Adam Knew Eve

I’m working my way through the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series by John Vervaeke. In Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar he’s laying out the foundation for just how saturated our language is with grammar from the Axial Age.

The videos have been absolutely fascinating so far. I’m quite thankful that he took the time to makes these lectures and put them online. The snippet below is a quote from Episode 3. It was too beautiful not to share.

… People sometimes note, and often humorously, that the Bible will talk about sexual intercourse with the verb “knowing”. So, you’ll get things like, “Adam knew his wife, Eve”. And it’s like, what does that mean? It means, has sex with. The word is “Da`ath”.

It’s like, we don’t use the word sex as a metaphor for knowledge, right? Well, you’d be surprised how many cultures actually do. Because, again, this is in a participatory sense. There’s a course here, and you’re participating in it.

What do we mean by, “participating in it?” It’s not like the modern sense of knowing it, like looking at it from the outside and having beliefs about it and having skills. You don’t know it in this way. You know it by identifying with it. You change it while it changes you. You’re immersed in it like a stream, like a course of a river. You’re participating in it.

When you’re making love with somebody, you’re participating in them. You’re identifying with them, empathizing with them, resonating with them. You’re changing them as they’re changing you. And it rises, forgive me for the pun, to a climax, to a turning point, a resolution.

See, in ancient Israel, faith, well this term has become useless for us know. Faith didn’t mean believing ridiculous things for which there is no evidence. That is a recent idea. That is not what it meant. Faith was your sense of Da`ath …