Eve

In the beginning there was relation, and in the act of turning toward the other, humanity was born.
Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923)

Today we bring the second chapter of Genesis to a close with the introduction of Eve. Today’s post will deal with Adam’s need for a helper, the differentiation of humanity into male and female and the birth of interpersonal morality with the first ethical injunction in the Bible.

As we discussed in last week’s Main Project post, God brings all the animals to Adam to be named. Following this we see “Adam gave names to all the cattle, to the birds of the air and to every beast of the fields. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him” (Gen. 2:20).

Seeing that Adam had no helper, God causes him to fall into a deep sleep and while Adam slept “he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man he made into woman, and he brought her to the man” (Gen. 2:21-22).

With this we now see a new beginning. The universe is created, the garden is created, man is created and now there is woman. With the creation of Eve we now have an interpersonal dynamic and with an interpersonal dynamic comes a very basic social contract in the form of the first ethical injunction on the part of God.

The Genesis story tells us about the relation between man and wife that “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

There is a lot here to contend with so let’s jump right in.

That Eve is taken out of Adam is of the utmost importance. While it is not a mainstream interpretation, there is a tradition that argues that Adam was originally a hermaphrodite. This idea found in the 5th century Midrash (a collection of rabbinic commentaries) is derived largely from Genesis 1:27 where god “created ; male and female he created them” and then later with the idea that Adam has Eve taken out of him.

This tradition is compounded by early Christian and Gnostic traditions (The Gospel of Thomas for instance). The Gnostics, having been influenced by Plato, also likely worked from the argument put forward by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium that the original humans were hermaphroditic and the gods split them in two causing them to spent their lives looking for their other half to reconstitute their perfect whole.

While I do not exactly subscribe to the hermaphrodite Adam idea, I do think there is some kernel in there that we can look at. I do not think of Adam as being a hermaphrodite upon initial creation, but rather that there was some kind of undifferentiated perfection or that Adam was an enfolded unity.

If we look back at the creation in Genesis 1, we see that creation is always an act of differentiation. God “divide(s) the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:4) and “divide(s) the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which are over the firmament” (Gen. 1:7). The dry land and the sea are separated and the fruit according to its kind (Gen. 1:11). Further, the day and night are divided (Gen. 1:14). When we look at these creative acts on the part of God we get the picture that there is something (like the void at the beginning of time) which is a kind of undifferentiated whole that God separates to create opposing forces or to put boundaries around discrete individualities in order to separate them from the whole and give them a form of individial reality (light/dark, land/sea, etc.).

I think we can look at the pre-Eve Adam in the garden much in the same way. Adam, in the few verses before we get the creation of Eve, is a sort of undifferentiated whole. In the same manner that light and darkness are separated out from whatever it was that existed before them and in some way contained both, so too woman has been separated out of man.

That Adam is a hermaphrodite prior tot he separation doesn’t seem to hold water for me. Whatever Adam is, it is before the origins of childbirth which is a consequence of the fall. A hermaphrodite implies both sexes exist together while I think Adam, prior to Eve, is something like a complete and sexless entity. It is his conscious awareness, like God’s at the beginning of time, which allows him for creation (in the form of naming the animals) and not the sexual act which is the unity of the separated entities which allows for the creative act (in the form of child bearing). It is not necessary that he is both man and woman for God to make man and woman out of him.

I think of it as separating a water molecule into hydrogen and oxogen. There is a sense in which there is hydrogen and oxygen together in a drop of water, but there is also a sense in which a drop of water is just a drop of water. For the human level of analysis, while we know a drop of water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, we wouldn’t look at one and think that it is two things together but rather a single drop of water. This is how I see Adam prior to eve. The difference is minute, but I think important as it shows how the creative process of God is the same for all things, humans included, and that all things begin as undifferentiated potential and their separation comes with some negative and some positive results.

With the separation of male and female comes the first ethical injunction by God. Prior to Eve there was no interpersonal relationships and as such there was no need for an ethics. Other than the rule to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is merely a draconian command on the part of God to Adam (one Adam never actually agrees to), there is no need for an ethics. Adam’s responsibilities are entirely to himself as an undifferentiated perfection, but now with Eve comes the responsibilities of a society.

So, here at the end of Genesis 2 we see the first ethical law in the Old Testament. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).

This is an incredibly striking rule. First of all, God just intentionally separated man from women and then immediately there is the injunction for man to become one flesh with his wife. This God, he is one tricky character. God only knows what he is up to. I think what the story is getting at here is the importance of the unity being a voluntary arrangement between the two parties over merely being the default condition of existence. No one is heroic merely for breathing.

There is almost an infinite amount of wealth here. First of all we have the blueprint for marriage which emphasizes its divine origin. Human beings are unique in that they get married. Yes, yes, yes about 3% of mammals exhibit some form of monogamous behavior. Gibbons, for instance, can pair bond which is reinforced by oxytocin in a similar way to humans and some termite species have a single king and queen that mate for life to sustain the colony. But really, and I say this knowing full well some people won’t like this response, who cares?

