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.” 

A Day in the Life

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of The Beatles. “A Day in the Life” from their Sgt. Pepper album is a quintessential Lennon-McCartney song. Beginning with John Lennon's dark musings (“I read the news today, oh boy”) about a man who “blew his mind out in a car” and watching a war movie, we transition to an upbeat Paul McCartney ditty about the life of a bloke who “woke up, got out of bed” and started daydreaming on a bus, only to return to Lennon counting “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” Lennon and McCartney wrote two separate songs, but merged them into one with some chaotic orchestration patching the seams. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We see a similar process at work in much of the Bible where strands of multiple sources are edited together to form a unified whole. No better is that demonstrated than in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis.

The very first chapter of Genesis has the familiar six-day creation story. Throughout the chapter, appears the formulaic “And God said…” followed by some command (“let there be light”, “let the waters be gathered together”, and so on), words indicating the fulfillment of the command (“it was so”), and an assessment (“God saw that it was good”). In Gen 2:3. God blessed the seventh day because that is when he rested (shabat, in Hebrew, the basis of the noun sabbath). The main point of the story is an explanation of why we should rest on the Sabbath. A secondary point is a polemic against rival religions by showing that God is the creator of objects like light, astral bodies, and animals that were regarded as divine beings in other cultures.




"Creation of Sun and Moon" on the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo

Gen 2:4 begins the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. At first it appears to be a recapitulation with specificity of events occurring on the sixth day of creation, but Gen 2.5 points out that at this point there was “no plant of the field” because there were no humans to till the ground. So the Lord God formed “the human” (ha’adam) from “the ground” (ha’adamah) and, only then, “made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (v. 9). Not wanting his creature to be alone, the Lord God formed out of the ground animals and birds (v. 19), but they were not suitable companions for the human, so the Lord God finally made a woman from the side of the human (v. 22). Indeed, the second creation story reaches its peak when the woman is brought to the human and he recognizes “bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh”. The point of this story seems to be that human beings are not meant to be alone but in community and the core of community is the special relationship between men and women.

Gen 2 is an entirely different creation story from Gen 1. The order of events in Gen 1 are plants-animals-humans (male and female). The order of events in Gen 2 are human (male)-plants-animals-human (female). In Gen 1, God orders something created and it is done. In Gen 2, the Lord God “formed” humans and animals out of the ground. Even the words for the deity are different. In Gen 1, the deity is referred to as “God” (elohim) but in Gen 2, the deity is called the Lord God (YHWH elohim).

In most English translations, “Lord” sounds like an honorific title (for example, “Lord Byron”), but it is actually the deity’s personal name, Yahweh (written in Hebrew using only the consonants YHWH). Jews do not utter the deity’s personal name, so in synagogue readings, they will say “my Lord” (adonay) wherever YHWH appears in the text. English translators followed this tradition, and put “Lord” is small caps to indicate that YHWH is being translated. Elohim is the common noun used to refer to a deity. The combination YHWH elohim only appears in Gen 2-3 (except for Exodus 9:30 where it may be a scribal mistake).

So what we have here are two creation tales that were joined together at some point. In the first, we have a heaven-centered viewpoint with Elohim, the universal deity, creating by divine fiat. In the second, we have a much more human-centered viewpoint with YHWH, the personal name of Israel’s deity, forming humans and animals from the ground the way a potter fashions earthern vessels. When the two stories were placed together, the redactor added the common noun Elohim after personal name YHWH in Gen 2-3, possibly to make the transition less jarring or to subtly indicate that the personal deity of Israel is the same universal deity of creation.

Continuing to read through the remaining chapters in Genesis and the other books of the Pentateuch, we will continue to notice the jump from Elohim to YHWH and back again. Using different names for the deity is one of the clues that we are dealing with different traditions or sources. Other clues are names (Israel vs. Jacob, Sinai vs. Horeb), distinctive vocabulary, or favored themes (rituals, laws, dates and numbers). Much like a detective identifying four different individuals at the scene of the crime from the clues they left behind, biblical scholars have identified at least four different traditions that were combined to make up the first five books of the Bible. This theory of composition is usually referred to as the documentary hypothesis.

There are some detractors of the documentary hypothesis. Some are fundamentalists who believe that the first five books were written by Moses because Jesus said it was (e.g., Luke 24:44). Others are critical scripture scholars who think supporters of the documentary hypothesis have developed an overly-complicated theory or doubt that individual traditions can be separated into individual continuous sources. Whether an editor combined completely separate sources or just fragments of various traditions together, there does seem to be overwhelming evidence that we are dealing with multiple sources and not just a single work by one author. Just like with “A Day in the Life”, the end result is a harmonious composition, but the individual components come from separate artists...and sometimes the seams show.