Geneses

Stupidly, I've never noticed that there are two Creation myths, side by side in Genesis, and distinguished, so I'm told, by different words for 'god'. (There is certainly no distinction in the Greek text but maybe there is in the Hebrew Bible, which I will struggle through to make sure, but not today, eh? It's gloomy and I have enough trouble with the languages I actually know.)

The first myth is the one in which God makes the world in six days and rests on the seventh. This one is particularly concerned with the fruitfulness of the earth and here God creates humans male and female, in his own image. I suspect (and will check on a less gloomy day) that personal pronouns are against us, but even still, in this version women are made in God's image too. Think about the implications of that. And now think about it back to front.

The second one starts at Gen 2:4 with the words "This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when they were made in the day". It does sound like the beginning of a new Creation myth, which is why I feel so exceptionally daft to have missed it. In this version a fountain rises out of the earth and waters the land and then god makes man out of dust and makes Eden for Adam to live in. Then, not wanting Adam to be alone, He creates birds (made on the fifth day in the first myth) and land animals (made before men and women on the sixth day in the other story) and brings them to Adam to name. It is only then that He makes Eve out of Adam's rib.

So, I gather the consensus is that this represents two competing myths that the writer(s) of Genesis (or Geneses as I am now in no way going to have the restraint or good taste to refrain from calling it) tried to amalgamate. The first probably suggests a more peaceful and agrarian society, in which the abundance of the natural world is evident. The second suggests a society under various kinds of pressure, probable econmic hardship and resulting social change, hence the desire to explain their excusion from plenty in the face of being God's Children through the Expulsion from Eden story and to justify the antagonistic relationship between the natural world and Mankind, not to say towards women.

Adam's rib is a truly strange story. There's a relief sculpture of it in the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo (right). BlueJ and I watched a group of Koreans looking at this and, through their body language, I got a fleeting glimpse (I can't speak for BlueJ) of what an unnatural myth this is and how inexplicable the story's idea seemed to them. This sculpture, of course, stresses the already fairly pronounced womb-envy aspect of the myth, but even without that, what strange creatures we are and how strange our ideas and our religion.

But to go back to the Book; what I can't help noticing is that, although, the first myth is the more commonly known, we have opted for the story of the creation of humans from the second. Since it seems to me the more cynical and mean-spirited of the two and since we have used it as the basis of so much of our theology, I am wondering if we couldn't do a bit of a rethink on some of these issues?