Nearly half of the Bible – forty-three percent of the text – is narrative (BibleProject 2026). God likes to communicate with us through stories. And it’s no wonder! Stories are easy to remember, and easy to understand, at least at a basic level. We teach Bible stories even to small children, although those stories also very often contain depths of meaning that only become clear with study and meditation at an adult level.
When we read these stories, however, we must remember that the Bible is an ancient book, or rather, a collection of ancient books. Ancient authors do not always tell stories in the same ways we tell them today. One particular difference is in the amount of description that authors choose to include. In writing about a person, for example, a modern author will very often describe their physical appearance, including their clothing. They describe mannerisms, minor actions, and even the kind of voice that somebody has. This is done to make it easier for the readers to immerse themselves in the story and to imagine that they are seeing and hearing what the author is describing. This kind of writing is a modern convention, however. Ancient authors, including the authors whom the Holy Spirit inspired to write the Bible, did not include very many unnecessary details. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the Biblical authors did not include any unnecessary details at all. If something is described in the Bible, it’s because that description is important.
I’m sure that many of you are nodding your heads right now. Of course everything in the Bible is important. But it’s sometimes hard to remember, in the middle of an interesting story, to pay attention to the little things. If we’re not careful, they can get overlooked.
Naming the Animals
In the second chapter of Genesis, Moses tells us that God brought all the animals to the man1 so that he could name them. It’s a small detail, taking up only two verses. But why is it there? It’s no help just to say that it happened; an enormous number of things have happened at one time or another, but most of them are not in the Bible, simply because they were not part of the story the Holy Spirit wanted Moses and the other Biblical authors to tell. This particular passage comes in between God deciding to make a helper for the man and him actually doing so. That doesn’t really help us either though, because the idea that an all-knowing God might actually have thought that an animal could take the place of a wife as a “suitable helper” for the man, is too silly to take seriously.
So let’s look closer. The passage in question actually reads:
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals (Genesis 2:19-20).
Many commentaries will tell you that giving something a name is a way of exercising authority over it, but they often don’t explain why. And if we think of naming as nothing more than making up sounds that we can mentally connect with animals, or with any other objects, that doesn’t actually seem to have anything to do with authority. What we need to understand, however, is that naming things isn’t really about assigning sounds to them at all, but about classification. We might imagine the man pointing at various animals and saying, “I can see that you, you and you are similar, so I’ll call you all ‘dog.’ But you there over in the corner, you’re a little different. You’re not a dog. I’ll call you ‘water buffalo.’” Put another way, each animal that God creates is uniquely itself, not exactly like any other animal, but also not utterly different from any other animal. The man, by naming the animals, turned them into dogs (a category), and elephants (another category), and hawks, and all the other kinds of animals that would be, from that moment on, a part of his world.
Classification is a basic function of language. It’s so basic, that’s it can be like water to a fish; all but invisible. It’s only when we compare one language with another that it becomes evident. And if we don’t watch out, differences in classification can create problems with translating one language to another. This is especially evident with kinship terminology – the words used to describe how people are related to one another. Some languages have a large number of very precise terms, while others have just a few words that are used more broadly. The Hawaiian language, for example, does not (or did not before European contact) distinguish between siblings and cousins.
With respect to animals, there is a great deal of similarity between different languages at the most specific level of animal kinds, the level at which we have foxes and rabbits. But moving to higher levels, to kinds of kinds as it were, things become more clearly different. To pick one obvious example, different cultures and different languages have different ideas about can be called a “clean” animal, and many of them don’t use that category at all. They classify animals differently.
For another example of this, the King James translation of Matthew 12:40 says that Jonah spent three days and three nights “in the whale’s belly,” but in Jonah 1:17 it says that he was swallowed by “a great fish.” Sometimes skeptics will point this out as a contradiction in the Bible, since a whale is a mammal and not a fish. The obvious response to that argument is that whales did not become mammals until 1758, when Carl Linnaeus created a name that grouped together the animal kinds that nurse their young. “Mammal” is a kind of kinds, and one that was created fairly recently.
