Genesis 2:21 Adam's rib

David777

David777

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I will occasionally be posting threads related to narrow sections of Genesis scripture in the Christian Old Testament Bible. The reason is to provide different ways of looking at that ancient book in out of the box modern ways that dominant dogmas miss. And will ask members refrain from going off whatever narrow subject. Note I am not one that believes in Bible inerrancy or a god with favorites of theological philosophers, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence powers that I see as magic non science.

In order to do so will use biblehub dot com as a source of translations to actual Hebrew. One reason for doing so is it provides useful charts for analyzing the range of interpretations for what scripture actually might state. For example at:

https://biblehub.com/text/genesis/1-2.htm

The first entry has a cell link to Strong's 776 entry for the word "erets" with a comprehensive ways that has been used. The English cell for that row shows just one common way it has been interpreted.

For this first example will start with something simple that only we modern science era humans might notice. Please comment your thoughts.

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Gen 2:20 The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.
Gen 2:21
So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his
ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
Gen 2:22
The LORD
God fashioned into a woman the rib
which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
Gen 2:23
The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”
Gen 2:24
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
Gen 2:25
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
---------------------------------

So the first thing to be noticed is if God was all powerful able to do anything imaginable, he would not have needed to do so that way. Just think whatever and it happens. The verse bothers to note God put Adam asleep to do so just like modern medicine would do with an anesthesia.

The second thing of notice is this oddly is one of only a very very few verses in the Bible that bothers to describe something with even a bit of possible science. Our bone marrow ribs and breastbone are one of the few places within a human body where undifferentiated stem cells may be readily obtained. Such undifferentiated stem cells in lower animals are already being used to research creating life in vitro. Such would likely be a process used by a race of Ultimate Intelligent Entities.

Third, that the verse bothers to incidentally note God put closed up Adam's flesh after doing so. If Moses actually witnessed a vision of how that occurred, he indeed may as a science illiterate have recorded it so. One might expect Moses to ask God about Adam and Eve. And note I do not expect Adam and Eve were the first homo sapiens but rather the first specially genetically modified humans that could be a subject for a future thread if this thread bares value.

(Per above link) Strong's Concordance
tsela: rib, side
Original Word: צֵלָע
Part of Speech: Noun Feminine
Transliteration: tsela
Phonetic Spelling: (tsay-law')
Definition: rib, side

NAS: one of his ribs and closed
KJV: one of his ribs, and closed up
INT: took one of his ribs and closed the flesh
 

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Or for that matter, why would God need to bother doing all this surgery, anesthesia, stitching up, etc.? He could have just created Eve right along with his creation of Adam. The way it's described, she sounds like an afterthought.

And if the reason for creating her in this way was so that they could be naked and have sex without feeling guilty because she is now "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," I fail to see the logic. Why should they feel ashamed in the first place? Why should her creation via stem cell surgery make everything OK now?

And, speaking of leaving mom and dad in order to marry, who were Adam's mom and dad?

One more "and...": And the image conveyed by this charming but preposterous fairy tale is more like God creating a robot and "bringing" that spooky creature over to Adam, to release him from the shame he would otherwise be feeling by looking at a naked woman. But - wait a minute - there were no women yet, there was no sex yet, at least nothing involving more than one person. So why was Eve necessary in the first place?

Kind of sounds like a cure for a disease that didn't exist yet.

What about all those other creatures that God designed and brought into being before he made Adam and Eve? Does your version of the Bible say anything about putting animals to sleep, using their ribs to make female animals, etc.? By the time it got down to Adam, God had already made a whole bunch of males and females. So why all this dancing around with ribs, guilt, etc?

Your very interesting post inspired me to get my copy of the New International Version of the Holy Bible down off the bookshelf and dust it off. The description of the creation of Adam and Eve in this version is a lot more logical and intelligent to a modern mind. It says:

"So God created man in His own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

And then he gave Man dominion over all the plants and animals on earth, which sounds like a big mistake to me. Just read the daily newspaper. But at least they got rid of all that rib and guilt stuff.
 
I thought Adam was fashioned by God out of earth; also Eve, plus a rib. Then God breathed life into them.

I don't know too much about Adam's first wife Lilith.

edit to say, I just read something about Lilith. Brings back the forgotten memory that she was bad news. She was created out of earth, like Adam.
 
