Adam Loves Eve: The Bible’s Guide for Men Seeking a Better Marriage is by Russ Resnik, published by First Fruits of Zion in August 2017.
The thing our old review never mentioned
First Fruits of Zion is a Messianic Jewish ministry, and this is a Messianic Jewish book. Resnik draws on the New Testament alongside Jewish teaching and tradition, and reads marriage through the Hebrew Scriptures in a way that assumes continuity with Jewish practice rather than a clean break from it.
That is not a warning, and it is not a doctrinal problem from where Called to Better stands. Messianic Jewish believers confess Jesus as Messiah, and this book is not arguing that Gentile Christians must take on Torah observance. But the frame is distinctive, some of the vocabulary will be unfamiliar, and a reader expecting a standard evangelical marriage book will notice the difference on the first page. Better to know going in.
Attribution on this title is genuinely muddled across retailers. Different listings credit First Fruits of Zion as publisher-author, and some name D. Thomas Lancaster or Grant Luton alongside Resnik. Russ Resnik is the author; the others appear in an editorial or contributing capacity we could not pin down precisely.
What it argues
It is written specifically for married men, and specifically for men who expected marriage to be more straightforward than it has turned out to be. Resnik’s approach is to run the question through the biblical text rather than through technique: what the creation account actually says about a man and his wife, and what follows from that for a Tuesday evening.
Reading Genesis 2 seriously as marriage instruction rather than as a proof text is the book’s strongest move, and it is where the Jewish interpretive tradition earns its place. There is a depth of attention to those chapters here that most Christian marriage books skip past in a paragraph.
What we removed
The previous version quoted two readers, one saying “It’s solid, biblically based, and to the point” and another recommending it to any man wanting a better marriage. We could not verify either. Gone.
Where we land
A thoughtful, textually serious marriage book for men, from a tradition most of our readers will not have read before. Worth it if that interests you rather than puts you off. If you want a familiar evangelical treatment, this is not the shortest path to one.
Adam Loves Eve by Russ Resnik on Amazon