Liz Charlotte Grant is an award-winning essayist whose first book, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible, will be released in January 2025. You can follow her on Threads: @lizcharottegrant.
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Eve Was Not Created From the ‘Rib’ of Adam
Katharine Bushnell / A Woman of the Century (1893)
AMERICAN EVANGELICALS LIKE to assume that reading the Bible is easy, that a plain reading exists. If only people were to hold our favorite English translation in their hands, Godself would arrest the reader, Truth making itself obvious on the tissue-paper pages. And voila! We would discover a clear path to world peace (or at least denominational peace).
Unfortunately, Bible reading is not so simple. Sometimes, we as readers have gotten the meaning of the text wrong. Sometimes commentators have allowed bias to shape interpretation. And sometimes, the problems start nearer to the root, in the translation itself. For example, the question of women’s roles in the Bible represents a tower of errors built up over time.
Katharine Bushnell, an American medical missionary to China who was fluent in the biblical languages, was one of the first female translators to take on these errors directly. In her 1921 commentary, God’s Word to Women, she painstakingly retranslated and corrected 100 Bible passages that referred to women and women’s prescribed roles within the home and church.
And she starts at the very beginning. While many male translators had written that in Genesis 2:21 Eve was formed by God from Adam’s “rib,” those translators render that same Hebrew word as “side” the other 42 times it recurs in the Old Testament. Bushnell explains that the Hebrew language contains a different word that explicitly means “rib,” a word that the Genesis author does not utilize in the account of Eve’s creation. Yet even today, a corrected translation appears only as a footnote in my NIV Bible. So, why has the mistranslation of Eve as created from the “rib” of Adam — rather than his “side” — persisted?
Why Was the Bible Banned in Utah Libraries?
The New American Standard Bible. Jessica Mangano via Unsplash.
As reported by The Salt Lake Tribune, the parent arguing for the ban of the Bible explained that the book “has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.” The anonymous parent wrote to the school board, “Get this PORN out of our schools,” before listing over eight pages of offending verses that seemed to fit the legislature’s definition of what is considered to be “pornographic or indecent.”