The ancient Hebrew came long before Latin and English. The story of Chavah (Eve), the wife of the first man, Adam. Why, perhaps, does the development of the linguistic roots of languages not matter?
Why does the way linguists work feel intuitively wrong to me? Linguists work by investigating from the mind, and in their way they are right, because that is how research works.
I feel there is another way to understand languages, to understand the Tower of Babel we live inside.
Language, I believe, passes between peoples and cultures in a different way: through frequencies, letters, gestures, sounds, and words. People felt a frequency, remembered and heard sounds, grasped a meaning. They heard, remembered, and understood a certain essence, and passed the word on with change, adapting it to themselves. The reasons for this differed in different periods of history. Why? Maybe because a word was hard to pronounce, or because that is how people remembered it and shifted it into a different pronunciation, seemingly “incorrect.”
This is how it was before the written word existed: there were sounds and frequencies; later, letters and words were carved on planed wood or hewn in stone. People illuminated them and “wrapped” them and gave them added meaning, because when a word is written, the shape of the letters adds another “weight,” and so another layer is added, beyond the sound of the word spoken aloud. From the written word onward, information passed in writing and no longer rested on oral stories alone. Of course, oral stories are still, to this day, a way to carry information, with all the technology we now have. And even now we call them, on social media, “stories”…
All of this is an introduction to explain something very specific, or rather, the example that follows will explain what the introduction has said. The name חַוָּה (Chavah) is the name of the first woman (supposedly), Adam’s partner. Her name itself tells a story. According to the meaning of her name, Chavah came into the world in order to experience, to live experiences, to undergo. In the Torah, a name symbolizes and holds a great deal of information; sometimes the name contains the whole story that will later unfold, or the parable of the story.
According to her name, Chavah’s purpose is to face trials. Her name does not say whether she must succeed in them or not, and not even to succeed, because the very point is to undergo the experience. That is the purpose.
Undergoing experience is what human beings, בְּנֵי אָדָם (b’nei Adam), literally “the sons of Adam,” and symbolically “human beings,” come into the world to do. To experience. (You are welcome to read my post on the gallbladder, which says the same from a Chinese medicine and philosophy perspective). Because a soul that clothes itself in a body can experience life; without this, a soul cannot experience, grow, and learn.
When we study the story of Adam and Chavah, the story of the Garden of Eden, we are told for generations that it is a story of failure. But failure is not passing the very thing you came into the world for, so undergoing experiences and trials cannot be called failure. Exactly the opposite. The narrative of failure sets us from the start in the wrong way by misunderstanding this very thing.
Chavah did not fail. That is not the story. To eat from the forbidden fruit was exactly what needed to happen.
Her story is a parable, a story full of imagination, flooding emotions, a lie, a “wrong” choice, all so that we would understand the first “mystical law,” inspired by Caroline Myss, who calls it “the first law,” or as a Taoist would call it, the “life curriculum.”
And here we are, all these years, having not really understood what the story wants us to understand…
“The law” is like a law of the physical world: every action has consequences. Every choice Chavah made was a neutral choice, for her and for those who came after her. Just as rain is neutral, but when rain falls on me and I get wet, it becomes personal, so too in this biblical story, even in her choice. It was a neutral act, like a law, yet it touches directly and carries consequences on the personal level, for us all.
In Chavah’s case, she knew in her mind that there was a situation of temptation, that she had a choice; she felt an inner movement, and she followed it. That is called experience. She experienced it.
To “fall from the Garden of Eden” is a hard, painful fall, but it brought with it a great many experiences that shaped all human consciousness.
In all the stories in the Torah, one can believe they happened in the physical world, as some believers do, or one can look at them as parables: an example of how to act, how not to behave, what happens if you do this and not that, and more.
חַוָּה (Chavah): the literal meaning is “to undergo an experience” in the past tense, masculine, singular, חָוָה (chavah, “he experienced”). But she is a woman, so the name should have been feminine. So why isn’t she called חָוְתָה (chavtah, “she experienced,” past)? Or תַּחֲוֶה (tachaveh, “she will experience,” future)? Or, in the present tense, חוֹוָה (chovah)?
Her name is pronounced in the masculine and in the past as a reminder, precisely to the male, to the man: what she did affects everyone, male and female alike.
