You fill your root cellar and hopefully by midway through autumn you can stand back and survey the fruit of all that labor, grateful that it all came together and secure in the knowledge that you have supplied your family with what they need. Now compare that feeling with grabbing a can of beans at the store and feeling happy that you remembered to do that so there’s some green on your kids’ plates tonight. It’s much easier, yes . . . but not quite the same in terms of satisfaction in a job well done.

On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruit that bent the branches low. In order to ear, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast. Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve- and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.

At the same time that he was devising a response to the Afghanistan incursion, Carter had to confront a much more acute crisis in Iran, where he had brought the greatest disaster of his presidency down upon himself. In November 1977, he welcomed the shah of Iran to the White House, and on New Year’s Eve in Tehran, raising his glass, he toasted the ruler. Though the shah was sustained in power by a vicious secret police force, Carter praised him as a champion of “the cause of human rights” who had earned “the admiration and love” of the Iranian people. Little more than a year later, his subjects, no longer willing to be governed by a monarch imposed on them by the CIA, drove the shah into exile. Critically ill, he sought medical treatment in the United States. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance warned that admitting him could have repercussions in Iran, and Carter hesitated. But under pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and the head of the National Security Council, Zbigniew Brzezinski, he caved in. Shortly after the deposed shah entered the Mayo Clinic, three thousand Islamic militants stormed the US embassy compound in Tehran and seized more than fifty diplomats and soldiers. They paraded blindfolded US Marine guards, hands tied behind their backs, through the streets of Tehran while mobs chanted, “Death to Carter, Death to the Shah,” as they spat upon the American flag and burned effigies of the president—scenes recorded on camera that Americans found painful to witness.

In thousands of years, you’re the first being to cross my path and give me a reason to fight for a different future. I never saw you coming, and I never anticipated you would wreak such havoc on both me and my life. There was no one else who was worthy.” He thought I was worthy. The mess of a shifter with no pack and a true mate who’d rejected her. “But you have a true mate,” I breathed, knowing I might fuck up everything with this line of conversation, but apparently, my deadass was gonna go there. Shadow’s face was awash in secrets, and as he leaned over, his mouth tasting the tender spot beneath my ear, he murmured, “Her face is a blur, and I have a fantastic memory for almost everything else in this world. Out of duty, I never kissed a single being in the time I was exiled from my world, but then you exploded into my life. Full of sass and fucking questions, with hair of a sunset, and a temper to equal my own. The gods themselves couldn’t have stopped me from claiming you.

This, then, was the Old World on the eve of Columbus’s departure in 1492. For almost half a millennium Christians had been launching hideously destructive holy wars and massive enslavement campaigns against external enemies they viewed as carnal demons and described as infidels—all in an effort to recapture the Holy Land, and all of which, it now seemed to many, effectively had come to naught. During those same long centuries they had further expressed their ruthless intolerance of all persons and things that were non-Christian by conducting pogroms against the Jews who lived among them and whom they regarded as the embodiment of Antichrist—imposing torture, exile, and mass destruction on those who refused to succumb to evangelical persuasion. These great efforts, too, appeared to have largely failed. Hundreds of thousands of openly practicing Jews remained in the Europeans’ midst, and even those who had converted were suspected of being the Devil’s agents and spies, treacherously boring from within. Dominated by a theocratic culture and world view that for a thousand years and more had been obsessed with things sensual and sexual, and had demonstrated its obsession in the only way its priesthood permitted—by intense and violent sensual and sexual repression and “purification”—the religious mood of Christendom’s people at this moment was near the boiling point. At its head the Church was mired in corruption, while the ranks below were dispirited and increasingly disillusioned. These are the sorts of conditions that, given the proper spark, lend themselves to what anthropologists and historians describe as “millenarian” rebellion and upheaval, or “revitalization movements.”125

Structurally, then, errors of love are similar to errors in general. Emotionally, however, they are in a league of their own: astounding, enduring, miserable, incomprehensible. True, certain other large-scale errors can rival or even dwarf them; we’ve gotten a taste of that in recent chapters. But relatively few of us will undergo, for example, the traumatic and total abandonment of a deeply held religious belief, or the wrongful identification of an assailant. By contrast, the vast majority of us will get our hearts seriously broken, quite possibly more than once. And when we do, we will experience not one but two kinds of wrongness about love. The first is a specific error about a specific person—the loss of faith in a relationship, whether it ended because our partner left us or because we grew disillusioned. But, as I’ve suggested, we will also find that we were wrong about love in a more general way: that we embraced an account of it that is manifestly implausible. The specific error might be the one that breaks our heart, but the general one noticeably compounds the heartache. A lover who is part of our very soul can’t be wrong for us, nor can we be wrong about her. A love that is eternal cannot end. And yet it does, and there we are—mired in a misery made all the more extreme by virtue of being unthinkable. We can’t do much about the specific error—the one in which we turn out to be wrong about (or wronged by) someone we once deeply loved. (In fact, this is a good example of a kind of error we can’t eliminate and shouldn’t want to.) But what about the general error? Why do we embrace a narrative of love that makes the demise of our relationships that much more shocking, humiliating, and painful? There are, after all, less romantic and more realistic narratives of love available to us: the cool biochemical one, say, where the only heroes are hormones; the implacable evolutionary one, where the communion of souls is supplanted by the transmission of genes; or just a slightly more world-weary one, where love is rewarding and worth it, but nonetheless unpredictable and possibly impermanent—Shakespeare’s wandering bark rather than his fixèd mark. Any of these would, at the very least, help brace us for the blow of love’s end. But at what price? Let go of the romantic notion of love, and we also relinquish the protection it purports to offer us against loneliness and despair. Love can’t bridge the gap between us and the world if it is, itself, evidence of that gap—just another fallible human theory, about ourselves, about the people we love, about the intimate “us” of a relationship. Whatever the cost, then, we must think of love as wholly removed from the earthly, imperfect realm of theory-making. Like the love of Aristophanes’ conjoined couples before they angered the gods, like the love of Adam and Eve before they were exiled from the Garden of Eden, we want our own love to predate and transcend the gap between us and the world.

