Adam and Steve

HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE BIBLE?
Part 2

One of the most common slogans thrown out by Christians who believe homosexuality is still a sin is this: "God made Adam and Eve, NOT Adam and Steve."

This is a reference to the first chapters in the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Few Christians would disagree with it: Genesis does indeed say that God made Adam and Eve, and there quite literally is no mention of a man named "Steve." So why do those Christians who believe homosexuality is a sin say it? To answer this, we need to understand the nature of religious myths.

Unlike how most of us use the term "myth" in our everyday conversations, myth as a category for understanding religion DOES NOT imply that a story is false. Nor does it imply that a story is true. A myth is simply a story that is held as sacred or important by a religious community.^[1] Since the Bible contains many stories Christians continue to read today, the Bible can be understood to be a compilation of many myths. Frequently myths are used as a way of understanding why people of a certain religion/culture do the things that they do. For instance, if you asked a random Protestant why Christians take Communion, they would probably answer that this practice was performed by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. Here, the Last Supper is acting as a myth, which provides meaning and explanation to the modern Christian practice of Communion. Myths, while describing the past, are very often tied to the present. They help us understand why we do the things we do, or why things are the way they are.

So what Christians are really implying when they point out that God did not make Adam and Steve is that the creation story in Genesis is the myth that they use to understand their own marriage norms, as well as to explain why they think those norms should be practiced by everyone else. In other words, they believe that God originally made one man to be with one woman, and therefore that is how marriage ought to be today, no exceptions.

For this article, we will be analyzing the first two chapters in Genesis to see if they indeed were meant to set God's standard for marriage through the creation myth of Adam and Eve. So we will be looking for these two things within the text:

1. References to marriage or sex to show a connection between Adam and Eve's creation and marriage/sexual practices

2. Evidence that the author(s) of Genesis meant us to take Adam and Eve's creation literally 

Without both of these elements, pointing out that God did not make Adam and Steve makes little sense. Before we begin our investigation of the text, it first must be pointed out that there is not one creation myth in the first two chapters of Genesis; there are actually TWO! Like many Old Testament books, Genesis was not written by one author, but rather is a combination of many sources all compiled by various editors over centuries. The first written edition of Genesis probably originated around the 11th century BCE, and it's final round of editing probably occurred around the end of the 6th century BCE. That's about 500 years of editing!^[2]

While this makes things complicated, we are not studying the entirety of Genesis, just the first two chapters that contain the two creation myths. We really just need to understand the intentions of the Genesis editor(s) who chose to include these two myths. To keep things easy to read, let's say that there was one editor of Genesis responsible for pairing the two creation myths who lived some time between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE, and let's call that editor "Ed" (his full name is Editor, obviously).

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Now let's briefly go through the content of both creation myths to see what Ed was trying to say by including them in Genesis 1 and 2. 

The first creation account can be found in Genesis 1.1-2.4a. In these verses, God creates the world in six days. The general outline of this creation myth can be summed up as follows:

Before creation: There was watery chaos.

Day 1: God creates light, and separating it from the darkness makes day and night.

Day 2: God creates a dome to separate the chaotic waters, creating a space for life. He calls this dome "Sky."

Day 3: God separates the water underneath the Sky dome into concentrated pools, creating seas, and revealing land where the water used to be. God then creates vegetation on that land.

Day 4: God creates the sun, moon, and stars in the Sky dome to signify day and night, as well as mark the seasons.

Day 5: Out of the seas God creates sea creatures and birds.

Day 6: God creates land animals, then creates a man and a woman (presumably at the same time) in likeness to his image. He then gives the humans dominion over all the sea creatures, birds, and land animals.

Day 7: God rests having finished making all of creation, and makes the seventh day holy.

In this first myth, we really don't see any direct references to sex or marriage.^[3] So let's turn to the second creation myth found in Genesis 2.4b-25, paraphrased below, to see what we can find:

During the day that God created the heavens and the earth, and before God created any vegetation, God created man (who would be called "Adam") out of the combination of dust from the earth and his breath. After this, God created a garden in a land called Eden, where he created all kinds of vegetation, including the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God then put Adam into the Garden of Eden and ordered him to till it and tend to it, allowing him to eat any fruit from any tree he likes, except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God then decided that Adam should not be alone, and so he created land animals and birds for him. Adam named all the land animals and birds, but did not find a suitable helper in any of them. So God caused Adam to sleep, and he removed one of his ribs and created a woman (who would be called "Eve"). After Adam wakes up and sees Eve he is very pleased. The two of them lived in the garden "naked and unashamed" (2.25).

