The Creation of Adam and Eve in the Bible and the Midrash

A biblical story about the first human couple is known to all religious and non religious people
around the globe, and it’s taken as a common place of general knowledge. However, Adam and
Eve are not very original characters, nor is their history very clear from the way the Bible
describes it. In Genesis they are being made twice, in two different stories, under different
circumstances and in different order. Contemporary reader may think that these two narratives
simply retell two more ancient cosmogony myths, and that there is no connection between the
two origins of the primal couple. This view was, of course, absolutely inacceptable for the Sages,
who tended to defend the unity of the Bible and saw the Divine inspiration behind every letter.
This resulted in a significant number of Midrashim, which try to merge two cosmogonies into
one, sometimes in a rather bold way. In this paper I will try to capture my own impressions about
the Genesis narrative on Adam and Eve, as a secular reader coming from a Christian background.
After this I will focus on one specific solution of the Rabbis which describes the primal human
being as an androgynous (hermaphrodite) unity of Adam and Eve.

The first story of creation starts at Genesis 1:1 and ends in chapter 2, verse 3. This division
between the first two chapters seems artificially imposed so as to suggest natural continuity of
the two stories. On a closer look, however, there are numerous differences which point out that
putting each story in its separate chapter would be much more logical.

In the first story man and woman are the last to be created before God took a break. They are at
the end of the chain of creations which are gradually becoming more complicated, starting from
inanimate objects, progressing towards living beings. After each step God took a look back and
was very satisfied; at the end he entrusted humans with all the precious things he made, allowing
both man and woman to rule over the created things. No priority is given to either of the humans
– the first story does not give us any hint to hierarchical order. They should be fertile and
increase, and no further commandments are given. We are inclined to see both, man and woman,
as the crown of God’s work, free to inhabit whatever part of the earth they wish, and rule over
other creatures. There is no Eden explicitly mentioned here, which makes the impression that
movement of humans is not limited.

In the second story, (Genesis 2:4 to 2:24), male – Adam - is created alone, before the vegetation
existed on earth. The context implicates that he is to be some sort of worker needed to “till the
soil”. He is planted into the Garden of Eden, which is the only part of Earth that the text further
describes to us. Eden’s unfathomable mystical and powerful object such as the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Bad and Tree of Life, create an impression that God made a nice garden
for Himself but not very suitable for a human, since it contains objects which have to be
forbidden to mankind. Adam also gets its “helpers” – other creatures – apparently, to make him
company. However, no “fit helper” is found for Adam, which finally motivates God to make Eve
without Adam’s approval. The first human couple is constantly exposed to temptation by
proximity of something which is God’s own secret (mystical Trees). They are even more tempted
by the commandment NOT TO EAT the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. This makes us
wonder if God actually wanted to test them.

I will now try to make some resume of the two biblical stories, according to my own impression.
In the first story God appears generous, creating the world which seems to have some autonomy,
placing there the first couple of man and woman and making them rulers over the creation. Man
and woman are equal in the terms of rights, their movement is free and their position dignified.

In the second story God creates a nice garden with magical plants in His close proximity, places
the man there to cultivate it, and creates a woman to help him. While creating her, He does not
ask Adam’s consent to take part of his body. The first couple is constantly in danger to break the
taboo which stands in front of their noses, and which is being pointed at, by God.

It is a pity for me that the second story was the one to be continued throughout the Genesis,
while the first gets dragged to the second chapter and then forgotten. For Rabbis, however, there
is neither gap nor contradiction – two stories actually fit with each other, but we have to read
between the lines. There are numerous midrashic bridges built between these different Creations,
addressing the issues that bothered the Sages. Does the plural form used in Genesis 1:26 (“Let us
create…”) mean that some other entities took part in creation of man? Why God took a rib from
Adam secretly while he was sleeping? If there were two different ways of creating woman, does
it mean that two Eves existed? What happened to the First Eve? Does the choice of Adam’s rib
out of all body parts, stays in connection to woman’s nature? Some of these issues are addressed
in the material which was given to us during Paideia course. I was however free to take professor
Shinan’s advice and search for additional sources and interpretations.

