The first eight parts of this Lesson comprise more-or-less independent essays or vignettes; the last two cover the Text and some "Footnotes." Enjoy any or all!
The Most Famous Couple
Bigger than Kanye and Kim, bigger than Brangelina, bigger even than Bogie and Bacall: Adam and Eve are arguably the most famous couple in our culture. John Milton told their tragic tale in Paradise Lost. Mark Twain parodied them numerous times, in their "Diaries" and "Soliloquys," as well as Eve's "Autobiography." They have been featured in drawings, paintings, sculpture--and porn films. Some see them as our primordial parents, and as the originators of the sin of all humankind. Others see in their story a psychological truth about the loss of innocence and the awareness of "good and evil."
They even feature in a playground prank:
Adam and Eve and Hitme
Went down to the river to bathe.
Adam and Eve were drowned.
Who was saved?
A & E, before and after (Michelangelo)
Let's meet these fascinating characters, and answer once and for all the pressing question:
Did Adam and Eve have navels?
In Which "Jim" is Called Forth as a Substitute
My rascally seventh-grade self. Paisleys and whatnot were big in 1968.
And it came to pass, when I was but a seventh grader, that Miss Boies, our beloved music teacher, called unto me and said, "Jim, an eighth-grade boy has sinned, and wilt therefore be unable to perform in the upcoming choral concert. And lo, shalt thou take his place?" After much fear and trembling, I replied, "Yea, Miss Boies, I shall."
And so I became the narrator of a cute little "Negro spiritual" called "Dese Bones Gonna Rise Again."
I still remember some of the couplets I recited (these were spoken, with the chorus singing the repeated lines and refrain). You have to picture this being spoken by a skinny little white (looking) kid, and backed up by a bunch of other mostly white kids, with perhaps a handful of very assimilated Latino-Americans or Asian-Americans in the group. But basically, Velveeta on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip, through and through.
Now the Lord he thought he'd make a man.
(Dese bones gonna rise again.)
So he took a little clay and he took a little sand.
(Dese bones gonna rise again.)
He thought he'd make a woman, too,
(Dese bones gonna rise again.)
But he didn't know 'zackly what to do.
(Dese bones gonna rise again.)
REFRAIN
I knows it, knows it,
Indeed I knows it, brother,
I knows it, PWEE!
Dese bones gonna rise again.
And so it went. I don't remember all the couplets, but some of them were:
So he took a rib from Adam's side,
And he made Miz Eve for to be his bride.
He set them in a garden fair,
And said to eat whatever's there.
Peaches and pears and plums and such,
But one of these trees they must not touch--
But that, of course, gets us into our next Lesson.
Now, I've searched on line for "THE words" to this, and made a stunning discovery: there are dozens of versions, with more (and possibly fewer) verses than I learned, and different wordings within them.
It leads me to believe that this was genuinely a folk song, and not something made up by a composer.
And that brings us to this week's Lesson: a different version of the creation of humans from the one in last week's Lesson.
By the way, here's an excellent version of the spiritual, recorded by the Golden Gate Quartet in 1939. (Their performance is a little better than ours was.)
The Story
The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo); this is not described in either creation account!
Here's what happens in most of Chapter 2 of Genesis:
There's no one to tend the plants, so God gathered some dust, and made a man, and breathed into him and made him live. Then he planted a garden, called Eden, and put the man in it. The fruit trees grew, and there were two special trees (important in our next lesson): the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Eden is watered by an unnamed river, which splits into four parts (see the Footnotes below).
And God made "the man" the gardener, and told him he could eat freely of all of the trees except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Note that he made no mention of the tree of life.) And if the man did eat from the tree of knowledge, he would "surely die."
Noticing that the man was lonely, God decided to make him a companion, so he made animals and birds, and brought them to the suddenly-named Adam for naming--but he still had not made a suitable "companion."
So God put Adam under, and pulled out a rib, and made from it a woman, whom James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake called "the cutletsized consort," but whom we more prosaically call "Eve," from a Hebrew word for life. (Folk etymology, at least, tells us that "Adam" means "earth," out of which God made him, but see the meaning in the Footnotes to 2:18 and 2:23 below.)
So Adam claims her--"bone of my bones" and whatnot--and makes the first pun, calling her "woman" because she "was taken out of Man." This is particularly rich since he wasn't speaking English! More on this in the Footnotes.
And that, apparently, is why people get married--to reverse the operation and become "one flesh" again. And to be naked together without embarrassment (?).
