Is Elohim male?  And if not, why do you insist on using male pronouns?

I have no evidence Elohim has any gender.  I used male pronouns, only because that is how most of my readers will have heard of Him, and because there are no gender-neutral pronouns that sounded right.  I would have liked to have used female pronouns, but I think I would have lost half my readership.  So until I know what Elohim should be called, I resort to male pronouns, following strict grammatical rules.  If you read Eve, though, you’ll notice that Eve asks Him what He is, and He answers that He can be anything.

Had Adam and Eve really spent time with Elohim, they would have believed in Him, right?

There’s a short verse included in the Bible and the Torah, right after Eve has Seth, one that I had never noticed before and gets very little mention, at least in all the sermons I’ve heard.  Look at Genesis 4:26 (italics are mine): “Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh.  At that time men began to call on the name of the Lord.”  What?  Didn’t Adam and Eve worship Elohim?  Didn’t they teach their children about Him?  Or did they not know how?  Better yet: did they struggle with their expulsion and their loyalty to Elohim?  I went with the latter.

How do you know what Elohim was like?  Or what He looked like?

I don’t.  Absolutely not.  I think this was one of the hardest parts about writing this story–how to portray Elohim—how He spoke, what He looked like.  I ran the risk of making Him appear like Bob Newhart, and that, I didn’t want, as you can imagine—my sincerest apologies to Bob Newhart.  Eve is at a loss for words, as I was, too.

Did Adam and Eve have sex in the Garden, or later, when they were thrown out?

Did Adam and Eve have sex in the Garden, or was the Garden too sacred for such a thing?  For this, I turned to The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination by Gary A. Anderson and The Life Story of Adam and Havah: A New Targum of Genesis 1:26-5:5 by Shira Halevi.  Anderson’s book also discusses the varying opinions—touted by some Rabbis, and only partly used by me—regarding the “garments of skin” Adam and Eve were given by Elohim to cover their nakedness.  For those who believe that no animals were slaughtered until after the flood (Genesis 9:1-7), this presents a problem, so they have come up with an alternative meaning.  What if Adam and Eve had a garment of light about them in the garden, and upon their expulsion, Elohim clothed them in garments of skin—their own human, mortal skin?