“Come now, from the Muses let us begin, who with their singing delight the great mind of Zeus the father in Olympus, as they tell of what is and what shall be and what was aforetime.” So writes Hesiod in the Theogony, the earliest known epic poem on the origins of the Greek gods. Writing in the eighth century BC, through his genealogy of the gods, Hesiod provides a foundational pillar for the Greek poets who come after him, recounting which gods came first, their many consorts and liaisons, and the eventual kingship of Zeus. But his poem is more than a mere list. Through myth, he co-opts the vernacular language of the celestial and terrestrial worlds, offering a cosmological framing for understanding humanity’s place in the world along with the nature of the world itself. Winds, rivers, oceans, night, sun, moon, and more abstract concepts, such as memory, fate, and death, are divinized and reified in the persons of the gods. The world, for all its soil and substance, is charged with the grandeur and greed of the gods.
Within Hesiod’s telling, the world begins with the void, earth, hell, and love. And from these come all the rest. Earth (Gaia) bears “starry Heaven (Ouranos), so that he should cover her all about.” Then, uniting with him, she gives birth to the central lineage of the tale through Kronos, who, in time, fathers Zeus.
Hesiod repeatedly employs the language of sexual union and gender in reference to Earth and Heaven. Three times he talks of those “born of Earth and Heaven.” And in the first introduction of Earth she is described as “broad-breasted,” while later, in speaking to her children, she says, “children of mine and of an evil father.” But for anyone who has ever read Hesiod’s Theogony, there is little need to prove that Heaven is portrayed as a man and Earth as a woman. The central plot tension of the initial generation of the Greek gods is Heaven’s mistreatment of his offspring, leading to Kronos’ usurpation of Heaven (Ouranos) as he castrates his father.
Such language sounds strange to modern ears. Why should Heaven be castrated? Why should Earth be a woman and Heaven a man? And why are Earth and Heaven even conceived as gendered entities? This language, however, is not unique to Hesiod. Similar gendering language of the primordial world and the first deities is also found in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation (circa 1500-1000 BC).
The Babylonian tale begins with Apsu and Tiamat. These are, respectively, the fresh waters and the sea. Apsu is presented as masculine and Tiamat as feminine, and in the language of the poem, they “mingled their waters,” leading to the creation of the gods. Anshar (sky) and Kishar (earth) are among their first children. While these two are brother and sister, similar to Hesiod, they become husband and wife. As the story unfolds, both Apsu and Tiamat are slain by their descendants, and Tiamat’s conqueror, Marduk (also known as Bel and thematically similar to Zeus), uses her corpse to fashion heaven and earth before creating humanity from the blood of the gods as slaves for the deities.
We would be mistaken to assume that the use of gender in these myths is mere accident or convenience. After all, so many of the deities in both myths take everyday realities and render them divine. And while there are many differences in the treatment of gender between the two stories, there are also striking similarities. First, each story presents gender as primordial, something that extends to the time before humanity enters the world. Indeed, gender is so primordial that, at least within these two tales, even the gods themselves appear constrained in their genders. Tiamat, for instance, does not change herself into a man to fight back against Marduk, though she is specifically called out as a woman by her opponents. She resists him as a feminine entity, albeit a chimera of the human and the monstrous. And in Hesiod, Earth must seek out the help of her son to resist the tyrant Heaven, though Heaven came forth from earth herself.
Second, each story presents gender as not only anthropological but also cosmological. It is an ordering principle of the universe, whether in the relationship between heaven and earth in the Theogony or in the two types of water in the Enuma Elish. My point here is more easily explained in the Theogony. It is not difficult to see how a gendered representation of Earth and Heaven in the narrative extends, in some manner, to the working of the world. Heaven provides sun, rain, and seasons while the earth provides fertile soil, a place for humanity to call home, and a source of nurture. It is the union of these two that provides life and sustenance to mankind. They are a type of mother and father and reflect an ordering necessary to humanity’s life in the world. In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat’s female body becomes the source of the world in which man lives, an apt analogy to pregnancy and childbirth. Gender orders the universe even as gender orders humanity.
