Here is an essay that I have been working on:
Most of us would claim to be very familiar with the Biblical story of the creation, temptation and fall found in Genesis 2. Some fundamental Christians might rejoice in it as a proof text for the inferiority of women and their continued suppression both in the church and in society at large. More liberal Christians might condemn it as an irredeemably patriarchal and mythological account. However when carefully examined without dogmatic preconceptions and with the help of competent scholarship, the story loses much of it's imagined patriarchy and opens into fresh insights.
To begin with, Genesis 2 is completely unlike the other Biblical creation accounts such as in Genesis 1, Proverbs 8, Psalm 104 or Job 38. It is a "stand alone" account. It begins with God creating ha'adam from ha'adama. This Hebrew pun literally means "the earth creature from the earth". It is usually quite difficult to preserve a pun in translation from one language to another but in English we might say, "the human from the humus". Note that ha'adam is not yet at this point a proper name but merely indicates what it is. In Hebrew it is a nephesh or "living creature". Note also "it" is not yet a creature with a sexual identification of any kind. We should further note that God's creative action here might be thought of as a form of evolution from a lower state to a higher.
God continues the creative process by producing a "garden" of all vegetation and places the ha'adam there to tend and till it. The care of the garden is entrusted to the care of the earth creature whom we might even think of as the patron saint of the environmental movement. The ha'adam is informed that it may eat of the fruit of any plant except the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". This suggests two things. Firstly, the ha'adam is a totally naïve and innocent creature. Without the knowledge of good and evil it lacks even the capability of sin. This would seem to me a crucial defect in the storyteller's development of this mythology.
Now we are informed that our androgynous ha'adam is lonely. Would not an omniscient God have foreseen this from the beginning? To remedy this lack of foresight God creates the animals and brings them to the ha'adam who names them, thus attaining symbolic power over them. However the ha'adam does not find another creature that would be suitable to overcome it's loneliness. Once again it seems odd that God could not have foreseen this as well. God now intervenes to cast the ha'adam into a deep sleep so as to perform the world's first "sex change operation". The rib taken from the ha'adam is formed into a woman and what remains of the ha'adam is now male. Both sexes came into being simultaneously! The woman is now described as a suitable "helpmate" to the man who is still referred to as ha'adam even though he is now a sexual creature. The Hebrew word that translates as "helpmate" seems to us in our language to infer a degree of inferiority. This is primarily a translation problem since the same word is used in many instances to refer to God as the helpmate of Israel. This hardly could suggest inferiority! It could in fact be suggestive that the female is superior to the male at this point.
Essay remains unfinished.
