May God be praised for woman: the misunderstood meaning of Genesis Chapter 2
Ben W. writes:
Last night I was watching “Dan Rather Reports” on HDNet; he was interviewing Benazir Bhutto. The program is in HDTV and I was taken in by the natural beauty of this woman’s face (at the age of 53). The current photos on the web do not do justice to her elegance. Her beauty was enhanced by her articulateness (I didn’t pay attention in particular to what she was saying—may have been something entirely dumb); one cannot beat a combination of beauty and brains in a woman. God did come up with something special when he created woman; it was man the idiot who then gave her the vote and debased her…
LA replies:
Attractive and intelligent, yes, but she always struck me (though I haven’t seen her in over a decade) as a bit precious.
Certainly the writer of Genesis chapter 1 had the greatest insight into reality when he said, “In his own image and likeness God created him. Male and female he created them.” Male and female in their distinct ways expressing the nature of God. But in the different creation story in Genesis chapter 2, in which God takes woman out of man’s rib, some people say this means that woman is inferior. Not at all. The story is saying that woman is the culminating act of creation! It’s woman who tops it all off.
LA continues:
Modern people with their literal minds are so stupid.
They say that because woman came out of man’s body the Bible is saying she is inferior to man. But what was man taken out of??? The DUST OF THE GROUND. So man was made out of mere dust, but woman was made out of a human being. So woman is made from vastly superior and finer stuff than the stuff that man is made from. She is the culminating act of God’s creation, the crown jewel of the universe.
As for the Fall which occurs later in chapter 2, that comes from woman’s disobeying God, and then from man’s following woman rather than following God. By not following God, both man and woman were failing to be their true self, which is to be the image and likeness of God.
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Dimitri K. writes:
You wrote: “Modern people with their literal minds are so stupid.”
They are not only stupid and literal, they are also obsessed with being the first. They think that if the Man was created the first and Woman the second, the Man is superior.
LA replies:
Exactly—just as they think that if the New Hampshire primary comes first and other states’ primaries come later, that makes New Hampshire “superior,” and that the only way to eliminate this wrongful “inequality” is to have all states’ primaries on the same day, thus destroying the very purpose of the primary system.
George R. writes:
You wrote:”Modern people with their literal minds are so stupid. They say that because woman came out of man’s body the Bible is saying she is inferior to man.”
Yes, but is this the only reason people say that women are inferior to men? You yourself have suggested that the relatively recent involvement of women in the functions of the state has had a deleterious effect on the integrity of society. Now, if society was better off when women were not in the government but instead were among the governed, does that not suggest that women by nature are fitted to be governed and men to govern? And since in the natural order the superior governs the inferior, women must be inferior to men to the extent that they are naturally fitted to be governed by them.
LA replies:
Obviously, to say there is a natural differentiation of function, and that men naturally provide for the public dimension of society, the state, the army, the police, and so on, is not to say that women are “inferior” per se to men, any more than women’s greater abilities as providers of humanity’s social, domestic, and emotional needs make men “inferior” per se to women. It’s only seen as “inferior” if we accept the feminist premise that women should be doing exactly the same things that men do. Once that egalitarian premise is accepted, any situation that falls short of equality will look like the “inferiority” or “oppression” of women. I detect a certain, uh, literalness in George’s argument …
By the way, I’m not saying that there are not real situations where men do oppress women. But these things need to be approached from what I would call a rational and commonsensical point of view, not a feminist point of view.
Jeremy G. writes:
The story continues. After man is created, God says, Genesis 2:18: “it is not good for man to be alone, I will make him a helper suitable for him” and He creates woman out of the flesh of man. From this we learn that woman was created because man was spiritually deficient by himself (i.e. before woman was created man was “not good” in the eyes of God). And a suitable helper doesn’t imply inferiority at all. The simplest interpretation is that God wanted to create a woman who was compatible with Adam and who would help him. The emphasis in this passage of Genesis is focused entirely on the help that Adam needed to become spiritually elevated in God’s eyes. And man needs woman for this purpose, not the other way around.
Scott C. writes:
“God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen 1:27).
Let’s leave aside arbitrary names like “male” and “female,” or Adam and Eve, for a moment, as these do not represent the fundamental relationship between the two revealed in Genesis. Instead, let’s use the biological distinction, XY and XX.
Assuming one of these two had to come first, if you begin with XX, all that can be produced from it is XX. But if you begin with XY, you can produce XY, XX and YY (which for whatever reason is inviable). Thus, in order for XY and XX to both exist, the former necessarily had to precede the latter.
The story of Adam and Eve in Chapter 2 is simply an allegory to further explain the relationship between male and female revealed in Chapter 1. To say that God took a rib from the side of Adam to create Eve is to say that He took X from the side of XY to create XX.
Now, let’s continue with the analysis of the fundamental relationship between these two revealed in the next verse—“Be fruitful and multiply” (1:28). This also is a biological distinction—Male + Female => Child—which when represented as a triangle with the child at the apex explicates the true meaning of the previous verse, of Man (male and female) created in the image of God.
***Child********Holy Spirit****** Future
Male Female*****Father Son*****Past Present
The Father begets the Son and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, just as the Male begets the Female and the Child proceeds from the Male and the Female, or the Past begets the Present and the Future proceeds from the Past and the Present. This is the fundamental Truth that is the source of all creation.
It is only when male and female form a union and lift up their child that Man is in the “image of God.” This is why Jesus, who came to bear witness to the Truth, sanctified marriage as the highest sacrament in His church.
The fundamental Truth revealed by this act is that originally Man, as a species, was monogamous, but later fell from grace into polygyny and polyandry through sin. Jesus preached that Man, male and female, can only return to grace, that is, to his original state as in the image of God, by entering into the sacrament of marriage and lifting up their children to the greater glory of God, as was intended in the beginning.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 22, 2007 11:20 AM | Send