Albrecht Dürer's "Adam and Eve" (1507)
On the sixth day, God tinkered
with what He had made, and on day seven, he knocked off. “Might as well have a holiday now,” God said,
and He invited everyone over to His place that day, even though they didn’t
really feel like going.
Next week God found some
particularly crappy ground where nothing was growing. He took the clay there and shaped another
human being with His own hands, because He was already bored with the other
human beings He made last week. Then God
made the Garden of Eden, which was a diorama to keep his new human in. Just to make things interesting, He also made
a tree that grew a fruit that would let you figure out the difference between
good and evil, but insisted that the human eat nothing from it. “Eat from that tree and you’ll figure out
right from wrong,” God said, “and then you’ll die. Now do my gardening.” (Years later, God would create another haven
for those who don’t know right from wrong, and He would call it the United
States Congress.) Then God decided that
people shouldn’t eat alone, so instead of going back to those other people He
created last week, He instead paraded all the animals in front of this man and
asked the man to name them. The man did
it, but there weren’t any good pets in the whole group of them. So God knocked the man out and surgically
removed one of the man’s ribs and built a woman, since all the women He had
created last week weren’t that interesting for some reason. God woke the man up and explained to him what
He had done, and the man said, “All right, I’ll name this one ‘woman’ because,
like, whoa, man, don’t tear my bones out of me when I’m asleep, okay? Kinda creepy, don’t you think?” (“The whole ‘woman from man’ thing is some
sort of wordplay,” biblical translators would explain later. “It doesn’t really work in translation, but
we’re leaving it in there anyway.” And
so it was.)
As they walked around the
garden, fig leaves would seem to follow them around for reasons that were never
sufficiently explained, obscuring parts of their bodies at all times. These new people were naked, and they both
liked being naked, because they had no body image issues. Those would come later. Boy, would they come later. Fruit is trouble.
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