Category: Hebrew Scripture

The lectionary Gospel reading for the first Sunday in this fourth year of the Narrative Lectionary cycle takes us back to the very beginning of the Bible, to the poetic priestly account of the creation of the world (Gen 1:1—2:4a). There is so much to say about this foundational text; I will be selective!

The story serves as an origin story—for ancient Israel, for the canon of scripture, for Christian thinkers. Words used in origin stories like this have a particular power—and origin stories are always created with care and deliberation, and passed on with love as explaining the essence of being. Each element reflects something of significance in the experience of ancient Israel, and indeed of contemporary humanity.

The first two verses introduce the key characters: God, first described as the one who creates; a formless void, which is how the earth is first described; darkness, an entity in and of itself (not defined in any further way); and the breath of God, sweeping over the waters of the void. 

The story that follows in Gen 1 places the creation of light, the first act of creation, at the head of the story. All that happens after that is bathed in the light of God’s creation. Telling of the creation of light (1:3–5) establishes a pattern which is then repeated, five more times, for each of the various elements whose creation is noted in this narrative: the dome, or firmament, separating the waters (1:6–8); waters and dry land, with vegetation (1:9–13); lights in the sky and seasons (1:14–19); swarms of living creatures in sea and sky (1:20–23); living creatures on the earth (1:24–25); and humankind, male and female, in the image of God (1:26–31).

The third verse introduces light, which comes into existence through a single word of command. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light (1:3). Light is the key entity in the creation story, signalling the creative process which then ensues. Each subsequent creative action results from something that God said (verses 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26). And each creation is affirmed with the phrase, and it was so (verses 7, 9, 11, 15, 24, and then verse 30).

The fourth verse tells of God’s approval of what had been created: And God saw that the light was good (1:4). Likewise, God then affirms as good the creation of earth and seas (1:10), vegetation (1:12), the sun for the day and the moon for the night (1:18), all living creatures in the seas and in the sky (1:21), then the living creatures on the earth (1:25). Finally, after the creation of humanity in the image of God, there comes the climactic approval: God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good (1:31).

In a number of the six main sections of the narrative, God explicitly names what has been created: he called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night (1:5), then God called the dome Sky (1:8), God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas (1:10), followed by plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it (1:12), and the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars (1:16). 

After this, the categories of living creatures are identified (1:21, 25), before the climax of creation is identified: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (1:27), and then God’s blessing is narrated (1:28).

Finally, each section concludes with another formulaic note: and there was evening and there was morning, the first day (1:5; likewise, at verses 8, 13, 19, 23, 31), before the whole narrative draws to a close with the note that on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done (2:2). Of course, it is from this demarcation of the sections of the creative process as “days” that there came the traditional notion that “creation took place over seven days”. 

The notation of “days”, however, is simply to give the story a shape that we can appreciate—they are not literal 24-hour periods, but a literary technique for the story, much like we find that some jokes, some children’s songs, and some fairy stories are constructed around threes (“three men went into a pub …”, or “three blind mice”, or “Goldilocks and the three bears”, etc).

The story is thus told with a set of simple, repetitive phrases, but arranged with sufficient variation to give aesthetic pleasure, and with a growing sense of building towards a climax, to shape the narrative arc towards the culmination of creation (humanity, 1:26) and the completion of the creative task (sabbath rest, 2:2–3).

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One verse in this stylised poetic account of creation has attracted much attention over the decades. It is a verse that is most famously quoted by Jesus in an encounter he has with some Pharisees—and so it forms a foundational idea for Christians, as well as Jews. And it is a verse that has particular relevance and importance in the immediate contemporary context, when matters of gender identity and sexuality are regularly in the public discourse.

The story told in Mark 10:2–16 reports this encounter; as they debate the matter of divorce, Jesus offers the Pharisees a quote from a key verse in Genesis, “from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female’” (Gen 1:27).

This verse needs attention; here I want to notes the rabbinic exploration of this text and associated matters. A warning in advance: this will lead to the conclusion that the strict binary understanding of human gender is inadequate. The rabbis clearly understood that not everyone fits these categories. That has important implications for our current understandings of human sexuality and gender.

