Genesis 3:20

Adam called his wife’s name Eve. This verse is not a disturbing interpolation in the context of the story of the Fall and its consequences, as some commentators maintain. It shows that Adam believed the promise with regard to the woman’s seed and manifested this faith in the name that he now gave to his wife.

Eve, chawwah. Chawwah means “life,” and is here translated Zoe by the LXX. It is an old Semitic form, found also in old Phoenician inscriptions, but was no longer used in the Hebrew language at the time the Bible was written. This has been suggested as indicating that Adam spoke an old Semitic language. If Moses had used a contemporary Hebrew equivalent, he would have written the woman’s name chayyah instead of chawwah, but by giving the name in an unusual archaic form he shows that his knowledge goes back into the remote past. In ch. 4:1 chawwah was roughly transliterated Eua by the LXX, whence comes our English “Eve.”

She was the mother. Adam gave the name “the living one” to his wife in faith, seeing in her the “mother of all living” at a time when his death sentence had just been pronounced. Also, he looked beyond the grave and saw in the seed promised to his wife the One who would restore to him and his descendants the immortality they had forfeited that day. Instead of calling her in gloom and despair — as could be expected under the circumstances — “the mother of all doomed,” he fastened his eye in faith upon his Judge, and, before she even gave birth to her first-born, called her, hopefully, “the living one.” Faith was indeed to him “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).