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Ariel Álvarez Valdez Adam and Eve: origin or parable? Santiago del Estero – According to the Bible, God made Adam, the first man, from clay. From one of his ribs, he made Eve, his wife. And then he placed them both in a fabulous paradise. Both lived naked and shameless and God, in the afternoons, used to come down to visit and talk to them (Genesis 2). This story, which admired us when we were children, puts us in a tight spot now that we are grown-ups. Modern science has show that man has evolved from inferior beings, from the Australopithecus, some three million years ago, passing through the Homo erectus, the Homo habilis and the Homo sapiens, to the man we are today. So today we know that man was not made of clay or a rib; that there was not one unique couple at the beginning, but several ones; and that the first men were quite primitive, they were not endowed with wisdom or perfection. Why does the Bible tell us this tale about the way man and woman were created? Simply because it is a parable, an imaginary tale that seeks to teach people something. It was created by an anonymous Hebrew religious educator, whom scholars call the “Yahvist”, around the 10th C. b.C. At the time nobody knew anything about the theory of evolution. But since his purpose was not to give a scientific explanation about the origin of man, but to give man a religious approach, he chose this narration in which every detail contains a religious message in accordance with the mentality of those days. We will now try to find out what the author wanted to teach us with this tale. A potter God The first detail that draws out attention is that the text says that man was created from clay. The Genesis says that at the beginning, when the earth was still an enormous desert, “the God Yahveh formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (v.7). In order to understand this, we must take into account that in those days the fact that some time after death a person turned to dust had always called people’s attention. This observation led them to imagining that the human body was made basically from dust. The idea extended throughout the entire eastern world, to the point that we find it in the tradition of most of those peoples. Babylonians, for instance, told how their gods had formed men from clay, and Egyptians depicted in their temple walls how the gods had made Pharaohs from clay. Greeks and Romans also shared this belief. When the sacred writer wanted to tell about the origin of man, he based himself on that same popular belief, but he added a novelty to his tale: man is not only dust, he possesses an internal sparkle of life that makes him different from all other live beings, because as it comes from God, it makes him sacred. And this happens not only to the king or Pharaoh, but to the ordinary man in the street as well. This is what he wanted to say when he says that God “breathed into his nostrils”. This was the beginning of the revolution of the anthropological conception of those days. The image of a potter God, on his knees, mixing clay with his hands and breathing into the nose of an image can seem strange to us. Nonetheless, for the mentality of those days, this was quite a tribute to God. Indeed, of all the known professions of the society of those days, the worthiest, the grandest and the most perfect one was that of the potter. It was quite impressive to see a man who, with nothing but a little bit of simple clay was capable of giving shape and create precious objects such as crockery, refined vases and exquisite utensils with such mastery. The Yahwist, without meaning to give a scientific lesson as to the origin of man, since he didn’t know it, wanted to indicate something more important: that every man, whoever he is, is a the direct and very special work of God. He is not just another animal of creation, but a superior being, mysterious, sacred and immensely big, because God himself went to the trouble of making him. The image of the potter God has been considered as one of the best achieved images of the book. And throughout the centuries, it will come back again to show us man’s extreme fragility and his total dependence in God, as in Jeremiah. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, says the Lord” (18, 6). Man’s loneliness After that there are several curious and interesting details in the story. He says that God put the man he had created in a marvelous garden, full of trees that provided him with shadow and which would yield tasty fruits (v.9). There was plenty of fruit in this garden, since it was watered by an enormous river which had four big branches. Since life at the time was mainly in desert lands where water was very hard to get, such a description awakened their appetites and gave them a perfect image of the happiness they would have wanted to enjoy. But all of a sudden the store comes to halt. God himself feels that what he has done is not very good: “It is not good for the man to be alone” (v. 18). He has surrounded him with luxury and welfare, but he has nobody he can develop a relationship with. Seeing this circumstance, says the Genesis, God seeks to correct the situation through another intervention of his. With great generosity he created all sorts of animals, those on the ground and the birds in the sky and presents them to the man so that he will name them and they will be his company (v. 19). However, he doesn’t find the suitable company for the man. The animals are not the ideal company for him either (v. 20). Has God made another mistake? After living it more thought, he will try to correct his second mistake through a definitive work: So the God Yahweh caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. He then took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the God Yahweh made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. Then the man said: “This is indeed bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man” (v. 21-23). Finally God is successful. He can smile in satisfaction because he has now achieved a good result. Man has found his happiness with the presence of the woman. The teachings of this narration are very deep: The first: that it isn’t good for man to be alone. That he hasn’t been created as an autonomous and self-sufficient being, but someone who needs the others, he needs others to complement him in his life; without them the same man ‘is not good’. The second teaching is in the phrase that says that Adam didn’t find “convenient help” in animals. Here he is telling us that animals are not on the same level as man, that they do not have the same nature, and therefore it wasn’t correct for him to relate to animals as he did with people. The third teaching tells us that it is correct for a man to leave his father and his mother, very solid and stable affections at the time, in order to unite with a woman. This is the Bible’s first song to conjugal love. Another fascinating detail is the deep sleep that God casts upon Adam before creating the woman. Many interpret this as a kind of preparatory anesthesia, since God is about to submit Adam to surgery to take his rib and before that wants to make him numb. Adam’s sleep is more related with the conception the author had of the creative action. Creating is God’s secret. Only God knows it only He can do it. Man cannot be present in God’s act of creation. That is why he sleeps when God creates him. When he wakes up he does not know what has happened. Nor does the woman who has just been created because when she realizes she exists, she has already been formed. With this scene the narration tells that God’s acts in the world are invisible for human eyes. Only those who have faith can discover them. Nobody can see God passing through his life if he is asleep and does not wake to his faith. A man and a woman But the most important moment of the narration and somehow the center of the entire narration, is the detail that the woman is formed from Adam’s rib. Our author uses a marvelous image in order to leave a magnificent lesson to the readers. In order to create the woman, God didn’t take a bone from the man’s head, because she is not destined to command in the house; but he didn’t make her from a bone of his foot, because she is not to be his servant. Upon saying that he creates her from his rib, that is, from his side, she is placed at his same height, at his same level, and with identical dignity. Such an audacity of declaring woman equal to man, must have greatly aggravated his fellow men, and was no doubt a revolutionary idea for those times. The narration finishes with a suggestive last detail: “They were both naked, the man and the woman, but they felt no shame” (v. 25). Further on, when the drama of the original sin unfolds over Adam and Eve, it says: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (3, 7). This detail fed the imagination of millions of readers through the centuries and lead to thinking that the original sin had to do with sex. But what the author was trying to tell us with this observation was a last message to his readers, based on everyday experience. He saw how little children went around naked without feeling ashamed. Instead, when they entered puberty, they became aware of their nakedness and covered their bodies. And that is the age when everybody becomes aware of good and evil and become responsible for their actions. The Yahwist wanted to say that every person, when they enter adult life, is a sinner, and therefore responsible of the misfortunes of society. Nobody can consider himself innocent of the evil around him, nor can he say: “it has nothing to do with me”. That is why everybody is ashamed of their nakedness. The Bible does not teach us what was the real origin of man and woman, because the sacred writer didn’t know that. But, as we saw, he is not interested in telling “how” man appeared on Earth, but “from where”. And his answer is: from the hands of God. The “how” is for scientists to say. The “from where” will be answered by the Bible. And something even more profound: that any man, whoever he is, is a direct and very special work of God. __________________ P. Ariel Álvarez Valdez is a Biblist Theologian and the author of the book Los Enigmas de la Biblia [The enigmas of the Bible] .
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