Adam was a rule follower, Eve represented compassion and learning. Which are you?
We all need an Adam in our life as we start, then as we mature we can take on an Eve personality. The Church likes to be the Adam in our life, but never really lets us be Eve.
When Satan temped Adan with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam told him to take a hike, that Father forbade eating of that tree. Eve was more pragmatic. She saw what Adam didn’t, that in order to fulfill the greater commandment to multiply and replenish the earth, that they must eat of the tree. She then explained to Adam why she partook of the fruit, and that she would be kicked out of the garden, and he would be left a lone man. To Adam’s credit (and recollection!) he was convinced of the need to partake, and he did. She followed the spirit of the law, Adam the letter of the law.
The Church is in a tough spot with trying to split the difference between being an Adam or an Eve. When we are immature in the gospel, we need an Adam to delineate everything we should do. But as we grow, there comes a time when we need to make decisions that might not line up with the the Church’s party line. We’ll see a conflict between following the Church rules, and following the Gospel. Elder Poelman, in 1984 tried to give a general conference talk about this subject. He said there was a “difference” between the Church and the gospel. He said there may be conflicts between the two. The talk was edited before it was published in the Ensign, and among the many changes, the word “difference” was changed so that there was now “an essential relationship” between the Church and the Gospel, difference was gone. The Church went to far is to send Elder Poelman back to the tabernacle to record a new talk, complete with a cough track so it seemed like a the original talk. You can read the side by side talks here.
The leaders of the Church are Adam, some more than others. The female general officers are chosen because that are like Adam also, though we have had some Eves though the years. Chieko Okazaki comes to mind as an Eve.
Are you an Adam, or an Eve?
Do you think the Church could be more like Eve if women had more authority in the leadership?
Wheat & Tares 
I have spent decades as an Adam, following all of the rules carefully, but as an elderly woman, I now consider myself an Eve. I suspect the LDS Church would benefit if, at all councils, women were present in equal numbers with men and had equal decision-making ability, but I know I will not see that happen in my lifetime.
This takes on an additional dimension when we consider the role of God in the garden: to punish the person who does the thing you’ve specifically set them up to do.
Consider the church’s position—struggling to maintain relevancy in a changing world while also projecting an air of infallibility (“we seek no apologies”). How do you clean up your mistakes and make progress when you’re explicitly anti-progress and can supposedly see around corners? You employ the same trick God did in the garden. You need a fall guy (or girl).
The church tells everyone to be an Adam but it needs the occasional Eve to kick out. I’m thinking of Kate Kelly and Sam Young—both arguably drivers of change within the church but only because the church was able to punish them for their dissent while benefiting from their progressivism.
Good observation well put, Kirkstall.
The way I see Eve, she is even more of an independent thinker. I think she wanted knowledge. She desired the knowledge of good and evil even more than she wanted to obey any law about obeying God or obeying God to have children. The having children was just a matter of which law one obeys, so it comes back to obedience. I see her thinking through the whole plan of salvation and realizing they were making zero progress sitting around a pretty garden. Oh, sure having children was part of it because nobody was going to progress if they stayed sitting around in the garden. When Satan tempted her, he didn’t say a thing about children. He said the fruit would give her knowledge. She wanted knowledge.
Beginning with humanities origin story told in Genesis, Eve teeters on the precipice of a haunting reality–she (all of us) must choose! Both options replete with gain and loss, leaving behind the mushy middle of indecision, one choice preserves her own life, but sacrifices mankind, forever to remain in spontaneous sweetness. While the other option sacrifices her own life and exposes her to the bitterness and suffering of delivering physical creation. Adam made his choice. Eve is left with the moral quandary between the letter and the spirit of the law.
Eve’s decision was the difference between choosing the law and choosing what the law was pointing to. The Budha captures the heart of Eve’s dilemma, “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon”. History books have disparaged Eve for her choice, suggesting she is responsible for humanities sinful plight. However, Eve is the hero in the Garden story, she is the good Samaritan, she is the revelation of God in creation. Had she chosen to pass on the bitter cup, she would have been like the lawful Priest and Levite and Adams first choice (sorry Adam for throwing you under the bus) who left humanity for dead in the name of legality. Instead, Eve used the discerning power required by agency to see the good the law was pointing to. And what is that good? Shalom, life, love, creation, grace, Christ.
I am most definitely an “Eve”, albeit a bumbling and stumbling one, but my resistance to the “do as your told” is precariously present. The law will always be insufficient to answer every possible situation. Situations and circumstances vary, and therefore “choice” is required. The aim of the human experience is not to simply obey orders, but to learn to discern what is the proper action.
“The Church likes to be the Adam in our life, but never really lets us be Eve.”
