Originally appeared May 24, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
Christian fundamentalists in letters to the editor often contend that if God had wanted there to be homosexuals in the world, he wouldn't have created Adam and Eve. But in reality it's not easy to discern any particular lessons about sex or childbearing from the somewhat confused folktale that has come down to us about the mythical couple.
FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANS often write letters to newspapers denouncing homosexuality, claiming that "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" and that the ancient creation story shows "God's plan for mankind." Does it?
The Garden of Eden story is the second of two somewhat conflicting accounts of creation. Genesis first gives a late theologized version (Gen. 1-2:4), then follows it with a much earlier Canaanite legend or folktale (Gen. 2:5-3:24). Adam and Eve appear only in the folktale.
According to the legend, Yahweh decided to create a living being and place him in a garden he is to till. So the god's original plan for mankind was for there to be a single man. It was a rather small garden if one man was sufficient to care for it.
Yahweh apparently intended the man to live forever, since he permitted him to eat from the Tree of Life. The tree functioned as a kind of Fountain of Youth providing the man with continuing life so long as he ate its fruit.
At some point, Yahweh changed his plan and decided that man should have some sort of companion. "It is not good that man should be alone" (Gen. 2:18). This was the god's second plan for mankind.
So Yahweh experimented a bit, creating various other species of living beings (the animals) to provide companionship for the man. But the man rejected them all as companions. Thus Yahweh's second plan for mankind was not a success.
Finally, in mounting frustration, Yahweh formed a third plan: He opened up the man, took out a rib and created a second human being from it, a women. This finally seemed to please the man because it was part of himself. So the god's third plan for mankind was for the man and the woman to live eternally as companions in the garden.
This third plan came to grief when the serpent persuaded the woman to eat the fruit of the one forbidden tree and the man and woman learned to distinguish good from bad.
At that point, Yahweh changed his plan again. Since each of his plans for humans in the garden had been complete and utter failures, he expelled the man and woman from the garden. That was now the god's fourth plan for mankind. More accurately stated, the expulsion amounted to Yahweh's giving up having any plans at all. The man and woman were on their own.
The expulsion was not punishment for eating the forbidden fruit, but to make sure the humans could no longer eat from the Tree of Life and be immortal.
After the man, now named Adam, and the woman were sent out on their own, they had sexual relations (Gen. 4:1) and for the first time the woman bore a child. And so human history began.
Now consider what the ancient legend tells about Yahweh's plans and how much it does and does not explain.
First, the legend shows that having children was not part of any of the god's original plans. Adam and Eve started having children only after Yahweh gave up on them and sent them away. In other words, Adam and Eve started having children only after they were no longer immortal.
For one thing, if the man and woman had produced children while they were in the garden, they and their descendants would have quickly overrun the small place since they all would have been immortal and reproduced endlessly. Yahweh would not want that.
But more importantly, having children, creating descendants, seems to be a kind of surrogate immortality, a pitifully inadequate attempt by Adam and Eve to compensate for the real immortality they had lost.
The sex that Adam and Eve engaged in after leaving the garden is the first mention of heterosexual sex. There is no indication that the man and the woman had sex while they were still in the garden, so heterosexual activity does not seem to be a noticeable part of the god's plan.
Nor does the story explain heterosexual desire. To be sure, immediately after the creation of the woman the overeager narrator intrudes to comment: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh" (Gen. 2:24).
But such a conclusion is wholly unwarranted. Yahweh does not say this and neither does the man: It is an interpretation from a later era. Fathers and mothers do not even exist at this point in the story.
Nor is there any evidence that Yahweh intended for the man to feel sexual desire for his companion. After all, the god created the various animals intending them to be companions and there is no evidence that Yahweh intended the man to feel sexual desire for the second human any more than for the animals.
True, the man pointed out that the woman was created from his own flesh, but that was only in connection with naming her "woman." It says nothing about his feeling heterosexual desire for her.
But since the two humans were originally part of the same body, we might speculate (as the narrator did) that they might desire to rejoin each other. While that might suggest a strong desire by the rib to rejoin the man, it does not suggest any strong desire for the rib on man's part.
People who lose a body part, say a hand or a kidney or a rib, may well miss it and wish to regain it, but they usually do not feel anything like love or sexual desire for it. Even supposing that the first man did so, his own loss of a rib could not explain heterosexual desire by anyone else since all subsequent men were born with a full complement of ribs.
So, contrary to the expectations of fundamentalist Christians, the Adam and Eve story markedly fails to show that the god's plan includes men's desire for women, heterosexual sex, or the generation of children.
Author's Note:
After publishing this piece, I realized there is specific textual evidence for the absence of heterosexual desire in the Garden of Eden.
In Gen. 3:16 when Yahweh is expelling Adam and Eve, Yahweh says to Eve, "you shall be eager for your husband" (or "you shall feel an urge for your husband"), indicating that this is something new that Yahweh is instilling in Eve.
Yahweh does this so Eve will not be able to evade the pain of childbirth by abstaining from sexual intercourse. So heterosexual desire, at least in women, is simply the enforcement mechanism for a punishment.
Since translations vary, I should also note that I have used the New English Bible: Oxford Study Edition (Oxford University Press, 1972), the most accurate translation I know, but I have also checked several other well-known translations.
- Paul Varnell