This 11th-century mosaic, which shows the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion, comes from the Church of the Dormition in Daphne, Greece. Early Christians found parallels between the Adam and Eve story and Jesus and the Church. In the mosaic, blood and water flow from Jesus’ pierced side in the direction of his mother, Mary. Early Christians believed that just as Eve was birthed from the side of Adam, so the Church was birthed from the side of Jesus.

The creation of woman in the Bible has been the topic of much debate in Biblical Archaeology Review. In “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” from the September/October 2015 issue, Ziony Zevit makes a shocking claim about the Adam and Eve story in the Bible.

The Biblical text says that Eve was created from Adam’s tsela‘. Although tsela‘ has traditionally been translated as “rib,” Zevit argues that it is better translated as Adam’s os baculum. This controversial conversation continues in Mary Joan Winn Leith’s article “Creating Woman,” published in the March/April 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

In her article, Leith examines the creation of woman in the Bible. She looks at the etiological and euphemistic support for Zevit’s interpretation, and she considers how this would have fit into ancient views of biology. Then Leith focuses on an interesting part of the Adam and Eve story in the Bible: the “punishment poem” in Genesis 3:14–19.

This poem occurs after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit. Because of their disobedience, God curses them. As Leith explains, this curse takes positive relationships, including childbirth, and turns them negative:

[T]he “punishment poem” in Genesis 3:14–19 reverses to negative effect all the positive relationships that prevailed before the humans disobeyed God. Humans and God, man and woman, humans and animals, humans and the earth now become alienated from each other where before all was harmonious. The most famous negative effect of the human disobedience is the woman’s pain in childbirth. At least theoretically then, before the punishment, childbirth in Eden should have been painless. If the father-as-child-bearer principle is hovering in the background of the creation of the woman, then the difficult childbirth promised to the woman in Genesis 3:16 reverses the painless “birth” in Genesis 2, where not only does a man—rather than a woman—give birth, but thanks to the anaesthetic “deep sleep” (tardemah), the man suffers no pain.

Thus, the creation of woman in the Bible from man—the first birth, according to Leith—is painless, but, as the “punishment poem” illustrates, all subsequent births are painful. Further, not only was the first birth painless, but it was a man—not a woman—who shockingly gives birth, setting it apart from all others.

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Leith then examines Christian symbolism related to the Adam and Eve story in the Bible. Early Christians believed that Eve was created from Adam’s rib or side, and they found parallels between Adam’s side and Jesus’ side that was pierced during his crucifixion. John 19:34 records, “Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his (Jesus’) side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.” Early Christians believed that the blood represented the holy Eucharist, and the water represented baptism—two sacraments given by Jesus to the Church. Therefore, the Church was birthed from the side of Jesus, just as Eve was birthed from Adam’s side.

This interpretation is illustrated well in an 11th-century mosaic from the Church of the Dormition in Daphne, Greece. In this mosaic, blood and water flow from the pierced side of Jesus in the direction of his mother, Mary. Leith explains that Mary is often referred to as the “new Eve” and “considered to personify the Church.” The birth of the Church is visually depicted by the blood and water (sacraments) flowing toward Mary (the Church). Adam also makes an appearance in this scene. Jesus’ blood drips onto Adam’s skull at the foot of the cross. This symbolizes 1 Corinthians 15:21–22: “For since death came through a human being (Adam), the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being (Christ); for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”

To learn more about the creation of woman in the Bible, read the full article by Mary Joan Winn Leith—“Creating Woman”—in the March/April 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Creating Woman” by Mary Joan Winn Leith in the March/April 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on March 14, 2016.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily

The Adam and Eve Story: Eve Came From Where?

Lilith in the Bible and Mythology

What Does the Bible Say About Infertility?

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Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?

Creating Woman

Did Eve Fall or Was She Pushed?

Eve and Adam

How Did Adam & Eve Make a Living?