Finally, by making gender primordial and rooting it in the cosmological, both stories develop extended narrative constructs that inform a mythos of gender. What I intend by this term (a mythos of gender) is the use of cosmological and epic narratives to symbolically communicate archetypal patterns that speak to the nature of the masculine and the feminine. These are mythos because the presentations are not linear and rational in the sense of logos. They are rooted in story, and their validity is presented by the stories’ authors as evident in their connection to the mythic origins of the world.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, both notable scholars of myth in the twentieth century, saw these relationships between gender and the mythic and incorporated them into their own works. In Lewis’ book Perelandra, the primary figure, Ransom, beholds the spirits of two of the planets, Perelandra (Venus) and Malacandra (Mars), witnessing the reality of their gender. Lewis writes (as if relaying what he heard and learned from Ransom), “At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine.”
Likewise, Tolkien writing in The Silmarillion on the nature of the Valar, the gods of Middle Earth, says, “But when they desire to clothe themselves, the Valar take upon them forms, some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby.”
I provide these quotations as evidence that the literary observations I am making are not novel, nor are they without parallel in our own time. Each of these scholars saw gender as something that transcends the body, though not wholly distinct from it. Lewis overtly renders this in cosmological terms by making planets and their spirits gendered, and Tolkien does something of the same with the Valar. Each represents gender as primordial. And each uses their stories, including the gendered beings described in the quotes above, to create a mythos of gender. Indeed, readers of the entirety of Lewis’ works will know that gender is a prominent theme. Notably, however, Lewis’ and Tolkien’s mythoi of gender are significantly different than those presented thousands of years earlier in Hesiod and the Enuma Elish.
Of course, most people alive today in the Western world would not accept either of the prevailing mythoi of gender in the Theogony or Enuma Elish as true. Hesiod’s later story of the creation of women in the Theogony and additional statements in Works and Days promote a denigrating view of women and the female nature. And the depiction of Tiamat as a chimeric sea monster in the Enuma Elish paints a dark and dismal view of the feminine. As to men, each story revels in rebellion and violence against fathers, castrating them, killing them, or imprisoning them. Masculinity is narrated as self-serving power, subjugating others to its own interests. Similar narrations of the masculine are present in the Iliad and in The Epic of Gilgamesh. These depictions rightly repulse us.
The differences, however, between the stories of the ancients and the present beg the question of how we got here. What changed? What happened over the last 4000 years that led us away from the depictions of Hesiod, Homer, and the Babylonian priesthood to those in Lewis and Tolkien? How did Western culture change such that the mythos of gender presented in these ancient tales is no longer self-evident but, instead, scandalous.
The short answer to this question is straightforward: Christianity happened. The story of the Scriptures fundamentally changed Western culture’s understanding of gender by giving us a different story, a better mythos. Before this response is written off as a simplistic answer to a complex question, I would like to propose a thesis, namely, that, beginning on the first pages of Genesis, the Christian scriptures use a similar approach to present a complex and nuanced mythos of gender that runs all the way through to the close of Revelation. This mythos is not detached from the cultural milieu of the ancients, but rather plays on the varying mythoi of gender evident in stories such as Hesiod’s Theogony, The Enuma Elish, and The Epic of Gilgamesh, undermining their mythoi of the feminine and the masculine while also developing rich and nuanced alternatives that are compelling, beautiful, and desirable. In short, the Bible tells a better story of gender, and this better story overcame and displaced the mythoi of gender prevalent from ancient times.
Scripture overflows with a mythos of gender. Unfortunately, much of it is lost to us. We children of the Enlightenment are not very good at reading stories, especially the ancient ones. They ask a great deal – prolonged meditation, deep reflection, reading and re-reading. I am afraid that we too often prefer the short, moralizing tale, or, even worse, the line-by-line, non-fiction work or the academic article, when what we really need are folk stories and fairy tales. When I was a child, we had a large book of Hans Christian Andersen. Nothing ever felt clearer after reading one of his stories. They left me confused, uncomfortable, disoriented – feelings I recently experienced again when reading Phantastes by George MacDonald. But it is these very feelings which force one to think and to wonder. Stories demand things of us. Strange stories demand even more. And Scripture is decidedly strange.
