Was The First Man Also The First Divorcé?

Discussions of the Genesis creation account almost always lead to questions. The most common question is, “why are there two stories of creation?” To understand this we have to first take a look at the commonly accepted timeline for the writing of Genesis and its authorship.

CREATION I – Genesis 1:1-2:3

There is no way of knowing definitively when creation occurred. When we read Genesis 1 and find that the earth was created in 6 days, we should take into account several temporal and physical realities.

1. The earth rotates once every 24 hours – creating the common earth day upon which human time is based.
2. In contrast, Venus (sometimes referred to as Earth’s Twin) rotates once every 5,832.2 hours (a little more than 243 Earth days).
3. Other planets in the solar system vary widely in rotation times.
4. God is not bound by our concept of time. In fact in creating a 24 hour rotation for the Earth, he also created our concept of time.
5. We do not know what God’s concept of time is (or if, for that matter, time even applies to him).
6. Authorship of Genesis is attributed to Moses. Most Biblical scholars agree that Moses likely wrote Genesis, drawing from oral tradition.
7. Everything in Genesis, from Creation to the Tower of Babel is neither physically or scientifically able to be substantiated and must be taken on faith and in the method of understanding the Bible based on our own reason and experience and our knowledge of the tradition at the time of the writer and of present day Biblical scholars (The Wesleyan Quadrilateral).
8. All of the aforementioned events had to have occurred some time prior to the lifetime of Abraham, which is commonly accepted to have been approximately 2200-2000 B.C.
9. The Book of Genesis is believed to have been written around 1400 B.C.; i.e., Creation as it is written in Genesis occurred or was completed [at the very least] seven to eight hundred years before it was recorded in writing.

It is my belief that the first creation narrative was an explanation for the Israelites of how all things came to be. They needed to know of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence, and this account does a very good job of accomplishing that. Don’t misunderstand my explanation — I DO believe that God created all things. I believe, based on modern knowledge,  understanding and reason that the creation account was written in language that the immediately intended reader would be able to understand.

CREATION II – Genesis 2:4-25

The second most common question regarding creation in Genesis is “Why are there two creation accounts?” In fact I believe, along with many Biblical scholars, that  the second creation account was emergent; that is to say further explanation was required. The account in Genesis 2 is dovetailed into the Genesis 1 account. It briefly restates the first account and then details the creation of Eve. Here is where confusion becomes controversy for some readers and scholars.

In Genesis 1:27 God creates male and female humans. In Genesis 2:18 God is unable to find a suitable helper for Man and says, “It is not good for the man to be [alone]” (emphasis mine). So what happened to the woman that God created alongside man in 1:27?

LILITH

In Jewish oral tradition from around the 8th century A.D., the woman created at the same time and from the same dirt as Adam is given a name: Lilith. This legend grew in the subsequent centuries, even being expanded upon in the late Middle Ages by Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Cohen. He contended that Lilith who was created as an equal to Adam refused to submit to her husband. She left Eden, ha-Cohen explains, and had intimate relations with the archangel Samael. She would not return to Eden thereafter, whether prevented by God (in some tellings of the story) or because she did not care to follow the expected order of God as it relates to man and wife. You may recognize the name Lilith as a symbol of female power in modern culture. Please remember as you consider this, that it is mythological in origin and is not from the Bible.

So we have our possible but unsubstantiated first woman, Lilith. This brings us to Eve. Eve was created, interestingly enough, not from the earth. It is clear that God was capable of creating man from the dirt of the ground, breathing life into his nostrils, but He chose not to create Eve in this way. In 2:21-22, God puts Adam into a deep sleep and removes a rib from his side. He uses this rib to create Eve. When Adam awakes, God brings Eve to him and he responds very poetically: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” Further there is now reason to put forth the first marital command, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

In order to understand this social order, we have to take into account the tradition of the Israelite people. Women at the time Genesis was written (and throughout ancient times even up to modern third world social environments) were expected to be subservient to men. They relied on men to provide for and protect their households and communities. This was a very different social clime than modern Western culture. The ideas and statements put forth in this article are archaic by today’s standards. There is truth in it though. In marriage, man and woman still become one flesh. The balance of subservience has certainly shifted, but God intends man and woman to be united in marriage submitting one to the other. In Ephesians 5:22-33 Paul shifts this balance somewhat. He admonishes both Husbands and Wives to submit to and love one another. Current times find women more equal to men than any previous social order. I would posit that if Paul were to write a letter to modern generations he would shift his view even further, allowing for total equality of the sexes.

Taking all of this under consideration, I ask several questions. Answer them for yourselves and then go back and read Genesis 1 and 2.

• Did God create a woman, Lilith, at the same time He created Adam?
• Was Eve Adam’s second wife?
• Was all of this creatively edited out of the oral tradition that led to the Genesis creation narrative?
• If Genesis were written today, how would it differ from it’s current form?
• Does it really matter?

A wise pastor once told me that there were about eight verses in the Bible that he didn’t really care for. He would prefer that they weren’t included in the Bible at all. Would he rewrite the Bible or throw out all of it because of these few perplexing verses? Of course not. To do so would be like missing the forest for the trees or throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

God does not ask us to put our brains on pause when we read his word. Rather, we have to think, reason and explore what He wants us to hear in the words that we read. The three legged stool upon which the Holy Word of God rests can stand only when all three legs – knowledge, reason and experience are present in our study.

In answer to the questions above: to all 5 — I don’t know (and that is quite okay).

~ by ddub74 on 22 June 2012.