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The Creation of Eve in Art and the Myth of Androgynous Adam

Yaffa Englard

I dedicate this article to my daughters Anat and Nina.

This article is based on lectures delivered at the Thirteenth World Congress

of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, 2001 and the Society of Biblical Literature

International Meeting in Berlin, 2002. I would like to thank Prof. Elisheva

Revel-Neher and Prof. Mira Friedman for their advice.

1 Helga Kaiser-Minn, Die Erschaffung des Menschen auf den spätantiken Monumenten des 3. und 4. Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1981), identified some scenes on third- to fourth-century sarcophagi as the creation or animation of Eve. The composition is close to the Prometheus imagery and differs from later compositions. In the Cotton Genesis (BL, Codex Cotton Otho B. VI), only a fragment depicting the introduction of Eve to Adam has survived from the scenes of the creation of Adam and Eve. The remainder is a reconstruction according to the San Marco

Depictions of Eve’s creation in art prior to the ninth century are extremely rare.1 Thereafter, the biblical account is depicted in two principal types. One appears to be a precise representation of the text in Genesis 2:21: “So the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man

[…]. He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot.”2 One of the earliest illustrations of this verse known to us, a frontispiece of the ninth-century Bible from Tours,3 depicts the Creator, represented as the Christ Logos, leaning over the lying man and taking a bone from

mosaics, atrium Creation copula, and other sources of the so-called Cotton Genesis “family”; see Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert L. Kessler, The Cotton Genesis (Princeton, 1986).

2 Scriptural quotations are taken from the New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1985).

3 Other examples are Moutier-Granval Bible (London, BL Cod. Add. MS 10546); the Alcuin Bible (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Bibl. 1); the Vivian Bible (Paris, BnF Cod. Lat. 1); and the San Paolo Bible (Rome, San Paolo fuori le mura, fig. 1); Wilhelm R.W. Köhler claims that hypothetical fifth-century Italian pandect frontispieces were the source of the Touronian Bible frontispieces, and “in most details, as in overall format, the Granval Bible is a faithful replica of this model,” see Herbert L. Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours (Princeton, 1977), 8–9.

Fig. 1. Creation of Adam and Eve, Bible of San Paolo, Tours, ca. 870, Rome, Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura, fol. 8v, detail

(photo: 1990 © SCALA, Florence)

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the left side of his chest (fig. 1, the rightmost scene). This and some more paintings show the next episode: “And the Lord God fashioned the rib that He had taken from the man into a woman” (Gen. 2:22), which is rendered

similarly to the depictions of the creation of the man.4 In a few miniatures the episode of the removal of the bone is missing, and the Creator is shown forming the woman from the bone He holds in his hand (fig. 2).5

4 This episode is presented in the leftmost scene of the second register in the San Paolo Bible, fol. 8. Note similar depictions in The Caedmon Manuscript, English (Saxon, ca.1000), Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 fol. 9; Histoire Universelle, late fourteenth century, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek, cod. 2576, fol. 3r, see Koichi Koshi, Die Genesisminiaturen in der Wiener “Histoire Universelle” (Cod. 2576) (Vienna, 1973), Abb. 1; Velislav Picture Bible (Bohemia, fourteenth

century), Prague, National Library Cod. XXIII C 124, fol. 3r, see Velislav Biblia Picta: Editio Cimelia Bohemica vol. 12, commentary by Karel Stejskal (Prague, 1970), fig. 3a; Venice, San Marco, atrium, Creation copula: Creation of Eve, see Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice (Chicago, 1984), fig. 121.

5 Hans M. von Erffa, Ikonologie der Genesis: Die christlischen Bildthemen aus dem Alten Testament und ihre Quellen (Munich, 1989), 153. This

Fig. 2. Creation of Eve, Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Bohemia, 14th

century. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Layel 67, fol. 14r, detail (photo: Bodleian

Library, University of Oxford)

Fig. 3. Andrea Pisano, Creation of Eve, marble relief, ca. 1344–48, Florence,

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (photo: Timothy McCarthy, Art Resource, New

York)

Fig. 4. Creation of Eve, Book of Hours, Bayeux, ca. 1450–60. Oxford,

Bodleian Library MS Douce 268, fol. 11r, detail (photo: Bodleian Library,

University of Oxford)

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The Creation of Eve in Art and the Myth of Androgynous Adam

Most medieval portrayals from the eleventh century onwards belong to the second type of depiction, in which the woman’s body emerges directly from Adam and is attached to his body. This representation has many variations. In some, Eve grows out of one of Adam’s sides (fig. 3), in others from his back or from behind his back (fig. 4), from his chest, or sometimes even from his belly (fig. 5).6 Generally, Eve’s body is turned toward Adam’s legs, her hands outstretched towards God.7 Birth of an adolescent or adult from a male body is found in the Greek myths about Athena and Dionysus who were fathered by Zeus. For example, in the painting on a fourth-century BCE volute krater (fig. 6), Zeus gives birth to Dionysus, who emerges from his father’s right thigh and stretches out his hands towards a goddess.8 But the combination of the male parental figure with an offspring deviates from the plain biblical narration stating that the Creator formed the woman’s body after He completely detached the rib from Adam’s body: “He took one of his ribs and closed up flesh at that spot” (Gen. 2:21). This iconography, in which the woman’s body emerges from Adam, and its possible sources were subjected to scholarly research that raised several hypotheses.

depiction is similar to Herrad of Landsberg’s drawing in her Hortus Deliciarum, pl. 7 fol. 17a; see Herrad of Landsberg, Abbess of Hohenburg, Hortus Deliciarum (Garden of Delights), commentary and notes by A. Straub and G. Keller, edited and translated by Ariside D. Caratzas (New Rochelle, NY, 1977), 23; Herrad de Landsberg, Abbess du mont Saint-Odile, Hortus deliciarum: requeil de cinquante planches […] avec texte d’introduction historique, littéraire et archéologique, suivi du catalogue complet des 344 miniatures et du commentaire icono-graphique des cinquante planches par Joseph Walter (Strasbourg and Paris, 1952), pl. 6.