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The universe evolved from the big bang some 14 billion years ago, the earth came into being 4.5 billion years ago. Life developed and evolved on this planet (and likely billions of other planets in the universe--nothing special about us, except for our arrogant egos). Human beings are one result of natural evolution. I would say we are the highest evolved species, except for the fact that we are in the process of destroying the planet and the rest of the animal kingdom, and eventually ourselves. If you want to say that some intelligent entity started the big bang, then there is no way to prove that one way or another. Unfortunately, she/he/they set the wrong parameters for this planet, unless it was just some grand science experiment to see what would happen.

The bible was written by (ignorant) people who had no concept of the universe but did understand human nature well enough to get some things correct.
 
Sunny said:
Or for that matter, why would God need to bother doing all this surgery, anesthesia, stitching up, etc.? He could have just created Eve right along with his creation of Adam. The way it's described, she sounds like an afterthought.

And if the reason for creating her in this way was so that they could be naked and have sex without feeling guilty because she is now "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," I fail to see the logic. Why should they feel ashamed in the first place? Why should her creation via stem cell surgery make everything OK now?

And, speaking of leaving mom and dad in order to marry, who were Adam's mom and dad?

One more "and...": And the image conveyed by this charming but preposterous fairy tale is more like God creating a robot and "bringing" that spooky creature over to Adam, to release him from the shame he would otherwise be feeling by looking at a naked woman. But - wait a minute - there were no women yet, there was no sex yet, at least nothing involving more than one person. So why was Eve necessary in the first place?

Kind of sounds like a cure for a disease that didn't exist yet.

What about all those other creatures that God designed and brought into being before he made Adam and Eve? Does your version of the Bible say anything about putting animals to sleep, using their ribs to make female animals, etc.? By the time it got down to Adam, God had already made a whole bunch of males and females. So why all this dancing around with ribs, guilt, etc?

Your very interesting post inspired me to get my copy of the New International Version of the Holy Bible down off the bookshelf and dust it off. The description of the creation of Adam and Eve in this version is a lot more logical and intelligent to a modern mind. It says:

"So God created man in His own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

And then he gave Man dominion over all the plants and animals on earth, which sounds like a big mistake to me. Just read the daily newspaper. But at least they got rid of all that rib and guilt stuff.
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Indeed you have stumbled over an obvious Genesis non-congruity haha I'll just briefly address because the whole chapter 1 beginning is too messy to become distracted about herein.

That is Genesis 1:26. Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 have been hypothesized to have been added many centuries after Moses during the Mesopotamian exile by a priest sect. That was possibly because Babylonian science of that much larger more ancient civilization, was viewed as more advanced than that of the Israelites. So during their captivity in order to make their religious book more credible to people of that day, they added what was generally believed throughout the Middle East. Thus the Genesis 2:4 start was what Moses actually wrote.

The same priest sect also supposedly added to what Moses wrote about the most science doubtful section of Genesis, The Great Flood. Scholars dissecting its Hebrew point to for same reasons the original lines of Moses scripture as just a local region Tigris Euphrates river flood that is part of a more ancient Babylonia flood story. But that is a subject for yet another thread so won't go into details, haha.

The verse about not feeling shame was obviously meant to not morally frighten those of Moses's generation audience that was certainly many tens of thousands of years in the beyond Adam, that were used to wearing clothing.

As for Adam's parents, my speculative input in a future thread I'll briefly mention herein since it is off subject, is Adam was the result of many generations of isolated genetic work by UIEs with ordinary homo sapiens.
 
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hollydolly said:
How was Adam created?..did God take a rib from his own body , and create Adam.. ?..if not, why did he not create Eve in the same way as he created Adam ? ..why go to all the bother of surgery.. :unsure:
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Well first what dogma purports is God as having a Earth monkey creature like body in so vast a universe as we exist in, is as viewed in this modern science day extreme anthropomorphic arrogance. The verse 1:26 that relates "Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;" could be considered valid as I will speculate if one considers what is the true essence of organic earth animals, electromagnetic+ fields as in oscillating brain waves within organic neural system containers. Thus am relating God's energy fields and ours may have similarities to what UIEs are but not the physical containers.
 
David777 said:
Well first what dogma purports is God as having a Earth monkey creature like body in so vast a universe as we exist in, is as viewed in this modern science day extreme anthropomorphic arrogance. The verse 1:26 that relates "Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;" could be considered valid as I will speculate if one considers what is the true essence of organic earth animals, electromagnetic+ fields as in oscillating brain waves within organic neural system containers. Thus am relating God's energy fields and ours may have similarities to what UIEs are but not the physical containers.
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Look David I respect your right to have religious views. But to be honest about it, you and millions of others are just making up stuff to try to give the human race some meaning in the universe. We are one animal species among many, and despite our obvious arrogance are no better than any other animal species. Our species just happened to be the first to develop through evolutionary happenstance a large forebrain so that we could make all this stuff up. Chimps share much of our genetic structure. From an evolutionary perspective chimps and humans are much closer than we are to ants for example.

