Eve meaning

Meaning

Life

Symbiosis, Tent Village

Etymology

From the verb חיה (haya), to live.

From the noun חוה (hawwa), tent village, from the verb חוה (hawa), to cluster in order to live collectively.

Related names

• Via חיה (haya): Beer-lahai-roi, Hiel, Jehiah, Jehiel

• Via חוה (hawa): Havilah, Havvoth-jair, Hivite, Mahavite

Eve is the wife of Adam; traditionally the first human female, but see our article on Adam for a more detailed look at what the story of Adam and Eve is all about.

The name Eve (or in Hebrew: Chawwa) shows up too in the Greek New Testament, where it is spelled Ευα; Eua (2 Corinthians 11:3, 1 Timothy 2:13).

Most (if not all) translators and interpreters derive the name Eve from the verb חיה (haya), meaning to live or have life:

In Genesis 3:20 it reads that Eve was named this way because she was אם כל־חי; mother of all life. The Hebrew word אם ('em), mother, comes from the same root as אמה ('amma), mother city, cubit, tribe/ people; hence the phrases Mother Babylon and Mother Jerusalem. The phrase "all life" returns six times in Scriptures and never just mankind is meant (show me). Hence the "mother of all life" is the biosphere; all living things.

And hence the NOBSE Study Bible Name List, Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names, and even BDB Theological Dictionary report in unison that the name Eve means Life. Here at Abarim Publications, however, we are not convinced. The motivation for a name is not necessarily related to the meaning of it, and it demonstrates a leap of critical neglect to assume that when parents call their baby Bob, and say, "because that was the name of our dog," they mean to state that the name Bob means dog. Moreover, the proverbial mother of something is obviously not the same as that which she is the mother of. The "mother of all life" is something that accommodates and supports life. She gives birth to life and hence comes before it.

Instead of predominantly pointing toward the verb חיה (haya), to live, our name Eve (חוה) is spelled and (according to the Masoretes) pronounced identical to the noun חוה (hawwa), tent village, from the root חוה (hawa), to cluster up in order to be viable:

Eve does not mean 'the girl of the two,' and is also not the model for all wives bound to goof up (as per Keil and Delitzsch' Commentary on the Old Testament). Man and woman are both under the label Adam, and their drive to group up is represented in the name Eve. The name Eve denotes the collectivity that is common to the behavior of living things.

In our article on the name Adam we discuss in detail how the familiar story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden gets forcibly reduced to a primitive caricature only when translated into languages like English and German. The original Hebrew story is most clearly not about two naked people in a park with a talking snake in a tree, but rather tells of humanity as it emerged from the animal world at the beginning of the agricultural revolution.

The name Eve means Symbiosis or more literally Tent Village, the most primary form of human settlement that's not in a natural cave but rather constructed from a novel use of natural materials: wooden twigs and perhaps large leaves first but later wool, that required husbandry and technology and also allowed artistic expression. If life is culture, and ultimately language and text, then in this important sense, Eve is indeed the mother of all of life.

The character called Eve did not happen just once. She not only embodies the transition from primitive tribe to sophisticated culture, but also that from colony of single cellular creatures to multicellular creature, and ultimately even the step from mere elemental atom to large complex molecule. For more on the self-similarity of matter, life and mind, see our article on the Chaotic Set Theory.

Later myths claimed that Eve had been preceded by Lilith. See our article on that name for a look at that.