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“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”
—Genesis 2:21–22, NRSV

ADAM AND EVE IN THE BIBLE. This mosaic from the Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily, depicts the creation of woman in the Bible. Eve is shown emerging from Adam’s side. Most translations of the Adam and Eve story say that Eve was created from Adam’s rib, but Ziony Zevit contends that she was created from a very different part of Adam’s body.

According to the Bible’s creation account, after making the heavens and the earth, God created humankind. The Adam and Eve story in Genesis 2 states that God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground, and then Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs. But was it really his rib?

The Hebrew word that is traditionally translated as “rib” is tsela‘. Ziony Zevit, Distinguished Professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages at American Jewish University in Bel-Air, California, believes that this translation is wrong, as do many scholars. It was first translated as “rib” in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the mid-third century B.C.E. However, a more careful reading of the Hebrew word for “rib” in the Adam and Eve story suggests that Eve was created from another, very different, part of Adam’s anatomy—his os baculum (penis bone).

Zevit carefully examines the account of the creation of woman in the Bible in his article “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” which appears in the September/October 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Of the 40 appearances of tsela‘ in the Bible, the Adam and Eve story is the only place where it is translated as “rib.” Usually it means the side of something. Zevit explains the nuance of this word:

This Hebrew word occurs some 40 times in the Hebrew Bible, where it refers to the side of a building or of an altar or ark (Exodus 25:12; 26:20, 26; 1 Kings 6:34), a side-chamber (1 Kings 6:8; Ezekiel 41:6), or a branch of a mountain (2 Samuel 16:13). In each of these instances, it refers to something off-center, lateral to a main structure. The only place where tsela‘ might be construed as referring to a rib that branches off from the spinal cord is in Genesis 2:21–22.

According to Zevit, “rib” is the wrong translation for tsela‘ in the Adam and Eve story in the Bible. Zevit believes that tsela‘ should be translated as “a non-specific, general term,” such as one of Adam’s lateral limbs, in the Adam and Eve story. Thus, it refers to “limbs lateral to the vertical axis of an erect human body: hands, feet, or, in the case of males, the penis.”

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Which of these lateral limbs lacks a bone? Human males do not have a penis bone, but many mammals do. Zevit concludes that in the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, the woman was created from the man’s baculum to explain why this appendage does not have a bone.

To see Ziony Zevit’s full explanation of the Adam and Eve story in the Bible, read his article “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” in the September/October 2015 issue of BAR.

Not a BAS Library or All-Access Member yet? Join today.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on September 15, 2015.

Related reading in Bible History Daily

Adam and Eve

How the Serpent in the Garden Became Satan

The Creation of Woman in the Bible

Lilith in the Bible and Mythology

What Does the Bible Say About Infertility?

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?

How Did Adam & Eve Make a Living?

Dealing with the Devil

From Eden to Ednah—Lilith in the Garden

Eve and Adam

The post The Adam and Eve Story: Eve Came From Where? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Here are 10 of the most notable examples (in no specific order):

• Gold Powder
  When Moses sees the Israelites worshiping the golden calf he grinds the idol into a fine powder, mixes it with water and forces the people to drink (Exodus 32:19–20).
• Scroll of Lamentations
  God gives Ezekiel a two-sided scroll of Lamentations to eat. Ezekiel fills his stomach and finds the scroll to be “as sweet as honey” (Ezekiel 2:8–3:3).
• Bread and Excrement
  God tells Ezekiel to eat bread baked upon human excrement but Ezekiel gets away with bread baked upon animal excrement. Unlike the scroll, we aren’t told how it tastes (Ezekiel 4:10-17).
• The Manna
  The Israelites survive for forty years in the desert on daily provisions of manna (Exodus 16:35). The name manna reportedly comes from the question the Israelites asked, man hu⁾, “What is it?” (Exodus 16:15). Although some commentators prefer a naturalistic answer to this question, e.g., manna is the gum resin of desert shrubs, the Biblical text presents the manna as a miracle food. It falls six days a week but not on the Sabbath, disintegrates when it is stored and stops falling when the Israelites enter the land of Canaan. Manna is even called “the grain of heaven,” “the bread of heaven” or “the bread of angels” in a number of Hebrew Bible, New Testament and apocryphal texts (Psalms 78:24, 105:40; John 6:31; 2 Esdras 1:19).

