The Bible tells the tale of Adam and Eve, in the Book of Genesis, and according to what is popularly believed, Eve — the first woman — was created by God from the rib of Adam, the first man. But a controversial study by a noted biblical scholar at a California university now claims that the Bible tells us something completely different about Adam and Eve.
Eve was actually created from Adam’s penis, not his rib.
At least, that is the interpretation claimed by Ziony Zevit, a scholar of ancient languages used in the Bible, in his latest book, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, and reiterated in his recent article “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” in the journal Biblical Archaeology Review.
The “baculum” is a bone found in the penis of most species of mammals. Humans are one of the few speciesof mammal to be missing a baculum, or penis bone — elephants being another.
Through what Zevit, the Distinguished Professor in Bible Northwest Semitic Languages at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, says is his close study of the actual translations of ancient Hebrew terms used in the original Bible manuscripts — not the King James and other English versions familiar today — has also determined that Adam was created from clay according to the Bible, not from dust.
Zevit was also able to place the location of the Garden of Eden — which he says was indeed an actual place — in what would have been the farthest northern region of the world, as far as the people of ancient Israel knew, near Lake Van in Eastern Turkey.
To get a better idea of Zevit’s views on the origins of the Bible, view the short excerpt of a talk given by the scholar, in the video below.
Zevit bases his most shocking claim — that Eve was created from Adam’s penis bone, rather than his “extra” rib, as the Bible is generally thought to say — on what he says is the accurate translation of the ancient wordtzela, the word used in the Bible story to indicate the bone taken from Adam to create Eve, or “Hawwa,” as the Biblical first woman is known in Hebrew.
The word refers not to a rib, but to any type of limb that protrudes from the body, according to Zevit. The professor then reasons that the only such “limb” in the human body that lacks a bone is, of course, the penis.
The Bible story was often thought to explain why men have fewer ribs than women — except for one inconvenient fact. Men and women, as it turns out, have the exact same number of ribs. But there is one other obvious, and obviously real, difference between men and women.
Men do possess that extra “limb,” which for mysterious reasons that are still debated by evolutionary biologists, has no bones. The Bible story could be seen as an attempt to explain why human males are missing a penis bone.
Professor Ziony Zevit [Photo via American Jewish University]But not everyone is buying Zevit’s new and phallic version of the Adam and Eve story. According to Elon Gilad,writing in the Israeli national newspaperHaaretz, there is plenty of historical evidence that the ancient Hebrew word tzela was, in fact, used to mean “rib.”
Gilad calls Zevit’s version of the Adam and Eve Bible tale “even more unlikely than the original story.”
“Not only is tzela ‘rib’ in post-biblical Hebrew, it has cognates meaning rib in practically every Semitic language we know… Tzela meant ‘rib’ thousands and thousands of years before proto-Semitic split up into the different Semitic languages.”
Those other Semitic languages include Arabic, Aramaic, and Akkadian, all of which have words similar to “tzela” that mean “rib.”
Even readers of the staid Biblical Archaeological Review have reacted with anger at the new Bible theory proposed by Ziony Zevit, with some readers reportedly threatening to cancel their subscriptions over the claim that Eve was created from a bone in Adam’s penis.
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