Male and Female, God Created Them
“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” asks Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner and Loew’s My Fair Lady. The early stories in Genesis are designed to answer a number of such universal questions. How did the world we know come into being? How did death enter the world? Why don’t we all speak the same language?
The earliest chapters of Genesis struggle with the issue of how men and women were created and the nature of their relationship to one another. It is particularly interesting that, in Genesis 1, the almost universal idea that men are the “natural rulers” of the world is challenged in significant ways.
In Genesis 1:26 we read:
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ …..
And God said: ‘Let us make adam in our image, after our likeness…’ (Translation: Rabbi Jo David.)
In this phrase, the word adam is used not as a proper noun, but as a collective for all human beings – “humankind.” Adam is not meant to suggest a proper name for the male being. In fact, the term adam rarely appears as a proper name and never appears in the Tanach in a plural form.1 The word adam can be used as a singular noun meaning “man” and as a collective noun meaning male and female. We see this in Genesis 5:1–2, in which the creation of the zachar (male) and the n’kava (female) is described using plural verbs.
זֶ֣ה סֵ֔פֶר תּֽוֹלְדֹ֖ת אָדָ֑ם בְּי֗וֹם בְּרֹ֤א אֱלֹהִים֙ אָדָ֔ם בִּדְמ֥וּת אֱלֹהִ֖ים עָשָׂ֥ה אֹתֽוֹ: זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בְּרָאָ֑ם וַיְבָ֣רֶךְ אֹתָ֗ם וַיִּקְרָ֤א אֶת־שְׁמָם֙ אָדָ֔ם בְּי֖וֹם הִבָּֽרְאָֽם:
This is the genealogy of Adam; on the day that God created humankind, God created humankind in the Divine image. Male and female God created them, and He called them Mankind on the day of their creation. (Translation: Rabbi Jo David)
Of particular interest in the first creation story is the phrase in Gen. 1:26 na’aseh adam b’tzalmo, kid’mu’taynu – let us create adam (humankind) in our image, (specifically) in our likeness. This can be understood as a teaching that all humankind is fashioned after the Divine.
The critical importance of this phrase cannot be overstated. It establishes the equality of all people. Gender, sexual preference, race, religion, nationality and variations of ability are all reflections of the Divine. The Divine is perfect. Therefore all humans are perfect and should share equally in the blessings of the world that the Divine has created.
The next phrase, beginning with the plural verb, v’yirdu – and they will oversee (rule) – further supports the idea that the term adam is meant to refer to all human beings.
וְיִרְדּוּ֩ בִדְגַ֨ת הַיָּ֜ם וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּבְכָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבְכָל־הָרֶ֖מֶשׂ הָֽרֹמֵ֥שׂ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ:
…and they (man and woman) shall oversee the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, animals that fill the world and all the crawling creatures of the earth. (Translation: Rabbi Jo David.)
וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם:
And God created adam (humankind) in His image, in the image of God (were humans) created; male and female (the Divine) created them. God blessed them and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful, and increase… Gen 1: 27–28 (Rabbi Jo David translation)
The insertion of the phrase zachar u’n’kayvah bara otam – male and female (the Divine) created them – is especially instructive. It’s as though the Biblical editor wishes to make it absolutely clear that both men and women are a simultaneous and equal product of God’s Divine creation of humankind. All of humanity was brought into existence at the same moment. This further emphasizes the importance of the earlier verse “na’aseh adam b’tzalmo, kid’mu’taynu – let us create adam (humankind) in our image, (specifically) in our likeness.” (Gen. 1:26) All humans are to share equally of God’s bounty. Should one believe that this applies only to men, this verse instructs us that God’s goodness and protection extends equally to men and women. Had the story of Creation ended right here, the world would be a very different, and (hopefully) a more just haven for all. However, as stated earlier, the Creation stories in Genesis not only relate a cohesive narrative of the creation of the world, they also seek to answer universal questions about the way in which the world operates. The creation of human beings on the sixth day of creation (Gen. 1:27–28) presents a philosophy for humans to follow. Everyone is equal and should share equally in God’s bounty. Men and women must continue God’s work of human creation by making more humans. Humans are the shepherds of the rest of God’s creation and should be vegetarians (Genesis 1:29.)
