Eve Was Not Created From the ‘Rib’ of Adam

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?

A hundred years ago, Bushnell pointed to the bias of the translators and the rabbis before them, bias that still exists. Returning to the Mishnah, the most ancient part of the midrashim, Bushnell quotes one interpreter who compares women to “meat ... which one may eat, salt, roast, partially or wholly cooked.” Misogyny has been a near-universal feature of human society. These biased attitudes do affect the translations of Eve’s creation in Genesis.

Bushnell also points to a tale attributed to first-century Rabbi Joshua, who in trying to understand why God has created Eve from a rib and not another part of Adam’s body, ultimately concludes that God must have assumed the best way to create Eve was to construct her body from “the member which is hid, that is the rib, which is not even seen when man is naked.” In other words, God is hiding the woman. Rabbi Joshua’s logical error continues: Since we can expect a contentious relationship between man and woman (Genesis 3:16), then we can expect that if the woman had been made from a more visible part (not the hidden rib), then the conflict between men and women would worsen. The two would vie for dominance. Instead, God makes the hierarchy clear from the beginning, hiding Eve behind Adam at her creation.

Another assumption underlies the former one: The early interpreters lay particular guilt on Eve — and through her, womankind — for yielding to the serpent’s temptation. Because God has anticipated womankind’s rebellion, God prepares in advance to check her bent nature. So, Eve is prematurely hidden away and demoted.

While the early writings do get this translation wrong nearly universally, they also contain other contrary opinions about the making of the first woman. One midrash asserts that God made Adam with “two fronts” so that Eve was created when God “sawed [Adam] in half,” as if the man were created as a double, conjoined with an unawakened Eve.

In her commentary, Bushnell herself draws on this tradition of halving Adam in Eve’s creation. She speculates that another method for Eve’s creation could have resembled “fissiparous” reproduction, in which an organism divides into a near copy, like mitochondria reproducing itself under the lens of a microscope. Picture Adam’s organs splitting into two like the colored liquid inside a lava lamp. Here is parity. Unlike the first translation, Eve being made from Adam’s side communicates equality. The two humans are seen as a true match, literally made of the same quantity of the same material; they would weigh the same in every respect.

Because of the range of interpretations of this single passage (not to mention others), I no longer buy the “plain reading” approach to scriptural interpretation. The holy part of the holy scriptures is not the commentary or the translation, but that the story somehow evokes the presence of God, God transcribed on a page.

And I take heart in Bushnell’s example. When she discovered holes in biblical translation, she did not despair but set to work. In the introduction to her commentary, she wrote, “Supposing women only had translated the Bible from age to age, is there a likelihood that men would have resisted content with the outcome?” She makes the case for why it matters that she and other women turn their attention to the biblical text. We can only understand the words of the Bible when the outsider revisits the words translated by insiders, each perspective adding interpretative depth.

I feel anger when I read of these translation errors, seemingly meant to continue the oppression of women. I am angry because the words of life have been sharpened to a point and wielded as a spear to impale the so-called heretic. I want to turn the spear around, to instead take a run at the accusers.

But this is not the way of Katharine Bushnell. From her, I have learned that even in our failures at biblical interpretation, translation, and application, I can still recognize God in the Bible. The fact that we can discover our errors is proof of mercy. Correction is mercy. Self-awareness is mercy. Sometimes this correction comes by way of the text itself, a careful reinterpretation. Sometimes correction comes through the neighbor reading the text beside us. But understanding arrives.

The trend of fixing faulty translation and the endless work of reinterpretation is a reason to hope rather than to despair. The disagreements, drag-out fights, deconversions, deconstructions, doubting, and renovations represent the wrestling that God’s people have always performed in the spiraling journey of faith. In sweat and blood, we write the theology of the future. So, the Bible will never expire as long as its readers continue to demand God from its pages. The God of mystery, the God of truth, the God of presence: This is who meets us in the pages of the Bible as we return to its words with our questions. The story never ends.