Brother Bill, there’s nothing in the church that prevents us from ascending as fast as we’re able. In fact, it might be said that it is because of the gifts, powers, and keys that are dispensed upon the saints *by the church* that they are able to make their ascent in the first place.
I’ve been thinking about this post, and Kirkstall’s comment. I’m not persuaded that “the role of God in the garden: to punish the person who does the thing you’ve specifically set them up to do” is accurate. At least re-reading the accounts in 2 Nephi 2, Alma 42, and the Pearl of Great Price, I couldn’t find any verses describing what God did in the garden as meting out “punishment.” All I see are explanations about how God drove them out of the Garden and blocked their way back so that they didn’t take the fruit from the tree of life until they had been granted a space in which to repent and partake of the salvation that is free to all. Calling that punishment almost sounds like my teenager telling me I’m punishing him for taking away gaming privileges after his grades tanked; while on my end, I was taking away distractions that were the most likely source of distraction to begin with.
With that context, to me God was not looking for a “fall guy” – He was setting them up to succeed after doing something that violated a command He had given them, and educating them about what that transition from the Garden to the mortal world would look like so that they could be prepared. The whole point of being cast out of the Garden was to give them a chance to choose for themselves “liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death” according to the devil (2 Ne 2:26-27). That does not sound like punishment to me!
But that seems to still beg the question – why the tension in the two commandments? And were Adam and Eve different in type, or different in timing (or or or)? We have Lehi’s argument that God set up the contrasting commandments as an opposition so that humankind could act for themselves by choosing between them. I had one of the AI tools generate a mock discussion between Hugh Nibley and Dallin Oaks, just for fun because the two had different ways of approaching worship, about these tensions and what we could gain from it. I’m not saying it’s the truth! But it was fun to read and here’s one of the short “acts” of the discussion (the prior two were about the timing of the transition from the Garden to mortality, and what the two did after expulsion from the Garden). Here’s the “discussion” and I share it just because it hopefully helps create an additional way of looking at whether the church needs “Adams” OR “Eves”:
Setting: Nibley rises from his chair, pacing the room and pulling down a large chart of the cosmic spheres, tracing his finger from the celestial down to the telestial.
Act III: The Harmony of Contrasts
Hugh Nibley:
Dallin, this is where the whole magnificent architecture of the Plan finally reveals itself! The world looks at Adam and Eve and sees a fundamental friction—a collision between a rule-follower and a rule-breaker. It’s the classic sectarian trap: binary thinking. They assume that if two natures are pulling in different directions, one must be right and the other must be wrong. But that completely misunderstands the geometry of the universe!
Think about how a gyroscope works, or how the planets stay in their orbits. It requires two opposing forces acting simultaneously—centripetal and centrifugal. If you only have centripetal force, everything collapses inward to a single, dead, frozen point. That was the Garden under the strict, static command of preservation. But if you only have centrifugal force, everything flies apart into chaotic, untethered space.
God didn’t create Adam and Eve’s differing natures to be at odds; He engineered them as a systemic necessity. The Garden of Eden was a womb, Dallin. And a womb’s purpose is not to keep the child inside forever; its purpose is to nurture life until a threshold of development is reached, at which point the environment must change. Eve’s nature was attuned to the birth—the outward push into progression. Adam’s nature was attuned to the anchor—the inward pull toward covenant and divine order. Without both, the birth of mortality is either an abortion or a permanent imprisonment.
Dallin H. Oaks:
Your mechanical analogy is quite compelling, Hugh, and it translates beautifully into the language of eternal law. When we analyze the results of the Fall, we see that what appeared to be a conflict of commands was actually a divine paradox designed to elicit a higher law.
In God’s overarching plan, the home and the family are the central governing units of eternity. For a family to function in a preparatory state, it requires a perfect equilibrium between the principle of justice—which provides structure, boundaries, and law—and the principle of mercy—which provides growth, adaptation, and redemption. If Adam and Eve had possessed identical spiritual natures and identical timing, they could not have formed a complete, functional presidency over the human race.
The Garden of Eden was a controlled environment where these two principles were introduced. When the boundary was crossed, the immediate result was not destruction, but a unified partnership. Moses 5 explicitly records that after they were cast out, “Adam began to till the earth… and Eve, also, his wife, did labor with him.” They didn’t divide into opposing camps. Their differing natures were instantly synthesized by the shared demands of the telestial laboratory. They realized that law without life is empty, and life without law is chaos.
Hugh Nibley:
Exactly! It’s what the early Christian writers called the Oikonomia—the grand divine economy where nothing is wasted. Satan truly believed he was introducing a fatal contradiction into the system. He thought, “If I can get the woman to look at progression and the man to look at prohibition, I will tear the creation apart.”