The problem with the first chapter of Genesis is that while it answers questions about how the physical world came to be, it also presents an equality between men and women that is not supported by the way in which most human societies operate. All humankind does not share equally in God’s bounty. There is almost universal discrimination against anyone who is not male, completely abled and of the correct ethnicity or race in a given society. In addition, there are important questions that are not addressed:
• How did men become the dominant beings in most societies?
• Why are women almost universally treated as subservient to men?
• Why do men and women feel sexually attracted to one another?
• Why do men and women feel compelled to be intimate with one another when that intimacy often leads to the pain of childbirth and possibly death for the woman in childbirth?
Chapter 2 of Genesis is presented to answer some of these questions. This is the story that most people know about the creation of human beings. God and the adama – mother earth – work together as parents to birth a male human. The adama gives of her body – the dust – and God contributes the breath of life. Then God sets the adam in the Garden of Eden, a perfect place, and charges him with naming all the creatures that live there. During this process, the man discovers his own proper name, Adam, son of adama.
The man, however, is lonely. God puts the man to sleep, takes a rib out of Adam’s body and from this secondary material, creates a woman for him. Only after Adam and the woman have become sexually aware does the woman get her name, given to her by Adam. He names her Chava, a wordbased on the Hebrew root for “life.” Her name signals the reader that it will be Chava’s responsibility to give life to the new humans who will populate the earth.
This story explains and justifies the familiar norm of male domination of women. Man is a direct creation of adama, the sacred Mother Earth, and God, the Divine father. Man’s origin is sacred. Woman is made of inferior material – a bone from the man, not the sacred dust from the life giver adama and the Divine breath of life from God the Creator. The story implies that because woman does not share man’s Divine origins, she cannot possibly be considered equal to man.
Casual readers of the Torah often dismiss or skip over the Chapter 1 creation story. Others may dismiss it as Biblical hyperbole. It is easy to overlook the Chapter 1 human creation story because the Chapter 2 Adam and Eve story is so deeply entrenched in the Western religious imagination. Christians, Jews and Muslims all “know” that God created Adam from the dust of the earth and later created Eve from Adam’s rib.
Jewish Biblical commentators, however, were very aware of the existence of the two stories and were disturbed by the differences between the two. Jewish Biblical exegesis is based on the idea that every single letter of the Torah has meaning. For this reason, the statement in Genesis 1:27, “Male and female He created them” was of concern because it seemed to contradict the Adam and Eve story.
Rabbinic commentators tried to explain the meaning of this phrase through midrashim, a technique in which issues in the sacred text are reconciled through storytelling. Early midrashim, like those in Bereshit Rabba 8:1 (approximately 5th–7th century CE) offer a variety of possible explanations for the phrase “male and female…” Rabbi Jeremiah ben Elazar is quoted as saying, “When the Holy One, blessed be the One, created the first adam, (God) created him as a hermaphrodite (or as an androgynous being.)” This interpretation implies that the first human creation was not Adam and Eve as one being but some other creature that somehow got lost in the mists of time.
Another midrash from the same source quotes Rabbi Shmuel Bar Nachman: “At the time that the holy One, blessed be the One, created the first adam, He created him double-faced and then split him, and made for him two backs.”2 The simple meaning of this statement is that God separated the male and female being. It does not explain, however, who these two beings were or what happened to them.
In neither of these midrashim is the issue of the female nature of the being considered. However, other commentators posited that the female in the term “male and female” was the first woman. Why then, was she not identified as Eve? Biblical exegetes deduced that the first woman could not be Eve because Eve’s creation is spelled out so specifically in Genesis 2. Therefore, if there was a woman before Eve, what was her name?