The quotation from Genesis made by Jesus, that God made human beings as male and female, sounds like a definitive declaration: this is the reality, this is who we are, there is nothing more to debate! Certainly, that’s the way this verse has been used in the “gender wars” that have swirled through western societies in recent times. “God made male and female” became “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”, in an early salvo against the emerging number of people who were “outing” themselves as same-gender attracted. “Not so” was the sloganeers’ reply; two genders, each attracted to the opposite, is who we are. Definitively. Resolutely. Absolutely.

It’s worth noting some aspects of this statement in its original context in Genesis. What the priestly authors of the creation story wrote was “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). The emphasis is not so much on defining who we are are gendered people—but rather, the verse is reflecting on the amazing feature that, within humanity, signs of divinity are reflected. And in association with that, the statement indicates that the two genders familiar from humanity are somehow reflected in the very nature of God. 

As God’s creatures, we are images of that creating being. The Hebrew word used, tselem (image), indicates a striking, detailed correlation between the human and the deity. This was the insight brought by the authors of this passage, perhaps shaped and honed over generations of telling and retelling the story, passing on through the oral tradition the insights of older generations.

My sense is that these ancients were not so much making a definite declaration about the nature of humanity—an early dogmatic assertion, if you like—as they were actually reflecting on their experience. They sensed that there was something within humanity that reaches out, beyond the material, into the unknown, beyond the tangible, into “the spiritual”. They surely knew the kind of experience that Celtic mystics have known, of coming to a place where “heaven meets earth”—what they call “a thin place”, where God can be sensed in the ordinariness of life. Indeed, such a “thin place” might well be being described in Gen 28:10–22, where Jacob comes to the realisation that “surely, the Lord is in this place” (Gen 28:16).

Indeed, as Jewish tradition developed over time, this fundamental duality of human gender—male and female—was questioned, probed, explored, and developed. Rabbis of late antiquity and the early medieval period (using the standard Western terminology) actually identified six genders.

The first move takes place in the Mishnah (early 3rd century). Tractate Bikkurim 4.1 contains the assertion, “an Androginus (a hermaphrodite, who has both male and female reproductive organs) is similar to men in some ways and to women in other ways, in some ways to both and in some ways to neither”.

It is interesting that the term androginus, a Greek term, is simply transliterated in this Aramaic work, as אדדוגינוס. That’s a sign that the consideration of this issue encompassed more than just rabbinic scholars, as they were drawing on insights and the term androginus from the hellenised world.

The text of Bikkurim goes on to offer indications of the ways that an androginus person is similar to, and dissimilar to, each gender (4.2–3). Another passage in the Mishnah identifies people known as a saris, סריס (Yevamot 8.4). These are people we identify as eunuchs; whether these are “eunuchs who have been so from birth … eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others … [or] eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs” (as Matthew reports Jesus saying, Matt 19:12) is not relevant in this context.

Presumably, the rabbis refer to males with arrested sexual development who are unable to procreate.  The female term for such people is given as aiylonit, אילונית. The discussion that follows makes it clear that these people are women with arrested sexual development who cannot bear children.

So this means that rabbis recognised four genders: male, female, androgyne, and eunuch (saris). In the Babylonian Talmud (sixth century CE), Rabbi Ammi is quoted as stating that “Abraham and Sarah were originally tumtumim” (טומטמין). Here we find another gender identity term; this time, describing people a person whose sex was unknown because their genitalia were hidden, undeveloped, or difficult to determine. (Tumtum means “hidden”.)

Thus, Abraham and Sarah lived most of their life as infertile, as their sex was not clear; and then, in Rabbi Ammi’s explanation, miraculously turned into a fertile husband and wife in their old age. The Rabbi points to Isa 51:1–2, saying that the instruction to “look to the rock from where you were hewn, and to the hole of the pit from where you were dug […] look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you” explains their genitals being uncovered and miraculously remade.

(Explaining one scripture passage by drawing on another passage, however distantly related—often through their sharing a common word or phrase—was a common rabbinic mode of scripture interpretation.)

