Were Adam and Eve babies? How would they know how to get babies out?

There's nothing graphic, but if you are listening to the show with your kids, which we love, you might want to listen to this one by yourself first, just to make sure you want your little ears hearing it, or so you're prepared for the questions they will have. Now, on to this kid question that almost stumped our biblical scholar this week. One more thing, this Thursday, April 25th, at 8pm central, I'll be hosting a Holy Post live stream. Normally, these are only for Holy Post Plus subscribers, but we are making this one available to Curiously Caitlin listeners too. It's your chance to hear more about the podcast and ask your own questions, even if you aren't a kid.

Head over to holypost.

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I don't know.

That doesn't make any sense.

Drew Johnson, thank you so much for being here today, and thank you for.

It has two parts to it.

Stomach. A fantastic question. Yes, a really good question. So legitimate.

You might.

But when I say they've been wrestling with this, so Jewish rabbis, do not hold back. They go with every possible thought that could work, because they're trying to figure out what's going on. Just like this kid, they're puzzling it through going, I need to fit all the pieces together.

And I don't think that they were born as babies, but we don't really have any time sequence. So the problem is, the man is, I hate to say, I can't call him Adam, because he's not really doesn't have a name. He's called the Adam, the dirt lane, right? The man is made from the dirt. And he's then commanded to eat from all the trees, warned about the one tree, and then the woman's made.

And according to the narrative, it's like five minutes. I mean, there's no amount, like, we have no sense of how long these people were alive when all of these things happened. Were they there for years or not? But they do seem to be adult. And here's one indication.

The first thing we see when they leave the garden is, I mean, the very first sentence after out of the garden is, they have sex, and she conceives and bears children. The very first blessing of, excuse me, of God to the humans in Genesis 1 is to be fruitful and multiply. So it seems like when we run into these people, everything that is being said about them and every inclination here is that they could be sexually active creatures. They're at least potentially sexually active, and for sure sexually active as soon as they leave the garden. And it seems like they probably might have been in the garden.

I was talking about this with my wife last night, and we were trying to game out like, well, they couldn't have been there longer than nine months, because if they were having sex, then maybe.

. But yeah, it's an open question. And then what do they do on the flip side when somebody's pregnant as well? So I think it's actually a good question. I'm not sure Genesis wants to answer the question of how old they were.

There is another problem here is, we tend to view children as innocent. The church has not throughout history, but because of this movement in Germany, the Romanticist movement, we tend to have this really like cutified version of children, of these innocent, blank slate things that only can be corrupted. Romanticism was a philosophical movement towards.

But his opponent, Augustine, who had a child of his own, knew that kids also sin. It's been noted that people like us in the.

God is called by his personal name, not by a title, Yahweh, which is like Susan or Clifton or something like that. And the man is not called by a personal name. He's called by his title, Ha'adam, which means the Adam and Adama. It's a wordplay off the word dirt, Adama. So I don't call him...

You could call him the earthling. That makes it sound like a sci-fi story. You could call him the soiling, which makes it sound like he's done something wrong. So I think dirtling is the one that communicates. he's called the dirtling because he's taken from the dirt.

The interesting thing is, all the animals are also made from the dirt and also given the breath of life, just like him, and also called living creatures, just like him. So there becomes this puzzle where it's like, well, how is he different than all of these other dirt-formed creatures who have the breath of life and are being presented to him by God? So, almost every instance in Genesis, one through, or at least two and three, it says the man, the man, or Adam, and that's not what it says in the Hebrew. It says the dirtling, the dirtling, the dirtling, because there is a word for man. It's ish.

And that is used when it says, behold, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, she shall be called isha, woman, because she was taken from ish. So there is a word for man, but that's not the word used in the Hebrew. So the author is taking a lot of care not to use the standard Hebrew word for man, but to call him by the substance from which he was taken, which is where the word human comes from. Hummus, the word hummus, which is the, the soil, right, and human. You got more than you asked for there.

No, that's great. I love that.

