Guest Post: Before There Was a Man, There Was Just a Human

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I have been thinking about a rabbi I will never meet. He lived in Babylon, sometime in the third or fourth century CE, and one morning he was reading Genesis 2:7 — the verse where God forms the first human from the soil — and he noticed something small. The verb vayyitzer, “he formed,” was spelled with two yods instead of one. When God forms the animals later in Genesis 2:19, the same verb appears with only one yod. An extra letter. A scribal error, maybe. Or maybe not. He sat with it. So should we.

What he decided was that the doubling was not a scribal error but a clue of human nature. God forms every human with two drives — yetzer ha-tov and yetzer ha-ra, the pull toward good and the pull toward destruction — woven into the same person. Not distributed among races. Not assigned by gender. The dangerous inclination lives in every person. Every person.

I keep thinking about him when I watch Al Mohler or Doug Wilson speak, and others who share that view.

Mohler declared recently that a woman answering questions about the Bible on a church podcast is a “problem.” Yes, Answering questions about the Bible. They can’t be trusted, is that it? For Wilson, they certainly cannot be trusted to vote, so he floated the idea that women perhaps should not vote individually, that households should vote through the husband.

Their authority, I suspect, is Paul. First Timothy 2:13: For Adam was formed first, then Eve. Sequence equals rank. First in, higher up. Paul deploys the Genesis plot as a pastoral argument for a local church situation, and Mohler and Wilson have been treating it as the exhaustive meaning of the text ever since.

But in doing so, I think, perhaps without knowing it, perhaps not, they have assigned yetzer ha-tov to men and yetzer ha-ra to women. Sound judgment belongs by nature to those who arrived first. The dangerous inclination, the appetite that reached for the fruit, the thing that must be managed, that belongs to those who came second. It is a clean system. It has the satisfying click of a locked door.

The rabbi, I think, would have looked up and said: but that is not what the text says.

Because before there is a man, before there is a woman, before anyone has been handed the dangerous drive and anyone the leash, there is ha’adam. A collective noun, not a personal noun. The human is formed from adamah, the soil, in a wordplay that would please the Rabbi no end. This human is not a man. It is not a woman. It is a dirt-being that already bears the image of God, fully, before any gender assignment.

Only after the human is anaesthetized, and its side is taken, do we have a man and a woman — ish and ishah — arriving simultaneously, as if Hebrew cannot say one without immediately saying the other.

Which means the yetzer ha-ra was woven into ha’adam before Adam and Eve made their appearance. Before there was a woman to assign it to. Before there was a man to take control. Paul’s sequence — Adam first, then Eve — is a retelling of a story that begins earlier than he starts it. The rabbi is reading further back.

I do not know what to do with Mohler and Wilson, or with the growing sexism that I see all around me in masculine Christianity today. The easy option is outrage, and I have some. The harder option is the question the doubled letter keeps raising: if the destructive inclination is in every person reading this post, without exception, then the question is not only what it looks like in them, but in us.