Lost in Translation

There’s an old Italian expression “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”), meaning that a bad translator can ruin a great piece of literature. When we look at the very familiar story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a lot of what we think we know about this story is wrong because of how the story has been traditionally translated.

For example, “everybody” knows that man was created first. When God saw that it wasn’t good for the man to be alone, he sought to create a helpmate for the man. God created animals and brought them to the man, but they would not do. So God removed a rib from the man and created a woman from it.

For centuries, many – mostly men – have used the story that “everybody” knows as evidence to support the conclusion that women were subordinate to men. First place is superior; last place is inferior. Women were an afterthought of God, created only as a “helper” to men. Because the woman was formed from a piece of the man, she was dependent on man for her existence.

Well, it turns out “everybody” is wrong. And misleading translations are partly to blame. Let’s look at the three translated terms I mentioned above in my synopsis: “the man”, “helpmate”, and “rib”.

Let’s start with the word translated as “man”. In Hebrew, the word ’adam is used to refer to a human being or collectively to humankind. The traditional King James translation of Gen 1:26 is “And God said, Let us make man (‘adam) in our image.” In English, the word “man” stands for the collective “mankind”. Someone reading or hearing the word “man” might think it is referring to a male human being, but the rest of the sentence “and let them have dominion…over all the earth” makes it clear “man” is referring to “mankind” or “humanity”, and that’s how recent translations handle it.

What happens when we get to Gen 2:7? The traditional translation is “And the Lord God formed man (ha’adam) of the dust of the ground (ha’adamah)” (KJV). We have two translation issues: 1) using “man” to translate ha’adam (ha is the definite article in Hebrew, “the”) and 2) losing the pun between ha’adam and ha’adamah. It gets even worse when the KJV (following the LXX and Vulgate) begins translating ha’adam as a proper name, “Adam”, in 2:19 and onwards. Modern translations will use “the man” throughout because, until the creation of woman, the text is obviously talking about one individual and not a collective. If we want to preserve a gender-neutral translation (like the original Hebrew) and retain the pun, we could translate this verse as “YHWH God formed the human from the humus” or, my favorite, “the earthling from the earth”.

The next problematic translation is “helpmate”. Actually, KVJ translates Gen 2:18: “I will make him an help meet for him.” The odd word combination “help meet” became corrupted into “helpmate”. “Meet” is an old way of saying suitable, fitting, or proper: “make him a help suitable for him”. Translating the word as “helper” in modern translations isn’t much better. “Helper” implies a subordinate or apprentice, but the Hebrew word refers to a companion of equal ability, a partner. The animals could certainly be “helpers”, but not “partners”.


Bartolo di Fredi's "Creation of Eve"

This brings us to the word translated “rib” in Gen 2:21: “and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh” (KJV). Almost every version translates the word as “rib” but every other use of the word in the OT refers to the “side” of something (like the side of the Ark of the Covenant). If translated as “took one of its sides and closed up its place with flesh”, it implies considerably more surgery than the simple removal of a bone; something big is removed from the original human/earthling that leaves it utterly transformed.

Departing from the traditional translations allow us to see the story in a different way. YHWH God forms the first human – not the first man – from the dust of the ground. YHWH God also formed birds and animals and brought them to the human, but none of them were a suitable companion. So YHWH God removed one of the sides from the creature and fashioned a woman and presented it to the man. Only after the woman is created does the Hebrew text use words exclusively referring to “woman” and “man”: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman (’ishshah), because she was taken out of Man (’ish)” (Gen 2:23, KJV). In a real sense, “man” and “woman” were created simultaneously when YHWH God performed his surgery.

The following interpretation is consistent with the Hebrew text: The earthling was created as a sexually undifferentiated creature. Corresponding to Gen 1 where God differentiated light from dark, upper from lower waters, and so on, here YHWH God is differentiating male and female from the original unsexed earth creature. The earthling was the prototype human; the man and woman are human version 2.0. When the man and woman are together, the original unity is restored and they can function as one; the two become “one flesh”. And, keep in mind, that “one flesh” is referring to the Hebrew idea of the undivided whole of a living being, not just the material aspect of a body/spirit duality as in Greek philosophy and contemporary thinking.


Could this be what pre-Eve Adam looked like?

While doing research on this, I discovered that this is not a crazy modern conjecture. Jewish midrash (rabbinic commentary on the Torah) considers the possibility that the first human was created with male and female sexual organs on each side of its body. Called the androgyne in scholarly literature, this creature was split in half to create the first man and the first woman. This was a way to reconcile Gen 1:27 that said “male and female God created them” with the account in Gen 2:21 of how YHWH God fashioned a woman from one of the man’s “sides”.

Whether this interpretation is close to what the author intended or wishful thinking, I can certainly agree with what Matthew Henry (1662-1714) wrote in his commentary on the Bible:

“The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.”