Adam and Eve
The pair who learn that knowledge and nakedness arrive together.
Hebrew Scripture · Narrative scripture · c. 10th–6th c. BCE
Genesis
The Yahwist
From creation and expulsion to flood, promise, and the crooked family that becomes a people. Blessing is a contested inheritance; the first stories of the West are already about exile and return.
Origin epic
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Characters
Abraham
The man of the promise, asked to offer the son the promise required.
Jacob
The trickster who wrestles a stranger and walks away limping, renamed.
Themes
Covenant
A relationship that binds God and a family across disaster.
Chosenness and exile
Election does not spare anyone the road out of home.
Motifs
First enclosure, first loss—later literature cannot stop returning here.
Jacob’s hip; the mark of having met what will not be named.
Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau: the family as the first polity.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.