When we were last together, we heard the first creation story, starting with the familiar line “In the beginning,” and then continuing with God speaking things into existence. It is the story of creation in six days, and then God resting on the seventh. It has the form with which most of us are familiar, and yet in its telling, we were missing many of the pieces which we also expect to find in the creation story, like God forming adam out of the ground, and then forming Eve using a rib from Adam, and the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And those are missing from that first creation story, because they are obviously not a part of it, because they are a part of the second creation story. Many people are surprised to discover not just that we have two creation stories, but they are so different from each other. But, what they show us was also very common in the ancient near-east. Egypt, for example, had several different creation stories, as did the Babylonians. They had different stories, because they had different purposes and reasons for telling the story, and each of them contains a fundamental truth that might not be about how creation was made, but the why and the who of creation. But before we dig into that, let’s clear up one piece of information.
If you notice, and hopefully you did, or you heard me point it out in the worship video we send out on Friday’s. Today’s passage does not begin at the beginning of chapter two, as we might expect it to, but instead it begins at verse four, and then not even at the start, but what is called verse 4b, because it’s the second line of the verse. In the original manuscripts of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there are no chapter and verse markings. Occasionally there would be a larger space of white in the text marking a transition, but that was the only breaks in the text. You could not cite chapter and verse, you would just read or say the passage out loud so that people would not what you were talking about. Chapters were not added until the 13th century when Robert Langston, who was the arch bishop of Canterbury, added them to the text. We have no idea why he made the decisions he did, and you will sometimes see, as we do here, that there were some very strange decisions made, and, quite frankly, he made some mistakes. But, Langston did not do verses, that didn’t come until the mid-16th century, when Robert Estienne, sometimes also called Robert Stephens, added verses, which also occasionally have some strange placement. There have been attempts to correct some of these problems, but they have failed.
And so chapter and verse are relatively new in the history of scripture, and don’t always go where we might think they should go. But, they are what we have, and at the end of the first story, or the beginning of verse 4, it says “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” And then it shifts to say “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.” It’s a subtle shift there, but the first story is from the heavens to the earth, and then the second is from the earth to the heavens. This is an indication of where the emphasis is going to be in each story, and we can see this in the portrayal of God. In Genesis one, God has been referred to as the cosmic God, although a better term is a transcendent God. God speaks and things happen, there is emphasis on God’s power and majesty and being totally separated from the creation. In that story, remember, humanity is also created last, and man and woman are created at the same time, and both are created in the image of God. That is a very different image and form of creation, than what we see in today’s story.
In the second creation story, God is very involved, literally hands on, as God forms man out of the dust of the ground and breathes the breath of life into him. Now two things here. Although the man is referred to in the Hebrew as adam, it’s translated as man, because that is the meaning of the word adam. It doesn’t become a proper noun as a name until chapter 3. And second, because we are reading the passage in English, we are missing some word play, which happens a lot in Hebrew, and so what the Hebrew says is that God created adam out of the adama, the man out of the ground, or we might say in English, the human out of the humus, or as Amy Jill Levine says, the earthling out of the earth. And the verb formed as the same one used for a potter forming a pot, and so God is very involved, down and dirty here. This is a very imminent God, one that is close to humanity.
What we also see here, although it’s much more apparent in the Hebrew, is that there is a different name for God being used. In the first chapter, God is referred to as Elohim, and translated simply as God. In the second story, God is referred to by what is known as the tetragrammaton, or the letters YHWH, which is commonly pronounced Yahweh, although we have no idea what the actually pronunciation is, and it is also the word that Jews won’t say, but it’s usually translated into English as Lord God, and Lord is in all caps, even if they are smaller caps, and so as you read the Hebrew scripture and you see different words being used for God, that’s why. what this also indications is great likelihood that there are two different authors who have written down these stories, but we will put off digging deeper into that until we get to the Noah story, where it’s easier to parse them out. It’s also believed that this is the earlier of the two stories, possibly being composed just before, during, or shortly after the time of King David, usually dated to around the year 1000 BCE, and chapter one probably written down around the time of the exile perhaps 600-500 BCE. And some have speculated that these two stories may represent different traditions in the two different kingdoms of Israel and so the second is written down at the time of the exile, and after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, to make sure that they were not lost.
But back to the story. God creates adam, man, but then notice that God places man into the garden, which means that he was not created there, but somewhere else, although where that is is not clear. And although we are given some indication where Eden is, besides for in the east, with the rivers named. We only know two of those rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. It’s entirely possible that the other two were also known in antiquity, and we have lost knowledge of them, or it could be that the other two were never known and the location then becomes a paradox, it’s so close and yet so far, known and unknown, “It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!” But wherever it is, once man is there, it’s not all free time and relaxation, he has to work the land, although there are trees to provide food, and remembering again that everyone is a vegetarian at this point, and two trees are important. One is the tree of life, and the second is, of course, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of which God says that the man is not supposed to eat, or he will drop dead, and of course we will talk a lot more about that next week.
