March 29, 2013

The section in chapter 8 about the "Judeo-Christian tradition of marriage" used to be much longer—at one point it was an entire chapter.  But then people I showed it to were like, wow, I can tell how much you enjoy research but please stop.  So the next few posts are from that section.

There’s a lot of stuff in the Judaic tradition that would get a lot of Christians a hell of a lot more upset than gay people getting married. (Which, come to think of it, it has, which is I guess why Christians have been killing Jews for millennia.) Here’s an example. Genesis 2:18-22 tells us (in the King James version) that

the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the LORD God . . . took one of his ribs . . . and made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

Adam looks sad and lonely, so God creates puppies and bunnies and butterflies to frolic around him and keep him company, and then he creates Eve to be his wife. Simple enough, right? 
Well, not quite, at least not according to Jewish sages, who aren’t stupid enough to pretend that that puppies and bunnies and butterflies crap will fool anybody. No, says Rabbi Eleazar in Yevamot 63a; Adam was lonely and he was also horny, and one by one, as God created the animals, Adam had sex with them all. It was only after Adam had fucked every animal on earth and still not had a truly satisfying orgasm that God realized he needed to step up his game and pulled the rib from Adam’s side to make Eve. This includes not just puppies and bunnies and butterflies but also the Tyrannosaurus Rex. And the tarantula. And the slug. And the paramecium.

How’s that for the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mr. Santorum?

Or let’s look a little more closely at the first man and woman, shall we? According to the King James version of Genesis 5:2, “Male and female created He them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam.” Later translations, interested more in easy comprehension than in accuracy, render “called their name Adam” as “named them man” or “called them human.” But Talmudic scholars are more punctilious in Genesis Rabbah 8:1; the only explanation for the singular name with plural sexes, according to them, is that Adam was a hermaphrodite. Sages differed on the question of whether Adam was simply a regular person with male and female sex organs (Rabbi Yirmiyah ben Eleazar) or more akin to Plato’s sphere people, with a male face and male features and genitalia on one side of the body and a female face and female features and genitalia on the other side (Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahman, who then interpreted taking a rib from Adam’s side to make Eve as cutting the whole in half), but they were all in agreement that the loins from which the human race sprang were intersex.
 

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