6 An analogous depiction is found in Bible Jumieges (twelfth century), Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 11, fol. 4 (initial I); see Mireille Mentré, Création et apocalypse: histoire d’un regard humain sur le devin (Paris, 1984), 30.

7 The portrayal of Eve’s body turned toward Adam’s head is rare. It appears on Byzantine ivory caskets (Adolph Goldschmidt and Kurt Weitzmann, Die byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X–XIII Jahrhunderts, 2d ed., 2 vols. [Berlin, 1979], 1:48–51 pls. 47–51), in the Sarajevo Haggadah (Catalonia, Spain, fourteenth century), Sarajevo, Zemaljski Musej, fol. 5, and in Bible Jumieges, fol. 4.

8 She is identified as either Aphrodite, Eileithyia, or Hera. A similar portrayal of Dionysus springing out of Zeus’s left thigh and stretching out his hands to Hermes is found in a relief from the same period, now in the Vatican Museum: LIMC, vol. 3/1, 478–79 figs. 667–68; 692

figs. 71–72; vol. 3/2, 376 fig. 668; vol. 8/1, 403 figs. 22a–b; vol. 8/2, 260 figs. 22a–b; Arthur D. Trendall, “A Volute Krater at Taranto,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 54 (1934): 175–79 + 2 plates.

Fig. 5. Creation of Eve, Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Catalonia, ca. 1440.

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 204, fol. 1v, detail (photo: Bodleian

Library, University of Oxford)

Fig. 6. Birth of Dionysus from the Thigh of Zeus, detail of a painting on a

krater, south Italy, ca. 400 BCE. Taranto, National Archeological Museum

(photo: National Archaeological Museum, Taranto)

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Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler proposed that these depictions represent a late conflation of the separate episodes: Adam’s prone body and the woman’s upright body being formed by God’s hand. Weitzmann assumed that “a priori, […] the first illustrator sought to render the text as closely as possible and the later copyists, either because of carelessness or for other reasons, lost touch with it to a variable degree.”9 Therefore their presupposition is that the two-phase scene (the extraction of the rib and the formation of the woman) constituted the sole model for the depiction of Eve’s creation.10 They believe that as early as the fifth century Roman artists copying paintings from manuscripts into frescoes fused the

two scenes in order to adopt them for display on the church walls.11 However, if Pietro Cavallini’s lost remake done between 1277 and 1290, of the fifth-century paintings of the Creation of Eve in San Paolo fuori le mura was reliable,12 their theory is not sufficient explanation of this image (fig. 7), one of the earliest portrayals of the creation of Eve, in which the Creator causes Eve miraculously to rise from behind Adam’s back rather than drawing a rib from Adam’s side or forming the woman’s body.

Gabrielle Sed-Rajna assumed that the deviation from the sequence of the events described in Genesis 2:21–22 is not a result of the transformation of images. In her opinion, the image of Eve emerging for Adam’s side stems from the reading of the word Úψ (.zela‘) in the original Hebrew text as “side.” Since this word is rendered equally as “rib” or “side” in Jewish interpretations, she believed it should be considered a Jewish motif. Yet she did not argue how it could influence Christian painters.13

Eve’s growth directly from Adam’s body is also conceived as representing New Testament typology which perceives Eve’s creation as a prefiguration of the birth of the Church from the crucified Christ’s wounds.14 The theory, in general, is true but, even in the depictions of Eve’s creation alongside the scene of the birth of the Church – such as that in the thirteenth-century Bible moralisée from the Bodleian Library (fig. 8) – one needs to explain why the Creator touching Adam’s shoulder with

9 Kurt Weitzmann, “The Illustration of the Septuagint,” in Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, ed. Herbert L. Kessler (Chicago, 1971), 67.

10 Note that in six members of the Cotton Genesis “family,” Eve’s creation differs from the iconography typical of Cotton Genesis as represented in San Marco’s Creation copula; in the former examples, Eve emerges directly from Adam’s body.

11 Weitzmann and Kessler, The Cotton Genesis, 22–23, 27–28; Herbert L. Kessler, “Eleventh Century Ivory Plaque from South Italy and the Cassinese Revival,” Jahrbuch Berliner Museen 8 (1966): 89–90. Kessler also suggested that in the fresco in San Paolo fuori le mura “the full figure of Eve may be a later addition,” Kessler, Illustrated Bibles from Tours, 17 n.18.

12 Cavallini’s paintings, that together with the remnants of the original fifth-century images were destroyed in a fire in 1823, are known from seventeenth-century water-color copies . Paul Hetherington stated that

in copying the Old Testament paintings in San Paolo fuori le mura, “Cavallini kept largely to the format of the early Christian work; this would indicate that in iconography of the S. Paolo paintings we cannot expect to find any large-scale innovations,” Paul Hetherington, Pietro Cavallini: A Study in the Art of Late Medieval Rome (London, 1979), 94.

13 Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “Haggada and Aggada: Reconsidering the Origins of the Biblical Illustrations in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts,” in Byzantine East, Latin West: Art-Historical Studies in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann, eds. Doula Mouriki et al. (Princeton, 1995), 418.

14 Ernest Guldan stated that the first-known expression of this typology in the world of painting is in the “Mainzer Titulus” composed by Ekkehard of S. Gallen in the eleventh century. The first picture in which this typology is visually demonstrated is a drawing of the crucifixion (Psalterium, Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod. brev. 98, fol. 8), a century later than Ekkehard’s titles; see Ernest Guldan, Eva und Maria (Graz, 1966), 46.

