London: A biblical scholar has claimed that Eve was created by using a bone from Adam's penis and not from his ribs as previously believed, causing a heated controversy among outraged Christian readers.
The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 says that God made Adam from the dust of the ground and then created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs.
However, Ziony Zevit, a distinguished professor of Biblical Literature at the American Jewish University in California, argues that the Biblical story has been wrongly interpreted since a mistranslation confused rib with baculum, or penis bone.
Zevit’s shocking claim has recently resurfaced in a paper published in Biblical Archaeology Review. According to Zevit, the bone of contention — literally — centers around the Hebrew word “tsela,” used in the Old Testament to indicate the bone 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,” discovery.com quoted Zevit as saying.
Tsela was first translated as rib in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible dating to the mid-third century B.C.
It would have then lost its original meaning, which according to Zevit relates to “limbs lateral to the vertical axis of an erect human body: hands, feet, or, in the case of males, the penis.”
“Of these appendages, the only one lacking a bone is the penis,” Zevit wrote in the Archaeology Review.
Not surprisingly, Zevit’s phallic interpretation of the Biblical story has come under fire from outraged Christians.
