 | that God created Adam in the image of God He made him. [2] Male and female He created them, and He blessed them, and called their name Adam, on the day He created them.
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| | caused a deep sleep to fall on the earth-creature, and it slept, and He took one of its ribs and closed the flesh beneath it. [22] And the Lord God constructed the rib which He had taken from the earth-creature into a woman and brought her to the earth-man.
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[23] And the earth-man said, this time this one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called wo-man, for from man was she taken.
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In the first story it seems clear that the original creation of the human species included both sexes, while the second suggests an original male creature for whom a female was created out of his flesh. The contradiction presents a classic hermeneutic problem.
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The Spiritual Androgyne: Philo
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In the interpretation of Philo, the first Adam is an entirely spiritual being, whose non-corporeal existence can be defined as both male and female. The second chapter introduces a carnal Adam, who is at first ungendered or male and then from whom the female is constructed.
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Bodily gender is thus twice displaced from the origins of "man." Further, in this reading, the creation of Eve, and thus sexuality itself, rehearses the Fall (Bloch 1987, 10):
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| | "It is not good that
any
man should be alone," For there are two races of men, the one made after the (Divine) Image, and the one molded out of the earth. . . . With the second man a helper is associated. To begin with, the helper is a created one, for it says "Let us make a helper for him": and in the next place, is subsequent to him who is to be helped, for He had formed the mind before and is about to form its helper.
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| | (Bloch 1929b, 227)
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| | 12. Again, I am following Bal (1987) on this. If the earth-creature is sexually undifferentiated (in one way or another), only the production of a woman turns it into a man.
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| | 13. The ambiguity, indeed the contradiction, in my own discourse between refering to the first Adam as "male" and as "ungendered" is no accident. If there is no other sex, then there is no gender, so Adam is ungendered. On the other hand, when Adam refers to "his" situation before the creation of Eve, he remembers himself as male. See Bal (1987) and Boyarin (1990d).
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