It is not only, however, that our capacity for deep story-understanding is withered. It is also that the gendered imagery of Scripture is, for most of us, viewed across a broad chasm. We read in a neutered modern English, and the text is in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. How are we to see clearly from so great a distance when imagery, like that used to depict gender, so often lives in the original language of a text, especially in the Old Testament? Too often, translation takes off the foreign, strange dress of the text and presents it in American business attire. Hebrew is nothing like English, and its literary devices are very different than our own. If we were to translate Shakespeare into Farsi would the language rhyme, the couplets couple, and the double entendre persist? “A little more than kin and less than kind” doesn’t translate, and meaning is lost. Even so with Scripture.
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There is a concreteness to the opening imagery of Genesis that is foundational to its narrative. But since our age values abstraction, particularly in a tendency towards perceived scientific phrasing, translations often fail at carrying this concreteness into our English readings. This is unfortunate, not simply because it replaces the playful physicality of Hebrew with the bland, measured speech of an imposed modern objectivity, but primarily because this supposed objectivity obscures our understanding of the text.
Take the following translation from the NIV for Genesis 1:2.
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
At face value, there is nothing wrong with this translation. It presents a reasonable word-for-word understanding of the Hebrew. Compare it, however, to the more idiomatic and embodied translation from the ESV.
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
Both translations begin with an earth that is empty or void. But in the ESV, darkness is over the face (paneh) of the abyss rather than a surface. How should we decide between surface and face? And does it even matter?
The word in Hebrew, paneh, has the common meaning of a face (when used as a noun). Certainly, it can be translated in many other ways, including surface. But these other meanings take on their meaning in reference to the construct of a face. Because of this, we might tentatively say that the ESV appears the better translation. It carries forward this more embodied, common meaning without any glaring oddity in the English. We can have sympathy, however, for the NIV. One can see how it might be strange (in English) to talk of the deep as having a face.
The best way to answer our question, though, is by reading further. Are there critical ways in which the text takes the image of a face – an image we all know – and then uses it to develop and communicate meaning? We should seek to use the translation that best serves the literary developments taking place within the Hebrew of the narrative.
When we look at the broader narrative context, we observe that it is devoted to creation. We do well to remember this. In considering our question of translation, to describe the nascent earth with the description of a face shapes how we view the earth in its moment of creation. A world with a face is something more than a world described in the terms of a shop class. There is a creatureliness to it that is lacking in an earth with only a surface. Our word choice (face versus surface) plays into this distinction. We must consider, then, which it is: does the text depict the creation of the world as an act akin to box-making or an act more like being-making?
Building on these observations, it is a very different thing for the text to describe darkness on a face compared to darkness on a surface. A dark face is a face without life. It is expressionless, lacking the light of life. But then light comes, as the first speech of God shines light upon this dark face of the earth. Perhaps here is a further image that also communicates being-making rather than box-making.
Neither of the prior translations of Genesis 1:2, however, adequately capture the fullness of the unfolding imagery within the immediate Hebrew context. This is impossible in English given the multivalent meaning of the Hebrew word for spirit, ruach (רוח), and the various English concepts the Hebrew term communicates. The relevance and the importance of the image of a face in these opening lines becomes more evident when we combine it with ruach in the following translation:
“Now the earth was unformed and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the breath of God hovered over the face of the waters.”
These lines intimate the image of a face-to-face encounter between God and the unformed world, not merely the abstraction of an invisible force encountering inchoate matter. The exhalation of God’s lips meets the face of the earth, his breath blowing into the still visage of the world, until, in a moment, he forms breath into speech, and the world becomes alive.