Adam and Eve lived in a perfect world. Their continued presence in the Garden was contingent on the keeping of only a few commandments, not 613 commandments. Under the best conditions this world has ever seen, Adam and Eve break one of the three laws and die in exile. It is not at all clear how the telling of the story of Adam and Eve’s failure to keep only a few commandments in a perfect world is supposed to encourage Israel to keep 613 commandments in a fallen world. Actually, it offers no encouragement, at all. And if we take the principle of ma’asei avot’ siman l’banim seriously, Adam’s story never was intended to warn Israel from following in Adam’s footsteps (i.e., a warning to keep the Law). Rather, Adam’s story was intended to be a prophecy that Israel would follow in Adam’s footsteps. “Israel, you will be just like Adam.

Every two years on the Eve of Lughnasa—which also happened to be my birthday—the kings of the Four Tribes came together to feast and toast each other with wide smiles and enough thick, foamy beer to strengthen the bonds of friendship forged in the alliances of years past. This would be Aeddan’s first time there as king, newly returned from a long period of exile in Rome after his father was killed, executed for selling vital information to the Romans.

the Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday with grim origins. A great patriot, Qu Yuan, drowned himself after his wrongful exile, and his anguished friends threw sticky rice into the river to distract the fish from nibbling on his body. To honor him, Chinese people ate zhongzhi and watched dragon boat races on the anniversary of his death.

God wants women to tend the home—tending the home must therefore be a hugely meaningful task.” The way we respond to the command shows whether we trust God or whether we doubt Him. Whether we assume He has great things in store for us or whether we assume that He prefers to hoard up nasty surprises to slap us with. It’s good for us to go through this again: If God is good, and if He wants us to subdue this planet, and if He wants us to obey the Great Commission and conquer this world for Christ, and if He tells half the human race that they’re in charge of tending the home, it follows from this that the home is actually one of the most strategic and important tools by which the world will be won.

Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are... One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met - the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve - and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: 'Sister, you got the short end of the stick...

True freedom lies in the opportunity to pursue excellence, and that opportunity is dependent on the boundaries that define and restrict the entire field of endeavor

The repercussions are swift and vast. God calls them to account. You can hear his footsteps in the garden. They are perhaps the footsteps of the pre-incarnate, uncreated Christ, seeking out his created siblings for their reckoning. The rest of Genesis 3 shows us that Adam and Eve are brought back out into the light to have their sin accounted for. Their sentence is pronounced, and it includes exile. They are cast out of the garden. We’ve been trying to get back in ever since.

the story of Adam and Eve, found in Genesis 2 and 3, is thought by many scholars to be less a story about human origins and more a story about Israel’s origins, a symbolic representation of Israel’s pattern of habitation, disobedience, and exile, set in primeval time.1

We, too, were married on a Friday; but while your Friday was a nondescript fifth day (I never knew whether it should be called fifth or sixth) ours was the 31st of October,--Hallowmas Eve. To be married on the of Hallowe'en is to play at skittles with an offended deity, the wedded couple being the skittles of course. But to be married at Hallowtide when it happens to fall on a Friday is to invite Satan to your house as an honored guest, and then needlessly insult him by a gift of the Shorter Catechism or an S.P.C.K. pamphlet.

Generally speaking, and as unflattering as this may be, when women yearn for some other cultural moment, their knowledge of that era comes from fiction in some form—either films or historical novels.

Now, when I say “exiled” I'm not referring to the old superstition about Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and now we're all under some kind of bad ju-ju from an abusive creator. And I'm certainly not talking about that obscene and perverted doctrine known as original sin. Whoever the ignorant, woman-hating, insecure, irrational, terrified, guilt-ridden, diabolical, self-despising horse's ass was who came up with that diseased and malevolent concept should have been thrown into the Nebuchadnezzar

It has been customary for quite some time for Christians to interpret Adam and Eve as humanity’s literal parents, but according to John Walton and Peter Enns, this is not what the authors of Genesis meant. Enns believes that we can learn a lot about the Adam and Eve story by looking ahead to the exodus story, when God creates the nation of Israel. Like Adam, Israel is “created” by God during the exodus “through a cosmic battle,” given a “lush land flowing with milk and honey,” and meant to “remain in the land as long as they obey the Mosaic law.” Ultimately, however, like Adam and Eve, Israel persists in a pattern of disobedience and is exiled to Babylon. According to Enns, Adam is also created after God tames the primordial waters of chaos, just as in the Moses story. 657 Thus it may be insightful to interpret the Aule–dwarves story as a story which resembles the story of the creation of Israel rather than the creation of the first human beings.

In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile. Adam and Eve were told that they would die on the day they ate the fruit; what actually happened was that they were