The Contradictions
Skeptics see in these two creation accounts (this and the one from last week's Lesson) logic-defying contradictions:
In Genesis 1, animals are made before humans; in Genesis 2, animals come after humans (or at least Adam).
In Genesis 1, "male and female" humans are created simultaneously; in Genesis 2, Adam comes first.
In Genesis 1, plants were created before humans; in Genesis 2, plants (or at least Eden) came after Adam.
In Genesis 1, birds, like fish, seem to be created from water; in Genesis 2, like "every beast of the field," they seem to be created from the ground.
Wah, wah, waaaah.
On the other hand, the True Believer will go through hoops and back-flips to prove that this is a seamless narrative, even appealing to the pluperfect. (That's right, the pluperfect!) When the language in Genesis 2 clearly says, "And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air" etc., it should say (the TBs claim), "the LORD God HAD formed..." (emphasis added), meaning some time before Adam was created. How this happened between the creation of Adam and that of Eve (indeed, it was the inadequacy of the animals as "companions" that made God realize Eve was necessary!) is not explained.
As you might have guessed, I can't fully subscribe to the position of either the skeptic or the True Believer.
So, what do I think?
Detail from a Japanese poster for Rashomon (Wikipedia)
Have you seen (or heard of) Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, Rashomon? As Wikipedia describes it, "The film is known for a plot device that involves various characters providing subjective, alternative, self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same incident."
Now, some modern scholars have determined that the first creation account, in Genesis 1, was written by the "Priestly" source, a document or school or "hand" that is responsible for much of the Pentateuch, and may have tweaked some of the earlier sources to conform to his/her/their/its view of things.
Genesis 2, however, derives from an earlier source, called the "Yahwist" for his (let's keep it simple) use of the Tetragrammaton, the four letters YHVH, which were formerly rendered Jehovah, but these days show up as Yahweh. (We'll discuss this more when Moses meets the Burning Bush in Chapter 3 of Exodus.) Just note that the King James translators have used "God" to represent the name Elohim, and the LORD God for YHWH. (Where are the vowels? It's a long story. Trust me, we'll get to it.)
The Hebrew characters for (right to left) YHVH, a name of God
So, like a half a Rashomon, the two accounts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are told from different points of view, with different purposes. As mentioned last week, Genesis 1 is a hymn; Genesis 2 is literally more earthy, and earthly. Dust? Rib? God having physical breath? An animal parade, not unlike the ones presented by circuses a couple of millennia later? (Imagine how a good story-teller could draw out that part around a desert campfire!) C'mon, can't we recognize a cracking good story when we see one?
This, like the song I spoke for Miss Boeis, is entertainment, a yarn, something that the least literate could wrap their heads around and retell with relish.
I'm reading Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock right now, and--as she did with Death Comes for the Archbishop--she embeds lots of great stories into her narrative, some of them almost certainly old folktales from the early days of the French settlement of Canada.
This is like that.
Plato's "Creation Myth"
"They had two faces, four arms, four legs, and so on.” (Image found widely on the internet, without attribution)
In Plato's Symposium, the character Aristophanes tells a "creation myth" that is almost certainly intended as satire. Nevertheless, it has implications for the Biblical account of the creation of Adam and Eve, so let me retell it briefly:
The original humans, he tells us, had double bodies (where these came from, he doesn't say). They had two faces, four arms, four legs, and so on. Their spherical bodies could roll around "like clowns doing cartwheels," as Wiki has it, and came in three sexes: male/male, female/female, and the androgynous male/female. After they attempted an assault on the gods of Olympus (we'll get to the Tower of Babel in a few weeks), Zeus decided that, instead of blasting them to bits (and thus losing their praise and offerings), he would just "cripple" them by splitting them in half, into two males, or two females, or one of each. (There's also some pretty gross stuff in there about rearranging faces and genitals and whatnot, but you'll have to read that for yourself!)
From that day to this, we seek out our "other half," each according to his or her kind. Aristophanes draws many moral lessons from this, taking shots at politicians and others, and ends up by saying we should respect the gods or we'll end up split again and hopping around on one foot and, presumably, waving one arm, and peeping through one eye!
Pretty silly, right? But only if we take it literally! It works pretty well as a story with a moral lesson, and explains a lot about human relationships.
Marriage in the Bible
I guess this is the place to talk about "Adam and Steve."
Let me point out that the Bible text has no quotation marks; I have added them in the passage below.
And I did a very tricky thing at 2:24. I put the words, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" in quotation marks, meaning that, as far as I'm concerned, they were spoken by Adam.
