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Creation
and Apocalypse, Page 10
Chapter
End Note
In
The Burning
Bush, the name "Adam" is associated with hardness and
thus with the first human beings to stand upright with skeletal
bones. The passage in Gen 3,17 (referring to Adam) is there identified
to that stage of human evolution (see pp. 19, 111, 429 and 466).
The tendency in most modern translations is to speak of "man,"
rather than "Adam," prior to the passage in Gen 3,17. This certainly
lends itself to what Steiner said about the stage when the human
being was first able to stand upright. It must be recognized,
however, that there is great difficulty in dissociating the name
"Adam" from the solids of which the human being was formed. While
I am not trained in Hebrew, it is clear that two different terms
are used in the creation account (Gen 2,4b-3,24), which, though
seemingly similar, do not fully coincide in meaning. One of these
is ha-`adam and the other is `adam,. The former
has in it the definite article, while the latter does not (on
this see also 1 AB 18, Note 22). Moreover, ha-`adam seems
to have a direct derivative relationship to the term used for
"ground" or "earth," namely, ha-`dama, as, for instance,
in Gen 2,5d ("no man [`adam,] to till the ground [ha-`dama]").
The
term `adam without the definite article appears only four
times in the creation story, in Gen 2,5,20 and 3,17,21. Some translations
use the name "Adam" in Gen 2,20, but none that I know of use it
in Gen 2,5--a quite interesting observation if one thinks about
it. The tendency has been to translate ha-`adam as "man"
or some other terminology indicating a state prior to sexual differentiation.
Perhaps
the definitive work on the meaning of these terms is Phyllis Trible's
God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (GRS). The New Interpreter's
Bible on Genesis commends her work highly and relies on it
in the interpretation of the creation story (see 1 NIB 324-325,
and its fn 5). Working from the Hebrew itself, she makes a powerful
case for interpreting the human being as non-sexual (asexual)
in Gen 2 prior to the sexual differentiation that takes place
in Gen 2,21-24. There (in vs 23) she points out, quite significantly,
that the Hebrew term translated "woman" is `issa and that
translated "man" is `is.
Those
who hold, according to tradition, to the male nature of the Trinity
and hierarchical spirits, and to the subordination of female to
male in the creative process (and since), would do well to consider
the powerful indications in Trible's work that these positions
are contrary to what is indicated by the Hebrew language used
in the biblical creation account.
Initially
Trible interpreted ha-`adam as androgynous prior to this
differentiation into male and female, but by the time of GRS she
had changed her position since "androgyny assumes sexuality,
whereas the earth creature [the prior human being] is sexually
undifferentiated" (see p. 141, fn 17). In The
Burning Bush, I also expressed the pre-separation
state as androgynous (see, for instance, p. 19). For our present
purposes, we need not discuss whether any reproduction prior to
this time of sexual differentiation was by asexual division or
androgynous procreation.
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