According to the Abrahamic religions, Adam and Eve were the first man and woman. In the Book of Genesis, God fashioned Adam from dust and placed him in the Garden of Eden.
Subsequently, Eve is created from one of Adam’s ribs to be Adam’s companion. Notice that neither was “Born of woman” in the traditional manner.
So…
How come they have navels?
they have navels because...
…that’s how medieval artists drew them.
Adam and Eve, if they existed, would also not look like northern Europeans. (Don’t tell the white supremacists that their beloved bible heroes are brown-skinned!)
Most of what people know about Christianity is from medieval times, theology designed to control the masses. Ancient Christianity bears very little resemblance to what Christians practice and believe today.
The Book of Genesis and the entire Pentateuch was taken from the original Mesopotamian stories, Babylonian, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Sumerian. Of course those stories weren’t edited for social control, so they were polytheistic and were considered history at the time.
It’s interesting to note that “Eve” has an original meaning (pre-Hebrew) of life, breath of life, or rib. I believe “rib” is a mistranslation from the Mesopotamian.
Also, according to those original stories, Adam and Eve were not the first attempts at creating an “Adamu” which means “worker-creature” and “clay.” Yes, the Mesopotamian stories say we were created as a slave race to the so-called “gods.”
In the attempt to create an Adamu to serve the gods, anatomically modern man was the sixth or seventh attempt at a worker race, depending on the source document. The earlier ones had various genetic abnormalities and diseases.
And Eve wasn’t Adam’s first wife. He was originally paired with Lilith, but she wouldn’t submit to Adam’s authority and was dismissed. She later became a arch-demon in medieval Christianity. That’s the way religion works, if you cross the religious leaders they’ll either brand you heretic or demon, or just kill you.
"if you cross the religious leaders they’ll either brand you heretic or demon, or just kill you."
… or mess with your navel.
Wanting more
“…anatomically modern man was the sixth or seventh attempt at a worker race, depending on the source document. The earlier ones had various genetic abnormalities and diseases.” Please give the source docs, I’d like some ammunition for the creationist arguments I get into with relatives.
sources
I’m not sure the sources will provide much ammunition because they are not scientific, but linguistic. The Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, is the immediate document on which the Hebrews based their creation story. The Babylonians inherited it from the Akkadians and ultimately, the Sumerians. We have only found fragments of these earlier clay tablets, not complete stories. ( https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Bible-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0060630043)
Either way, the Hebrews edited the older creation stories to make them monotheistic. They also edited out many other aspects of the story. The original creation stories were more historical epics like the Iliad and the Odyessy, but later authors and editors added a morality element that was not originally there.
I’m sure the standard creationist would just say that these older creation stories are pagan, and therefore influenced by the devil, one of the stock responses of Christianity.
Linguistic is all they recognize
I’ve successfully argued the Epic of Gilgamesh into their awareness, as well as Lilith. Thanks, I’ll hunt this stuff down.
Eve = women = bad
Great topic, navels notwithstanding. (On navels, God was just thinking ahead….)
The thing that always got me about this story was that Adam, the first man, was passive, while Eve, the first woman (actually second, including Lilith) was active but bad — disobeying God’s direct order, using reason to justify her actions, being subject to temptation, etc.
It seems to me that mankind has used the story of Eve to keep women down right to the present day and also to denigrate or deemphasize anything that is associated with femininity (the arts, domesticity, the “soft” sciences such as psychology, other similar things). Our society remains very masculine in orientation, and men and women alike are indoctrinated with the same masculine bias. Same as it ever was!
It Gets Worse
In an odd coincidence, I was rooting through some old files just now, and happened upon a bunch of documents I put together about Adam and Eve back in the late ’90s. The one I’m quoting below makes the case for my comment above, or at least provides evidence. Hard to believe just how thoroughly anti-woman people have been through the ages.
From The Dark Side of Christian History, by Helen Ellerbe. Chapter Eight: 1450 – 1750 C.E.
The witch hunts were an eruption of orthodox Christianity’s vilification of women, “the weaker vessel,” in St. Peter’s words. The second century St. Clement of Alexandria wrote: “Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman.” The Church father Tertullian explained why women deserve their status as despised and inferior human beings:
And do you not know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on
this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity
live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of
that tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are
she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to
attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of
your desert that is, death even the Son of God had to die.
