“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” [Genesis 2:23].
[L] Michelangelo’s iconic Creation of Adam. [R] Creation of Eve, by William Blake, c.1803-05.
A super-intelligent boy of 8 years of age came out from Sunday school and his mother was at the car waiting to take him home. At that age, the boy was obviously putting on his thinking cap when he asked, “Mom, do you know why we call God ‘Father’?” “No, why?” the mother replied. “Because He is a man. So Jesus called God our Father in heaven.” The mother knew her son. She knew that something else was coming after this. “Ya, ok,” she just answered real casually as if that was no big deal, while she slowly eased the car out of the church compound. Then the boy continued, “That’s why men are more important.” The comparative “more” here clearly implies “women” as the subject of comparison. “Oh, is that so? How did you get that?” asked the mother. Sensing that he has solid backing for his knowledge, the boy confidently answered, “You see, mom, God is a man, and the Bible says God first created the man and only afterwards created the woman. That’s why men are more important.” Q.E.D.
Not bad for an eight-year-old, using Scriptural backing with apparent ease to demonstrate his claim. Did he just get some biblical tips from his Sunday school teacher on that one? Perhaps the teacher was talking about the story of creation from the Book of Genesis that morning? Whatever, the trouble is, the boy’s Sunday school reference to the Bible did not go deep enough to clarify the relative importance of boys and girls, if ever there was such a thing at all in the will of God.
The Old Testament gives us two creation stories out of different traditions. In the first story, the first chapter of the Book of Genesis narrates creation in six days, completing the cycle on a day of divine rest on the seventh day. A few preliminary points stand out for us here.
- At the end of the third, fourth and fifth days, the first two days being the creation of light and separation of the waters, God saw what He made and it was “good”. At the end of day sixth, after a habitable garden was made ready for humanity, God created the man and the woman – the summit and crowning glory of His creation. He then saw all He had made and it was “very good” – the first usage of the superlative.
- In this first creation story, God made both man and woman together. When God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves”, the word “us” and “ourselves” signify divine consultation with the heavenly court, while the word “man”, translated from the Hebrew “adam”, is a collective noun which includes man and woman. The full meaning of mankind, or better “humankind”, is achieved only when there is man and woman. The divine intention is crystal clear: it is “let us make humans”. We should mention in passing that instead of “Let us make man in our image” carried in the Revised Standard Version (RSV), the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) now reads “Let us make humankind in our image”. So long as Christian religious texts of whatever category intended for circulation within the faith community continue to use the grossly inadequate word “man”, or worse “he”, to denote both man and woman, instead of speaking inclusively in terms of “human” or “they” or “he and she”, our eight-year-olds and even their Sunday school teachers will continue to be quite confused and in error.
- And so, man and woman were created in the image of God and thus share the same fundamental dignity, man and woman were blessed by God, man and woman were told to be fruitful and multiply, and man and woman were given dominion over all creatures that move in the earth.
The second chapter of Genesis begins by saying God completed the work of creation on the seventh day, blessed that day and made it holy, and He rested on the seventh day.
The second creation story narrated in Genesis 2, however, is a whole lot different from the first.
The man was made from dust, lifeless at first, and was given life through the gift of the breath of God. Here the emphasis is very different. The man [ha adam in Hebrew] is specified as being made from earth [ha adama] thus conveying the image of humankind’s relation to earth, an earth-creature whose material-origin is earth (recall “and to ashes you shall return”). Also conveyed here is the image of the Divine Maker as a potter molding clay (Jeremiah 18:6). At this point, the man did not possess any sexual distinction, not until the woman was created in 2:22. Meanwhile, the man was desperately lonely, needing a fitting companion. Translated, that means the man was experiencing a deep longing for community. So God put the man to sleep, took a rib from him and fashioned it into a woman and brought her to him. The man welcomed this new creature as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”. He called her “woman” for she was “taken out of man”. Gender distinction began at that point, and the two went on to become one flesh..
Under closer scrutiny, a shocking truth emerges about the woman that offers a rebuttal to the eight-year old boy’s statement that “men are more important”. In fact, the woman in this second creation story is presented as God’s most special creation. How do we get there?
We turn to St Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century. He has an exegetical principle which shakes our usual interpretation of the creation stories. This principle is:
What comes last in the order of execution is first in the order of intention.
In the first creation story, being the last created before God rested, human creatures were the ultimate intention in God’s plan. Creation was not complete without man and woman in place. One might even go on to say that creation would have been pointless were it not populated by human beings. Who would be there to even say the word, “God”? And then, in the second creation story, since woman was created after man, and God did not rest after creating man, we would have to accept, based on Aquinas’ principle, that woman was undoubtedly God’s masterpiece – the last “item” executed in the work of creation to cap it all.
There is more, for the man in the second creation story was fashioned directly out of dust and then given life by God’s breath, which perhaps explains why men tend to be a bit “square” [at least comparatively so]. As the men are evidently more deserving of the description of “blockheads” when it comes to sensitive and emotional matters, women today are challenged to forgive their stiff and blockheaded men.
Turning our focus on the woman, the picture we get is evidently different. She was not fashioned directly from dust, but from something that was taken out from the man who by then was already flesh and blood, imbued with God’s ruah or Spirit, and capable of feelings and emotions, knowing that he was lonely, lamenting it, and desiring community. With her starting point clearly a step up from the man, her development was understandably faster. That perhaps explains why women are so much richer than men in emotional cells and in feelings. Women being so much more gifted in intuition and sensitivity, men today are also challenged, but in a different way – to learn to bear with their women whenever necessary in the rich department of intuitions, emotions and sensitivity.
Combining the two creation traditions in Genesis 1 and 2, one realises that God places His secrets in men and women who are supposed to complement each other; yet, surprisingly, it is in the women – God’s masterpieces – that God saves for the ultimate disclosure of His secrets. The “female genius” that Pope John Paul II referred to clearly included women’s special gifts to nurture nature and to care for the gifts of nature. They love better and care deeper.
However, as with all gifts, the special gifts of women come with a heavy responsibility. As women, their duty is not to encourage their men to be aggressive, even violent, to go and grab as much wealth, status and power as possible for the family by any means and to trample on others if that’s what it takes to get there (like “the ends justify the means”). Instead, the special role God has assigned to women is to love, to care for, and to nurture the gifts of nature, and to teach men – square, blockheads, and mad because they are insensitive, violent, aggressive, and often power-crazy – to love, care for and nurture the gifts of nature. If the women fail to do that, they fail God’s will in the special gift of the female genius. This world would then be so much more impoverished.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, February 2011. All rights reserved.
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