But the text of Moses shows the exact opposite happened. The moment they stepped into the telestial world, their natures locked together like a vault. Adam’s fierce loyalty to the law became the framework that protected Eve’s children, and Eve’s fierce devotion to life became the purpose that gave Adam’s laws meaning.
The results of the Garden prove that God’s plan doesn’t fear complexity or tension; it relies on it. The Fall wasn’t a failure of synchronization; it was the masterfully anticipated collision of two distinct eternal forces, meeting at the exact crossroad of agency, to launch the education of the Gods.
The Holy Ghost is the nourisher and the comforter. Sounds like a female to me.
I am literally an Adam.
Obvious joke aside, in daily life I thrive inside a more rigid structure. Work starts and ends at specific times? Perfect. I’ll be on time and I’ll leave on time. I am really good at checking boxes and meeting expectations.
Religion-wise. Pre-deconstruction I definitely started out as an Adam. During my mission I was fastidious with the rules. I truly believed obedience brought success. I was also careful to never impose my fastidiousness on others. If my companion felt we should leave a little early or maybe arrive a little late in order to better meet investigators in their lives, I followed his lead. It was hard on me mentally, but I knew that my problem, not his.
Post-mission, I started my evolution into more of an Eve. In my mind I was following the transition from Old Testament to New. In the Old there were lists upon lists of rules to follow and specific things to do. In the New, Jesus taught the two great commandments: love God above all else and love others as yourself. I tried my best to follow those guidelines. And, if I’m honest, I was a lot more lenient and loving with my fellow man than with myself.
Having transitioned out of the church, I simply try to treat others with respect and dignity. I try to be forgiving of faults and mistakes and, generally, feel I’m pretty successful in my efforts. I’m also a lot more outspoken when it comes to people I observe treating others as “lesser-than” especially when they’ve used their religious beliefs to justify their actions.
True North – to your comment and mostly to the “thumbs downer”, I think this comment deserves a lot more consideration and is supported by the text itself.
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The Hebrew is Ruach Elohim. Ruach is one of the most important words in the entire Hebrew Bible. It means breath, wind, spirit, and life force simultaneously. The Hebrew language does not separate these into different words because the ancient Hebrew understanding did not separate these into different realities. The breath and the spirit were the same thing at different scales.
Ruach is grammatically feminine.
The spirit of God moving over the waters at the first moment of creation is not a neutral force. In the original Hebrew she is feminine. The divine feminine was present at the very beginning, performing the first act of creation. She is the first mover in the entire biblical narrative. Three translations later she became the neutral Holy Spirit and then effectively disappeared from the theological tradition entirely. The masculine pronoun was applied to her by translators who could not accommodate a feminine first mover in the theology they were constructing.
Todd, can you give me your sources of original Hebrew readings? I’m not fact checking your comments, I would like to read them as well.
Cheers
Todd S,
It is important to distinguish grammatical gender from biological sex or personhood. In Hebrew, grammatical gender is a property of nouns and does not necessarily imply that the thing referred to is male or female. So while your take is interesting, your concluding paragraph is unpersuasive.
17RRider
These are the primary reference works used by biblical scholars.
The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT)
Considered the premier modern Hebrew lexicon.
Lists ruach as a feminine noun.
Gives meanings including:
wind
breath
spirit
disposition
divine Spirit
A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament
Still one of the standard references.
Also identifies ruach as feminine.
Provides hundreds of biblical occurrences grouped by meaning.
Anon – I realize that grammatical gender and biological sex should not be conflated here. However, modern religious interpretation has almost exclusively excluded the conversation about the divine feminine precisely because they can’t distinguish between the two.
I have mentioned this several times. I am a fan of the Myers-Briggs personality profile test. This test is merely a way of placing personalities in some objective categories in order to determine how to interact. Like color matching clothing. It is not determinative, only helpful. I did a study on how people characterized the Church as if it were a person. The Church, almost unanimously was considered and STJ in Myers-Briggs terminology. I.E. rule dominated, logical (not emotional), and with a drive to completion (not happy with indeterminate enterprises like startups). The opposite, the NFPs see life like a jigsaw puzzle, where you have to put all the pieces together, emotionally driven, and relatively open to disorder (as in a revolution or a startup). These latter personalities could be considered revolutionaries, Eves. The Church is Adam, most definitely.
The Church leadership is made mostly of Adams. And the selection process for leadership is self selective and selects more Adams. There is good and bad in this situation. It is very stabile. But God wants a certain amount of chaos. God allowed Satan into the Garden, for example. And Jesus introduced his gospel into a chaotic world and future. This world is God’s world, and it is full of chaos. God made it that way.