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• Animal Fodder for a King
  In accordance with Daniel’s prophecy, Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon lives in the wilderness for seven years eating grass like an ox (Dan 4:33). A similar story appears in 2 Esdras (9:23-27, 12:51) where Ezra sustains himself on a diet of flowers for seven days. Interestingly, a number of scholars suggest that the story of Nebuchadnezzar is actually based on Nabonidus, the king of Babylon who spent a decade of his life at an oasis in the Arabian wilderness.
• 40-Day Superfoods
  An angel gives Elijah a cake and some water and it is enough to sustain him for a forty-day journey from Beersheba to Mount Horeb/Sinai, where he encounters God in a cave (1 Kings 19:3–9).

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• The Fantastic Fruits of Eden
  There were two supernatural trees in the Garden of Eden, each with its own fruit. The tree of knowledge bestowed a divine knowledge of good and bad, making one like the gods. The tree of life granted immortality (Genesis 3:22).
• Food from Nowhere
  A number of Biblical figures are saved from thirst and starvation in the barrenness of the desert. For example, Hagar and Ishmael are shown a hidden well by God (Genesis 21:14–19), Moses finds water in a desert rock (Numbers 20:11), and Elijah is given bread and meat twice a day by ravens in the desert (1 Kings 17:1–6).
• Human Flesh
  Cannibalism on account of hunger is perhaps the most extreme punishment in the Hebrew Bible. It is at times described in vivid detail, e.g., in the threat of Deuteronomy 28 that fathers and mothers will eat their own children in secrecy so that they do not have to share the meat (Deuteronomy 28:53–57).
• Free Refills
  There are a number of stories about the miracles performed by the prophets Elijah and Elisha. According to the Book of Kings, a hungry woman’s jar of flour and jug of oil refilled themselves until a famine subsided (1 Kings 17:10-16), a poor woman’s single jug of oil was able to fill the many vessels of her neighbors (2 Kings 4:1–7), and a man’s twenty loaves of bread were miraculously able to feed one hundred hungry men with some left over (2 Kings 4:42–44). A similar story appears in John 6, where Jesus feeds five thousand men with five barley loaves and two small fish. Again, there is still food left over.

This Bible History Daily article, “The 10 Strangest Foods in the Bible,” was originally published on May 6, 2014.

David Z. Moster, PhD, is a Research Fellow in Hebrew Bible at Brooklyn College and a Lecturer in Rabbinics at Nyack College. He is the author of the upcoming book Etrog: How a Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He wrote The 10 Strangest Foods in the Bible in 2014.  His websites are www.929chapters.com and brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/DavidMoster.

More by David Moster in Bible History Daily

Fruit in the Bible

You Are What You Eat: The Israelite Diet and Archaeology

10 Great Biblical Artifacts at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem

More on food and dining in the biblical world in Bible History Daily

Biblical Bread: Baking Like the Ancient Israelites

What Did People Eat and Drink in Roman Palestine?

Ancient Bread: 14,400-Year-Old Flatbreads Unearthed in Jordan

BAR Test Kitchen

Making Sense of Kosher Laws

A Feast for the Senses … and the Soul

Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?

A Biblical Spice Rack

Feeding the Pyramid Builders

The post The 10 Strangest Foods in the Bible appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

What purpose did creation stories in Genesis serve? Were they Biblical myths? Pictured here is The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man (c. 1617) by Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Were the creation stories in Genesis meant to be taken literally?

Maybe not, says biblical scholar Shawna Dolansky in her Biblical Views column “The Multiple Truths of Myths” in the January/February 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Our world is very different from the world in which the Biblical authors lived over 2,000 years ago. The ancient world did not have Google, Wikipedia and smartphones—access to information on human history and scientific achievements developed over millennia at the touch of their fingertips.