Fig. 7. Creation of Eve (a copy of a fifth-century fresco from San Paolo fuori

le mura), Codex Barberini, 17th century, Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,

Lat. 4406, fol. 25 (photo: © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican)

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The Creation of Eve in Art and the Myth of Androgynous Adam

a long bone draws Eve out from behind his back here and from his side in other images, while the Church emerges from the wound in Christ’s chest.15

I wish to revise these interpretations of images depicting the creation of Eve, beginning with the connotations of the Hebrew .zela‘. Thirty-five of the forty appearances of this word in the Bible mean a “side” or a wall of the Tabernacle (Exod. 26:20, 26–27; 36:25, 31–32), Holy Ark (Exod. 25:12, 14; 37:3, 5), altars (Exod. 27:7; 30:4; 37:27, 38:7), and cedar or cypress boards for wainscoting and flooring in Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 6:5, 8, 15, 16, 34).16 Once it means the side of a mountain (2 Sam. 16:13). Probably, .zela‘ denotes a “side” – the side

of a man – in Jeremiah 20:10,17 and it was translated as pleurá18 by Symmachus and Theodotion19 and latus (side) in the Vulgate.

If in the account of the creation of Eve, the .zela‘ refers to Adam’s rib, this is the only case of the biblical usage of this word for a human or animal bone.20 Jerome’s Vulgate used costa, which means both rib and side, for the .zela‘ in Genesis 2:21–22; but in the architectural context it translated .zela‘ as latus (side). Besides the two occurrences in the description of the creation of Eve, costa appears in the Vulgate in Job 18:12, where .zela‘ probably refers to a woman,21 suggesting a conclusion that Jerome took the woman to have been created out of the man’s rib, and not

15 In the Bible moralisée, now in Vienna, Österreichische National-bibliothek, MS 2554 fol. 1v, the Creator draws Eve out of Adam’s right side, whereas the Church is drawn out of Christ’s chest.

16 The exact meaning of the word in 1 Kings 6:5–8, 15–16, 7:3 and Ezek. 41:5–26, has been disputed in biblical exegeses. See John Gray, I and II Kings: A Commentary, 3d ed., Old Testament Library (London, 1977), 165, 169, 175, 178.

17 William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 1: Introduction and Commentary on Jeremiah 1–XXV, The International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh 1986), 478.

18 In Classical Greek, the word pleurá meant a side of human or animal bodies, or side of “things and places” and only rarely a rib; see Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford, 1996), 1416–17.

19 Origenis Hexaplorum […], ed. Frederick Field, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1875), 2:625.

20 According to Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, .zela‘ means “rib” only in Gen. 2:21–22; Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, translated and edited by M.E.J. Richardson, vol. 3 (Leiden, 1996), 1030. According to the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed. R. Laird Harris, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1980), 2:768, “.Sela‘ is used once for the man’s side (Genesis 2:21–22) […] God created woman by taking ‘a rib’: conceivably this means that God took a portion of Adam’s side.” The Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Altem Testament, eds. Heinz-Josef Fabry and Helmer Ringgren, 10 vols. (Stuttgart, 1973–2001), 6:1061–62, states that: “.Sela‘ […] sicher aber ist, wenn .sela‘ ‘Rippe’ bedeuted, dann nur hier! Diese semantische Singularität gebietet die Ausschau nach einer anderen Lösung […]. Die Anwesenheit dieses Verbs des Bauens führt dazu, .sela‘ auch hier als Terminus der Sacralarchitektur anzunehmen [...]”

21 Similarly, the Aramaic Targum (translation) of Job 18:12 translated the word .zela‘ as ‰È˙˙‡ ([his] woman). Concerning the time of the Targum’s composition, different opinions have been expressed, from the earliest date of the second century till the eighth century. See Raphael Weiss, “The Aramaic Targum of Job” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1974) (Hebrew), English summary, 12.

Fig. 8. Creation of Eve and Birth of the Church, Bible Moralisée, Paris,

ca. 1235–45, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 270b, fol. 6, detail

(photo: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

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his side. Similarly, Ambrose22 and Ephrem the Syrian23 understood .zela‘ as a bone or rib. This notion derives24 from an ancient Jewish tradition found in the Book of Jubilees (second century BCE) and in 4Q 265 frag. 7:11–12 (first century BCE), where .zela‘ is treated as Adam’s bone.25

Medieval Christian scholars of the seventh and eighth centuries were acquainted with the Bible mainly through the Latin translation.26 The Vulgate’s reading of the story of Eve created from Adam’s rib was so entrenched that when in 1543 the Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius stated that men and women have the same number of ribs, he encountered sharp opposition in Church circles.27

In like manner, the Aramaic translations28 and the Syriac version (Peshitta)29 of the Bible clearly distinguish

.zela‘ in the story of the creation of Eve from that word in other contexts, stating that Eve was created from one of Adam’s ȉÂÚÏÚ (“ribs” or “bones”), whereas a .zela‘ of objects

was translated as ¯ËÒ or ‰ˆÈÁÓ meaning “side,” “wall,” or “partition.” The Septuagint most frequently renders .zela‘ as pleurá or pleuron, and sometimes as julon (1 Kings 6:15), klitow (Exod. 25:12; 26:20, 27, 28), or \jedra (Ezek. 41:11). pleurá translates the .zela‘ from which the woman was made, the .zela‘ (side) of a mountain, the .zela‘ot (sides) of the altar (Exod. 41:11), and the .zela‘ot of cypress in Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 6:5, 8, 15b; 7:3), and ten of the eleven occurrences of the word .zela‘ in Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple (Ezek. 41:5–9, 26).

The Septuagint gives the same word, pleurá, as a translation of the Hebrew word .zad (side): a side of a mountain (2 Sam. 13:34), of the altar of incense (Exod. 30:4), or of the human body.30 We thus may deduce that in Genesis 2:21–22, as well as in all these occurrences, the pleurá standing for the .zela‘ could mean Adam’s side.31

Following the Septuagint, Philo of Alexandria,32 Theophilius of Antioch,33 Origen,34 Tertullian,35 and

22 “Sed de ipsius Adae costa facia sit mulier,” De Paradiso, book one,10.48, in Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanesis Episcopi Opera Omnia, Patrologia Latina 14 (Turnholt, 1969), 298; Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, translated by John J. Savage, Fathers of the Church 42 (Washington, DC, 1961), 327–29.

