gstafleu

It is amazing. I did a search for the keywords "god" and "woman" together in the thread titles of this forum, and came up with... nothing! I did the search twice just in case I pressed the Enter key the wrong way the first time around. Right, clearly it is time for some rabble rousing feminism. After all it is almost Christmas, the time when Mary, not good old Joe, gave birth to Jesus.

In Gen 1 God creates man and woman in some unspecified manner. Gen 2 is more specific: the man is created from some red goop. Now let us consider some obviousnesses.

First it is women who give birth, not men. This fact is so obvious that I suspect even BC&H scholars will not ask for sources. Because of this same obviousness, we can also safely assume, without sources, that the fact was known to the people who came up with the Genesis stories.

Second, in ancient times there was, for not too subtle reasons, the idea that babies got formed from menstrual blood. Here of course I should give sources, but I don't have them. Well, I could give Gabriella Kalapos book about holidays, but it is probably better if I don't. So I'll plead the spirit of Christmas.

Now the fact that it is women who give birth is enough to make one wonder if the God if Gen 1/2 wasn't a woman. I suppose one could come up with an excuse about how Gen 1/2 wants to make the point that the God is extra special and has, in contrast with all other male creatures, the power to somehow give birth. But that seems rather transparent to me.

Then we have this red goop business (see e.g. http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/adameve.htm). Where did God get this red goop? Perhaps she was menstruating and made a virtue out of necessity?

So anyway, I think there is some reason to assume that even the very male God of the Bible started out in female form. And now we do have a thread with "god" and "woman" in the title.

Gerard Stafleu

spin

Awright awready with the silliness over etymology! Red goop indeed, leading to your menstrual blood reverie later on. Etymology doesn't tell you what the word in question means, just where it came from, so you can't infect the current meaning with that of the source. Imagine starting with the notion that "book" is derived from "beech" and working up the notion of people reading trees...

But it's not a matter of giving birth. It's a matter of divine intervention.

In ancient times, women rarely intervened in history. The society wasn't built that way. As men wrote the stories, they were the centers of attention. God is male naturally.

Doh! The word for dust is actually totally different and Adam was formed from the dust (PR of the earth )DMH and it's this latter that you are thinking of. Red earth is nothing strange, but Adam was formed from the moisted dust, so there is no hope of an attempt to play the way you want to. The woman is made from man in order to explain the social status quo of the time. Man is the one that comes first.

The creation out of dust though is interesting in its own right. There are two creation accounts the first ending at 2:4 and features a creation out of a water chaos, the second starting at 2:5 (some say 2:4b, but I don't agree), and is a creation out of a dry world, which couldn't start without the vapor to soften the dust and make it a formable paste for god the artisan. In the first account god created everything just by speaking it into existence, starting with light and finishing with men and women. The second started with men and then the animals then women and all the rest. God had to work to make his creatures. The first from a watery chaos, the second from a dry desert emptiness. The second is a local home grown desert creation, while the first is related to the creation stories from Babylon, where the waters of the rivers flooded and caused perennial damage.

Really?? Why put women second if god were a woman?

I think this thought of giving birth here is totally off beam.

OMGOMGOMG :banghead: Where the heckle and jeckyl does "red goop" come from, I mean from what sick speculating mind of quivering bubbler excogitated this piece of unjustifed genius? This dust, moistened to make clay for our potter god, was around long before woman was created in the second creation account.




spin

mountainman

Leave the little pond of this forum and move to a more
general arena ...

Do a google search on any particular [KEYWORD] you like.
Note the stats on a bit of paper if you like control stats.

Now do a google search on "MALE and FEMALE [Keyword]"
Then the same search on "FEMALE and MALE [Keyword]"
Again note the stats, but then without any keywords..

do a google search on "MALE and FEMALE" ... 8,840,000 hits
Then the same search on "FEMALE and MALE" ...1,160,000

You will note that everything is MALE DOMINANT with the
approximate imbalance in the order of 10 times. Just as to
what this imbalance results from, I do not intend to here
to further analyse or discuss. It's in the world everywhere
it would appear. Some people can see it while others are
more or less oblivious.

When this imbalance permeates BC&H, it skips and jumps, and the
ratio leaps out well about the order of 10 to 1, probably in the order
of 100 to 1 or more. IOW gstafleu, it is my opinion, that the texts
of the bibles (and I need only distinguish the old and new testaments)
were put together by wankers.

With the old testament, they were ancient Jewish wankers.
With the new testament they were antisemetic Roman wankers.

It is good to see someone attempt to redress this very imbalance.
Especially in a forum such as this one, where there are (or so we
are told) so many unexamined postulates floating around.