So, just considering this question that this kid asked, how would you describe how we should be taking this story, or what kinds of questions are good questions for us to ask? And if they might be related to this question of, which I think is not just a question of the logistics, it's also a question of, as you said, it seems important that they are to be fruitful and multiply. So I have some questions about that. So how might we take this story, this text, with?

I'm a minimalist, so I'm like, what can I say with a lot of confidence, that I think everybody should take seriously here? And one of the things I think is all stories have an arrow through them that points them in a particular direction. And that's constructed in kind of conflict and resolution patterns, right? If you've been to high school, you know how narratives work, character development, conflict resolution, height, plot, tensioning, setting, et cetera. So I do think that we often kind of blow past those because we have all kinds of theological meanings we want to read into the text or derive from the text.

And we don't ever stop and say, I mean, I do it every semester in class. I say, okay, most of you have read this story before, you read it for your homework, we're reading it in class right now. What's the story about? And man, I get every answer under the sun, right? And I say, no, no, no.

An author constructed the story with a particular structure in mind, which kind of helps eliminate what it's not about and focus you in on what it is about. And I've done that with churches, I've done that with all kinds... I've done that with Bible teachers in private Christian high schools. And I've yet to have people that can really clearly on the fly say, oh, well, here's the conflict that comes to resolution through this climax. So it's got to be about something like this, even if it's about other things.

So I think paying attention to the structure of the story, which even children, like young children, understand structure to story. They understand when stories aren't properly told or where the ending's held away, or something like that. So I think paying attention to the structure of the story will help us focus on what the author wants us to pay attention to. A friend of mine used to tell this story about gossip and prayer circles. I don't know if you are familiar with this phenomenon of where someone...

He made up this story as an illustration of like, did you hear Judy got arrested? Arrested for what? We got to pray for her, for what? She got arrested for stealing. Stealing, what does she steal?

She went into the convenience store and she stole Tic Tacs. Tic Tacs, what flavor? And you're like, that doesn't matter. The fact is, Judy is in jail because she got arrested for stealing. So I think there's some point where there's a natural line of questioning that you pursue, but you got to figure out when the question becomes irrelevant to what the story you're trying to tell, right?

And what's important about the story.

So I think we have a lot more work to do on that front of paying closer attention to the stories. We're asking what color were the Tic Tacs and the author of Genesis is like, I'm actually trying to point you down the line to this other thing that you need to know, which is why I think... Well, I don't know why, but Genesis 1 through 3, I mean, it's the creation of the cosmos, humanity, and the kind of like the ruining of everything. in three chapters. And lots of scholars point out, you have 12 chapters about Joseph, who isn't even a patriarch, whose line is going to die off by the time you get to 2 Kings 16..

Why do we have 12 chapters for Joseph and only two to three chapters for the creation of the cosmos? That seems intentional. And it also means that every single sentence, every single word are like laser-like, trying to focus you and say, no, not that, not that, but pay attention to this. And remarkably, as you follow Genesis into Exodus, it really is the stuff that keep you focused on laser-like in Genesis 1 through 3 that keeps coming up again and again and again in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and beyond, even into the New Testament, I would say. And now a word from our sponsor.

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And thank you to Brazos Press for sponsoring this episode. That is really helpful. And, to your point, I think an impulse we might have in a church if a kid asks this question, or if this is a reasonable question for an adult to ask too, might be to think in terms of, well, we're Adam and Eve, historical characters, historical people or characters in a story. And I have to kind of answer that question first before I get to the logistical question that you are asking. And it sounds like part of what you're saying is that's not a question that the text seems very interested in answering.

And so let's pay attention to the structure of the text itself and what it's pointing us towards. And, to the credit of this kid, they are kind of getting at something that it does seem to be important in the text, which is procreation. So to answer their question in a kind of sideways way, because again, I think some of the question to what you've already said, we don't know, we're not totally sure about all of this, but how would you answer their question of how did they know about babies, or were they babies? in terms of what the text actually thinks is important about procreation? Like what is here that the text does want us to ask about, that would be important for us to make sure we don't miss?