Today, we would explain the phenomenon of a tumtum as being an intersex person, born with both male and female characteristics, including genitalia—although modern science would not go so far as to accept a miraculous reversal of the condition, as Rabbi Ammi proposed. 

There’s a quite accessible discussion of these issues in an article by Dr Rachel Scheinerman, entitled “The Eight Genders in the Talmud”, in the My Jewish Learning online resource.

The title reflects the fact that Dr Scheinerman divides both aylonit and saris into two, on the basis of birth identification. So she lists: (1) zachar, male; (2) nekevah, female; (3) androgynos, having both male and female characteristics; (4) tumtum, lacking sexual characteristics; (5) aylonit hamah, identified female at birth but later naturally developing male characteristics; (6) aylonit adam, identified female at birth but later developing male characteristics through human intervention; (7) saris hamah, identified male at birth but later naturally developing female characteristics; and (8) saris adam, identified male at birth and later developing female characteristics through human intervention.

Dr Scheinerman concludes, “In recent decades, queer Jews and allies have sought to reinterpret these eight genders of the Talmud as a way of reclaiming a positive space for nonbinary Jews in the tradition. The starting point is that while it is true that the Talmud understands gender to largely operate on a binary axis, the rabbis clearly understood that not everyone fits these categories.”

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-eight-genders-in-the-talmud/

Dr. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, a Talmudic scholar in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, California, has provided a much more detailed and technical discussion of the matter of gender identity, in the online resource the Jewish Women’s Archive. See 

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gender-identity-in-halakhic-discourse

The abstract of this article reads, “Jewish law is based on an assumption of gender duality, and fundamental mishnaic texts indicate that this halakhic duality is not conceived symmetrically (as seen through the gendered exemptions of some commandments). Rabbinic halakhic discourse institutes a functional gender duality, anchored in the need of reproduction of the Jewish collective body. As such, it aims to enforce and normalize a congruence between sexed bodies and gendered identities. Furthermore, the semiotics of body surfaces produces other different and seemingly more ambiguous gender possibilities, and rabbinic discourse has widely discussed the halakhic implications of these ambiguities.”

What that means, I think, is that whilst Torah prescriptions are based on a definite duality of gender (you are either male or female), later rabbinic discussions entertained the possibility of a range of gender identifications. In this regard, the rabbinic discussions prefigured the move in contemporary society to recognise the full spectrum of diversity amongst human beings: some men are gay, some women are lesbian; some people are bisexual, attracted to both genders, while others are asexual, having no sexual-attraction feelings at all. 

Biologically, we know that some are born intersex, with both male and female physical characteristics; whilst psychologically, some people are born into a body that is clearly one gender have an internal energy that leads them to identify with the opposite gender, and so they undergo a medical transition to that gender, and we identify them as transgender people. And so we have the now-widespread “alphabet soup” of LGBTIQA+ (where the plus sign indicates there may well be other permutations within this widely diverse spectrum).

So we would do well not to remain in a static state of assertion that the Genesis text is a prescription for how human beings should be identified (and a definition for marriage). I think it is preferable to add into the discussion both the rabbinic understandings,  contemporary medical understandings, and psychological insights that reveal a wide spectrum of gender identities; a dazzling kaleidoscope of “letters”, as it were. For this is how we human beings are made, in an image that reflects the diversity and all-encompassing nature of God. 

I believe it is important that, rather than misusing the Genesis/Mark text as a club to batter people into submission, we ought to rejoice in the diversity we see amongst humanity, and affirm that, no matter whether L or G, whether B or A, whether T or I, all people who are Q, and all who are straight, are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14).

There is a helpful collection of the Jewish texts relating to this matter in the online resource, Sefaria, entitled “More Than Just Male and Female: The Six Genders in Ancient Jewish Thought”, collated by Rabbi Sarah Freidson of Temple Beth Shalom in Mahopac, NY, USA. See

https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/37225?lang=bi

And so, in the end, given the rabbinic midrashic exploration and exposition of this crucial text, I hope we can come to the same conclusion as the ancient priestly writers: “God saw everything that he had made [including the diversity of gender expressions within humanity], and indeed, it was very good”.