She symbolizes the way, a path perhaps not an easy one, but the way of the first woman, and what she did will affect every person in the world who comes after her, just as it immediately affected Adam, the first man of the Garden of Eden story. That is: an action of hers, done in the past, affects him in the present; and this is the way of all human beings: their experiences pass through her, because of her and thanks to her, in the collective unconscious, by the very fact of their being human, בְּנֵי אָדָם (b’nei Adam), the sons of Adam. Chavah in English: What happened to the translation of her name? Did it get lost? Who decided that her name is “Eve”? What happened, from the Hebrew name חַוָּה (Chavah) to being translated as “Eve” in English?
Maybe it was hard for certain people to pronounce the letter ח (chet)? Maybe in different places in the world, the ח (chet) shifted into the letter א (alef)? Maybe the linguistic process went like this: חַוָּה (Chavah) shifted to אָוָה / Ava, and from there to Eve?
Or maybe “Eve” actually comes from somewhere else entirely? In כְּתוּבִים (Ktuvim, “Writings”), the third and final part of the Hebrew Bible, after תּוֹרָה (Torah) and נְבִיאִים (Nevi’im, “Prophets”), we find the story of אִיּוֹב (Iyov, Job). Maybe the experiences of human beings begin with חַוָּה / Eve, and to them is added the letter ו (vav), which in Kabbalah is the connecting, linking letter, and so the name “Eve” connects to the man אִיּוֹב (Iyov, Job)? Maybe this hints at a joining of the two stories? We begin with the first story, of Adam and Chavah in the Garden of Eden, Eve, and we end with Iyov (Job), which is “Eve” plus the connecting letter ו (vav) between them?
Chavah did not listen to the voice of God, who said not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge; and in the story of Iyov (Job), he does not understand why all the horrible things happen to him while he believes in God. God answered him: I do not recall that you were with Me at the time of creation. Whereas Eve / Chavah, she was there… And so a circle closes.
Or maybe “Eve” is actually a shortening of the word עֶרֶב / erev / evening? Evening symbolizes בֵּין הָעַרְבַּיִם (bein ha’arbayim, “twilight, the time between the day and the night”), a time of change, a time of passage between light and darkness, a time of transformation; of moving from the Garden of Eden, life beside God, to the descent, the fall, onto the land, to the earth…
Eve, as mother, the first woman, the wise woman, the first of all the mothers who would follow, made, supposedly, a “wrong” choice; but it was in fact the right thing, because we human beings live and grow from trials and experiences. She initiated us and taught us this.
The evening powers of twilight, the magical powers of transformation, will be with human beings from then until the end of the world. Ever since the story of the “Tower of Babel,” we live in all languages at once; today, with the internet and artificial intelligence, we know that she is simultaneously חַוָּה (Chavah) and Eve. This knowledge was revealed through the nearness of peoples, physically, through journeys and wanderings, and today in the digital world. Let us remember that she simultaneously contains both of the names, and all they bring with it, as both Eve and Chavah.
The time of twilight is called Eve / עֶרֶב (erev), a time of “spells,” of mystical decision-making… a time of dusk.
Maybe this is a connection, and a reminder from the translators of the Torah, to the first, true woman, לִילִית (Lilith)? So that we would not forget her? Let us look at Lilith just briefly. The sound of the name is not at all like “Eve,” which means: the shift from Chavah to Eve probably happened after the written word already existed, after there were letters, and not according to their pronunciation, but when one understands the meaning of the words and the shape of the letters that compose them.
לֵיל (leil), its meaning in Hebrew is night, לַיְלָה (lailah), the time when darkness rules. “Eve” is עֶרֶב (erev), a softer time, a time that prepares us for the night.
The woman, Eve, is as her name says: she comes to shine the light for humanity, so that there will be no absolute darkness. So that we remember there is always a little light in the darkness, like the yin/yang symbol: in the white there is a drop of black, and in the black a drop of white. So that we remember there is always light at the end and at the beginning of the tunnel, even when we experience reality as the dark side of our soul (the “dark night of the soul,” which John of the Cross wrote about 500 years ago).
Lilith is the “Queen of the Night,” and the hard things she symbolizes are already a subject for another post. Just briefly: Lilith is a female figure from Jewish tradition, seen as a demon or a night spirit. The root of her name is connected to the word “night” (לַיְלָה, lailah), and also to ancient Mesopotamian night spirits; she is the voice that distances us from ourselves, from our own good, and from our connection to the Divine. And so the night is given over to Lilith, to the abyss, to the powers of night.
