Genesis 2 (yes, still continued)

Before I move on with the story of the creation of woman, I'd like to take the opportunity to make a couple of brief notes on Genesis 2:5-6 and Genesis 2:10-13. This aside is largely the result of my wife's input--she looked at my last post and thought I did not focus enough on what a correct or appropriate handling of these verses should be. (After much hunching of my shoulders and a series of "but"'s and "I meant to"'s, I agreed that she was right about what she was saying.)

Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.

My wife has been studying ecology this semester, and she said it was possible that the Earth's biosystem was originally intended to bring water to the soil in this way. It makes sense to me (although I was much less agreeable yesterday) because the Earth's present system (in which rain comes down upon the ground in a variety of downpours, thunderstorms, and severe incidents of weather turbulence such as hurricanes or cyclones) does not seem to fit the harmonic description of a paradise created by a God of order (both in Genesis 2 and in the song recorded in Genesis 1:1-2:3). One of the Bible's constant themes, as we will see in the coming months, is God's unchangeable nature--why would a God who, according to Hebrews 13, is the same yesterday, today, and forever create a weather system as erratic as the one that exists on Earth today?

Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon--it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good--the bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon--it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris--it flows east of Assyria--And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

I mentioned in my last entry that the above verses have become the stuff of a great deal of speculation among people who (to be quite honest) have far too much time on their hands . . . but what I didn't cover was the significance they had for the ancient Israelis, and the significance they should have for us 4 millennia later. The ancient Israelis, it seems, had a fairly good idea where the Garden of Eden was--it seems that to them, given verses 11 and 12 which describe a place that was real and commonly known to the Israeli society of the time (obviously a place in which precious metals were mined and/or traded), the Garden of Eden constituted more than a convenient story to tell little children but a memory passed down from generation to generation. To them, the Garden of Eden was a literal place--it existed, it had form, and it was a location that would have been identifiable to the Israelis who heard Genesis 2 recited.

What does this mean to us?

I've studied the origin stories of several ancient civilizations, and all carry the same theme of a paradise that was destroyed or lost due to a rift between human beings and "the gods." Whether or not you believe Genesis 2 and 3 to have been a literal event in the history of the human race, it is impossible, in my view, to take all of these stories as mere fairy tales. Indeed, even today, humanity carries inside of its core the fundamental awareness that disease, death, and natural disasters are wrong. What scientists and secularists have taken to be a sign of humanity's inventiveness (the stories of ancient cultures) may instead be an expression of an unconscious memory, the memory of a time in which the natural rhythms and processes of the human body and soul existed in harmony with creation and Creator, free from the constraints of infirmity, old age, and physical collapse.

With these notes in mind, let us turn our attention to the story of the creation of woman . . .

Genesis 2:18-25 is the crux of the Bible's teaching on men and women--everything the Bible says about sexuality, about social relations in and outside the home, and about families and marriage derives from these 8 verses, which serve as the "why" behind the rest of the Bible's coverage of these topics. It has become a great deal harder these days to determine the veracity of claims by this or that faction regarding the "true intent" of the Bible as it relates to men, women, and sexuality--particularly in a culture whose "bible" is the corpus of products distributed by entertainment companies--and I think that even a cursory reading of the Bible demonstrates that, to a certain extent, all sides battling for supremacy in what has become known as America's "culture wars" are in error.

Let us first consider Genesis 2:18, which serves as the reason for the creation of women:

Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone--I will make him a helper suitable for him."

If it is one thing that social scientists have conclusively proven (though they seem to have proven little else), it is that human beings are, in their terms, "social animals." We live, we thrive, and we conceive ourselves in relation to one another--sons to fathers, wives to husbands, workers to management, and so forth. The preponderance of human civilizations, large and small, demonstrates that we cannot live isolated, bereft of human companionship. The occasional soul who divests him-/herself from communities and social ties to seek a life of solitude is rare, and usually the products of their isolation are fraught with misery and pain.

However, I think an even more fundamental point about our species needs to be made here. Genesis 1:27 says

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him--male and female He created them.

Male and female cannot exist apart from one another--they are essential qualities that can only have meaning in the shadow of the other. Men generally perceive their masculinity in a sense that is not female, just as women through the ages have perceived their sexuality and identity as not male. Both male and female, moreover, bear the stamp (or image) of God--so a reading of Genesis 2:18 in light of Genesis 1:27 implies that in God's eyes, humanity was incomplete without both masculine and feminine qualities. (I know that, to some extent, this is a mundane point, but you would be surprised at the number of people who lack even a rudimentary understanding of this dynamic as it relates to the human soul. To me, it is no surprise that a culture which has essentially tossed aside every concept of masculinity that it once possessed--however imperfect--is experiencing the explosive development of GLBT communities. Human beings cannot exist as "asexual" entities, and any attempt to bring about a culture of "asexuality" will foster alternative sexualities that are, at their core, unconscious attempts to restore the essential division between male and female.)

Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them--and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

These verses are important in the narrative because they establish (clearly) that for human beings, male and female coexist together within our species. Again, this is a rudimentary point, but it also reveals a fundamental understanding among the ancient Israelis who heard these words recited: that the human soul, in both its male and female aspects, is essentially different from the life qualities of an animal. As I said in my previous post, there is a "something" about human beings that is qualitatively different from animals--and this is not always good.

A female donkey, goat, or lion can neither appreciate, nor be appreciated by, a man in the same way that a woman can be. The reason has less to do with differences in anatomy than in the fact that human beings, in their sexual relationships, look for love, a concept that animals neither understand nor are capable of giving. Let's face it--love, as we generally understand it (and always have understood it) is the complete joining of two human hearts together as one . . . anyone who has ever owned or caref for animals knows that the mating of male and female birds, cats, dogs, cattle, and lions bears little resemblance to our homey concept of the human family. Cats, for example, mate without regard to any semblance of a family unit--the male "boinks" with the female, then leaves her (presumably for another female) to raise a litter of kittens which will leave her care in a matter of months.

Something inside of us revolts at the idea of considering the above scenario to be right, good, or normal for human beings, regardless of culture or historical time frame. To the extent that we look to sexual relationships as a source of genuine affection and love, we prove that, at its core, the human soul is (both in its male and female qualities) different from the life of an animal.

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 the flesh at that place.

Two things to note here:

First, this verse was the inspiration for the modern surgical procedure of anesthitizing the patient before opening his/her body. The fact that human beings perform a version of this procedure on each other demonstrates the likelihood that a man could have been rendered asleep by God, opened up, then "sewn" shut again.

Second, the theory that women have fewer ribs as a result of God's "surgery" is . . . false. (Medical science has conclusively proven that both men and women have 24 ribs.) However, it is also a given in medical circles that a rib can grow back in its entirity after removal from the human body, in the span of approximately 2 or 3 months, so for those people who are looking for some sort of "evidence" that human beings were created by a divine originator, this verse will simply prove to be a waste of time. (The ancient Israelis, by the way, were no less intelligent than we are, even if they did not have the surgical technology we have, and I am sure they were well aware that men and women had equal sets of ribs.)

The Bible, at its core, does not give human beings easy formulas. Instead, it invites the human soul to reconcile itself to the God that the Bible celebrates on the basis of one thing: faith. This quality is severely lacking in our culture, which is unfortunate, because without it, one cannot appreciate this text, nor any other portion of the Bible, in the ways in which it was designed to be appreciated.

The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

The man 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."

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife--and they shall become one flesh.

The core of the Bible's discussion of human sexuality derives from these three verses in Genesis 2 (verses 22-24). These are verses which Jesus himself quoted in an argument with the Pharisees over divorce (see Matthew 19:1-12) and which Paul quoted in reference to the ideal relationship between husbands and wives (see Ephesians 5). They are, in addition, the wellspring from which all of the sexual commandments in the Torah originate.

We practice this concept even today, though in a somewhat different fashion than what conservative Christians may like to imagine. The scenario in which a man leaves the home of his birth to seek a relationship with a woman with whom he lives as a common-law spouse is a story as familiar to individual experiences as it is to our culture's entertainment products, and I might hasten to add that the union between man and woman, or what the ancient Israelis would have referred to as "marriage," differs greatly from the institutional model we see in our society today.

This verse--and all the other passages about sexuality in the Bible--make it perfectly clear that to the ancient Israelis, and to first century Christians, sexuality--and ultimately, marriage--was a bonding together of two souls into one. Any reading of the Bible that treats marriage as a ceremonial union involving paperwork, the lighting of candles, and a house with a white picket fence utterly misses the original meaning of the text as its original recipients would have understood it. As I mentioned earlier in this blog entry, humans over the millennia have always sought one thing over all others in their sexual relationships: love. What is love other than eternal union of two souls as one?

If it is one thing that Christianity has mishandled, it is this concept . . . a principle that lies so deeply within the core of humanity's consciousness that it is accepted as a given across cultures and time frames. According to the Bible, one is not married to someone simply because he/she engages in a ceremony but because he/she, for whatever reason, unites his/her soul with that person. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is what essentially happens during the sexual union--not merely a uniting of bodies but a uniting of hearts, minds, spirits, and souls.

This is why the Bible treats of sexualities that do not respect this principle with horror--not because they represent attempts by individuals to overturn a social order but because they (in effect) bring about the uniting of hearts, minds, and spirits that are not designed to be united. Only a couple suited and designed to be together can, in good conscience, do as the first man and woman are said to have done in Genesis 2:25:

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.