This is the imagery of being. And it is precisely within this image of God’s breath upon the face of the unformed world that a knowing reader of Genesis will find a familiarity, an echo within Scripture which helps us perceive both its expansiveness and minute self-awareness. What may have seemed an inconsequential translation choice is suddenly revealed as an important building block to a profound parallel in the text. God’s face and breath up against the primordial world, breathing life into a lifeless face, portends the imagery of humanity’s creation.
Genesis 2:7 reads,
“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
These mirrored images communicate a profound seminal union between the world and humanity. God’s breath upon the face of the world is recapitulated as God’s breath breathes into man’s face, bringing life. And because Adam and the earth are enjoined in this shared image, we learn that what the world is in its wholeness, Adam represents in his person. His beginning is a recapitulation of the initial moment when God’s breath hovered over the face of the earth, giving it light and being. He is now presented as the breath of God enearthed in earth, Adam (mankind) from the adumah (earth) - all packed into a particular being within the greater world. As the divine and the earthly met in that initial moment, so now they meet again in particular union in mankind.
Adam (both individually and as mankind) is then, not an isolated body or being wholly distinct from the earth, but a body within the single, greater body of the earth, both analogous to it and a participant within it, the child of its nascent womb. He is, himself, a union of heaven and earth while also being the representation of the greater cosmic union of the two, the ruach (רוח) and the adumah (אדמה). He is both individual and communal, particular and universal, anthropological and cosmological.
Throughout the narrative, the text reinforces this relationship between Adam and the creation such that, in a story that is soon to sing a repeated refrain of separation and division, Adam is, by comparison and contrast, a concentrated locus of union. God separates light from darkness. He splits the waters above from those beneath. He divides the dry land from the seas. But in Adam, in humankind, God brings to a pinpoint the heavenly and the earthly into a singular unity. And this one is a symbol of the whole of the world and the intended relationship between God and the earth. Adam is filled with God’s spirit because the earth is ordered and filled with God’s spirit. He is made of the adumah because the adumah is the substance of the world he inhabits. Thus, he represents both the creation and the creator. His origins are divine and earthly.
Because of Adam’s union and its resonance with the cosmological, specifically the original union of heaven and earth in Genesis 1:1, it is with ironic, though perhaps not unexpected, symmetry that he is subsequently also divided into two, similar to the divisions that have taken place in the ordering of the earth. He is separated into male (zacar; זכר) and female (neqebah; נקבה). This division is ironic precisely because Adam is initially an expression of union. But it is also expected because if Adam is a participative representation of the world in which he lives, then he, too, will be ordered through division and boundedness. What has taken place in the whole of the earth now takes place in mankind himself. He is divided, split apart.
But the purpose of Adam’s division goes beyond an artistic flourish. It presents another deeply meaningful parallel link to the greater cosmos within the creation narrative. For just as the waters above now settle upon those below, just as light stretches forth its fingers into darkness, just as the sea touches the dry land, so also in humanity, God creates a separation, which, while creating distinction, opens a liminal space within humankind, one filled with potentiality. Male and female will now reach across this space into their own union, imitating the original union of creation, the coming together of the heavens and the earth into mankind’s greater whole.
By this separation of the one into two, God provides the opportunity for a union within humanity which otherwise could not have been known, and a knowing between man and woman which brings deeper union between themselves and the creation they rule. They will now, within themselves, become re-enactors of the first moment of creation, the coming together of heaven and earth for the life of the world.
Within this division into man (ish; איש) and woman (ishah; אשה), the two separate parts of humanity each become a representation of a particular portion of the union between heaven and earth. Adam, as the masculine, appears as a representation of the heavens, while Eve, as the feminine, is a representation of the earth. Each participates in a greater reality that transcends the individual while still maintaining the communal and universal aspect of the pre-divided Adam. Accordingly, neither loses his or her participation in mankind as adam (אדם; in Hebrew, adam is more often the term for man or mankind than it is a name or an individual), or, thereby, their status as being made in the image of God. They are both adam, but they are now also ish (man) and ishah (woman), zacar (male) and neqebah (female).