In the book Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature, Judith R.
Baskin gave some other quotes from Genesis Raba (8:1), which describe the first human as
hermaphrodite: “R. Jeremiah b. Leazar said: When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first
‘adam, He created it with both male and female sexual organs, as it is written, ‘Male and female
He created them, and He called their name ‘adam’… R. Samuel b. Nahmani said, “When the
Holy One, blessed be He, created the first ‘adam, He created him with two faces, then split him
and made him two backs – a back for each side” i I found this version particularly fascinating and
searched for parallels from other cultures. It turned out that stories similar to rabbinical idea of
primal androgyny appear elsewhere, referring to primordial men or to androgynous divinities. In
Plato’s Symposium some of the original humans were hermaphrodite:

“In the old days, he says, there were three species of human beings, not just two: double males,
double females and a sort of mixed species…The males descended from the sun, the females
from the earth, and the mixed, androgynous sex was under the patronage of the moon. These
people were twice as strong as ordinary people… the primordial double humans decided to
assault the Olympians who…[decided to punish them] by cutting them in half (190B-D). The
effects of the halving humans beings were disastrous: “It was their very essence that had been
sliced into two; so each half missed its other half and tried to be with it; they threw their arms
around each other and longed to be grafted together.ii

Longing for each other which marks human relations is therefore interpreted as our urge to attain
the primal state of unity and bliss. This praise of primordial unity was not limited to pagans.
Some Jewish and Christian mystics have also seen an Androgynous Man as a supreme being
from which we had fallen into lesser state, separateness of male and female. Accordingly, they
perceived the urge to unite in love and marriage as the search for the lost part of ourselves, which
reminds us of the divine origin. For example, Christian mystic Jacob Boehme saw the primal
androgyny as an initial integral wholeness of man. Originally, man’s feminine component was
Sophia - wisdom and innocence. After the original sin, they became physically separated, man
deteriorated into Adam and Sophia into Eve. Jewish poet and philosopher, Judah Leon
Abravanel, wrote in “Dialoghi d’amore” that even God has male and female aspects. Adam, the
first man, was created in his likeness - male and female - which means androgynous. Abravanel
was one of the adherents to the theory that Eva came into being by “separating the sides” and not
by the removal Adam’s rib. According to him sexual intercourse and procreation are a remedy for
sin: sexual act is an attempt to temporarily regain the divine unity of the first humans.iii

Further exploration for the purposes of this assignment led me to the statement of Catholic
theologian Franz Von Baader: "The higher meaning of sexual love, which should not be
identified with the instinct for reproduction, is nothing other than to help both man and woman to
become integrated inwardly (in soul and in spirit) in the complete human or original divine
image.”iv I was very happy to learn that the idea of spiritual celebration of the conjugal unity is
not only a popular consumerist product, but rather an echo of similar tendencies throughout the
ages – found among Jews such as Abravanel and Christians such as Baader.

Adam and Eve, we are taught, sinned greatly and brought a misfortune to all the further
generations of humans. What was exactly their sin – in other words, what did “eating from the
tree of knowledge” cause - is not clear from the Bible. We, however, as Adam and Eve’s
descendants, also have our own sin. That is, in my opinion, an erroneous identification of
primordial disobedience to God as the first act of physical union between man and woman. This
unhappy chain of interpretation led to demonization and suppression of sexual urges. I therefore
used the midrash about the first androgynous human as an opportunity to trace some alternative
teachings which rehabilitate the sexual union from its sinful status into an act which repeats the
perfect state of unity between male and female. If my reflections became very far-fetched, it will
only prove that you have successfully taught us the methods of midrash.

Vesna Adic
i
Judith R. Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature, Brandeis University Press (2002),
46-47
ii
Sergius Kodera, Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Medicine, and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy, University of
Toronto (2010) available here: http://www.itergateway.org/resources/id=19
iii
Kodera, Disreputable Bodies , Chapter 7 http://cf.itergateway.org/es/pdf/ES_23_Chapter_7.pdf

iv
Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, Inner Traditions (1991), 213