23 St. Ephrem the Syrian, The Commentary on Genesis (Section 2), Ch. 12, in Hymns on Paradise, introduction and translation by Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY, 1998), 205.

24 Carl O. Nordström, “Rabbinic Features in Byzantine and Catalan Art,” CA 15 (1965): 182.

25 “(11) In the fir[st] week [Adam was created, but he had nothing sacred (?) until] (12) he was brought to the Garden of Eden. And a bone [of his bones was taken for the woman…].” Qumran Cave 4, 25, eds. Joseph M. Baumgarten et al., Discoveries in the Judean Desert 35 (Oxford, 1999), 70.

26 Robert E. McNally, The Bible in the Early Middle Ages (Atlanta, 1959, repr. 1986), 22–23.

27 Von Erffa, Ikonologie der Genesis,151. According to the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Adam had thirteen ribs; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis, trans. Michael Maher, The Aramaic Bible, 1b (Edinburgh, 1994), 24. The Pseudo-Jonathan (Jerusalem I) targum is an admixture of material from diverse periods. There is evidence of antiquity but its present form is from the seventh–ninth century. The creation of Eve from Adam’s rib created a problem for the theologians: either the first man was created as a monster with an extra rib, or as part of God’s plan, when the rib was extracted from him he was mutilated.

28 Targum (translation) Onklos was probably composed in Palestine in the second century and edited in the fifth century in Babylonia.

29 The closest estimation places the Syriac version sometime in the second century.

30 In the translation of the phrases “spears in your sides” (Num. 33:55), “thrust his sword into the side of his adversary” (2 Sam. 2:16), “And thou shalt sleep upon thy left side” (Ezek. 4:4), “thou shalt sleep again upon thy right side” (ibid., 4:6), “thou shalt not turn thyself from one side to the other” (ibid., 4:8), “the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side […]” (ibid., 4:9), and “Because ye have thrust with side and shoulders” (ibid., 34:21).

31 For this interpretation, see Heinz-Josef Fabry, “.sela‘,” in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Altem Testament (n. 20 above), 6:1064; Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, translated by William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich (Chicago, 1958), 668; Friedrich Rehkopf, Septuagina-Vokabular (Göttingen, 1989), 234; Johan Lust classifies pleurá as ‘rib’ only in Genesis 2:21–22; Johan Lust, Erik Eynikel, and Katrin Hauspie, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, rev. ed. (Stuttgart, 2003), 496–97. In the Patristic literature the main meaning of pleurá is side of Adam and side of Christ; see, Geoffrey W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961–1968), 1091.

32 Philo, Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis, 2.19–20, in Philo, 10 vols., with an English translation by Francis H. Colson and George H. Whitaker (Cambridge, MA, 1962 [1929]), 1:236–39.

33 Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum 2.20, 28, text and translation by Robert M. Grant (Oxford, 1970), 58, 70. The English translation is not consistent: on pp. 59 and 61 “thn pleuran” is translated “one of his ribs,” while on p. 71 it is twice translated “his side.”

34 Origène, Contre Celse 4, 38.3–5, ed. and trans. by Marcel Borret, 4 vols. (Paris, 1967–76), 2:278.

35 Tertullian, De Anima, ch.36, ed. Jan H. Waszink (Amsterdam, 1947),

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Cosmas Indicopleustes (Constantine of Antioch)36 understood pleurá in Genesis 2:21–22 to be a man’s side. Cosmas elucidated that the woman was “made from the man’s side because the two sides bind the whole body close together,” and God made the woman “from his side as being in her nature his equal […]. God pronounced the two to be one flesh, both from the constitution of the two sides.”37 Augustine was ambivalent on this point. He stated once that God formed Eve from a costa (rib),38 another time that Eve was made from Adam’s latus (side),39 and elsewhere Augustine combined the meanings: “out of a bone taken from the man’s side He also made him a wife.”40 Such a duality is found in the Jewish sources approximately contemporaneous to Augustine (354–430): the fourth- or fifth-century Genesis Rabbah narrates, “And He took one of his ribs [ÂÈ˙ÂÚψ, .zal‘othaw]. R. Samuel b. Nahmani said: “He took one of his sides […]. But Samuel maintained: He took one rib from between two ribs […]” (17:6).41 The testimonies for the ambivalent reading of the Hebrew name of the object from which Eve was created settle the seeming contradiction between Sed-Rajna’s

idea that the depictions of the creation of Eve attached to Adam’s body express the understanding of the .zela‘ as a “side of the body” and the common Latin translation of this term as costa, i.e., a bone.

Another kind of ambivalence stems from the dual creation accounts in the Bible. While Genesis 2:22 describes God’s formation of Eve from Adam’s .zela‘ in the Garden of Eden, an earlier passage (1:27) already related that a woman has been created simultaneously with the man on the sixth day of the Creation. The mainstream exegetic traditions understood these different accounts as a general statement about the creation of humans followed by a more detailed report about the way they were created. This meant that on the sixth day a man was created part of whom – either rib or side – was the female being, or in other words, as a story of the androgyne that later was separated in the Garden in Eden.

An early impact of the myth about the primeval creature of both masculine and feminine nature is found in a pseudepigraphical elaboration on Genesis (and part of Exodus) in the Book of Jubilees, composed as early as

52; idem, On the Soul, ch. 36, in idem, Apologetical Works […], translated by Edward A. Quain, Fathers of the Church 10 (Washington, DC, 1977 [1950]), 265–66. Tertullian apparently used a written version of the Bible in Latin. The Old Latin version was translated from the Septuagint, the text customarily used in the Christian communities. See Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, translated by Erroll F. Rhodes (London, 1980), 87.

