It stands to reason that the world is actually much older than the Bible stories make us think. In fact, the history of the creation of mankind goes way back. I have no proof, but intuition and blind faith tell me that early on God was still inexperienced. She had never yet tried to create humans before. She had done well with snakes, though. Their brains had turned out powerful and perfectly capable of cunning, as we later found out. But let us begin at the beginning.
For one thing, Earth was also new and time was still set at “universe” which meant that things went extremely fast and extremely slow at the same time. Later this sort of thing was shoved into a box labeled “quantum theory”. Remnants of the old clock setting still remain today. While in the United States, for example, “time” means money and by extension, “hurry up”, in Italy, Spain, and many other cultures “time” means “take yours”, in other words, “Hey, not so fast”. But I am digressing again.
So it took God only a day or so to start “Project Mankind”, but from then on development was slow going. The thing turned out to be more complicated than expected. As a matter of fact, it took decades, celestial decades. By the time the first complete model, Adam, was rolled out he was already in his celestial eighties. So when God set him down and explained the basic rules he was almost deaf, or at least hard of hearing and, truth be told, did not understand a word of what she said about the tree and the apple, for example. It did not matter because that topic wasn’t to come up ’till later. First she had to convince him that the least he could do was to make himself presentable when in public, and that Eve should do the same. Three fig leaves would be the norm for her, one would do for him, God said. But as we already know Adam did not hear well and consequently just gave God that blank stare of senile non-comprehension. So she tried to communicate with him in an audio-visual way. She showed him artists’ renderings of Eve before fig leaves and Eve after. The idea was to make him see the difference, what is better: with or without. Like the optometrists do, flipping lenses: “One more time, Left? or Right?” The answer seemed obvious to God but the procedure was completely wasted on Adam who had already lost most of his vision by the time he hit celestial seventy. All he could say was that he did not notice any difference. He must have been stone blind, if mixed metaphors are in order.
Just then God accidentally dropped her clip board. Adam, who had already developed some innate sense of politesse, instantly bent down to pick it up, a maneuver he was not prepared for. Some thing snapped and he could not get up. He had to be helped to his feet. At that moment it occurred to God for the first time that maybe she was going to have to scrap this model.
The next item on the list was that apple thing. That was important, after all. Maybe, she thought, he will understand, and maybe he will straighten out once it sinks in that this is serious. So preparations were made and Eve, wearing her finest fig leaves, brought the apple to Adam, suggesting that he take a hearty bite of it, just as the snake had instructed her. He was most willing to do that. The red-cheeked ripe juicy “Paradise Delicious” smelled so good. But his one wobbly upper front tooth, assisted by equally wobbly pre-historic partials, just did not cut it. Literally! He was unable to cut into the hard skin of the offered fruit. That did it. “If he can’t even do this!”, God mumbled. She turned the lights out in Paradise and went back to her drawing board to start over.
How long that took I do not know, but celestial time had rolled on and we were approaching modernity. We get back to the story at about Genesis 1:26. We now have a little problem, though. Can we assume that God spoke some sort of Proto-Greek? She must have spoken something. How else could anyone have heard her. It could not have been English. Even the English themselves had not been invented yet. But if you follow the text you know that she was about to create mankind, something like anthropos, and that there would be an andros and a gynaika. But then English came into use and sure enough, the English speaking translator picked the word “man” for anthropos. I wish he had been a jew. I am sure he would have called him “a mensch”. That might have been too much praise but at least it would have disspelled the notion that God favored the male of the species. That misconception, alas, has now hung on for thousands of years. It is still gospel in much of the world. I find it refreshing that lately we are beginning to suspect that in world affairs at least, we have long enough ignored the fact the Irish poet Thomas Moore laid before us, namely that “‘Tis woman, woman, rules us still”.
Perhaps “rules” is too strong a word. The old Hindu philosophers claim that it is not “a woman” or even “women” that hold sway over us but the female principle, and that is also why I think “God” is a “she”, yet not a woman. But I don’t much go for this nebulous mystic talk. And as for man, i.e. andras, the male of the species, I really have to dig deep in my memory. When was the last time one of them did anything really helpful? I believe that from time to time it simply does take a woman to set things right, here or there. A Meir, a Thatcher, or a Merkel, say.
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman. Picture credits: clipart
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