These parallel patterns are the basis for the otherwise puzzling language of Genesis 2:4, which begins as a genealogy, stating, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth.” This is an odd thing. Why use the language of genealogy and kinship in reference to heaven and earth for a section that opens a narrative on the creation of Adam and Eve? Because the parentage of the world lies firstly not in Adam and Eve, but in the coming together of the heavens and the earth. Heaven and earth united to bring mankind into the world. And these two are those parents of which Adam and Eve are imitative offspring. They, not Adam and Eve, are the original pair. Thus, there is an inseverable link between what Genesis presents as a gendered cosmos and the subsequent creation and gendering of humanity. To rephrase the point, the gendering division and subsequent union of Adam and Eve tell the story of the original creation of the world and its intended purpose, and this story is intrinsic to the story of the world and humanity’s purpose within it.
These parallels do not mean that the earth is divine or that somehow Adam is divine and Eve is not. They are not statements of hierarchy, value, or worth. They are not descriptions of gender roles. Rather, they are a potent symbol of the nature of the intended relationship between God and the world and of the deep, mystical union of humanity to the earth, the creation to God, and a husband to his wife. Scripture ends with very similar imagery, as the New Jerusalem (the new creation) comes down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband, the Christ, as heaven and earth are fully reunited once again. Just as in the end God shall fill all things (1 Cor. 15:28), so it was in the beginning.
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My point in sharing this exegesis is to show that Genesis begins with a similar approach to incorporating gender as to that which I have described in the Theogony, Enuma Elish, The Silmarillion, and Perelandra. First, the story casts gender as primordial. By establishing heaven and earth as the initial pair and connecting humanity’s gendering to this pairing, Genesis presents a view of gender that precedes the sexed differences of Adam and Eve. Second, using this same approach, Genesis renders gender both cosmological and anthropological, treating it as an ordering principle not only of mankind but of the universe. It then goes on to present an epic narrative that symbolically communicates an archetypal pattern of beliefs about the nature of the masculine and the feminine.
This could, perhaps, go without stating, given the primacy of Adam and Eve to the later narrative. But it is worth calling out. The gendered nature of Adam and Eve does not spring out of the margins of the text as something new and unexpected. But neither are its antecedents linked by a stream of rational argument. In other words, assuming my exposition above is correct, Genesis introduces a rationale and explanation of gender that lives in the weave of the story. In a sense, it is the story. And this is what I mean by a mythos of gender.
This mythos of gender does not end with Genesis 1. It becomes a rhythmic motif within the Torah and beyond, a drumbeat within the storyline, driving the narrative forward. We meet it in the earth that opens wide her mouth to swallow the blood of Abel, in Cain’s city, the Sons of God and the Nephilim, Noah and the ark, Abram and Sarai, Christ and his wounded side.
I want to state again that a mythos of gender should not be confused with gender roles. Confusing a mythos of gender with the idea of gender roles gets the truth backwards. The very idea of a mythos of gender is that, within the story and, by extension, within the world, there is an essence of the masculine and the feminine that is inescapable, such that when a man does something he does it in a de facto masculine way and when a woman does something she has no choice but to do it in a feminine way, regardless of perceived gender roles in any given society. It is a fundamental reality in the nature of the world and humanity. It is not a piece of clothing, a style of dress, a pitch of voice, a set of occupations, or a list of tasks. It is not even a body part. It is why we say a man fathers and a woman mothers, because it could not be that a man mothers and a woman fathers, regardless of any attempts otherwise.
For too long, the Bible’s mythos of gender has been overlooked or marginalized. The materialism of our time neuters everything, and Scripture is no exception. We must go back to this mythos of gender in the Scriptures if we are to truly understand them and ourselves. It infuses the redemptive narrative and speaks to why God came in masculine form, the nature of the church as a woman, and why the earth groans in labor, awaiting the resurrection of the dead. It explains the historic practices of the church, the nature of the priesthood, the dignity of women, the goodness of marriage, and the virtues of singleness. A persistent failure to embrace and understand this true mythos will lead us only to greater harm. For to return again to C.S Lewis, “we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us.”
Daniel Hindman is a physician living in Baltimore.
