Five years ago I observed that Scripture arguably describes a simultaneous creation of Adam and Eve. Read literally, woman was extracted from man. Extraction means the woman was already within the man at creation. Did God sort a comingled bag of jellybeans into pinks and blues, or did God change one-half of only-blue jellybeans into pink jellybeans? If the former, then Adam and Even co-existed ab initio.
The learned mind understands that texts communicate on multiple levels. Words need not be literally true to communicate a true message. Jesus showed this repeatedly with his parables—parables whose narratives were fictional but whose truths were eternal. In this way, the mature Abrahamic monotheist understands that Scripture is not one-dimensional. There are times when it is literal, times when it is figurative, times when it is didactic, and times when it is a dimensional fusion.
Writing to his protégé, Paul admonished Timothy, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Tim 2:15). In other words, Paul exhorted Timothy to apply his understanding to see the many dimensions of Scripture, to isolate the correct context(s), and to stand confidently in his analysis.
The creation narrative is a ripe example of textual polydimensionality. There are extensively camouflaged nuances begging to be extrapolated within the literal narrative, though there are limits to its literality. But the message is absolutely true in communicating that God created all matter and all life, and that God did so in a manner which reasonably resembles the narrative.
Acts 17:24 “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; 25Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; 26And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; 27That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: 28For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. 29Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. 30And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent.”
Even in this modern era we cannot fully fathom the mechanism(s) by which God created the observable world. We can, at best, merely describe God’s creation (laws of gravity, planetary motion, thermodynamics) without actually being able to explain the created (quantum theory). And if we, with our advanced knowledge, cannot completely understand God’s creation, then how much less would humans have understood a completely transparent explanation even 100 years ago? Two thousand years ago? Four thousand years ago?
It hardly seems possible to establish any degree of transparent narrative when the baseline vocabulary—photon, atom, fusion, mitosis, deoxyribonucleotide—did not exist and only by which are the concepts comprehensible. Explaining the whole of physics and biology would produce oral histories and texts too extensive to survive. But we do have an interesting nugget concerning Adam and Eve.
Genesis 2:21 “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
High school biology teaches that human existence is determined by DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). There are four nucleotides: Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine. Some six-billion nucleotides link side-by-side into long parallel strands. The parallel strands lock together like a ladder: A exclusively pairs with T while C exclusively pairs with G (i.e. A–T or T–A, C–G or G–C). The parallel strands twist into a double helix to form compact chromatids. Two chromatids interlock at a centromere to form forty-six chromosomes. Chromosomes group into twenty-three pairs containing one chromosome from the biological mother and one chromosome from biological father. The first twenty-two pairs contain common instructions for all humans. But the twenty-third pair determines physical sex, male and female. How would ancient humans have perpetuated such knowledge? How could it possibly persist over the millennia?
Biology textbooks oversimplify depictions of human chromosomes. Chromosomes are scattered within the cell nucleus and are never on a single plane nor on a common axis. Most images are not so tidy as the Denver System:
The twenty-third pair shows that these chromosomes belong to a human male. A human female would have a homologous final pair (i.e. “XX” instead of “Xy”). The idea of the sex chromosomes being the “last” or the “twenty-third” pair is a human contrivance (as are the groupings). But the point is that one of the chromosomes is, we might say, amputated.
To be clear, I do not contend that Scripture should be made to conform with human theories or discoveries, but I adamantly maintain that Genesis is a supremely abridged history—Cliff’s Notes of Barron’s Notes of Reader’s Guide. Neither should ever be contrived to fit the other as if pounding a square peg into a round hole, though it is always worthy of notice and celebration whenever Scripture and science fit hand-in-glove, lock-and-key. And it is equally worthy when one calls into question the assumptions of the other so that we may examine both more closely.
Take, for example, Genesis 2:6-7 which describes a steamy jungle climate (“there went up a mist from the earth”). God creates humans from common earth elements (“God formed man of the dust of the ground”). We know that the earth was formerly an insufferable greenhouse and we are, of course, mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Our DNA is nitrogen-based. Are these mere coincidences?
Some verses later, “God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and [God] took one of [Adam’s] ribs, and closed up the flesh.” If dust is an arguable metaphor for common earth elements, why can’t the “rib” be a metaphor of the forty-sixth chromosome? In other words….an amputation near the centromere. The symbolic imagery makes sense—the chromatid arms are analogous to the shape of a rib; the upper chromosome is analogous to a torso (which contains the ribs). We might think of “clos[ing] up the flesh” as suturing a wound, but it just as easily applies to the stump of an amputation.
What if this narrative is meant to explain that God removed part of the the forty-sixth chromosome to create two distinct sexes? With its biological instructions amputated, the chromosome had no ability to regenerate; it was closed off.
This is a pretty slippery rabbit hole as it raises the possibility that God created the first human as something other than what we understand as “man.” In fact, the Hebrew word translated as “adam” does not indicate gender at all. It is more properly “a human being.” After the differentiation into the two sexes, “adam” turned into the first human’s proper name, “Adam.”
This thought experiment suggests that the first human was not “male” as we understand it today, and also not “female” as we understand it today. That first human was genetically non-male, and plausibly androgynous or hermaphroditic. Yikes! I can’t even imagine how congregations would react to a suggestion that God created a female-ish human first, carved out the feminine, and left the masculine behind. A mature faith can contemplate such ideas without questioning the faith itself. Most faith is not that mature.
The arguable symbolism doesn’t really matter, though. All abridgments aside, the abiding truth is that God created everything. We humans cannot know the mind or the mechanisms of God. According to Proverbs 25:2, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.”