Others expressed the view more bluntly. The sixth century Christian philosopher, Boethius, wrote in The Consolation of Philosophy, “Woman is a temple built upon a sewer.” Bishops at the sixth century Council of Macon voted as to whether women had souls. In the tenth century Odo of Cluny declared, “To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure…” The thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that God had made a mistake in creating woman: “nothing [deficient] or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been produced then.” And Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all. Orthodox Christians held women responsible for all sin. As the Bible’s Apocrypha states, “Of woman came the beginning of sin/ And thanks to her, we all must die.”
_+_
Christians weren’t the only ones who hated women, of course, but they certainly went at it with gusto.
The second century St. Clement of Alexandria wrote: “Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman.”
The ultra-scary thing is that Clement was actually considered one of the more liberal church fathers. Yikes!
So much misogyny...
Thanks for the read, Lise. I won’t say I enjoyed it, but it certainly was eye-opening. I am familiar with the general attitude, but those quotes and specific examples are sobering.
There is a traditional Jewish prayer that says in part “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a woman.”
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-has-not-made-me-a-woman/
misogyny
The earliest sources did not have this misogynistic theme. In the Mesopotamian Eden stories the woman was wise for listening to the so called serpent because the entity that later became “the serpent” was Enki, creator and benefactor of man (along with his wife Ninhursag). Enki became part of the mash-up figure that became the Christian devil in later theology. One of Enki’s primary symbols was the serpentine double helix. Depictions of this symbol show strands connecting the entwined spirals. Looks a lot like DNA to me.
Anyway,back to the story…
…Enki was trying to liberate man from the fear of Enki’s brother Enlil, the sky god, deity of war, progress, law, and social order. Enlil did not like the humans that Enki created, and to add insult to injury, Enki gave us the ability to procreate. Enlil had ordered him to create only sterile drones for use as a labor pool.
The whole “I was tempted by the woman” is a later edit. Actually, Adam is more hesitant to accept the truth in the older versions. Eve recognizes Enki’s good intentions toward humans as protective and Enlil’s as hostile. [Note: In the flood story, Enlil wants humans wiped out but it’s Enki who saves humans.]
I think the changes in these stories represent the shift from the matriarchal culture during the age of Taurus to the patriarchal culture of the age of Aries. The age of Pisces was supposed to reconcile the two, but things have not gone well the last 2,000 years. The Arian warlords refuse to cede power.
The Gnostics later disseminated this interpretation and were brutally oppressed by the nascent Christian Church. Not just for this one idea, but for their entire philosophy which was stunningly progressive for the 1st century CE: equality of sexes, children’s rights, animal rights, free expression of ideas without fear of reprisal, and the one that really pissed off the Church: spirituality is personal–priests and intermediaries are not needed for spiritual enlightenment.
Alien workshop
I always thought the Mesopotamian creation myths sounded a lot like genetic modification and I know there are some (Sitchin, for instance) who make that claim. If so, it would explain why humans seem so out of place on this planet — overly advanced technically but not quite smart enough to use their power wisely. What the future will bring to our species can only be imagined by the scientists who will recreate us in that future (assuming we survive the various catastrophes we’ve inadvertently engineered for ourselves….)
Will we even need navels in the future? Now there’s a question.
Sitchin
I loved reading Sitchin, always with a grain of salt. His linguistics are good, orbital dynamics not so good. But this is tough material to interpret–cosmology and origin myths, tribal history, contact with non-human intelligence.
He was frequently attacked for not holding a degree in the Sumerian language, but showed as much skill and subtlety as the stuffiest ivory tower academic.
But when you see clear depictions of a double helix in the context of medicine and the creation of new biological entities, along with flying craft and energy devices in the earliest Mesopotamian art, it is quite provocative.
Of course, I don’t automatically default to the extraterrestrial explanation. However, I do believe the evidence is plentiful to suggest extraterrestrial contact and genetic interference on Earth.
Atlantis research is illuminating in this respect (see Hapgood’s “Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings”). If Atlantis reached high civilization and started colonizing the world with its distinctive pyramid constructions, it would account for many archaeological anomalies. Cultural distribution including linguistics, oral history, mythology, etc. could be pretty well explained using the Atlantis hypothesis.
Humanity may have already reached high civilization before, even several times, before some catastrophe, man made or natural, sent them back to the stone age. You might ask “where is the evidence?” It is everywhere. It is just usually written off as an anomaly (this is called ‘one-timing’) When anomalies abound it is time to revisit the faulty hypothesis.
Atlantis and Belly Buttons
An animation note… Disney’s Atlantis is an underrated film, one that many don’t even know exists. Not great, but not bad.
A belly button note – recall that the network forbid the showing of the belly button of Barbara Eden on “I Dream of Jeannie” in the 1960’s!