I admire your ability to string together a bunch of nonsensical stuff, like God and electromagnetic fields. You have a quite vivid imagination!
 
Personally, I think discussions like this are interesting. But, you know, religion and politics.

Seems to be a lot of this on the site now.

And, to my mind..recipe for disaster.

I think it will, just inevitably lead to a lot of arguments and discord.

And then folks who liked each other and enjoyed interacting with each other...will just wind up with resentments and disagreements.


Personally, I think we really should limit these things.


I mean, with COVID...and this being a message board where seniors could use a decent exchange of information about a current issue that directly affects our lives? Yes, I think that should be an exception.

Or, with the war in Ukraine and everyone, in the immediacy of the day, very worried...seems wise to utilize this format for us to, you know, maybe come together to help us through our worries.

But, in general? In general, I think we need to limit the discussion of politics and religion.

Personally, when I read about the horrors in the news...the things that help me, are people posting pictures of their grandchildren and sharing fun and nice stories.

So, anyway, that is my two cents.

Also, as regards politics and religion, folks should know that I alone am always right. Always! :)
 
JonSR77 said:
Personally, I think discussions like this are interesting. But, you know, religion and politics.

Seems to be a lot of this on the site now.

And, to my mind..recipe for disaster.

I think it will, just inevitably lead to a lot of arguments and discord.

And then folks who liked each other and enjoyed interacting with each other...will just wind up with resentments and disagreements.


Personally, I think we really should limit these things.


I mean, with COVID...and this being a message board where seniors could use a decent exchange of information about a current issue that directly affects our lives? Yes, I think that should be an exception.

Or, with the war in Ukraine and everyone, in the immediacy of the day, very worried...seems wise to utilize this format for us to, you know, maybe come together to help us through our worries.

But, in general? In general, I think we need to limit the discussion of politics and religion.

Personally, when I read about the horrors in the news...the things that help me, are people posting pictures of their grandchildren and sharing fun and nice stories.

So, anyway, that is my two cents.

Also, as regards politics and religion, folks should know that I alone am always right. Always! :)
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If people would just drop out if the convo becomes not to their liking instead of arguing, there would be no problem. But I hear ya Jon.

As for myself, I can't take too much religious talk, so I'm sure I won't last too long. :)
 
JonSR77 said:
Personally, I think discussions like this are interesting. But, you know, religion and politics.

Seems to be a lot of this on the site now.

And, to my mind..recipe for disaster.

I think it will, just inevitably lead to a lot of arguments and discord.

And then folks who liked each other and enjoyed interacting with each other...will just wind up with resentments and disagreements.


Personally, I think we really should limit these things.


I mean, with COVID...and this being a message board where seniors could use a decent exchange of information about a current issue that directly affects our lives? Yes, I think that should be an exception.

Or, with the war in Ukraine and everyone, in the immediacy of the day, very worried...seems wise to utilize this format for us to, you know, maybe come together to help us through our worries.

But, in general? In general, I think we need to limit the discussion of politics and religion.

Personally, when I read about the horrors in the news...the things that help me, are people posting pictures of their grandchildren and sharing fun and nice stories.

So, anyway, that is my two cents.

Also, as regards politics and religion, folks should know that I alone am always right. Always! :)
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Hey whatever floats your boat. However, folks can discuss whatever they want on this site (except politics of course) which I find invigorating in my old age! Sorry, respectfully, you don't get to make that decision (only @Matirx and a few others do).
 
spectratg said:
Hey whatever floats your boat. However, folks can discuss whatever they want on this site (except politics of course) which I find invigorating in my old age! Sorry, respectfully, you don't get to make that decision (only @Matirx and a few others do).
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Sounds like you are taking my comments too personally, there. I could be wrong, of course, but I thought there was mention in the rules to not discuss either politics or religion. Sorry if I misread something.

But I just misread something.

Do not direct any anger at me. This is the internet, but it is still society. Not your place to direct anger at me. I have done exactly ZERO wrong.

And, you know, since, over the years, I have done reading for the blind, worked in soup kitchens and done endless, endless hours of volunteer work and helping people...definitely not your place to criticize me with some kind of anger. Keep that to yourself.
 
