Eve ex Adam

Leo Dong -

I recently watched a YouTube short which suggested that the litany of modern Bibles have mistranslated the story around the creation of Eve.

The YouTuber suggested that the Hebrew word "tsela" was translated as "side" instead of "rib" in the forty other uses of the word in the Hebrew Bible. The account then presses home the convenient sexism of this and extrapolates the translation to suggest the original intent was that Eve came from Adam's side, or in other words, Adam’s half.

I thought this was a little convenient, too cute, and probably a bit too liberal for the BCE zeitgeist. Upon a cursory Googling, many scholars also disagree with this interpretation. They suggest instead that the translation of "tsela" in the context of Eve's creation in Genesis could have been either a tail or the os baculum[1] (or penis bone).[2]

Zevit (one of the scholars) reasoned that everyone, including the Israelites, knew a person had an even number of ribs, and that "tsela" usually translated into something lateral to a main structure such as a supporting beam, or in this case, a penis.

  1. "What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden", Ziony Zevit (Yale Univ Press, 2013). ↩︎

  2. Which does not exist in humans, but does exist in some other mammals. ↩︎