Yeah. And I think this will actually.

is. there's something about God that has male and femaleness in him, right? Or in it, if you want to say whatever the Godness is. For evolutionary biology, that's controversial, because if evolution had gone correctly and efficiently, there would be no male-female difference. There would be no sex.

Nobody would ever have sex. Everybody would be self-replicating. Apparently, according to biologists, this is entirely possible, that humans could be, there could be some form of a human that is self-replicating. I don't know what that human would look like or how it would work, but it's an embarrassment of evolutionary thought that we've split up into two different sexes, because it creates all kinds of problems for evolution. It's onerous, courting rituals, people get killed because they have to wear long feathers, because the girl likes it, all this kind of stuff.

All the things that kill lots of people today.

when God blesses the animals. He doesn't command them to, I will point out too. There's no command to have sex. It says he blesses them to have sex, to be fruitful, multiply. Fruitfulness is a metaphor there for sexual procreation and actually something beyond procreation.

But he does it to the animals first, and then he also gives the same blessing to the humans later, to be fruitful and multiply. So the first thing we know about humans is they're male and female, which means they're sexually differentiated creatures. The male has to go with the female in some kind of biological way. And the next thing we know is they're blessed in order to have sex and for it to be procreative, which means it produces, it makes babies.

Now, any reader of the Hebrew Bible or hearer, most people would have been hearing the scripture.

. Any adult, I guess, who understood sexual activity.

So in some ways you could even say, well, I've got four kids. I don't think it was unusual with kids that your kids start asking you questions about sex when they see animals having sex. And if you grew up in agrarian subsistence cultures, animals having sex is not going to be foreign to you. You might even be forcing some animals to have sex in order to husband them.

So actually, watching the patterns of the world brings questions of sex into the environment. Interestingly, nobody is sexually produced in Genesis 2 at all. They're crafted from the dirt and then crafted from the side of the man.

But then the addendum at the end of that is therefore a man shall leave his father's and mother's house. And you're like, what's a father and mother? Again, the assumption is you're a later person, you're hearing about this, you know what they're talking about, and shall sexually cling to their wife. And you could say, okay, why sexually cling to their wife? Well, we already know from Genesis 1..

And then we don't actually see the first couple have sex until Genesis 4, first sentence. Because they use the euphemism of to know somebody is to have sex with them, including at Sodom and Gomorrah, to sexually assault somebody is to know somebody can also mean sexually assault non procreatively.

So there's all this sexual language everywhere in this text. So it would be weird for them not to have some clue that this is going to come to, or it was a giant, it's going to be like the kid said, it's going to be a giant surprise. You know, you ate too much fruit one day and then you're like, wow, you're really packing on the fruit pounds. I don't know. I do know that animals do not have to be instructed with sexual education.

And humans are animals, according to scripture. I mean, we're in parallel, we're viewed in parallel to animals as part of God's creation. above other things. You've said a couple of times, and I just want to.

So we don't actually know. So you will get a lot of people who, who will talk about the rabbis as if they lived during the days of Jesus. Some of those can be figured out because you can see Jesus responding to things that sound like later rabbinic teaching. But I would say be very careful when you hear somebody hanging a sermon on, well, the rabbis taught this, therefore, because it's very difficult to know. So these are people a few hundred years after Jesus, who are commenting on scripture.

And it's really interesting, like, you know, one rabbi will comment, and you can read that, you can see it on the page. And another rabbi from 100 years later, 200 years later, will comment and say, I don't know what the heck this person's talking about. You know, rabbi, you know, rabbi. Eliezer said this, Yochanan says this, but I think he's wrong. They argue with each other right on the page.

And they didn't, they didn't know each other. Like they're people who come in successive events. So they have these centuries long explorations where they're trying to figure out, some of them are just asserting, here's what I think this text says, here's what I think it means. And then other people are coming along going, well, I don't see that at all. Here's what I think it means.

And I think the first person is wrong. And this is actually, you know, if you want to, if you ever, like I was in New York City for a long time, if you ever see an Orthodox Jew in public reading something that looks like Hebrew, it is not the Bible. They're reading these arguments between these rabbis and Aramaic. So it looks like Hebrew because it's written in the same script, but it's actually mostly Aramaic. And it's these arguments between rabbis over the centuries.