But, the man is in the garden, tilling and tending it, but he’s alone, and so God decides to create a companion, a helper, a term we will come back to in a moment, and God creates animals, also formed out of the ground, and the man gives them names, and as we will see moving forward, naming is an important thing and can give power over things, and tell us what we consider important or not, as we are discussing now, and we might wonder what would have happened if the woman would have been able to name things. Would they have been named differently? Would the power be different? We don’t know, because she’s not there yet. After the animals are created, and man has named them, none of them are found as suitable partners, and so God puts adam to sleep and brings forth woman, which is great because while dog’s can make good companions, they can’t eat chocolate, they don’t care anything for flowers, and they don’t know what to do with jewelry, and without those as stand-bys, men would have no idea what to get for gifts.
And so God puts Adam to sleep, and pulls out a rib and creates a suitable helper as his partner, and then man even names woman. So a few things here. In 1 Timothy, the author, who is not Paul as this is a pseudo-epigraphical letter, my $60,000 word for the day, which means a writing written in someone else’s name by an anonymous author, as Paul was much more egalitarian towards women, but this author says “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” We’ll deal with the woman being a transgressor next week, but this is a little selective editing here, because when were man and woman created in chapter 1? At the same time. And so the author of this letter has consciously chosen one passage over another in order to confirm his own biases, something we still do today. But, let me ask you a question. If a company comes out with a product, and then later releases a second model or version, which tends to be the better one, version one or version two? It tends to be the second because all the problems with the first model get corrected in the second version. But ladies, since I have just defended you, let me defend the men as well. The rib that was removed I believe is the one that should have been here across our guts to hold our bellies in, and so we don’t want to hear anything more about our bellies hanging out because you took that rib.
Now the second problem, and one that leads to a lot of misogynistic behavior is that the passage says that woman was made to be the helper of man. We sort of have a definition of helper as someone who is secondary, or subordinate to the main player, and that is certainly how this passage has been used over time to keep women in their place. But, the Hebrew here is ezer kenegdo. That phrase is used 21 times in scripture. Twice here in Genesis 2 to describe the woman, but do the other uses confirm the typical understanding of a subservient helper to someone else? No, in fact just the opposite. Three times this used to describe nations that are providing military assistance to Israel. That is Israel has gone and asked for their help in fighting, and so the assisting nation is the ezer kenegdo, helper. And then 16 times the phrase is used to describe God’s relationship with Israel. That God is the ezer kenegdo. Now there are plenty of people who want God to play a subservient role to them and doing whatever they want, what Will Willimon has called God as cosmic butler, but that is certainly not the correct understanding here, nor is the woman being subservient to the man to be understood in this passage. She can do things for him that he cannot do for himself, or wouldn’t be able to do without her assistance, including having babies, which is what she can do that none of the animals could do.
Now anthropologists argue that this imagery of men giving birth, or creating, which is a fairly common motif in the ancient near east, is the male’s attempt to come to terms with women being able to give birth, to give life, to be creators: saying we did it first, we did it while asleep, we did it without pain, and look at how you do it. Perhaps a better way to understand the relationship between men and women is from a Jewish Midrash, which is extra-biblical teachings, which says that that if Eve had been made from Adam’s head that she would have lorded it over him, and if she had been made from Adam’s feet he would have walked all over her, but instead Eve was made from Adam’s side so that they could be companions and walk side by side with each other through life. That’s much better imagery and understanding.
So last week, I said that if we want to know what the story is ultimately about, pay attention to the ending, and here the passage ends, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” It’s seeking to explain the origin of relationships, or of marriage, although we talk about Biblical ideal of marriage, and use this passage; this is not the only view of marriage given in scripture, as we will see. But what is striking about this passage is that the male leaves his parents in order to cling to his wife. A man going into the household of his wife is the standard found in matriarchal societies. In patriarchal societies, it tends to be the opposite; women go into the household of their husbands. Pay attention to that as we continue through Genesis.
But I would argue the more important piece here is about relationship. God says that it is not good for the man to be alone. We are made to be in relationship with each other, and that takes many different forms. Some are the intimate relationships of marriage, and some are other relationships. And we should honor a multiplicity of ways that we relate together, which includes singleness. The UMC social principles affirm “the integrity of single persons” and “reject[s] the idea that God made individuals as incomplete fragments, made whole only in union with another.” And we reject all social practices that discriminate or social attitudes that are prejudicial against persons because they are single. This also includes single parents. And we should also add the multiplicity of ways in which people are created and who they love and that we believe that all people are people of sacred worth, because we are all created in the image of God, who breathes into us a the breath of life, and so all that breathing we do should remind us of that, and connect us deeper with God, and when we are connected deeper with God, we should also connect deeper with others. We are not made to be alone, but to be in relationship with others, and so most especially during this time of social distancing may we remember this need and check in with one another, and uphold one another, and support one another and be there for one another as brothers and sisters in the faith, as children of God. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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