Best wishes,


Pete

QUOTE for the DAY:

And they allowed Apollonius to ask questions;
and he asked them of what they thought
the cosmos was composed;
but they replied:
"Of elements."

"Are there then four" he asked.

"Not four," said Iarchas, "but five."

"And how can there be a fifth," said Apollonius,
"alongside of water and air and earth and fire ?"

"There is the ether", replied the other,
"which we must regard as the stuff of which gods are made;
for just as all mortal creatures inhale tbe air,
so do immortal and divine natures inhale the ether."

Apollonius again asked which
was the first of the elements,
and Iarchas answered:

"All are simultaneous,
for a living creature
is not born bit by bit."

"Am I," said Apollonius, "to regard
the universe as a living creature?"

"Yes," said the other, "if you have
a sound knowledge of it,
for it engenders all living things."

- The Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
Philostratus, c.220 CE

Toto

Everyone knows that the God of Genesis was male. He used to have a consort, like a decent god, possibly the Shekhinah, who was later turned into the "feminine aspects of God."

gstafleu

Spin,

calm down . Let me explain my precarious position. I live in London, Ontario, Canada. Not to far away is the village of Stratford, obviously on the Avon river (and yes, the river through London is called the Thames). Stratford is known for its Shakespeare festival and well worth a visit should you be in the neighborhood. It is also known for its cutesy stores, one of which is a nice book store.

In this age of Borders, Chapters (Canadian Borders) and Amazon I tend to support such a little independent bookstore if I find it. By buying books, and that may cause occasional pitfalls. recently I thus acquired a copy of Fertility Goddesses, Groundhog Bellies & the Coca-Cola Company: The Origins of Modern Holidays by Gabriella Kalapos. I've even given the internetinfidel Amazon link so IIDB will make some money if anyone buys it. But you have to be a real sucker to go and buy it.

While the idea for the book sounds good, the execution is not. There are some references in the back of the book, but every third is the Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker. The reviews for the latter on Amazon don't sound promising. I didn't quite spot this in the store. So what was I to do in order to get some bang out of my buck? This thread seemed like a good idea, because I maintain:
Two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Now to some of your other points. You don't seem to be too impressed by etymological arguments, OK, but from what I've seen philologists may disagree with that. Then I'd also remind you of the derivation of Easter I posted in another thread, I would argue unmitigated relevance in that case.

Now I think that you harbor a faint suspicion that even so my rendering of "Adam" as "red goop" may have been on the tendentious side. There is no reason for that suspicion to be faint, you are completely right. However, I suspect (but cannot back up right now) that the link between baby formation and menstrual blood is valid.

And there is an other thing I maintain:
That of course doesn't mean that the "wankers" (to borrow a term ) who made up the Genesis creation stories didn't go for it.

BTW, I don't want to give the impression that the bookstore mentioned above is some sort of wavy new-age joint: you can find Ehrman and Eisenman (to mention two respectable männer) there as well. And I've not given up on my quest for mythological relevance re BC&H. To that effect I have now ordered (from Chapters I have to admit) two volumes of Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God. I think Campbell is held in a bit better regard than Kalapos and Walker. I could be wrong of course. I'll get back to you about that. In a while.

Gerard Stafleu

neilgodfrey

Gary Greenberg's Myth #11 in "101 Myths of the Bible" says that the Hebrew tradition of God creating "man in his image" derives ultimately from an adaption of an Egyptian myth. If Gen.1:27 means that being made in his image meant the result was "male and female", then that is only what one would expect from a creator god (originally Egyptian) who is a bit on the androgynous side.

What is the status of this view in the lit?

Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com

spin

Fuck, I hate this stupid comment (no intended offence, gstafleu). What do I have to do when someone stumbles into something I have dealt with so often that I, in passing, write off a response and get on with something else, only to wind up with a "calm down". Well, you get it raw and extremely calm. If I were any calmer in the writing I would probably be comatose.

jeffevnz

The God of Genesis 1/2 was neither a "he", nor a "she", nor an "it", but a "they".

spin

If you look at Ex 32:35, it says "they made [(SW] the calf which Aaron made [(SH]." Here you can see two forms of the verb, the first being plural indicated by the -W, while the second is singular. In Gen 1:7 there is a different form of the verb, "and god made [Y(S] the firmament", but compare, Ex 12:16, "And the children of Israel went and did so [Y(SW]." Clearly the verb in Gen 1:7 (like all the others predicated on god) is in the singular form, so despite the form of )LHYM with its plural appearance, the writer sees the reference as singular, given the singular verb. The claim that )LHYM is plural in the passage is not based on the passage itself.


spin

jeffevnz

What about "Let us make man in our image and likeness..." or "Let us go down and confuse their language..."?