Image Details

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

EAST OF EDEN. Eve suckles her son while Adam gathers water from the well, in this 16th-century oil painting by Paolo Veronese. When God expelled Adam and Eve from Eden, he bestowed upon the woman a gift, albeit with painful consequence. Childbearing, in other words, the continuation of the species, was the form of immortality that God gave humankind. The Woman, therefore, is named Eve, the Hebrew word for “life” (in Greek, Zoe, “living thing”), “because she was the mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20).