You can dig up some instances of monogamous behavior in invertebrates and yes there is a species of seahorse which form exclusive mating pairs but you know full well this isn’t marriage the way humans construe marriage cross-culturally and even in Scandinavia where social gender distinctions have been flattened out from the top down politically (in case you were thinking it was a social institution which is enforced by a power structure — which it is not).

Humans get married and that marriage is, according to the Genesis story, a constitutive aspect of humanity which is divine in origin and which constitutes the first interpersonal ethical rule — when you get married, everything else, even your family, is subordinate to the marriage. Go on, try doing it any other way and see how that works out for ya.

Further, we get the concept of unity being intentionally created. In the undifferentiated being that is pre-Eve Adam there is unity, but no intentionality there, no responsibility. With the separation of Adam from Eve, they need to come together and recreate that unity, sharing life’s responsibilities, joys and challenges.

However, there is more here than just Adam and Eve. In fact, there is more than just marriage. This verse sets the fundamental pattern for the family structure which is the foundational element of societal stability. Within the seed that is the divine pattern of marriage set out in Genesis 2:24 there is the potential for stable society.

Jesus references this verse specifically in Matthew 19:4-6 which he is asked by the Pharisees about divorce. Jesus points to the divine origin of marriage and says that “what therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” underscoring the divinity of marriage and its indissolubility. In 1 Corinthians, Paul alludes to this verse when he speaks about sexual immorality saying that “he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her” (1 Corinthians 6:16-17) in a none too subtle emphasis on sexual exclusivity.

All of this is fairly straight forward. God establishes the divine pattern of marriage and later Jesus and Paul point to it to establish marital permanence and sexual morality. Then, in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul throws us a curveball and this will change the entire tenor of Genesis 2:24. Paul writes, “for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (1 Ephesians 5:31-32). Talk about opening a can of worms.

Sure enough, we see that in Matthew 9:14-5, Mark 2:18-20 and Luke 5:33-35 Christ refers to himself as the “bridegroom.” In John 3:27-30, John the Baptist, speaking of Christ’s role in the world, says “he must become greater; I must become less. The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and now it is complete.”

Moreover, in Revelation 21:2, 9:10 , the Holy City is “prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” and is called “the wife of the Lamb.” Again, in Matthew 25:1-13, we see that the faithful are portrayed as the “ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.” Further, in Isaiah 54:5 and Hosea 2:16-20, God is depicted as the husband of Israel and Jesus’ identification as the bridegroom along with Paul’s letter to the Ephesians extends the metaphor to the Church and the people of the new covenant.

You can see that the impact of the first injunction to humans beings, that of the necessary entanglement of man and wife, far exceeds the direct implication and unfolds into implications for society, the state and the relationship between man and God as such.

Having established both interpersonal ethical behavior as well as the pattern for marriage which will be extrapolated to the state and, later, to God we get our first glimpse into the relationship between Adam and Eve. There, in the garden, “they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25). What a killer way to end chapter two.

This first statement about Adam and Eve is packed to the brim with significance which will come to the forefront when we discuss the fall next week. With the fall, Genesis 2:25 unfolds into a much broader concept. That said, for now we need only to look at what we can extrapolate from this line as it stands on its own.

This verse implies that the author found it worthy of remarking that despite being naked, the man and his wife were not ashamed. The verse implies that at some point (now) people are ashamed of being naked and at some point in the past they were not. The immediate implications are, firstly, that something has happened between then and now which accounts for the introduction of shame and, secondly, that there is somehow a connection between nudity and shame.

The most common and traditional explanation of the connection of nudity and shame has to do with the sexual connotations of nudity, but I think this is wrong. I think there is something far more sophisticated going on in this story. When someone has the very common nightmare of being naked on stage, it is not a sexual dream (unless you are a weirdo). The nudity in that dream, and in this story, seems to me to be far deeper and more nuanced than merely sexuality on display. This is a topic we will really spend time on when we cover the fall.

In the meantime, we know that there is a pre and post shame period which, in the biblical stories, corresponds with the pre and post fallen state of man. Modern anthropology also acknowledges a pre-shame time in human culture. Studies like The Naked Ape (1967) by Desmond Morris and Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success (2015), which are supported by Blobs Cave Findings (Nature, 2008) suggest that the origins of complex social norms developed roughly 300,000 years ago and before that humans treated nudity much like other animals.

Prior to this time, groups lacked the cognitive or cultural framework for nudity-related shame. Self awareness in terms of shame with regard to nudity seems to have emerged roughly 100,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic era as humans formed larger, more complex societies. These societies saw the emergence of art, burial rites and adornments suggesting the early development of symbolic thinking. This is the same time that shame about nudity likely arose  as societies established norms around status and group identity. In short, the line between when man began to feel shame in nudity and the time before corresponds with the line which separates the self-conscious and social man from the primitive, more animal like evolutionary stage in both the current biological and anthropological literature as well as in the biblical account of Genesis.

With this, we bring Genesis 2 to a close. From the habitable order extracted from chaos by God, to the creation of the world and the balance of the garden, we have come to where man and woman live together in the garden, tending and keeping it, in a voluntarily unified, interpersonal relationship with one another to which their individualities have been subordinated beneath the recreated unified whole.