Mother of All Life (Gen 3:20)

Into and Out of the Garden

²⁰ Ḥavvah — for she was the mother of all life [ḥay]. חַוָּ֑ה כִּ֛י הִ֥וא הָֽיְתָ֖ה אֵ֥ם כָּל־חָֽי׃

Let’s talk a little bit more about that name Ḥavvah on our own, before we go on to read the explanation given in the second half of the verse. She is “Eve” in English, of course, and that is clearly just a variant of Ḥavvah, as Ian, Jan, Jean, and John are of Hebrew יוחנן Yoḥanan. (That’s why there’s an h in John.) Many languages, from the Akkadian spoken in ancient Mesopotamia on down, have had trouble with guttural letters, so it’s no surprise that the ḥ sound dropped off the beginning of the word. From then on, it’s simply vowel changes.

Nonetheless it’s interesting to see how the name has been treated in various ancient versions. Let’s look at these two:

• Vulgate (Latin): Hava

• Septuagint (Greek): Ζωή (Zoe)

The Latin version simply transliterates the name into Roman characters (where the double vv of the Hebrew name, shown by the dagesh in the וּ, was irrelevant). The Greek version, which gives us the name Zoe, is trying to translate the name, as shown by what the New English Translation of the Septuagint writes here:

And Adam called the name of his wife Life, because she is the mother of all the living.

Which of these versions, the Latin or the Greek, is right and which is wrong? Wrong question. Neither version contains a mistake. They are different choices, both reasonable. That’s a good reminder — which I like to provide from time to time — that if you’re not reading the Bible in Hebrew, you want two Bibles always with you to remind you that you are reading in translation. Like news sources, Bible translations all have their own slant; reading more than one gives you a better chance at getting closer to the truth.

The Hebrew verse itself both quotes the name and “translates” it, that is, explains it. Before we get to that explanation, I want to spend a moment wondering whose explanation it is. That will involve devoting a few moments to the word כי ki‘because’. It would take a book, not a single column, to talk about every facet of this word, so for now, we’ll just look at its use in the explanation of names.

To show you why I’m asking the question, let’s go to the next occurrence of this phenomenon, in Gen 4:25. Here it is in the NJPS translation:

     Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning, “God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel,” for Cain had killed him.

The way NJPS translates כי here is “meaning.” You see the difficulty if they had translated more literally:

     She named him Seth because God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel.

There are no quotation marks in the biblical text, of course; English translations put them in as an aid for the reader. What’s different in this case is that the woman is mentioned in the third person (“she named him”) at the beginning of the verse and in the first person (“God has provided me”) by the end. What point marks the transition between the narration of the story about the character and the speaking voice of the character? It is the word ki.

The Greek and Aramaic translations both add in a verb of speech to mark the moment when Seth’s mother opens her mouth, but there is no such word in the Hebrew text, only a כי = “because” where the writer pivots from third person to first person. There’s no mistake here, nothing has dropped out of the Hebrew text. When someone or something (like the place Peniel in 32:31) is named, the explanation naturally falls (in Biblical Hebrew) into the voice of the person doing the name, introduced with the word כי.

All of which is a long way of framing the question, Is “she was the mother of all life” the man’s explanation or the narrator’s?