Father Earth and Mother Heaven
The Greeks Got It Exactly Wrong
In my last Substack, I suggested something about gender and sexuality that not many seem to be talking about. I proposed that the man of Genesis 2, Adam, represents the earth in its press toward the apex of history, its union with heaven. By the way, that is not what the ancient world thought. Woman was always associated with the earth in its fruitfulness. In Greek mythology, Gaea was the personification and goddess of Earth, and her husband, Uranus, was the god of the heavens. The Greeks had it exactly backward. It is Father Earth and Mother Heaven. The woman of Genesis 2 represents the heavenly sanctuary destined to come forth as a bride and unite with the earth on the last day.
I came to the woman as a symbol for heavenly Zion through the insights of one of my seminary professors, Mark Garcia. The woman's identification with the people and realm of eternal life (Gen 3:20, mother of the all-living; Gal 4:26, Rev 19, 21, heavenly Jerusalem, our Mother above) has made a lot of sense to me ever since I was introduced to the idea. There has to be more to gender than the modern evangelical preoccupation with “roles.” If our Bible is about patriarchs transforming national culture by masculine strength, well then our differences are about being born into “roles” that will make that happen. But if the Bible is about God revealing himself and his plans to bring a beloved people to behold him in a city built by him (Heb 11:10), then maybe gender is about something different.
As I have already written, I believe that God has revealed himself through making mankind as an equally ultimate unity and diversity. And not only that. Mankind also resembles God by their simple essence. Their essence as image-bearers is like God’s irreducible essence. It is not composed of parts. The man, the woman, and every individual from all the tribes and tongues and nations that will come from them, will bear the image of God in the same sense and to the same degree. This is what we share in common. But now we come to Genesis 2 and see that there are things that we do not share in common as male and female. We have “incommunicable personal properties,” essential differences that point to God’s plans to bring us through covenant to the end he has planned for us
Last Substack, I wrote about Geerhardus Vos’s insight that God not only is describing his own move from work to rest (earth to heaven) in Genesis 2:3, but also calling Adam and Eve to make every effort to follow him and enter God’s own heavenly rest. This is the introduction to the rest of Genesis 2. God will tell Adam how to go from earthly testing in the garden sanctuary to rest beyond testing in the heavenly sanctuary. It will be by obedience to a covenant that God will make with him. God will set before Adam two trees, one threatening death and one attached to the promise of never-ending life and consummate communion with God. God tells Adam that if he does not eat from the tree of testing, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then he will receive the right to the tree of life. Eating from that tree will bring him, and those united to him, to God’s mountain, his heavenly temple dwelling, and set in motion the “last things.” Those things go beyond irrevocable and immediate communion with God and include the coming together of heaven and earth.
Now if I can say something about covenant. I began to understand covenant as the “skeleton” of the Bible in my late 40s. Up until then, I had read the Bible not understanding well what held the two testaments together. I never saw clearly the unity of Old and New Testaments or the unfolding of Genesis to Revelation. Understanding covenant theology was revolutionary to me. It was jaw-dropping. It was by far my greatest “aha” moment in seminary. Ever since then, the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace have been before my eyes. I was not raised in the Reformed tradition, so I don’t take covenant theology for granted. It continues to thrill me. That said, I ask myself, when it comes to the diversity of the man and woman of Genesis 2, why is the glory of covenant left out? Why don’t the Reformed have a covenantal and “unfolding” (acorn to oak) understanding of gender and sexuality? It’s as if the woman coming second is a liability and not a glory. Why do the Reformed share basically the same understanding of the woman as second(ary) and “helper” with all the other expressions of Christianity, including those against whom they protested in the 16th century? They also share the same thoughts about women with cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, to say nothing of other world religions — yes, including the Muslims we lived among for 23 years. Reformed Christians are not unique in thinking that women exist to “affirm, receive, and nurture (male) strength . . .” or, in Calvin’s words, “that they may acknowledge themselves inferior in consequence of the superiority of the male sex” (Calvin’s Commentary on 1 Cor 11:10). This thinking is at least as old as Aristotle, but I would venture to say that it goes back further. It seems to me that Lamech spells out the same thing for his wives in Genesis 4:23-24 when he starts with, “Listen here, you wives of Lamech . . .” and by Genesis 6:2 (“. . .and they took for their wives any they chose”), the “sons of God” seem to have built something of substance on Lamech’s new anthropology. This is not the anthropology of Genesis 1 and 2.
So what would a covenantal understanding of sexuality and gender look like? It would have a means and an end. I suggest that in Genesis 2, man represents the means. He is the symbol and representative of the earth under testing and the covenantal head of the families of the earth. The woman represents the goal. She is the symbol and representative of heaven and a people destined for Sabbath glory. So beginning with Genesis 2:4, we see that Adam is repeatedly tied to the earth. Adam is the first generation of the earth, being made to serve the adamah (2:5), when it had not rained and mists came up from the earth to water the whole face of the adamah (2:6). He is called Adam after the adamah. God molds Adam from the adamah (2:7) and tasks him with keeping the plants that have sprung up (like he has) from the adamah (2:9, 15). Adam also names every beast of the field and the birds of heaven that God also formed out of the adamah (2:19). He is given the command, “you shall not eat,” under threat that he will die, not returning to God, but to the adamah from which he came (2:16, cf. 3:19). In Genesis 3, Adam’s fall leads to the cursing and enslaving of the adamah in 3:17-19. Adam’s representation of the earth is no generic personification, but rather his covenantal identity as one destined for Sabbath glory. He represents the adamah specifically as it “springs up” and presses toward the goal for which it was made. Adam guards and keeps the earth and is personally charged to not eat the forbidden fruit because his obedience is the means by which the climax of history will come about.
Adamah is a word used over and over again in the account of Adam’s creation in Genesis 2. It is also used three times in Genesis 3 in connection with Adam’s disobedience, the cursing of the earth, and his own return to the adamah from which he came. That needs to be considered with the fact that adamah is never used in the account of Eve's creation in Genesis 2 or the penalty for her sin in Genesis 3. Eve’s creation is other-worldly. Her creation is not earthy. She is taken from Adam’s zela, a word reserved in Scripture exclusively for the walls of the sacred objects and structures made according to the heavenly archetype, whether the ark of the covenant (Ex 25:12, 14; 37:3, 5, 27), the tabernacle (Ex 26:20, 26; 36:25, 31-32), the bronze altar (Ex 26:27, 35; 27:7), the altar of incense (30:4), the altar of of ascension (Ex 38:7), Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:5, 8, 15, 16; 6:16, 35), the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6:16); the doors of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:35), or Ezekiel’s eschatological temple (Eze 41:5, 6, 7 , 9, 11, 26). It also used once to indicate the “side” of the holy city, a hill of Mt. Olivet (2 Sam 16:13, cf. Ps 125:1-2) and once for the walls of Solomon’s palace (1 Kings 7:3, cf. Ps 45:15). Zela is never translated as rib elsewhere. Has zela ([sacred] side) as the origin of woman and her association with the sanctuary gone unnoticed? I suggest we must look again at zela and the woman of Genesis 2:21-22 in connection with sacred space, most especially Zion’s personification as mother, daughter, and bride in the prophets, to say nothing of her as our final identity in Revelation 19, 22.
In my next Substack, I hope to finish up the woman’s covenantal representation as the second and final order and look more closely at the last verses of Genesis 2 and what it says about our eternal hope.
I get so excited reading you, Anna. Your work truly leads to doxology.