The human species (homo sapiens) is physically inferior to other primate species. One hypothesis would hold that the human species developed a large brain in a last-ditch effort to survive extinction. There were at least seven other species (such as the Neanderthals) that did go extinct, except for some interbreeding that resulted in a small amount of their DNA in modern humans.

Koko (1971-2018) was a gorilla who understood approximately 2,000 words of spoken English, in addition to sign language. Koko's life and learning process has been described by in books, peer-reviewed scientific articles, and on a website. She understood nouns, verbs, and adjectives, including abstract concepts like "good" and "fake", and was able to ask simple questions. IQ was estimated to be at least 70. By contrast, profoundly retarded humans have an IQ as low as 50. Normal human range is 70 to 130.

If you have ever looked into the eyes of a chimpanzee, as I have done, it is a rather eerie experience. There is something in there looking back at you. Much different than looking into the eyes of my dog.

Intelligence is a human defined term. If you define it from the dolphins’ standpoint, for example, they are far more adapted to their natural environment than most human beings. (A naked human being thrown into the wild somewhere would be dead in short order.) Other animal species have self-awareness. So if the human soul survives death, then surely so must that of Koko and species with self-awareness such as chimps, dolphins, and elephants and probably others. Human defined intelligence is a spectrum; we just happen to be at the top.

Perhaps an evolved biological species on any planet (in this unimaginably vast universe) that is able to invent technology eventually sows the seeds of its own destruction, as we are now doing. It most likely started with onset of the Industrial Revolution, about 1760. We consider ourselves masters of the Earth, but in fact we are destroying the planet on a daily basis. Making up a bunch of stuff over the centuries called religion is a self-delusion of arrogance.

God help us.
 
My take on this thread was David777 was trying to generate discussion on the stories in the bible that conflict with science.

Beginning with the beginning of making mankind in "our" image. That alone could bring more questions than answers that could be verified. Beginning with if woman was made from Adam's rib then how did DNA expand? Would DNA be the same or would it change in some way?
 
What we should really do, is engage a psychological profile of everyone on here. Find all their emotional vulnerabilities and then provoke and exploit them. Then alone will we be free.

People are very very sensitive about religion. Some have been abused by nuns and hate religion. Others are deeply religious and are offended about criticisms of religion.

Either way, it is a big recipe for disaster, a big recipe for people just becoming very angry at each other.

On the other hand...when we do simple things like share heart felt stories about grandchildren, or peace while gardening or fishing...we all help and support each other.

I understand people's interest in discussing issues...but then, maybe the software on the board could be changed...so that there is a separate section and posts don't pop up in the current feed with titles like, "I Hate God - Who is With Me?" Or, "I Hate Atheists - Who Is With Me?"

I have already received a bunch of nasty comments back when discussing pretty non-controversial things. I can't see discussing controversial topics as being some simple benign engagement that is going to be without bad consequences.

And, you know, a nice deaf woman recently came on the boards here...and a bunch of jerks were so nasty to her, that she just left. It was not her. It was the jerks. The idea that it is, in any way, shape or form, ok to do that to a deaf woman is simply outrageous and utterly disgusting.
 
JonSR77 said:
What we should really do, is engage a psychological profile of everyone on here. Find all their emotional vulnerabilities and then provoke and exploit them. Then alone will we be free.

People are very very sensitive about religion. Some have been abused by nuns and hate religion. Others are deeply religious and are offended about criticisms of religion.

Either way, it is a big recipe for disaster, a big recipe for people just becoming very angry at each other.

On the other hand...when we do simple things like share heart felt stories about grandchildren, or peace while gardening or fishing...we all help and support each other.

I understand people's interest in discussing issues...but then, maybe the software on the board could be changed...so that there is a separate section and posts don't pop up in the current feed with titles like, "I Hate God - Who is With Me?" Or, "I Hate Atheists - Who Is With Me?"

I have already received a bunch of nasty comments back when discussing pretty non-controversial things. I can't see discussing controversial topics as being some simple benign engagement that is going to be without bad consequences.

And, you know, a nice deaf woman recently came on the boards here...and a bunch of jerks were so nasty to her, that she just left. It was not her. It was the jerks. The idea that it is, in any way, shape or form, ok to do that to a deaf woman is simply outrageous and utterly disgusting.
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Yes, you are referring to Silent Rose. Such a shame that she left.

Hang in there, Jon. From my 7 months on SF, I have learned there are more nice, supportive members than there are confrontational ones. It just takes time to decide which category each falls into. "Ignore" is also extremely valuable.
 

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