Many scholars believe that the ancient Israelites had creation stories that were told and retold; these stories eventually reached the Biblical authors, who wrote them down in Genesis and other books of the Bible. Creation stories in Genesis were etiological, Shawna Dolansky and other Biblical scholars argue.¹ That is, the creation stories in Genesis served to provide answers to why the world was the way it was, such as why people wear clothes and why women experience pain during childbirth.

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Creation stories in Genesis were among the many myths that were told in the ancient Near East. Today we may think of myths as beliefs that are not true, but as a literary genre, myths “are stories that convey and reinforce aspects of a culture’s worldview: many truths,” writes Dolansky. So to call something a myth—in this sense—does not necessarily imply that it is not true.

Scholars argue that Biblical myths arose within the context of other ancient Near Eastern myths that sought to explain the creation of the world. Alongside Biblical myths were Mesopotamian myths in which, depending on the account, the creator was Enlil, Mami or Marduk. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the creator of the world was Atum in one creation story and Ptah in another.

Shawna Dolansky

“Like other ancient peoples, the Israelites told multiple creation stories,” writes Shawna Dolansky in her Biblical Views column. “The Bible gives us three (and who knows how many others were recounted but not preserved?). Genesis 1 differs from Genesis 2–3, and both diverge from a third version alluded to elsewhere in the Bible, a myth of the primordial battle between God and the forces of chaos known as Leviathan (e.g., Psalm 74), Rahab (Psalm 89) or the dragon (Isaiah 27; 51). This battle that preceded creation has the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish as its closest analogue. In Enuma Elish, the god Marduk defeats the chaotic waters in the form of the dragon Tiamat and recycles her corpse to create the earth.”

In what other ways do Biblical myths parallel ancient Near Eastern myths? What can we learn about the world in which the ancient Israelites lived through the creation stories in Genesis? Learn more by reading the full Biblical Views column “The Multiple Truths of Myths” by Shawna Dolansky in the January/February 2016 issue of BAR.

BAS Library Members: Read the full Biblical Views column “The Multiple Truths of Myths” by Shawna Dolansky in the January/February 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Notes

1. For example, see Ziony Zevit, “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” BAR, September/October 2015; Mary Joan Winn Leith, “ReViews: Restoring Nudity,” BAR, May/June 2014.

Related reading in Bible History Daily

The Adam and Eve Story: Eve Came From Where?

The Creation of Woman in the Bible

What Does the Bible Say About Infertility?

How the Serpent in the Garden Became Satan

Love Your Neighbor: Only Israelites or Everyone?

The Animals Went in Two by Two, According to Babylonian Ark Tablet

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

The Creation Story from Genesis

Creation Myths Breed Violence

The Persistence of Chaos in God’s Creation

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on January 31, 2016.

The post Should We Take Creation Stories in Genesis Literally? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?

By Ziony Zevit
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 400 pp., $30 (hardcover)
Reviewed by Mary Joan Winn Leith

When he saw Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1541) in the Sistine Chapel, papal Master of Ceremonies Biagio da Casena denounced the fresco’s “dishonest” and “shameful” nudity. Thirteen years later at the behest of the Council of Trent, Daniele da Volterra (and other artists over the centuries) draped the “obscene” figures with fig leaves and vestments in a literal cover-up that only ended in 1994 when restorers at last stripped away the offending drapery and restored the figures to the nudity and nobility envisioned by Michelangelo. In this new book, author Ziony Zevit attempts a similar restoration, not of a painting, but of the story at the opposite end of cosmic time: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Zevit argues that readers of the Bible have been infected by an interpretation of the Adam and Eve story that dates to the Hellenistic era (323 B.C.E.–c. 100 B.C.E.) centuries after the story was originally written down. Yet central to the “muscle memory” of Western civilization is the idea that the Garden of Eden was the site of “the Fall,” a sin for which humans forfeited a “blissful life in a state of grace before the presence of God.” What Zevit calls “backreading”—putting ideas into the story that were never there, like the draperies da Volterra added to the Last Judgment—misleadingly “infuses the story” with “mythic authority,” including the misogyny that feminists decry. But what if, like the fresco restorers, one strips away inherited preconceptions—what Zevit calls the “defect explanation”—to uncover the original story, the story as understood by its ancient Israelite narrator?