“Night” in English is night, and in Dutch, nacht, and maybe these words, in both languages, are based on the goddess Nyx? In addition, nix in Dutch means “nothing.” According to the philosophy and medicine of East Asia, from the void everything is created. In Genesis too, the beginning is chaos. And Pangu, the Chinese creation story, was also all chaos in the giant egg, before it broke apart and shaped the world.
Let us understand a little who Nyx was: the ancient Greek goddess of night.
Her name means “night.” She is one of the first beings, born from Chaos, before the twelve Olympians, a dark and powerful figure whom even Zeus feared. Belief in Nyx is part of the ancient Greek religion, practiced roughly from the Archaic period onward, that is, from about the 8th century BCE. She already appears in Hesiod’s Theogony, where he describes the creation of the world and the birth of the ancient gods. From there she continues to appear in Greek poetry and thought throughout the Classical and Hellenistic periods. She is also a central figure in a mystical-religious current called Orphism, a school that saw Nyx as an especially important primordial figure, almost the source of everything. In Orphism she was considered a being from whom the process of creation began. In practice, this tradition lived on as long as the ancient Greek religion was practiced, until roughly the 5th century CE, when Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and the pagan cults faded. So: almost a thousand years of belief, roughly from the 8th century BCE to the first centuries CE.
Maybe the aim was to give Chavah / Eve the magical powers of the night, whose source is the abyss, the pagan source? Or, as in the description in Genesis:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void (תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ, tohu vavohu), and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters, and there was evening, and there was morning, one day.”
It does not say, “and there was night, and there was morning”…
Why not? After all, night is the opposite of morning. Maybe because “night” might have reminded us of Lilith, and the writer did not want that? It says “and there was evening (עֶרֶב, erev)…,” hinting to us at Eve / Chavah.
Eve / Chavah: the second woman, but the only one we remember, more positive than Lilith. (In Hebrew, לִילִית with the letter ש added at the beginning becomes שְׁלִילִית / shlilit, “negative,” the opposite of positive). But Chavah, too, is of course complex, as we have seen: she “sinned,” and supposedly brought about the disaster of the fall from the Garden of Eden…
There is wordplay here, codes, an encryption of information. Not mistakes. Something waiting to be revealed, just as Kabbalah is built on layers of understanding, of knowledge that one can receive…
There is a creation of continuity, a bridge between languages; it is not that something got confused in translation. These are gifts we have received ever since the disaster of the “Tower of Babel,” gifts we can uncover that show that we all do come from one linguistic source. One must be sharp-eyed, because the knowledge is hidden.
Just as the knowledge of Reiki, of chakras, of yoga and more, belonged to masters and scholars, so too in Kabbalah the knowledge belonged to the wise, to teachers and to rabbis.
Today, thanks to the internet, the global village, the World Wide Web, and the information that is now exposed, we live in times of a consciousness different from before, one that did not exist. This allows people like you and me to understand depths.
The story? To experience everything. Night too. Not only day, because the Garden of Eden is not that, and will not be.
So every time “Eve” is mentioned, there is a hint of the time of day that is evening, and it actually contains the night within it, because after evening, night will always come.
Lilith is a memory of darkness, because Lilith too comes to teach, to tell us what happens at night, the hidden, the unexposed. Night holds secrets; it symbolizes sins. That is Lilith.
This connects to the whole conception of our time, and of the last few centuries. The cycles of daily change: morning/noon/evening/night. The cycles of seasonal change: spring/summer/autumn/winter. The cycle of a woman’s menstrual cycle: follicular phase/ovulation / luteal phase/bleeding. The cycle of a woman’s life: girl/woman/menopause / old age.
Our society idolizes the girl, the young woman, the phase before ovulation and ovulation itself, glorifying the efficiency and the doing of the morning and noon hours. And on the other hand: to be frightened of, not to speak of, not to want the arrival of, to shame, old age, and the bleeding; to fear the night and the winter… to fear falling; to not understand that falling is part of everything. Of life.
We learned this into the collective consciousness, because Chavah already experienced it so that we would remember. It is only a law: experience and response. According to the story, God grew angry and banished. And we rise every morning, not into the Garden of Eden, but into a reality with experiences, trials, and passages.
This is life.
Fall & Rise.