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Thursday, October 23, 2025
The Genesis of a Cure?
A few years ago, a NYT columnist wrote an article wondering whether (as I recall) the emerging sport of “pickleball” would be, as the title put it, “the Cure to Male Loneliness?”
The Internet being The Internet, this turn of phrase, as well as the idyllic cover art of a man weeping as he beholds his peers playing … well, “pickleball,” I guess … near flowers and butterflies, beneath a sky that streams sunbeams like the glory of God ... has been turned into a meme. The weeping man’s mustache, singlet undershirt, and semi-mullet are all out of central casting for 1980’s machismo, contrasting the line of feelings-laden tears tracing his cheek down to a chiseled jawline. With apologies to Diogenes: Behold, a man. (The original picture, used here in the meme, is by an artist named Benjamin Marra).
I couldn’t help but grab that image for this week’s reflection. For some reason, I’ve been stuck on Genesis 1-2 for a few weeks – the story of the seven days of Creation, and then of Adam and Eve’s creation. I’ve been swimming in the ancient vocabulary, and what the Hebrew (and later Greek) words and ideas described here meant. There’s the fact that the Hebrew “Adam” name comes from the word for earth or red dirt – I’ve started wondering if we should translate this name to the English “Clay” instead. There’s the connection between breath and spirit and wind – the Hebrew word “Ruah” and the Greek word “Pneuma,” which both mean all three of those things … so when God breathes life into Clay, it’s also Spirit entering him.
I’ve been contemplating Genesis 1:26 quite a bit. Here, the NRSV English translates “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.” The word that the NRSV translates as “humans” is interesting. I first checked the Greek Septuagint (which was a popular Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures used broadly throughout the Ancient world), because I know my Greek well and Hebrew not much at all. In Greek, the word translated “humans” is “ἄνθρωπον” (or “anthrohpon”). It has the same root word as “anthropology,” the study of humankind. Of special note, “anthropo” is a gender-neutral word. Greek has the word “andros” to talk about men and “gyne” to talk about women (androgynous is a word we have meaning “both manlike and womanlike,” from both terms). Using Anthropos instead is interesting, and supports us arriving at the English “humans” … though “anthrohpon” is a singular noun, not plural.
The Hebrew is even more interesting; it’s the word “adam,” which means – so far as I can discern with very little training – “man.” The Hebrew word IS a masculine noun … though Hebrew, like many other languages, uses genders for many neutral concepts too – you might have heard of the Spanish “la mesa” meaning “the table” as a feminine noun, but it doesn’t mean your table is a girl and not a boy. Still, when God creates humans in Genesis 1, it is “adam” that God creates. More on that in a moment.
What’s MORE interesting to me about Genesis 1:26 is that it’s one of the only parts of the story in which we get any sort of “why” from God. Much of the Creation is simply the “how” of things. God creates various things. The closest we get to a purpose throughout much of the account comes after each step, with the repeated affirmation: “God saw that it was good,” or “very good” (1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25, and very good at 1:31 with things generally completed).
God “seeing it was good” is itself pretty interesting. In the ancient world, to see something and to know something were intimately connected. In Greek (again, that’s my better language), the word “oide” meant both “to see” and “to know.” Of some interest, this might seem to be a story of Creation in which God knows how good creation is by beholding it at completion – more of an artist beholding a finished product than some sort of genie moving things towards an always intended purpose. Turns out there are plenty of moments in Genesis in which God wants to see something to believe it … say, when the holy visitors leave Abraham to check in on reports of human wickedness. What is to be made of that?
Regardless, with the creation of humanity, God speaks a purpose: “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth,” (1:26), and from there God suits action to purpose in verse 27: “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” If you’ve ever heard the Latin phrase “imago dei,” this is where it comes from: we’re made in the image of God.
It's interesting that with so many male pronouns for God (Elohim in Hebrew … which, fascinatingly, is a masculine plural noun …), when humans are created in God’s image, they are created male … AND female. And our purpose, at least in the first account of Creation, is to “have dominion over” the things made before us. So some of the adam that will have dominion is created male and some of the adam that will have dominion is created female.
Pretty good case for that “humans” translation we have all these generations later, and that’s a sensible intuition when we’re talking about God creating us as part of all that is.
Genesis 2 gets even more interesting. Bible scholars call this the “second account of Creation,” but it presents itself on its own terms – Genesis 2:1-4 is the epilogical conclusion of the first account, but Genesis 5-7 makes its own start: “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens … the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Here, the dust from the ground has that root word “adam” to it again … the ancient Hebrew word for a man is connected to the ancient Hebrew word for the earth, and the breath of life that God breathes into that man is what makes him a being with life.