And they say all kinds of things because they're kind of gaming every verse and they take one verse at a time per page, one to two sentences per page. And they comment on it. And then they argue with each other all over the page. And it's a historical argument. And they say some crazy stuff because they're trying to work out every angle.

And they really are. I mean, they think very deeply about these.

thank you for explaining that. Any last thoughts about these questions, like things we have not talked about, that you think are important, or things that, if you were, again, not just responding to this child, but in a church where a child is asking this question and a bunch of grownups go, actually, yeah, I'm confused about that too. Is there anything we?

But I also would point out, cause. I read Genesis every semester with my classes and a lot of Christians are not prepared for how blunt the discussion of sexuality and sex is in Genesis through Deuteronomy and how much value is placed on human fertility. And again, I don't think, I wrote a book recently on Darwin and natural selection. I had to have a whole section where I talked about sexual reproduction, which was actually a little bit darker of a journey than I was ready for, because I hadn't really fully thought through how dark that conversation is in evolutionary biology and how the Bible actually kind of, you know, it puts sexual assault, both female, sexually assaulting males and vice versa, on full display and kind of lets you know what's really going on and the possible outcomes of that. So I think sometimes when people ask questions like this, I want to both shield them from scripture and be like, you're probably not ready.

You know, like I tell my students, don't read East of Eden until you're like 30 or 40, because you'll think it's too wild of a story to be true. And once you're older, you're like, oh, I know people like that. And I think it's similar with scripture. I think we need to be not so afraid of the kind of the sexual discussions, but scripture leaves them at a level where we can just go like, oh, bad stuff happens or good stuff can happen. And I don't think we have actually absorbed the impulses of sexuality in scripture.

yet. Like, so one of them that I discovered as I was researching it was, we think, in terms of procreation, because we think of nuclear families, my children, the biblical authors, are almost universally focused on my great, great, great grandchildren that I will never meet. How am I going to set things up for them, right? And that has environmental impacts, that has political impacts, and how they think about how they manage the land and everything, you know, and how they manage their relationships with the people around them. So I think something that starts out with where do babies come from?

Did they know about babies? Actually, the biblical authors are like, great, that's a great starting point. Let's move into your great, great, great grandchildren. Let's talk about them. Or, you know,

everybody's going to be in a family that's going to have great, great, great grandchildren, whether you're the one producing the line or not. So they want to have a bigger discussion than I think most of us are ready to have. And so I think it wouldn't be bad for us to take some of.

And sometimes it's the questions of kids that can force us to realize like, oh no, if you just read this, it's provoking some important ideas and questions that we should take pretty seriously. Thank you, Drew, so much for this. Thank you for taking seriously this really important question with me.

Johnson said, not just sexually, but in terms of humans taking what God created and creating more with it. And the text is not primarily interested in the nuclear family either. While it cares about marriage and children, Dr. Johnson pointed out how the frame of reference most people had throughout the whole story of scripture was one of generations beyond that nuclear family. The great, great, great grandchildren that a family would produce.

One thing the first few chapters of Genesis seem very interested in is how humans respond to God's good creation. With fruitfulness and faithfulness, or with death and destruction, not only for themselves and their children, but for generations to come. How will we take the gifts of God's creation, even as they and us are marred by sin, and do faithful work that outlasts us? When I was in Italy a few summers ago, I was captivated by beautiful cathedrals, huge, stunning works of art that took the medieval masons who made them decades, sometimes hundreds of years. The original architects sometimes never saw the finished product.

Are we willing to work with future generations in mind? Are we willing to work faithfully, knowing we might not see the fruits of our labor, healthy families, thriving communities, beautiful works of art, until eternity? Are we willing to work with faith that God will redeem our fallen and finite efforts, even if they appear to be failures here and now? Wrapped up in this kid's question, it turns out, is a rich theology of our life on earth and what faithfulness does and doesn't look like.

Curiously, Caitlyn is a production of Holy Post Media. Produced by Mike Strelow. Editing by Seth Corvette. Theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids, and never any butt news.