Genesis 3:20

There is a naming that makes a direct connection between a name and that which is named. This suggests a potential of control. If you can name, you have dominion. For such a reason people guard their “true” name and share only their “use” name.

There is also a naming that disconnects by way of inventing an etymology or public, easy, explanation of a name—putting a layer of reason between the name and the named. This distraction allows a false sense of knowing the named.

Alter quotes Herbert Marks regarding these two naming processes:

In a verisimilar narrative, naming establishes and fixes identity as something tautologically itself; etymology, by returning it to the trials of language, compromises it, complicates it, renders it potentially mobile.

Adding to the misdirection of an etymological sufficiency here are additional ways in which the Hebrew root word for “Eve” sounds like more than “to live.” In the related language of Aramaic, “Eve” can sound like the word for or evocation of a “serpent.”

Readers might begin to wonder about such a connection and suspect an on-going conversation or questioning of what we think we know and how it is we know it. “Eve” not only connects us with basic animal life—multiplying—of post-Edenic biology, but with knowledge of good and not-good—questioning—of post-Edenic philosophy and psychology.

Readers might also travel farther down that path and begin connecting the question-asking serpent with the beginning of life or being its mother. Current abortion legalist use a fetal heartbeat as a measure of the beginning of life while those more oriented toward honoring multi-valent choices come closer to the arrival of a question as a marker of the beginning of life.

It is not until we get to the point of multiplying, post-Eden, that a “mother” is a possibility. Unless the “shame of nakedness” is code for bodies mature enough for procreation, there is nothing to suggest there was ever going to be children born within Eden. G*D seemed satisfied with the two. ’Ishah and ’ish, to talk with at evening time. The grafting, budding, process of rooting a rib or cloning it that has been used up to this point has carried no suggestion of birthing, much less mothering.

Like G*D or g()d, Eve needs demythologizing. Might that be notated with the orthography of Eve* ?