36 W. Wolska-Conus identified the author of the Christian Topography, known since the eleventh century as “Cosmas Indicopleustes,” as Constantine of Antioch, see Wanda Wolska-Conus, “Stéphanos d’Athènes et Stéphanos d’Alexandrie: Essai d’identification et de biographie,” REB 47 (1989): 28–30.

37 “'ßEk thw pleuraw tou androw thn gunaika pepoihken o Yeow, vw tvn duo

pleurvn pan to svma susfiggousvn...agg' ek thw pleuraw, vw ishn ousan

kata fusiv...ek thw kataskeuhw tvn duo pleurvn kai tv ek thw sunafeiaw

blastanonti karpv,” Cosmas Indicopleustès, Topographie Chrétienne, vol. 1, book 3 (47), ed. Wanda Wolska-Conus (Paris, 1968), 483; idem, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, translated and edited by John W. McCrindle (New York, 1897), 109.

38 Augustine, Opera Omnia, De Genesi, Contra Manichaeos, book 2, ch. 12 (16, 17), Patrologia Latina 34 (Turnholt, 1969), 205; idem, On Genesis, translated by Ronald J. Teske, Fathers of the Church 84 (Washington, DC, 1991), 113.

39 Augustine, Opera omnia, In Libros de Trinitate, book 12, ch.6 (8); ch.13

(20), Patrologia Latina 42 (Turnholt, 1969), 1002–3, 1009; idem, The Trinity, translated by Stephen McKenna, Fathers of the Church 45 (Washington, DC, 1963), 350–1, 362.

40 “[…] etiam conjugem illi in adjutoium generandi ex ejus latere osse detracto fecit ut Deus”; Augustine, De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, book 20, ch. 23, Patrologia Latina 41 (Turnholt, 1969), 373; idem, The City of God against Pagans, vol. 4, translated by Philip Levine (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 114–16; idem, The City of God, Books 8–14, translated by Gerald G. Walsh and G. Monahan, Fathers of the Church 14 (Washington, DC, 1963), 290. (In both English translations the reference is book 12, ch. 24.); Augustine, Opera Omnia, De Genesi Ad Litteram, book 9, ch. 17 (31); ch.18 (34), Patrologia Latina 34 (Turnholt, 1969), 405, 407. Augustine’s dual interpretation of the term influenced Peter Lombard’s Sentences (1100–60) and the Hexameron by Grosseteste (1175–1253); see Peter Lombard, The Four Books of Sentences, book 2, distinction 18, chs. 1–4: http/:www.franciscan-archive.org/lombardus/opera/Is2-18.html and Robert Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation, 6.1, a translation of the Hexaëmeron by Christopher F.J. Martin (Oxford, 1996), 305–6.

41 The translation is from Midrash Rabbah, translated […] under the editorship of Harry Freedman and Maurice Simon, vol. 1: Genesis Rabbah (London 1961), 136; for Hebrew critical edition see Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, critical edition by Yehuda Theodor and Hanokh Albeck (Jerusalem, 1965), 157.

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the second century BCE.42 The myth of the androgynous people circulated in ancient Iranian, Greek, and Roman cultures,43 and circa 385 BCE was elaborated in Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes, one of the speakers at the symposium, relates that in the beginning of humankind there were three kinds of human beings: male, female, and hybrid. The latter, called Androgynous, had a two-faced head with four ears, and a round body with four arms and legs and two sets of genitalia. The androgynies, very strong and ambitious creatures, dared to attack the gods. To prevent that threat, Zeus weakened them by cutting their hermaphroditic bodies into halves, which became men and women.44

Fusing the Jewish exegetic traditions and mythology, Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE) explained that on the sixth day God created the genus (a concept of a man) who contained both male and female, and only afterwards, when the substantive man was created in the Garden of Eden, “composed of body and soul, man or woman” the androgynous genus was divided.45 In Philo’s view, the creation of the woman from the man’s pleurá intimates that the woman was half of the male’s body.46

The Talmud and Genesis Rabbah47 indicate that in the early talmudic period, a Septuagintal version apparently existed whose translation of Genesis 1:27b and 5:2 (“male and female He created him”) reflected a change of two letters in the Hebrew text: in 1:27 Â˙›‡ (“him”) instead

of Ì˙›‡ (“them”) and in 5:2 ‡¯· (“created him”) instead of ̇¯· (“created them”). This translation intimates that the first man, created on the sixth day, was androgynous.

The story of Adam-Androgyne is apparent in several other midrashim: “R. Jeremiah b. Leazar said: When the Holy One, blessed be He, created Adam, He created him hermaphrodite […]. R. Samuel bar Nahman said: When the Lord created Adam, He created him double-faced, then He split him and made him of two backs, one back on this side and one back on the other side” (Genesis Rabbah, 8:1).48 The Greek origin of this motif in the midrashic literature is indicated by the Hebrew names used for the hermaphrodite: ÒÂȂ¯„‡ or ‚¯„‡ (androgynos or androgeno), a transliteration of the Greek androgúnoúw; and »„ or «È„; (du or dio) Ûˆ¯Ù or plural, ÔÈÙˆ¯Ù; (par.zuf or par.zufin) or ÔÂÙÂÒ¯ÙÈ„ (dyprosopon)49 for Greek dúo prosopá (double-faced). Noting that the Greek mythology “circulated in various forms in the Hellenistic world in which rabbinic Judaism emerged,” Lieve Teugels stressed that the rabbis found the myth of the androgyne “a useful hermeneutic tool to solve textual problems in the first account of human creation and to harmonize it with the second account. They adapted it to their own hermeneutic purpose: the explanation of textual problems in the dual creation account.”50 The theory of the creation of the androgynous people was inherited by medieval Jewish exegetes Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yi.z.haki,

42 “And after all this he created man: a man and a woman he created […] (2.14) [...] and he took one of his bones to make a woman (and so the origin of woman was this rib taken from Adam’s bones) (3.5). […] In the first week Adam was created and the rib – his wife: in the second week he showed her to him (3.8),” Jubilees, translated by Robert H. Charles, revised by Chaim Rabin, in The Apocryphal Old Testament, ed. Hedley F.D. Sparks (Oxford, 1984), 15, 18. For a slightly different translation see The Book of Jubilees, translated by James C. Vanderkam, Scriptores Aetiopici 88 (Louvaini, 1989), 11–12, 17.