Some sources speak of her as “the first Eve.” In Bereshit Rabba 22:7, Judah ben Rabbi suggests that Cain and Abel were arguing about “the first Eve.”3 Other sources ascribe the first woman’s identity to the Sumerian demon Lilith mentioned in the story Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree. This epic poem, found on a tablet at Ur, dates to approximately 2000 BCE.4 The legend of Lilith tells of a demon goddess whose role in the universe is to harm women in childbirth, and to hurt or abduct infants and children. Some stories also state that Lilith delights in creating discord between husbands and wives. Because Lilith is independent, insists that she is equal to any man and is unmarried, male storytellers cast her as an unhappy woman who is jealous of all women who are married. Lilith is vilified and used as a cautionary tale for young women who don’t accept their “place” in the social order – subservient to men.5
The idea that Lilith was the woman described in the first chapter of Genesis is strongly embedded in Jewish folklore. In Sepher Ben Sira (The Alphabet of Ben Sira) an early midrashic work written sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries C.E., Lilith is presented as Adam’s first woman.6 The story explains that Lilith was created out of the dust of the earth in the same way in which Adam was created and at the same time. They are the equal creations described in Genesis 1:27–28.
According to Sepher Ben Sira, Adam and Lilith live together in the Garden of Eden. However, when Adam and Lilith are going to have sex for the first time, Adam commands Lilith to lie underneath him so that he can dominate her. Lilith refuses to agree to be submissive to her husband. She fights for her equality, basing her claim to equality on the fact that both she and Adam were created in the same way – from the dust of the earth – and at the same time(This is an explanation of the phrase “male and female God created them.). When Adam does not agree that he and Lilith are equals, Lilith speaks God’s unpronounceable name7 and flys away from Eden. Because she was not banished from Eden, Lilith maintains her immortality. Adam later loses his immortality when he is expelled from Eden. In addition to the Ben Sira text, this story is told in Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews.8
The story of Adam and Lilith does not appear in the text of the Torah. However, the midrash speaks of them as being married. This is a parallel to the concept that Adam and Eve were married in the Garden of Eden. However, a close reading of the Hebrew text in Genesis 2 and 3 does not support this idea. Rather, the marriage of Adam and Eve is a midrash imposed on the text in translation.
The purpose of creating a midrashic interpretation that sees Adam and Eve as a married couple is designed to support the institution of religious marriage. Reading an established religious ritual or social norm back into the text (we marry because Adam and Eve were married) is an ancient technique for justifying a wide variety of religious and social practices. This technique is so successful that we don’t realize that it is not supported by the text. To understand what is actually happening, we must begin by looking at Genesis 2:18.
The man is in the Garden and is not happy. God notices that the man needs a companion.
וַיֹּ֨אמֶר֙ יְהוָֹ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֔ים לֹא־ט֛וֹב הֱי֥וֹת הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדּ֑וֹ אֶֽעֱשֶׂה־לּ֥וֹ עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ:
And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be by himself; I will make a helper for him who is like himself. (Translation: Rabbi Jo David)
The Hebrew phrase here ezer k’negdo suggests that the being created will meet the man’s needs in a way that is complementary and supportive but not subservient. We know that this is a proper interpretation because the term ezer is used in other places in the Torah to describe God’s support of human beings. Since no one would suggest that God is subservient to human beings, an ezer must be at least an equal of the man, if not superior to him.9
God takes one of the man’s ribs and fashions it into a woman. (Gen 2:21–22)
וַיִּ֩בֶן֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֧ים ׀ אֶת־הַצֵּלָ֛ע אֲשֶׁר־לָקַ֥ח מִן־הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְאִשָּׁ֑ה…
Then the Lord God took a rib from the man and made a woman. Gen. 2:22(Translation: Rabbi Jo David)
Presented with his new helper, the man breaks into a poetic mode and announces that she will be called “woman” because she was taken from man. (Gen.2:23–24)
וַיֹּ֘אמֶר֘ הָֽאָדָם֒ זֹ֣את הַפַּ֗עַם עֶ֚צֶם מֵֽעֲצָמַ֔י וּבָשָׂ֖ר מִבְּשָׂרִ֑י לְזֹאת֙ יִקָּרֵ֣א אִשָּׁ֔ה כִּ֥י מֵאִ֖ישׁ לֻֽקֳחָה־זֹּֽאת:
Then the man said, ‘This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman for from man was she taken. (JPS translation)
“(She) shall be called Woman for from man was she taken.” This is a barely understandable pun in English. In Hebrew it works better because of the assonance of the words ish (man) and isha (woman). It should be noted, however, that the Hebrew words for man and woman are actually derived from different linguistic roots.10 An isha is not a female ish, although folk tradition tends to think of them in this way.
