Another Side to Genesis 2

Miranda:        How is your mum?

Gary:               Still frantically trying to find me a wife.

Miranda:        My mum is the same.

Gary:               What, trying to find you a wife?

Miranda:        Finding me a wife … but just to be clear, she wants me to find a husband, because I am a woman.

Gary:               Right.

Miranda S1 E1, ‘Date’ (2009)

A vintage poster depicting Adam naming the animals. Huzzah for expired copyright!

So this week I’m back to my old habit of getting cross about English Bible translations – specifically, English translations of Genesis 2. Honestly, with so many English renderings out there, you’d think there’d be a bit more diversity in how this chapter is dealt with, but in actual fact, there are a couple of translation decisions that I think are really poorly judged that seem to uniformly plague the entire spectrum of versions, all the way from the super-literal NASB to that pile of alphabet soup known as the Message. As a result, I’ve had this post on my to-do list for quite a while.

Because obviously my little old self, with my basic training in the Biblical languages and my less than a decade of having actually been taking the scriptures seriously, is so, so much cleverer and more spiritually insightful than all those translation committees: gather at my feet, children, and I shall enlighten you. By which I in fact mean, please look at what I say (which isn’t original, by the way) with a critical eye and test it to as ruthless a degree as you can. Get second opinions on my second opinion. This is one of those occasions where I’m struck by such disbelief at the fact that virtually everybody seems to be doing the same thing with the text, despite there being no apparent sound logic behind those choices, that I can’t help but be just a smidgen paranoid that I’m missing something.

I’ve translated verses 4-8 and 15-25. The clunkiness of my rendering is deliberate: I’m trying to reflect the structure of the Hebrew as accurately as I possibly can, at the expense of English fluency, because I figure you’re really not short of more idiomatic versions to help you out with grasping the sense of the passage. The things I really want to make a point about, I’ll explain in more detail below, but I’ll mention one of my translation choices now: I’ve rendered the divine name – usually given as ‘the LORD’ in English Bibles – as a transliteration of its Hebrew consonants, YHWH. I think this all-caps-all-consonants form is the best English way of making clear what the word actually is, without encouraging anyone to pronounce it.

So yes, grab your favourite Bible translation, flip it open to the relevant chapter, and enjoy an entertaining game of spot the difference as you hold it against the below:

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth in their being created, in the day of YHWH God’s making earth and heavens.

And every bush of the field is not yet in the earth, and every herb of the field is not yet springing up, for YHWH God did not cause it to rain upon the earth, and there was no human to work the ground,

and a mist is going up from the earth, and it watered all the face of the ground.

And YHWH God formed the human, dust from the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living soul.

And YHWH God planted a garden in ʿēden, in the east, and he put there the human whom he had formed.

…

And YHWH God took the human and he set him in the garden of ʿēden to work it and to keep it.

And YHWH God commanded the human, saying: From every tree of the garden you shall certainly eat,

and from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat from it, for in the day of your eating from it, you shall certainly die.

And YHWH God said: It is not good, the human being on his own; I will make for him a helper as corresponds to him.

And YHWH God formed from the ground every animal of the field and every bird of the heavens and he brought (it) to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human being called a living soul, that (was) its name.

And the human called names for every beast and for the bird of the heavens and for every animal of the field, and for a human he did not find a helper as corresponded to him.

And YHWH God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the human, and he slept, and he took one of his sides, and he closed up flesh in place of it.

And YHWH God built the side which he took from the human into a woman, and he brought her to the human.

And the human said: This one, this time, is bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh; this one shall be called woman, for from man this one was taken.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and adhere to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

And they were both naked, the human and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

Spot any major differences?

See, the way every English Bible translation I’ve checked tells this story, you get the impression that God initially made a male human, from whose form he then nabbed a solitary rib in order to make a female one. But I really, really don’t think that’s what the text actually suggests. First off, note that, while there’s only one human about, the word used to refer to that human is, well, ‘human’ – Hebrew אָדָם (ʾādām), which refers to a human being of either sex. I’ve said this before, but the fact is that, leaving aside the creation accounts and instances of the word being used as the proper name Adam, the first time it shows up in reference to people of one sex specifically, namely in Numbers 31:35, it denotes a group of women.¹

Now, granted, אָדָם is grammatically masculine, which means that it takes masculine pronouns and so forth, but that doesn’t ascribe any quality of actual maleness to the being it denotes, any more than a modern French-speaker would construe, say, a hat as being actually male just because chapeau happens to be grammatically masculine. The way English simply doesn’t bother to gender its nouns actually makes it pretty weird as languages go. When we choose to refer to something or someone using ‘he’ or ‘she’, we’re not merely following a grammatical rule, but (usually) making a statement about the actual maleness or femaleness of said something or someone. For this reason, it’s kind of misleading that I’ve referred to the human using ‘he’, ‘him’, etc. in my translation above, but the only real alternative was ‘they’, which presents its own problems, so, you know, what can one do.