Then, God plants a garden and puts this living man in it (2:8). Things go well for about ten more verses of scripture as God shows the man how to live in the garden.
But then, finally, at verse 18, God offers another observation ripe with purpose and moral evaluation: “it is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”
Now, this is interesting. Because what God does from here is start making pets. “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name,” (1:19). This is a different order from the first account in Genesis 1: humans are made last in the first telling, but here, our boy Clay has a nice vegan existence in the garden until God decides to address the bowling-alone problem. One other striking note: the word “helper” that God intends for Adam is a male word, “ezer” in Hebrew and “boethon” in the later Greek translation.
It's worth being clear: this is the ancient Hebrew version of “How the Leopard Got Its Spots” from Aesop’s fables. It’s a story about why the creatures of the earth have the names they have: they were given those names as they were considered for the role of the-only-man’s best friend. Somehow, dogs didn’t make the cut here. Genesis 2 is often trotted out as a commentary on human sexuality, which can make God’s activity here seem strange or gross … why is God trying to get Adam to sleep with every creature on earth? But when the story is actually read, it’s about the human being not being alone, rather than, say, “how do I get humans to self-replicate for this garden” or some other such purpose. Child-bearing, in fact, doesn’t arrive until the punishments for giving in to the serpent’s temptation, or at least until eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: God’s intentions didn’t seem to involve human sexuality or procreation at all; they would be stewards of the garden instead.
Regardless, the companionship project results at first in failure: “The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner,” (2:20).
God is not, however, a God of failures. And so the verses continue: “So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken. Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” (2:21-25).
There’s quite a bit going on here. First of all, it’s striking that God puts Adam in the omnipotent-creator’s equivalent of a medically-induced coma. Presumably, having a rib removed was as big a deal for the first human as it would be for any of us since. And the phrase that comes after does quite a bit of work: “the rib … [God] made into a woman.” I remember being given a riddle when I was a kid: “Archeologists find two bodies in ice and know they’re Adam and Eve; how?” We were allowed to play 20 questions about it, and eventually the answer is that the two are naked (or at least wearing crop tops) and the archeologists can spot that they have no belly buttons, like every human thereafter would have to have.
These days, I have an even more modern curiosity: what were Eve’s chromosomes? I can imagine this rib-to-person process involving quite a bit of divine power. Eve presumably was taller than the 6-8 inches of a rib (I’m guessing at the scale of a rib here; I couldn’t get mine out to check). As God adjusted the bone into new flesh and sinew, did the changes go down to the genetic?
That said, I’m reminded of a story from the set of Star Wars: A New Hope. The young and earnest Mark Hammill was worrying about an editing cut: the team had just been soaked in a garbage sewer, but were now running down a hallway, dry and (I hope) smelling fresh as a daisy. Instead of backing his young colleague’s concerns, the slightly-more-established Harrison Ford weighed in: “It ain’t that kind of movie, kid.”
Well and fair. Genesis 2 isn’t a story about genetics. And those last few verses tell us something about what it IS a story about … and we have to take a bit of a leap of faith to get there: we hear that the reason the word “woman” sounds like “from man” (ish and ishah in Hebrew) is the rib trick. Adam, after all, is the one who named everything – again, this is an origins-story fable. We also get the purpose of marriage from verse 18: it is not good that we should be alone. Finally, the story concludes by giving us its own understanding of its point: “therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife.” This is a theological foundation for a cultural practice … we make new households after marriage because it’s how Adam embraced Eve. That said, Adam literally didn’t. Adam has no human father or mother, and the word “wife” hasn’t yet been used – it’s been “helper” and such so far. But those who told and heard this story first would have understood that it wasn’t meant to be taken literally – they didn’t need a clap on the shoulder from Harrison Ford to bring them up to speed.
Where does that leave us?
Well. That original meme and its joke aside … we’re still pretty lonely in 2025, despite two years of pickleball. When Jesus gives the Great Commandments and tells us we have to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, that’s as much for our own salvation as it is for theirs. We need to be companions. Humanity is meant to be in relationship. We are to be helpers for one another, whether we’re married to someone or not.
And I think it’s worth pausing to reflect now and then, that from the earliest ways the Hebrew people found to share what it means to be created and loved by God, the intention has been to care for creation and love one another. That the very purpose of being made by God in the first accounts of Genesis is that we should be caretakers, of the world and the human family.
And perhaps the other Greatest Commandment is at stake in all of this too: that we love God with all of our heart and mind and soul and strength.
Because, if we dare to do some truly literal “theo-logy” – that is, to “say a thing about God” – then perhaps the math adds up: that we are made in the image of God, and that it is not good for us to be alone, and that perhaps, it is not good for God to be alone either … but instead, we are invited to be with our God.
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