43 Ernst L. Dietrich, “Der Urmensch als Androgyn,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 58 (1939): 141; Wayne A. Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity,” History of Religions 13, 3 (Feb. 1974): 184 n. 89, 185.

44 Symposium, 189–90 (Greek), in Plato, Symposium, ed. Kenneth Dover (Cambridge, 1980), 36–37; idem, Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1997), 473–74.

45 Philo, On the Creation 24.76, 46.134, in Philo, 10 vols., with an English

translation by Francis H. Colson and George H. Whitaker (Cambridge, MA, 1962 [1929]),1:61, 107.

46 Midrash Philon […] (The Midrash of Philo), vol. 1: Genesis 2–17, ed. Shmuel Belkin (New York, 1989), 45 (Hebrew). Philo does not take the story of the creation of the woman literally: “[...] What are we to say? ‘Sides’ is a term of ordinary life for ‘strength’. To say that a man has ‘sides’ is equivalent to saying that he is strong […]”; Philo, Allegorical Interpretation 2:7 (n. 32 above), 236–39.

47 BT Megillah 9a; Genesis Rabbah 8:11; see also Meeks, “Image”: 185; Tryggve Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1-11 in the Genuine Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian (Lund, 1978), 81 n. 106.

48 Midrash Rabbah (n. 41 above), 1:54.49 BT Berakoth 61a; BT ‘Erubin 18a; Genesis Rabbah 8:1; Leviticus Rabbah

14:1.50 Lieve Teugels, “The Creation of Humans in Rabbinic Interpretation,” in

The Creation of Man and Woman: Interpretation of the Biblical Narratives in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Gerard P. Luttikhuizen (Leiden, 2000), 109; Dietrich, “Der Urmensch”: 113.

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1040–1105),51 Abraham Ibn Ezra (1093–1167),52 Rambam (Moses ben Maimon, known also as Maimonides 1135–1204),53 and Ramban (Moses ben Nachman, known also as Nachmanides, 1195–1270)54 and was also expressed in the Zohar (1:34b, 35a, 47a).55 The Zohar, composed in Castile in the late thirteen century, is based on earlier traditions, some of which are traced back to the Jewish mysticism of the late Hellenistic era.56

The concept of Adam’s .zela‘ as the female component of the androgyne in Judaism influenced Gnostic scriptures.57

The idea of identifying primeval Adam with Plato’s androgyne was also familiar to early Christian theologians. For example, Eusebius of Caesarea’s The Preparation for the Gospel (ca. 314), the most comprehensive Christian apologetic work of that time, referred to Aristophanes’

speech from Plato’s Symposium as an example of mis-understanding of the biblical text.58 Wayne A. Meeks revealed that the “early Christians in the area of the Pauline mission adapted the Adam-Androgyne myth to the eschatological sacrament of baptism.”59 In the third and fourth centuries, the idea that Eve was first part of Adam’s body was expressed by Tertullian60 and Ephrem.61 Possibly, the source that inspired the Church Fathers in this point was the Book of Jubilees.62

Ephrem the Syrian (fourth century) composed an ekphrasis describing the image of androgynous Adam, from whom “The rib of [which] Eve [was made] grew from itself and through itself, the bone brought forth the bones and the senses and the joints. [The rib] is the vine-shoot from man.”63 Ephrem accentuates the miraculous

51 “This is [what they meant] when they said of two faces were they created”; Rashi, The Torah with Rashi’s Commentary, The Sapirstein Edition, translated, annotated and elucidated by Yisrael I.Z. Herczeg, vol. 1 (Brooklyn, NY, 1995), 28.

52 “Man was originally with two faces; man is thus one but also two”; Abraham Ibn Ezra, Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Pentateuch, vol. 1: Genesis, translated and annotated by H. Norman Strickman and Arthur M. Silver (New York, 1988), 46, 63–64.

53 Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, translated by Michael Friedländer ([New York], 1956), 216.

54 Ramban (Nachmanides), Commentary on the Torah, vol. 1: Genesis, translated and annotated by Charles B. Chavel (New York, 1971), 80. Ramban found a purpose for the creation of the hermaphrodite Adam – so that men would take their wives for life and became psychologically united with them like the first man and woman who were one (Gen. 2:24).

55 The creation of Eve from Adam’s side in Gen. 2:21 is conceived as “the separation of this pair, in which they are turned face-to-face to one another so that they meet […] in this sense the humans are made in God’s image: the sefirot Tif’eret and Malkhut were a single entity, back-to-back. They had to be ‘sawn’ apart so that they might be properly united,” Arthur Green, “Introduction” in The Zohar, translation and commentary by Daniel C. Matt, 3 vols. (Stanford, CA, 2004–6), 1:31, 67.