So here's a hetero guy stating what he considers to be the proper form of marriage. Of course he does! But if I were to take those words out of the quotation marks, they would become a rule that everyone, everywhere, for all time, would be expected to follow.
Another movie poster (Wikipedia)
And that is how the True Believers take those words, with their glib little statement, "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
Okay, fine, whatever, but let me tell you a little story.
I was once a delegate to the Annual Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. (Yes, I was in that deep!) And the discussion was, as I call, on the ordination of gay men. (A boat which has happily sailed--we consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003! There are more, now, and lesbians, too.)
Anyway, there was a forum where delegates were invited to speak their piece at a microphone, and when we plebes noticed that Fr. (now the late Canon) Howard Happ was in line, there was a buzz of excitement. He was a brilliant religious scholar who just had a way of putting things.
When he got to the mic, Fr. Happ did not disappoint. "Everyone keeps talking about 'Biblical morality,'" he said, and then asked, "Would that be the polygamy of the patriarchs, or the celibacy of St. Paul?"
A hush, then applause. (It even alliterated!) Today, we would add <drops mic>.
The point is, the Bible is broad, and you can find mostly whatever you want in it. Does it specifically condone homosexuality, or gay marriage? No, it doesn’t. But neither does it explicitly prohibit them. Homosexuality was certainly known in the world of the New Testament, and yet Jesus did not say an unambiguous word about the topic in the Gospels, and the few "proof texts" in the Old Testament and the Epistles are open to interpretation.
BUT...
All of this is to fall into the trap of assuming that the morality of a desert tribe 3,000 years ago is somehow binding on us today--a notion that Fr. Happ's dictum easily lays to rest.
And this brings us to the key question regarding this passage.
The Navel Destroyer
Evidence that demands a verdict
Modern humans have actually spent time seriously pondering the question, "Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?" Talk about navel-gazing!
Sisters and Brothers, I will give you a definitive answer, if first you will answer some simple questions for me:
What color hair did each of them have? (If you say "black" because they were Middle Eastern, then where did blondes come from? Because that's a recessive gene.)
What color were their eyes? (Same problem.)
How tall were they?
And so on. You see--forgive me--Adam and Eve were fictional characters.
Or to put it more nicely, they are paradigms, metaphors, "stand-ins" as it were, for the first fully-human creatures to emerge on the planet (which took place somewhere in Africa, and couldn't even be pinpointed without defining some terms.)
The incidental traits of a fictional character depend on the author, and whoever wrote the Bible seems to have forgotten to tell us about the belly buttons. (Some wag or other mentions the excitement of, say, Seth's kids: "Grandma! Grandpa! Show us your bellies! No belly buttons? Ew! That's so weird!")
But here are the arguments:
PRO: If they were human like the rest of us, they had belly buttons.
CON: No umbilicus, no navel.
And here's another question: Jesus: Virgin birth! So no navel?
The Two Pockets
Pasadena City College, where I got a two-year degree in four years (from the school's website)
Before we get to the Text and the Footnotes, I want to tell you a neat little story that nicely utilizes the two creation accounts.
The first time I studied a Biblical language, it was a night class in conversational Hebrew at Pasadena City College, that two-year school where so many great things happened to me in the four years it took me to graduate.
The teacher was a middle-aged man named Sol Beckerman, who asked us to call him Shlomo, the Hebrew form of his full name, Solomon. We were tickled when, as a mnemonic, he offered that it was "kind of like a slow moe." His greatest line was always, "At last, here is a grammar rule that has no exception!" [beat, and a raised finger as he turned to the class] "Except..."
Shlomo was a font of folk wisdom no less than the arcane grammar of modern Hebrew, and one of his stories always stuck in my mind.
"Every man," Shlomo said, "should have two pockets. In one, he should carry a note which reads, 'I was created in the image of God.'" (We recognize this from Genesis 1.) "And in the other, a note that says 'I was made of the dust of the earth.'" (Genesis 2.) "Then when he feels low and downtrodden, he should pull out the first note. But when he feels high and mighty..." [shrug]
And now, let's get to the Text and the Footnotes.
The Text: Adam in the Garden of Eden
2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,
2:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
2:6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
2:4 generations: This verse is transitional between the previous Lesson and this one. The word generations has to do with descent, family, birth, race, etc.
2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
2:7 breath and soul: "Soul" here means anything that breathes. It's also translated as (among others) self, life, creature, person, living being (but never plant life), and a number of less-physical attributes: appetite, mind, desire, emotion, passion, and so on. And so by the mechanical act of breathing into his nostrils, God made (not gave) Adam a soul. The same Hebrew word (nephesh) was translated life and creature in Genesis 1 (verses 20, 21, 24, and 30).