Now we all know what eventually happens with the bit about the talking snake^[4] and Adam and Eve's ejection from the Garden of Eden. But that is not part of the creation aspect of the myth, so I am cutting the narrative a little short. Unlike the first myth we looked at, this second creation myth draws parallels to heterosexual intercourse within marriage, and so it is more relevant to our discussion. After God creates Eve, Ed provides an interpretation for us:

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2.24)

So it appears this second creation account of Adam and Eve does comment on sex within heterosexual marriage. The above bit about two becoming one flesh is referring to sex, and just as Eve and Adam were at first one flesh before God surgically removed Adam's rib, so too does a man and woman become "one flesh" (so-to-speak) when a man inserts his "flesh" into a woman during intercourse (I apologize to my more squeamish readers). Obviously a man and woman do not literally become one flesh when having sex, but symbolically they do, according to Genesis. The passage above also mentions how this reflects family structures: men leave their original family units to make a new family unit by becoming "one flesh" with their wives. But we must remember that myths explain contemporary practices, in this case Ed's. Ancient family structures such as the one Ed knew in the Middle East did not include homosexual family units, so the author of this second creation myth was only trying to explain the origins of the heterosexual family unit, not homosexual.

So this myth is about symbolically explaining ancient family units and sex within those units, not literally. In reality, a husband is no more "one flesh" with his wife than a husband is to his husband, or a wife is to her wife. So far, Adam and Steve only violate ancient symbolism.

[[But this second creation myth does say that God originally created a man and a woman to be together sexually. And this myth is in the Bible, so can't we assume that Ed wanted us to take God's actions literally?]]

It doesn't seem so. On the contrary, it appears that Ed didn't take these myths literally. Think about it from Ed's perspective. Right in the beginning of Genesis we see two creation stories that contradict one another. The whole timeline is completely different in both of these stories:

Myth 1: God creates vegetation, then animals, and then both man and woman in the course of a week.

Myth 2: God creates man, then vegetation, then animals, and then woman in what appears to be a single day.

On top of that, the origins of man and woman are different:

Myth 1: God creates man and woman together.

Myth 2: God creates man, then creates animals so that man won't be lonely, and when that doesn't work creates woman (sorry ladies, Ed was also around before feminism). 

Ed's not an idiot. It's not as if Ed didn't notice that both these stories contradicted each other. In ancient times resources and education for writing were not common, and those who did write did so meticulously. So not only did Ed include two stories that he knew contradicted one another, he put them back-to-back. Simply stated, how could Ed put conflicting stories right next to each other AND expect his readers to take both stories literally? HE DIDN'T.

[[Okay, so why would Ed include two contradicting creation myths if he didn't take them literally?]]

Genesis as a whole is a book about beginnings. In it we find the origins of the covenant between Abraham and God, the origins of Israel, and the origins of Israel's Twelve Tribes. It made sense to start Genesis with the origins of the earth itself, but there was clearly disagreement among the Israelites as to how the earth was actually created. These two myths were included as speculations about God's role in the origins of the earth and humanity, NOT as chapters in a history book. And if there would have been homosexual family units among the Israelites, we might well have seen a third creation myth in Genesis about Adam and Steve.

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To wrap up, the slogan "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" relies on the idea that God's creation of man and woman was his ideal model for sex and marriage, but in reality the creation myth this argument is based on is one of two found in Genesis that were not meant to be taken literally. Instead, these creation myths were included to serve as possible explanations for the origins of the cosmos to better understand Israelite society—a society that had no concept of homosexual family units. These myths were NOT written to comment on or critique homosexuality, or even to be taken literally for us to do so today.

"God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" may be a catchy rhyme, but it has little significance in the modern Christian debate over gay marriage.

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Notes

[1] "Myth" comes from the Greek word muthos, and has been used in academia to simply refer to sacred stories, not stories that are necessarily believed to be false. I included this term to introduce readers to a common definition used in the field of Comparative Religion, not insult the stories of Genesis. Some myths are indeed thought to be true, such as Jesus' last supper. Other myths are not meant to be considered true, such as Jesus' parables, or poetic works of fiction like the book of Job.

[2] Many believe that Genesis along with the rest of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) were written by Moses. Few scholars take this seriously. For starters, Genesis never identifies itself as being written by Moses (indeed, it narrates a time before he was born!). It was also normal for ancient Middle Eastern texts to be written anonymously.

[3] This is, perhaps, a bit misleading. In the first creation myth, God does tell man and woman (as well as other beasts) to "Be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1.28). This indirectly implies heterosexual intercourse. However, it never proscribes heterosexual intercourse, nor is there any indication that man and woman are to marry before "multiplying." As such, I would not consider this as evidence connecting creation to heterosexual intercourse or the institution of marriage. My wording on the original post was poorly written: “In this first myth, we really don't see any references to any kind of sex or marriage.” We obviously do see some kind of reference to some kind of sex, it's just not connecting creation of man and woman to exclusive heterosexual intercourse, or any kind of marriage.

[4] It's also interesting that while Christians often believe that the snake was Satan, the Genesis text never identifies it as such. For the author of this second creation myth, it appears to merely be a snake who can talk. He isn't the only talking animal in the Torah, either (see Numbers 22.21-39).