In the Beginning, There Was... A Whole Buncha Bullshit

The Adam and Eve Story They Never Taught You in Sunday School

You Think You know the story…

God makes a man out of dirt. Man gets lonely. God puts him to sleep, pulls a rib out of his side, and creates a woman. She talks to a snake, eats a piece of fruit she was told not to eat, hands some to her idiot husband who knew they shouldn’t eat the fruit, and the whole thing goes fuckin’ sideways.

Kicked out of the garden, cursed to suffer, and according to the church — that’s on all of us now. Forever. Because of her. That’s the story we got.

Here’s what’s actually in the book.

First Problem: There Are Two Stories. And They Contradict Each Other.

Genesis has two creation accounts. Back to back. And they don’t match. In Genesis 1, God creates humans, male and female, at the same time. Together. Equal. On the same day. In Genesis 2, God forms Adam first, alone, and then later decides he seems lonely, puts him under, and builds Eve as an afterthought. Those are two different stories. Written by two different, very human, authors.

Biblical scholars figured this out centuries ago. They call them the Priestly source and the Yahwist source, which is academic for “yeah, two different people wrote these, probably at different times, and nobody held a final team meeting when they decided to tell the world the story.” Kind of like our current Cheeto in Charge. Tells American citizens he’s using donor money to fund his ballroom, then pushes to legislate our taxpayer money instead. Same story. Two different endings.

The church picked the second one and ran with it. The one where Eve comes second. How convenient.

Second Problem: That Was Not a Rib. The Hebrew word in Genesis 2 is tsela. The church translated it as “rib.” But tsela appears all over the Hebrew Bible, and every single other time it shows up, it means side. Not rib. SIDE. It’s an architectural word. It’s used to describe the sides of the Ark of the Covenant. The sides of the tabernacle. The flanks of a structure.

The “rib” translation first appeared in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the mid-thirdish century BCE and then locked it into the Latin Vulgate, the Catholic Church’s official Bible translation. And every single English Protestant Bible that followed copied the Latin translation instead of going back to the original Hebrew. Because cherry picking the narrative is what men do.

That’s how you get “rib” baked into 1,700 years of bullshit Western theology.

What the text most likely says, is that God took Adam’s side, half of him, and built Eve from it. Some scholars read it as two equal halves of one being, separated into two people. That’s a wildly different story than “here’s a bone, have a wife.” The “rib” reading handed the church a woman built from spare parts. The actual word gives you something closer to equals.

Third Problem: Adam and Eve Barely Appear Anywhere Else in the Bible. If this story is the cornerstone of all human theology — the fall, original sin, why women suffer in childbirth, why men toil in the fields, the entire framework of human brokenness, yada yada yada — you’d expect it to come up constantly throughout scripture, no?. It almost never does.

Smells like more bullshit to me.

Outside of Genesis, Adam gets one single mention in a genealogy list. Eve gets referenced a handful of times in the New Testament. The full theological weight the church placed on this story, the doctrine of Original Sin, the subjugation of women, the entire guilt architecture, was built on top of a story that the rest of the Hebrew Bible essentially told to fuck off.

Augustine formalized Original Sin in the 4th & 5th centuries. Paul used Eve to argue that women should stay quiet in church. The story kept getting heavier and heavier with each new theologian who needed the narrative to evolve with his patriarchy. But Genesis itself? It tells the story and moves the fuck on.

The Deleted First Wife

Okay, this one is fun. There’s a reason Genesis has two creation accounts where women are made differently. Some ancient readers noticed the same inconsistencies I just pointed out. And in medieval Jewish tradition, they filled the gap with a character named, none other than… Lilith.

Personally, I prefer the story with Lilith. She’s a badass. The idea was that the woman created equally in Genesis 1 was Adam’s first wife, who refused to be subordinate to him, said absolutely not, left the garden on her own terms, and was written out of the story. Eve, built from his side in Genesis 2, was the replacement. The compliant version. The woman built under patriarchy.

Lilith doesn’t appear in the Bible by name. What appears is, lilit, buried in Isaiah 34, a prophecy about a cursed wasteland full of jackals and goat-demons. Depending on which Bible you pick up, that word gets translated as “screech owl,” “night creature,” or “night hag.” No garden. No Adam. No first wife. Just a bird in a ruin.

Medieval Jewish storytellers took that single word, connected it to Babylonian demon mythology they already knew, and built an entire woman out of it. She became Adam’s first wife in a text called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, probably written around the 8th or 9th century — a satirical, deliberately provocative piece that was never meant to be taken as scripture.

But, someone felt the need to fill the gap. The contradiction between the two Genesis accounts was obvious enough that people noticed it and invented a whole character to explain it. And the story they told to fill it?

A woman who refused to comply and got erased.

What Science Actually Gave Us And What the Church Did With It

In the 1980s, geneticists were tracing human DNA back to its origins. They discovered that all human mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material passed only from mother to child, traces back to a single woman. A common ancestor. A definitely-not-white woman who lived in Africa somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Scientists, with what I can only assume was a complete failure to predict the consequences, named her Mitochondrial Eve.

The church lost its mind.

Because that’s all it took. One word. Eve. Scientists had spent decades dismantling the literal Genesis narrative — evolution was settled, the earth was billions of years old, two people in a garden was looking more like poetry than history. And then researchers handed them the one thing they needed more than evidence: a fucking name. They didn’t read the science. They read the headline. Scientists Find Eve. That was enough. Proof, as far as they were concerned, that she was real, the story was true, and they’d been right all along.

It didn’t matter that Mitochondrial Eve was a statistical concept, not a person in a garden. It didn’t matter that she lived alongside thousands of other people. It didn’t matter that Y-Chromosomal Adam lived tens of thousands of years before or after her and the two almost certainly never met. The name was everything.

The church wasn’t excited about the science. They were excited about the branding.

What the scientists were actually saying, was that she was not the only woman alive. She was not the first woman. She was simply the woman from whose maternal line every living human happens to descend, because all other female lines eventually died out over tens of thousands of years. Other women lived alongside her. Plenty of them. The human population at that time was probably around 10,000 people or more.

“Mitochondrial Eve” is a statistical concept, not a lady molded from a man’s rib. Similar research found a “Y-Chromosomal Adam,” the common male-line ancestor, and the two almost certainly never met. They may have lived tens of thousands of years apart. Science found that we all share common ancestors who lived in Africa a very long time ago. What the church heard was: see, we told you.

Oh, brother.

A man and a woman. In the beginning. But, that is not what they found. The story of Adam and Eve has been used for centuries to explain why women suffer, why they should stay quiet, why they are spiritually suspect, why they carry blame for the fall of humanity (even thought are the sole creators of it.) It has been used as the foundation for some of the most persistent, abusive and damaging theology about women that the Western world has ever produced. And it was built on a borrowed story, a mistranslated word, a church that picked the creation account it liked better, and a medieval addition about a woman who used no as a complete sentence and got written out entirely.

The text isn’t even the problem, really. The text is just two old stories trying to make sense of what it means to be human — mortal, complicated, and always reaching for something just out of reach. If you haven’t already, go touch some grass. The Bible is bullshit.

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