This book in essence tells you “everything you wanted to know about the Garden of Eden but were afraid to ask.” Zevit, Distinguished Professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, has combined his experiences as scholar and popular lecturer into a formidably minute yet consistently engaging exploration of the world of Adam and Eve. The book is a response to “complaints against and comments about the story of Adam and Eve,” especially from women in his classes who ask questions such as, “Why is it called the ‘Fall’?” and “How bad was Eve’s sin?” Students want to know why God cursed humanity and what Original Sin is.

Zevit acknowledges the pitfalls of assuming anyone can really know the original intent of a Biblical story. Biblical scholars emphasize that the Bible is like an archaeological site with strata of additions and edits accumulated over time. Nevertheless, after presenting a clear (and compact!) history of early Hebrew and making a case for the relevance of archaeological data and texts from neighboring cultures, Zevit works up a fairly convincing picture of the Biblical author as a ninthcentury B.C.E. citizen of the kingdom of Judah. While this may sound like standard historical-critical Biblical scholarship, one of the unique features of this book—which occasionally leads to some disingenuousness—is that Zevit wants to show readers that the ancient story, understood on its own terms, can provide life-affirming insights relevant to human life today.

This book employs unusual strategies to guide the reader deeper and deeper into the Garden of Eden. One encounters a lively array of Biblical commentary from rabbinic Midrash and Rashi to Martin Luther and Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, by way of African-American spirituals and irreverent American jokes. Epigrams juxtapose 20th-century novelist Marcel Proust and the Talmud. In his renderings of the Biblical text, Zevit leaves some Hebrew words and names untranslated and then discusses their meaning in detail. This effectively short-circuits pre-existing ideas about the story and sets readers up for fresh, often surprising perspectives. Referring to the first woman as Hawwa, for example, circumvents culturebound negative associations that the name “Eve” might trigger. The first man, the ’adam, is made from ‘aphar, not “dust” but a “dirt clod.” The role of the first woman as ‘ezer k’negdo (in the NRSV this is “helper as his partner”) undergoes careful linguistic scrutiny before Zevit proposes “a powerful counterpart,” observing that none of the animals submitted for this role could share the first man’s “load of labor and responsibility.”

Many of Zevit’s word choices and interpretive suggestions would be familiar to Biblical scholars, but this book includes one new idea that many, including this reviewer, have found persuasive. He points out that “rib” is actually only a guess for the meaning of the unusual Hebrew word ṣela‘. In a tour de force of zoology, physiology and linguistics, Zevit plausibly contends that Hawwa was constructed from Adam’s penis bone (part of his argument is that the story explains why human males differ from many mammals in not having one). Some of the other suggestions in this book, while worth consideration, belong in the “maybe” category: that Adam and Eve had sex—and children—in the Garden of Eden* and were mortal from the start.

Feminists will find helpful Zevit’s observation that, while the Garden of Eden story comes from a patriarchal culture, it never alludes to “nonbiological male and female roles and tasks,” perhaps because, as Carol Meyers has argued, in the rural settlements of Iron Age Israel, men and women had to perform many of the same tasks.** Zevit also points out that the Bible barely alludes to the Garden story. So even though the story is essential to Judeo-Christian culture, it “was not a particularly important story, nor did it have any direct bearing on the historical, covenantal, and other theological themes of interest to most authors of the texts included in the Bible.” Zevit concludes that the story is not about a “Fall” at all but about “how all humanity … obtained the knowledge to discriminate between the more and the less preferable when making choices.”

Notes

*Mary Joan Winn Leith, Biblical Views: “Who Did Cain Marry?” BAR, November/December 2013.
**Ross. S. Kraemer, Bible Books, review of Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context, by Carol Meyers, Bible Review, August 1990.

Mary Joan Winn Leith is associate professor and chair of the department of religious studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, and regular contributor to Biblical Views.

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