2:8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
2:9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
2:7 Eden: Note that the garden is IN a place called Eden; it is not called Eden itself. Yet, the word Eden can mean "garden" or "paradise," which itself means "an enclosed park."
Scholars have argued for millennia about its location (read more about this under "rivers" below); but for my money, here's how to get there: take the second to the right, and straight on till morning. Yes, it's in the same neighborhood as Neverland--and Oz, Narnia, Hogwarts, and all the other fictional locations.
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2:9 the trees: These will become of great significance in the next Lesson, but let's make one thing clear: neither was an apple tree!
2:10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
2:11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
2:12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
2:13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasses the whole land of Ethiopia.
2:14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goes toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.
2:11-14 the rivers: This is a great example of how something can be both precise and inaccurate. If someone had given you this description, you might be pretty confident that you could find it on a map. But no one ever has: all guesses are qualified with "must have been" or "might be." (Besides, wouldn't Noah's flood have rearranged drainages anyway?)
But for completeness's sake, let's say Havilah is in Arabia, so the Pison drains that. Ethiopia is a translator's stab; the original is Cush, (perhaps meaning "black," hence the association with Ethiopia), another unknown place, and the Gihon an unknown river. With Assyria we reach more solid ground, though the Hiddekel is unknown by that name. And everyone knows the Euphrates.
Wild speculation has made of the four rivers the Indus (and Havilah is India), the Nile (because Ethiopia), the Tigris and the (given) Euphrates. But there is no place where any but the last two touch. Maybe in that Dark Ages of geography it was speculated that they all must spring from a single source somewhere? Who knows?
Nevertheless, one gets a vague impression that this is, perhaps, somewhere near Mesopotamia, and indeed Sumer, the earliest known civilization, was located there.
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2:12 bdellium: a tree resin used in perfume and incense, and found from India to sub-Saharan Africa
2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat:
2:17 "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."
2:16-17 you may freely eat etc.: One view of the Bible is that it is made up of progressive dispensations, or (something a little different), covenants. Though God never changes, his "deal" with humanity does. And this is the first one: the Edenic Covenant (along with that "be fruitful, multiply, have dominion, eat what you want" bit in 1:27 and 28), also called the "Dispensation of Innocence." This will change pretty quickly--in the next Lesson, in fact.
The Text: Companions--including Eve
2:18 And the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him."
2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
2:22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
2:18 an help meet: Somehow this has become a single word; dictionaries allow "helpmeet" (though my spellchecker does not). But originally, it was a help (helper, companion) that was meet (fit, appropriate, suitable). I'm fascinated at the idea that God had to go through trying out all the animals before he got around to making a woman (especially as in 1:27 he made "male and female" pretty much simultaneously). Again, I can't help but imagine how a good storyteller could expand this scene.
This, incidentally, is the first time the man is called "Adam," and it appears without explanation. The word means "humanity" (see Footnote at 2:23), but folk etymology says it means "earth."
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2:19 brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: I mentioned the "circus parade" above, but the question is raised, "In what language did he call them?" And what did he use: like, "stripey things" for tigers, and "tall things” for giraffes? Also, did he name all the species of insects? Inquiring minds want to know!
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2:20 cattle vs beast of the field: In Japanese vegetarian cuisine, wild and domesticated vegetables are distinguished as sansai ("mountain vegetables") and yasai ("field vegetables"). I think the same thing is going on here, but in this case "field" signifies "wild."
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2:21 caused a deep sleep and took one of his ribs etc.: This makes God the first anesthesiologist and the first surgeon. Marriage is meant to be a reversal of the procedure; see Plato's myth above for an alternate version.
2:23 And Adam said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
2:24 "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."
2:25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
2:23 Adam's declaration: Adam, as mentioned, makes the first pun, which works in Hebrew as well as in English because man (male person) is ish in Hebrew, and woman is ishshah. When we say that Adam means "man," we should really say "humanity" or "mankind."
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2:24 "Therefore…": As mentioned above, the placement of the quotation marks here is crucial. Did Adam say this, or did the writer/editors? Is this a personal preference, or a law? I think it's the former, and it's the choice I made (to marry a woman), but I wouldn't force it on everyone.
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2:25 naked: <snicker> But seriously, this small, totally unnecessary, detail points toward an interesting psychological reading of the next part of the story.
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Next up: Genesis 3: The Fall
See you then.