The next verse goes on to explain:
עַל־כֵּן֙ יַֽעֲזָב־אִ֔ישׁ אֶת־אָבִ֖יו וְאֶת־אִמּ֑וֹ וְדָבַ֣ק בְּאִשְׁתּ֔וֹ וְהָי֖וּ לְבָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד:
“Therefore, a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his woman so that they become one flesh. (Translation: Rabbi Jo David)
Most texts translate the term ishto as “his wife” rather than “his woman.” However, there are absolutely no grounds for such a translation. If the word isha means “woman” in one verse, how can it mean “wife” in the next? It is only a patriarchal understanding of the Biblical text that imposes the concept of husband and wife in the translation of this story. First, in Genesis 2:24, the woman is turned into a wife. Then in the apple eating scene in Genesis 3:6 the woman gives her “husband” the apple.
…וַתִּתֵּ֧ן גַּם־לְאִישָׁ֛הּ עִמָּ֖הּ וַיֹּאכַֽל:
And she gave it (the apple) to her man who was with her, and he ate it. (Translation: Rabbi Jo David.)
The term ish is once more applied to the man. There is no special word that suggests that the man’s status has changed in any way. He is only a “husband” through the translator’s lens and the desire of patriarchal religious institutions to impose “marriage” on a man and woman who are living together.
The rabbis were very enthusiastic about the marriage of Adam and Eve and there are many midrashim about their nuptials.11 However, the plain sense of the text does not support the transformation of the man and the woman into marital partners.
The use of the stories in the Bible as proof text for societal roles and norms that are unjust is an ancient tradition. Without the ability to read the original story in Hebrew, it is all too easy to find a translation that distorts the Bible’s plain meaning.
Of particular concern should be the use of the Creation stories to support gender discrimination and inequality for humans who are not male (There are, of course, many other ways to read this text to support equality for others who are discriminated against. That, however, must be the subject of a different article.).
It is my hope that this exegesis of the early creation stories helps the reader to understand that the Bible actually supports the ideal of male and female equality and that the “time honored” translations of words like adam, ish and isha must be looked at more critically so that the sacred text is honored rather than distorted to promote gender discrimination and inequality.
May we all be blessed to struggle with these texts in a spirit of love, healing and reconciliation.
1. Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Commentary, Genesis, (Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1989,) note on “man,” 12
2. Rabbi Dr. H. Freeman and Maurice Simon, eds., Midrash Rabba; Bereshit, Vol. 1,( London, Soncino Press, 1961) 54; accessed from source below, 12/24/15
3. Midrash Rabba, – Bereshit, Vol 1, 187. Accessed from source below, 12/24/15
4. http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/lilith/, accessed 12/19/15.
5. For an excellent discussion of Lilith and her history, see https://www.academia.edu/4063943/WOMAN_HAS_TWO_FACES_RE-EXAMINING_EVE_AND_LILITH_IN_JEWISH_FEMINIST_THOUGHT and The Lilith Question, Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, Lilith Magazine, Fall 1976 Vol 1, #1
6. Sepher Ben Sira, accessed through https://www.academia.edu/4063943/WOMAN_HAS_TWO_FACES_RE-EXAMINING_EVE_AND_LILITH_IN_JEWISH_FEMINIST_THOUGHT
7. What is meant by “the unpronounceable name” is not clear, although the term most likely refers to the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name of God that Jews do not pronounce. In early rabbinic literature, the tetragrammaton is understood to be God’s attribute of mercy. In the context of the Sepher Ben Sira story, the meaning of Lilith invoking the tetragrammaton makes sense because she is asking for God’s mercy in order to be released from a situation that she feels is unjust. For more information about the tetragrammaton, see http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-tetragrammaton/#
8. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol 1, Henrietta Szold, trans. (Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1954).65
9. Sarna, foot note “a fitting helper.” Also see; Deut 33:7; Ps 33:20.
10. F. Brown,S Driver, C Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, (Peabody, MA. Hendrikson Publishing, 1996) 35 – ish;.61 – isha.
11. See http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/eve-midrash-and-aggadah.