56 See Green, “Introduction,” 1:34–37.57 The Apocalypse of Adam/The Revelation of Adam, 64.6–22; The Hypostasis

of the Archons/The Reality of the Rulers, 89.3–16; The Gospel According to Philip, 63, all in The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation, with annotations and introduction by Bentley Layton (Garden City, NY, 1987), 50, 55, 65, 70. See also Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, “The Creation of Man and Woman in the Secret Book of John,” in The Creation of Man and Woman: Interpretation of the Biblical Narratives in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Gerard P. Luttikhuizen (Leiden, 2000), 150–55, and also online: www1.tip.nl/~t770268/androgsum.html#2 (last

accessed on December 18, 2008). Alexander H. Krappe thought that, “the Jewish myth of the androgynous Adam is of Indo-European origin” and that “these Jewish traditions have left their mark on the tenets of various Gnostic sects, which have in their turn influenced the European folk-lore”; Alexander H. Krappe, “The Birth of Eve,” in Occident and Orient, Being Studies in […] in Honour of Haham Dr. M. Gaster’s 80th Birthday: Gaster’s Anniversary Volume, eds. Bruno Schindler and Arthur Marmorstein (London, 1936), 314, 321.

58 Eusèbe de Césarée, La Préparation Évangélique, livre 12, ch.12, 1–3, ed. Édouard des Places (Paris, 1983), 73; Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, book 12, ch.12, c-d, translated by Edwin H. Gifford (Eugene, OR, 2002; first ed.: London, 1903), 2:585; “In Books 10–12 Eusebius argues that the Greeks had borrowed from the older theology and philosophy of the Hebrews, dwelling especially on the supposed dependence of Plato upon Moses,” ibid., “Introduction,” 1:19.

59 Meeks, “Image”: 165–208.60 “The male was molded first and the female somewhat later. So, for a

certain length of time, her flesh was without specific form, such as she had when taken from Adam’s side; but she was then herself, a living being, since I would consider her soul as part of Adam,” Tertullian, “On the Soul” 36 (n. 35 above), 265–66.

61 “In Ephrem’s exegesis of Gen. 2:21–22 (and the related verse Gen. 1:27) the basic point is that before the formation of Eve from the rib of Adam the male and female were perfectly united in the body of Adam/man […]. This idea of the original Adam/man as a complete body, a perfect unity of male and female is subject to a comprehensive elucidation in CGen on Gen 1:27: ‘Eve was in him [Adam/man], in the rib […]. Yet she was with him not only in the body: even in the soul and spirit she was with him […]’”; Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1 –11, 81. “Ephrem evidently draws on the Haggada of Adam/man as originally created androgynos,” ibid., 218.

62 Nordström, “Rabbinic Features”: 182.63 Carmina Nisibena, 47.10, 1–4 in Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11, 82.

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gradual growth of Eve out of the man’s body, omitting from his narration the episodes of God’s extraction of Adam’s rib and healing the man’s flesh, and the transformation of the bone into Eve. The story of the androgynous creature spread in the Christian East and West, echoing in the writings of Maximus the Confessor (Maximus of Constantinople) in the seventh century,64 and was also known to John Scotus Eriugena in ninth-century Ireland.65

The aforementioned sources and exegeses disclose the long-lasting tradition that interpreted the dual account of the creation of Eve in the Book of Genesis as her being a part of androgynous Adam and her separation from the masculine half of the androgyne. With this in mind, we may propose a new explanation for the images of the creation of Eve, which deviate from the plain illustration of the biblical narrative.

In the painting in a fifteenth-century Speculum Humanae Salvationis (fig. 9), the Creator holds the upper end of the rib which is growing from Adam’s side into a female torso.66 Such an immediate transformation might been alluded to by Ephrem the Syrian’s concept of the woman being prearranged within the man in the form of his rib which “grew from itself and through itself the bone brought forth the bones and the senses and the joints.”67

An eleventh-century manuscript of the Paraphrase by Ælfric of Eynsham portrays a fully formed Eve emerging from a small hole on the right side of Adam’s waistline, with her feet still remaining within his body (fig. 10). The description of the scene of the creation in this manuscript reads: “d–a genam he an rib of his sidan gefylde mid flæsce d–aer d–aet rib waes.”68 Since this Old English text based

on the Vulgate states that the woman’s body was formed after the extraction of a rib from Adam’s side, and was not attached to his body, one would expect the illuminator to show God extracting a rib from Adam’s side, as did the painters of the Bibles from Tours (e.g., fig. 1). Yet, the artist of the Paraphrase did not “simply read the Old English text” and use “his own ingenuity to illustrate it,” as Dodwell and Clemoes assert,69 but presented a commentary reinterpreting the creation as extraction of Eve’s entire body directly from Adam.

A similar approach to the creation of Eve is discernible in the fourteenth-century reliefs on the façade of Orvieto Cathedral (figs 11–12) that represent the story in two consequent episodes. In the first stage, the Creator bends over the sleeping Adam and makes an incision in his right side near the waistline, presumably in preparation for the removal of a rib (fig. 11). The next relief shows fully-formed Eve with her feet overlapped by Adam’s body, so that she seems to be gliding out from him towards the Creator (fig. 12).

The supposition that Eve depicted almost entirely drawn out from Adam, except for her feet still within his body, refers to the interpretation of her creation from an androgynous creature is corroborated by the images representing an earlier stage of the story. This is represented in Andrea Pisano’s fourteenth-century marble relief (fig. 3) in which the Creator pulls a three-quarter formed Eve out of a large orifice in Adam’s side, her legs still inside Adam. Or when only a half of her figure emerges from Adam: an example of this iconography is found in a twelfth-century manuscript containing the Antiquitates Judaicae, where Eve’s torso appears from the back of Adam reclining on his belly

64 See Meeks, “Image” 165.65 Joannis Scotus, Opera, Patrologia Latina 122 (Turnholt, 1969), 856–57;

Von Erffa, Iconologie der Genesis, 146.66 See a similar image in the twelfth-century Pontigny Bible, Paris, BnF

MS Latin 8823 fol. 1r.67 Cited after Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11, 82.68 The Old English Version of the Heptateuch: Ælfric’s Treatise 0n the Old

and New Testament and His Preface to Genesis, ed. Samuel J. Crawford (Oxford, 1969; 1st ed. 1922), 87 (Gen. 2:21).

