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The Myth of the Creation of Woman in Genesis 2: 18–23 and Its Possible Translations – the Consequences for Christian Anthropology

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The Myth of the Creation of Woman in Genesis 2: 18–23 and Its Possible Translations – the Consequences for Christian Anthropology Studia Religiologica 47 (2) 2014, s. 77–88 doi:10.4467/20844077SR.14.006.2379 www.ejournals.eu/Studia-Religiologica The Myth of the Creation of Woman in Genesis 2: 18–23 and its Possible Translations – the Consequences for Christian Anthropology Aleksander Gomola UNESCO Chair in Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication Jagiellonian University in Krakow Abstract This article discusses selected examples of English and Polish translations of the myth of the crea- tion of man in Genesis 2, 18–23. Its purpose is to present various translations of the Hebrew text resulting from the polysemic character of the Hebrew terms adam and ezer kenegedo and how they may lead to different versions of the Christian anthropology and male-female relationships. The article presents the feminist interpretations of Genesis 2, 18–23 as well as its two different contem- porary Polish Catholic translations resulting in two different versions of the Christian anthropology. In the conclusions, the author points to the role of translation as a factor inevitably modifying (warping) the original text. Key words: myth, creation, woman, translation, Bible, feminism Słowa kluczowe: mit, stworzenie, kobieta. przekład, Biblia, feminizm The ancient nature of myths involves their being passed down through generations and across cultures. The transfer of myths, especially between cultures and civilisa- tions, is achieved mainly by the translation process and everything that goes with it, namely various forms of interpretation, adaptation or even distortion. Names of mythical heroes are changed, as in the case of Greek and Roman mythologies, narra- tives are adapted to local needs, some are expanded, others censored. Since much of the mythical tradition of the world, including Western civilisation, goes back to pre- historic times, before the invention of writing, mythical stories and narratives were passed down and spread orally, undergoing various changes and modifications. Yet even with the advent of writing and the translation process proper (i.e. rendering a text into another language), distortions and interpretations of the original text and its contents did not end. The aim of this paper is to show some elements of the myth 78 translation process in the past and present, taking as an example the biblical myth of the creation of woman, and to show how specific, translation-related factors may have a strong effect on the way the myth is used as either a foundational or a buttress- ing element of a concrete anthropology. The other aim is to demonstrate how two very different modern Polish translations of the same Genesis text coexist, both with the formal approval of the Catholic Church in Poland, while at the same time leading to entirely different anthropological conclusions. Biblical myths of creation Unlike, for example, Hindu myths of creations, presenting various scenarios of the origin of the world, the Judeo-Christian Western civilisation associates the mythical origins of the world with the biblical book of Genesis, which was (has been?) the foundational religious/ideological text shaping the worldview of Western societies for many centuries. According to the most popular translations of the Hebrew origi- nal (Gen 2: 18–23), the text presents the creation of woman from man and defines woman’s role as subordinate to man. The myth of creation of woman from man was also a crucial component of Western anthropology, until modern times being the cor- nerstone of relations between the two sexes and a justification of the inequality be- tween them for Christians, sanctioned by God. Interestingly, the Bible proposes two, radically different, accounts of the creation of humankind: one in which it is presented as the final act of creation of the universe and in which no hierarchy or inequality between the sexes is presupposed; and the other, more familiar to us, in which, as it seems most often, woman is made from man and God seems to attribute different roles to men and women, proclaiming the latter to be “helpers” of men (Gen 2: 18–23). The first biblical myth of the creation of humankind presents humans as the crown of creation and underlines the complementarity and equality of men and women: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (Gen 1: 26–281). If Western civilisation were to inherit only this account of creation of humankind, (or – to put it in terms of biblical historical criticism – if we were to be left only with the Priestly source of Genesis, as the first book of the Bible is actually a result of an editing process comprising many different and much older sources), Western anthropology might have looked entirely different. Yet another source of the Genesis text – the Yahwist – presents a longer account of the creation of human beings in Gen 1 Bible quotes, if not indicated otherwise, from New American Standard Bible, Nashville 1995. 79 2: 18–23: a myth we are all familiar with, in which Adam, the first male, cannot find anyone like him among other creatures, so God decides to give him a companion, and thanks to this woman appears – born from man. This myth, thanks to its narra- tive structure and internal dynamics (Adam’s loneliness, his sleep, God’s “surgical operation” involving Adam’s rib), appeals more strongly to readers of the Bible and, overshadowing the Priestly source recorded in Gen 2: 18–23, has become an integral part of the collective mythical memory of the Judeo-Christian world. Gen 2: 18–23 may be approached from various perspectives, and it has been the focus of interest of as many various disciplines as anthropology, sociology, psychol- ogy or, most recently, gender studies. However, in most cases whenever the text is quoted or some of its elements are used to illustrate one thesis or another, those who employ it seem to ignore the fact that it originated in ancient Hebrew culture, dis- tant from ours in time and space, and reached the Western world not as the original text but as a translation: first the Greek one (the Septuagint), then the Latin one (the Vulgate), and later on in the form of translations into various modern Western and non-Western languages in modern times. And since an act of translation is always an act of interpretation or even a betrayal of the original text, (traductor traditor est, as the old Latin adage goes), it is worth considering to what extent the original ideas of the myth are present in its translations into various languages in their non-distorted forms. Indeed, it turns out that the story in Gen 2: 18–23, conveying the secondary char- acter of woman compared to man in the chronological, ontological and practical or- der – as virtually all translations of the narrative into Western languages suggest – is not as obvious and unproblematic as it seems to be. Gen 2: 18–23 and its possible meanings The problem with Gen 2: 18–23 is that the narrative presented in it may be inter- preted and understood differently depending on how one translates the crucial term occurring there several times, namely adam2 – a polysemic term with various mean- ings. According to the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, “adam means ‘human’ and can be used either collectively (‘humankind’) or individually (‘a human’).When used in contrast to a word for woman or female, it can also indicate a specifically male human. In Gen. 1–5 the word is used to refer to the first human, Adam. This word is used in contexts that play upon all of the different senses of the word – collective, individual, gender nonspecific, and male.”3 2 For the sake of convenience I am using the simplest possible version of transcription of the Hebrew terms. 3 Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, D.N. Freedman, A.C. Myers (eds.), Grand Rapids 2000, p. 18. St. Jerome was also aware of this ambiguity, as he wrote in his treatise on Genesis: “He made them man and woman, and blessed them, and called their name Adam, that is, mankind. So the designation ‘man’ is applicable both to man and to woman”, Jerome‘s Hebrew Questions on Genesis, C.T.R. Hayward (ed.) Oxford 1995, p. 35. 80 This ambiguity of adam cannot be retained easily in translation, which the follow- ing rendering of the original text into English demonstrates: “Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one [adam] to work the ground ... Then the LORD God formed a man [adam] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man [adam] became a living being” (Gen 2: 4–7). (...) “The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man [adam] to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him’. Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man [adam] to see what he would name them; and whatever the man [adam] called each living creature, that was its name.
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