Back to the point, then, only after woman has been made does the actual Hebrew word for an adult male,אִישׁ  (ʾīsh), show up; only after woman has been made, in other words, does man become a thing. And while we’re on the making of woman, I’d like to stress that the word given as ‘rib’ in this chapter by so many translators,צֵלָע  (tsēlāʿ), does not carry that meaning in any of its thirty-odd other instances in the Hebrew Bible. On the contrary, it means ‘side’. It’s used of the sides of the ark, the sides of the tabernacle, the side of a mountain, the sides of a door, the side chambers of the temple, but never does it have anything remotely to do with such a thing as a rib.² And yes, granted, words sometimes have different meanings in different contexts, but why on earth would one postulate some dubious alternative possibility in an instance where the word’s common, standard meaning already makes perfect sense?

And it does make perfect sense. God decided to take one of the sides of the initially unsexed human and make a helper as would correspond to him (or them, or whatever) – as would correspond to him perfectly, because the two are halves of one whole. Marital sex then represents the reunification of that whole: one flesh. Remember also how, last chapter, God split light from darkness, heaven from earth, sea from dry land; this, therefore, is just one more split in that creative sequence.³

See, doesn’t that just sit better than the normative interpretation? Doesn’t it trace a more coherent story arc through the creation narratives? Doesn’t it reassure you more fully of the equality of the sexes – that woman was never merely some deviation from the norm, but a corresponding half of the human whole? Doesn’t it shed more light on the purpose of sex and marriage? And I haven’t done anything clever to achieve that; it’s all just there in the text, if only the sense isn’t obscured by dubious translation decisions. I hasten to add, as well, that you don’t have to translate even half as clunkily as I have in order to renderאָדָם  andצֵלָע  in a fashion consistent with their other appearances in the Bible; that would be perfectly achievable in a nice, smooth, idiomatic translation.

I stand by what I’ve said before, that if two or three English versions are saying the same thing, you can be pretty confident that that’s what the underlying text actually means⁴ – but unfortunately, there do remain these occasional instances where I’m totally at a loss as to why the translators have done what they’ve done. I remain, therefore, extremely thankful that I live in a society where I’m able to read and study and interpret the Bible for myself; where I’m permitted to question and challenge normative interpretations; where I’m even free to fling articulations of my atypical opinions into the digital ether for the perusal of charming humans like yourself, O Darling Reader, who, incidentally, have all the same rights I’ve just described. That we, common-or-garden believers that we are (that we all are, indeed), have God’s holy scriptures in our own hands, is a blessing never to be taken for granted.

Footnotes

¹ I mentioned as much in ‘On Being a Woman in the Church’, under August of this year in the box on the right. If you want to examine how the word is used throughout the scriptures for yourself, here’s a good place to start: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/Lexicon/Lexicon.cfm?strongs=H120&t=KJV.

² Check it out: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?strongs=H6763. It seems to me that the only time there’s a decent case for translating it as something other than ‘side’ or ‘side chamber’ is in Jeremiah 20:10, but it still definitely doesn’t mean ‘rib’. So where on earth did the rib thing come from? The best answer to that is the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), which translates צֵלָע in these and most of its other instances as πλευρά (pleurá), a word which can mean either ‘rib’ or ‘side’. According to the legendary Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pleura&la=greek#Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=pleura/-contents, it tends to occur in the plural when referring to the side of a person or animal, so I suppose you can sort of see why a translator might have mistaken its occurrence in the singular in Genesis 2 as meaning ‘rib’, but that said, it does sometimes mean ‘side’ in the singular too, and the failure to compare to other instances that its being rendered ‘rib’ here betrays hardly seems indicative of careful or thorough translation technique.

³ You remember, but here’s the chapter in question just in case: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+1&version=ESVUK.

⁴ That’s a case I made in ‘Dear Fellow-Believers Who Don’t Read the Biblical Languages’, under September 2017 in the box on the right.