If you’re familiar with the Bible at all, you likely know the story of creation. God made the first man (Adam), from the dust on the ground. Then, wanting a companion for Adam, made the first woman (Eve) from one of Adam’s ribs.
Well, not so! Says biblical scholar, Ziony Zevitt. He claims that the correct version of this story is that Eve was created from the bone in Adam’s penis!
Ziony Zevit is a professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages at the American Jewish University, in California. He says Genesis 2 has been mistranslated. The correct translation, he surmises, was that God made Eve from Adam’s baculum — penis bone.
The bone of contention (pun intended) is the Hebrew word “tsela,” which was used to describe the bone that was taken from Adam to create Eve.
“This Hebrew word occurs some 40 times in the Hebrew Bible, where it refers to the side of a building or of an altar or ark, a side-chamber, or a branch of a mountain. In each of these instances, it refers to something off-center, lateral to a main structure,” Zevit wrote.
Going with this inferred definition from the other uses of the word, in the Bible, tsela relates to “limbs lateral to the vertical axis of an erect human body: hands, feet, or, in the case of males, the penis.” Zevit stated. “Of these appendages, the only one lacking a bone is the penis,”
Interestingly, Zevit’s definition would explain a couple of mysteries. First, it would answer the question why men don’t have an uneven number of ribs, if one were taken to create Eve. It would also explain why human penises don’t have an os baculum (penis bone), unlike most mammals, including those most closely genetically similar to humans – gorillas and chimpanzees.
Zevit’s theory was first presented in the book What Happened in the Garden of Eden, in 2013. However, it’s gained new attention, with a paper recently published in Biblical Archaeology Review.