Holy Moly: Two Beginnings?

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. Gen 2:1-3

This can only be explained as the writer being lazy and sticking a paragraph of the previous chapter at the beginning… wait, Ephraim is telling me that the original writers of the Torah didn’t come up with the chapter headings. So… someone in the middle ages fucked up royal, huh?

Why break the chapters like this? Could it be to make it so that it doesn’t seem quite as much like two different origin stories hastily cobbled together? To make Adam and Steve… sorry, Eve, seem like part of the previous story?

Adam and Eve

So here we are, where we all want to be, Genesis 2 (the not-scribal-error part). We don’t know what day it is because, well, it’s a different story. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Adam and Eve are to “the six days of creation” what Khepri the creator is to Atum the creator: both of the latter are creation myths by the same culture that lasted thousands of years, and both can coexist happily, but neither have to be part of the other for it to work. So it is with Genesis 1 and 2.

Genesis 1 tells the story of creation, the genesis of the world if you will. Human beings are put on the world but other than “Get fuckin’!” they don’t get much air time. So now we’re going to trace the roots of the chosen people way, way back to the father of it all, Adam, whose name means “The Man,” by the by. He’s the primeval man. And his creation from dust is very, very similar to the creation myths of numerous other Middle Eastern cultures, except for some reason without the whole jacking off onto the dust to make mud aspect of things. Ephraim tells me they discussed that but wanted to avoid a hard R rating.

So God makes Adam, and he’s obviously a chosen guy because God made him told him to give names to things; which, as we saw in Genesis 1, is a pretty big deal. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had Adam decided to name everything “Burton Q. Lindquist Jr.” but that’s neither here nor there. God is on the hunt for a partner for Adam, so Adam gets to name everything.

Here’s where a culture which placed value in a particular animal might have changed this myth. Say the Israelites had placed particular value in goats, for instance. Then God would have gone looking for a partner for the primeval man and when God brought forth the goats to be named, that would have been the partnership. And maybe the whole thing with the Fall and ancient mysoginy would have wound up differently.

But the ancient authors of this myth wanted to make it pretty clear that only woman was fit to be a partner to man. Now, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: this is a Just-So story about how men and women came to get together, and it rather places women in the subservient role in the relationship. “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” And that’s how the leopard got his spots. Woman is part of man, she is his helpmeet, etc.

But think about it for a minute based on what I just said: no other partner for man would do than woman. It’s an acknowledgment that human relationships are going to be paramount to this particular story, the story of the chosen people, not the story of the chosen people and also their goats. Livestock are important, but husband and wife are one fucking flesh, yo.

And nowhere does God say, “And by the way, only a man and a woman can do this; if you’ve got two dudes screwing, forget it, out of the pool, I’m tearing it down and starting over. Two chicks doing it is totally cool though, as long as they’re hot.” God just says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Man does pretty much all the talking, and it’s clear he’s straight, so when he says that’s how it is, take that as how he thinks it should be, not how God says. Adam’s doing all the naming in this chapter anyway, and God lets him, but God doesn’t say it’s all correct, just that if that’s the name Adam decides on, that’s the name he decides on.

In all seriousness, I don’t want this to all be about liberal theology. The men (pretty much all men) writing the Bible were living in a time when things were a certain way. Moving on.