This is a surprising concept, and possibly a difficult one to fully grasp, especially for people who only speak one language. Names do refer to real things in the real universe, but those real things do not, in themselves, form categories. (As an archaeologist, I like to say that categories are not part of the data, they are part of the analysis.) Every single thing that exists is, in some way, like any other thing. And every single thing that exists is, in other ways, different from any other thing. To create categories, or kinds, somebody has to make a decision about which similarities and which differences are important, and which are not important. And that, finally, is why naming is an exercise of authority, because the minute you decide that something is important, it becomes necessary to ask, “important for what purpose?” Classification, whether of animals or of anything else, is always for some purpose. How you classify something reflects how you intend to use it. In Genesis 2, when the man named the animals, he was defining how humans would interact with those animals from that point on. And since that time, various others (such as Carl Linnaeus) have added their own classifications, for their own purposes. The authority to give names has not been lost.
Fig Leaves
With that in mind, let’s look at another odd detail that we find in the very next chapter of Genesis:
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves (Genesis 3:7).
Do you see it? Moses tells us that it was, specifically, fig leaves that the man and woman covered themselves with. Why does he point that out? In the Eden story only three plants are named: the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and figs. And notice that the text doesn’t tell us what the man and woman used for thread, or for needles; it only mentions the fig leaves. For some reason, this detail is important. But why? A recent article, authored by Raanan Eichler (2025) and published in a leading journal of Old Testament studies, sheds some light on this question.
First of all, we need to ask whether “fig leaf” is a correct translation. As it turns out, there is no scholarly controversy about what kind of plant is being named in Genesis 3. The experts in ancient Hebrew are pretty much all agreed that the word here refers to the common fig that was, and is, regularly eaten. So we’re on solid ground there. But, except for this one incident, fig leaves are never used for clothing. And that’s interesting.
As described in the article, Eichler performed some experiments with fig leaves. What he found was that fig leaves are simply not very useful as clothes. First of all, figs do not have flexible vines, like grapes, that could simply be tied around the waist. Grape leaves would be very easy to make into simple clothes, but fig leaves have to be sewn together (which is, of course, what the Bible says happened). Unfortunately, fig leaves are quite flimsy; they tear very easily. What’s more, they quickly dry out and become brittle. It would be extremely difficult to make any kind of functional clothing from fig leaves.
But the really important thing about fig leaves in this story is that the sap of the fig tree contains chemicals called furanocoumarins that, when rubbed on the skin and exposed to sunlight, will produce a painful, itching rash. And if you’re using fig leaves to cover your nakedness, that rash will be exactly where you least want it. Making clothes out of fig leaves would be a lot like making them out of poison ivy (except that poison ivy doesn’t live in the Middle East, and would not be expected in a garden if it did). Since figs were common food plants, we can reasonably assume that Moses’ original audience would have known all of this, and would have seen the humor in it. The man and woman allowed themselves to be convinced that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was “desirable for gaining wisdom” (Genesis 3:6), but immediately after eating it, they made the dumbest possible choice of material to cover themselves with. But the real kicker is the realization that putting fig leaves on their privates was the second dumbest thing they’d done that day.
The Paradox of Humanity
These details are important to help us fully understand this story. Before eating from the forbidden tree, the man had sufficient insight to divide the animal kingdom into categories that defined how each kind of animal would interact with humanity. After eating, the pair made an idiotic choice of clothing material. And the story itself is important because it isn’t just about them; it’s also about us. If we understand Genesis 2 and 3 only as the story of two people a long time ago we’ll miss the point. Who Adam and Eve were is, in some very important ways, who all of us are. We still possess insight. Enough to figure out how to split the atom, cure hundreds of diseases, talk to each other across vast distances and travel to the moon. And we’re still idiotic enough to eat a burrito that we know we’re going to regret in a few hours. Even more idiotically, we can do all these things without trusting, obeying or even acknowledging the God who created us.
Old Testament scholar John Walton (2015) uses the word archetype, meaning that, while Adam and Eve were actual people in an actual past, a great deal of their importance in the Bible is not due to the things that were unique about them, but rather the things that are universal. Every man is Adam. Every woman is Eve. Their story is our story. We are highly intelligent. We are also idiots. And we stupidly rebel against the only source of actual wisdom that exists anywhere. But, thanks be to God, our story didn’t end in the garden.
1. “Adam” is not used as a personal name until later in Genesis.
References Cited
BibleProject
2026 Literary Styles. Electronic Document, https://bibleproject.com/videos/literary-styles-bible/, accessed February 27, 2026.
Eichler, Raanan
2025 Girdles of Fig Foliage. Vetus Testamentum (2025):1-12.
Walton, John H.
2015 The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate. InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove.