Two Naked People in The Garden
A Recovering Gospel Doctrine Class: Moses 3:21–25
We all know the beginning: Two naked people in a garden.
21 And I, the Lord God, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam; and he slept, and I took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh in the stead thereof;
22 And the rib which I, the Lord God, had taken from man, made I a woman, and brought her unto the man.
23 And Adam said: This I know now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.
24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Above is the particular Mormon version plucked from ancient Egyptian papyrus (papyri?).
Now Joseph Smith translated quite close to the King James Version of the Bible, but what if we leave translations and go further back to the Hebrew noun, tzela. Now tzela means rib, but in 1 Kings 6:15–16 it is used to connote a support beam. This makes sense of course since the ribs are the support beams of our chest.
Having recently broken a couple of ribs, I can tell you that they are indeed support beams of the torso, but funny thing, I have 24 ribs like most people — male and female. How does this story make any sense? One guy walks around with 23 ribs and sires an entire world of 24 ribbed people, including the Eve made out of just one of his ribs?
Our myths usually serve some explanatory purpose, but none of this makes any sense. Men come out of women, not the other way around. Women come out of women, too. So how is Eve his bone? His flesh? Bones. Flesh. Cleaving. One flesh. Naked. Not ashamed. The entire five paragraphs carry an uneasy, but heavy sexual suggestiveness, but something has apparently been lost in translation and 6000 years.
Fortunately modern science and scholarship appeared at the dawn of the millennium to clear up at least a part of the mystery. Two professors, Scott F. Gilbert and the Utah-ish-Jewish named, Ziony Zevit, came up with a theory that even makes sense for the evolutionarily minded. You see, most male mammals and primates have a bone in their dicks or for the more scientific minded — human males suffer from a baculum deficiency.
Humans may call it a boner, but a distinctive homo sapien feature is that human guys’ penises (my wife: peni?) have lost their bones, or should I say support beams, aka their tzela.
Yes, the Genesis story is the story of how the male cock became as boneless as a chicken tender. The woman took it out of him. So somewhere in the Neanderthal-ian past, natural selection decided that it is not good for man’s penis to have a bone. The penis could harden, could become one flesh, but the bone was gone. The thin line running down the underside of your cock and balls? The Book of Moses tells us how that line got there — it is where God took out the bone and closed up the flesh so humans could procreate 24-ribbed creatures without a male tzela.
The beginning carried such promise. Deboning and boning, flesh and cleaving, full blown-nudity (albeit artfully covered by leaves in the temple movies), men and women living together naked and unashamed.
How did it all go so wrong?
Next Week’s Lesson: Moses 4 and Becoming Like God