69 The Old English Illustrated Hextateuch, British Museum Cotton Claudius

B, IV, eds. Charles R. Dodwell and Peter Clemoes (London, 1974), 66. George Henderson, “Late-Antique in Some English Mediaeval Illustrations of Genesis,” JWCI 25, 3/4 (1962): 172–98, claims that “the source used by the artist of the Aelfric Ms […] was an elaborate Greek source, preserving in it […] an early cycle.” The illustrator may, however, have created his own depiction based on the interpretation that Eve was inside Adam. This manuscript furnishes other illustrations not previously found, such as the horned Moses and the round-topped Tablets of the Law.

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The Creation of Eve in Art and the Myth of Androgynous Adam

Fig. 9. Creation of Eve, Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 15th century.

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce f. 4 fol. 5v (photo: Bodleian Library,

University of Oxford)

Fig. 10. Creation of Eve, Ælfric of Eynsham, Paraphrase, Canterbury (?),

England, 1025–50, London, BL MS Cotton, Claudius B IV, fol. 6v, detail

(photo: © British Library, London)

Fig. 11. God Makes an Incision in Adam’s Side, attributed to Lorenzo Maitani, relief, 14th century. Orvieto Cathedral, façade (photo: © Nehama Kaplan)

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Fig. 12. Eve Rises Up from Adam towards the Creator, attributed to Lorenzo Maitani, relief, 14th century. Orvieto Cathedral, façade (photo: © Nehama Kaplan)

Fig. 14. Wiligelmo, Creation of Eve, marble relief, 1106. Cathedral of Modena, west

façade (photo: © Nehama Kaplan)

Fig. 13. Creation of Eve, Antiquitates Judaicae, French, 12th

century. Paris, BnF, MS lat. 5047, fol. 2r, detail (photo: Bibliothèque

Nationale de France, Paris)

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The Creation of Eve in Art and the Myth of Androgynous Adam

(fig. 13).70 It is thus possible that the images showing Eve’s torso rising out of Adam’s back with no incision or orifice being visible on his body – such as that in Wiligelmo’s marble relief of 1106 on the west façade of Modena Cathedral (fig. 14)71 – may be versions of the “birth” of Eve inspired by the legend of androgynous Adam.

The images in few twelfth-century historiated initial letters IN quite clearly render the Creation of Eve as the separation of an androgyne. In one of them (fig. 15), the figure facing the Creator has two legs and one belly, but two heads and two pairs of shoulders and arms. In a painting from a twelfth-century Genesis Page illustrating the initial IN (fig. 16), Eve’s torso is attached to the trunk of Adam, who sleeps in an almost standing position. It is noteworthy that in the mid-fifteenth century painting of

Eve’s trunk attached to Adam’s back (fig. 4), their bodies form a similar – though mirror-reversed – Y-like shape.72

When the male and female trunks are tightly joined to each another, they allude to the androgynous story even more visibly. For example, the depiction of the creation of Eve on the sixth day in a thirteenth-century Parisian manuscript (fig. 17) looks as if the Creator separates the androgyne, here a three-legged one, into a man and woman rather than that He extracts Eve from Adam’s body. A combination of the two motifs derived from the androgyne myth – the separation of the androgyne and Eve’s “birth” from Adam’s body – is found in an illustration from Peter Lombard’s Sentences of ca. 1300 (fig. 18) that depicts Eve’s torso going forth from an almost sitting Adam. The image creates the effect of an androgynous

70 For Eve emerging from Adam’s back, see also Saint-Fuscient, Psalter, Amiens (?), 12th century, Amiens, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 19, fol. 7; Walter Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts: The Twelfth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1996), 1:fig. 325.

71 This type of depiction was popular in twelfth-century Umbro-Roman book illuminations, such as the Genoa Bible, the Tody Bible, and the

Pantheon Bible. See Edward B. Garrison, Studies in the History of Medieval Italian Painting, 4 vols. (London, 1993), 4:119–21, 202; Walter Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination (Ithaca, 1982), 144–47 figs. 99, 101, 102.

72 For the Y-like shape in the iconography of the androgynous, see Günther Feuerstein, The Male-Female in Art and Architecture (London and Stuttgart, 1997), 57–60.

Fig. 16. Creation of Eve, Bible, Mosan, 12th century. Paris, Bibliothèque

Mazarine MS 36, fol. 6, detail of the initial letters IN (photo: Bibliothèque

Mazarine, Paris)

Fig. 15. Creation of Eve, Parc Abbey Bible, Belgium, Leuven region, 1148,

London, BL Cod. Add. 14788, fol. 6v, detail of the initial letters IN (photo: ©

British Library, London)

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being composed of the male and female parts attached to each other by their sides, so that Adam’s right leg may seem to be Eve’s as well.The depictions of Eve and Adam as a hybrid creature testify to the impact of the story of an androgyne on representations of the Creation of Eve in the art of the Christian West.73 Like Jewish and Christian biblical exegetes, the artists adopted the Judaeo-Christian myth concerning an androgyne, double-faced first human being,

in order to reconcile the dual account of the creation of woman in the Book of Genesis. As a result, the images were intended to reveal to their viewers an inter-pretation of the story rather than to illustrate the plain biblical narrative.74 Finally, the legend of andro-gynous Adam, and not only the translations of his .zela‘ as a “side” or a prefiguration of the Creation of Eve as the birth of the Church, could inspire the depictions of fully or half-formed Eve emerging from Adam’s side or back.

73 The same phenomenon is evident in Christian Byzantine art. 74 See John Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (London, 1997), 90.

Fig. 18. Creation of Eve, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, England or France, ca. 1300. Oxford,

Merton College MS 111, beginning of Book II, fol. 73r, detail (photo: Bodleian Library, University

of Oxford; by permission of the Governing Body of Merton College, Oxford)

Fig. 17. Sixth Day of Creation, Bible, Paris, 13th century.

Paris, BnF, MS lat. 15467, fol. 11r, detail of initial I

(photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris)