She Births the World
The divine dance of She and He in Genesis
Genesis begins not with light driving out darkness, but with a divine dance in which dark, feminine depths birth the cosmos. Yet that feminine presence has been buried beneath the translation, and this loss has critical consequences for culture.
A long time ago, not quite in the beginning, lived a people who loved both the darkness as well as the light. It was from this group of shepherds, in a liminal space between empires, that the narrative of the Hebrew Bible’s six days of creation arose. Today, however, this precious page of Genesis, anchored in powerful feminine darkness, finds itself projected through a cultural lens of pure-masculine-only-light archetypes. But even still, hidden in plain sight is a beautiful secret between the black fire and white fire of the opening words of the Torah.
The Hebrew Bible begins with the primordial he-waters and the hovering she-Spirit face to face in darkness; this is the dark womb of creation from which the phenomenal world is birthed into balanced polar pairs of night and day, earth and waters, female and male ever crashing together across the three domains of time, space, and culture.
Contrast to this is the closing of the Christian Bible in pure light cosmology of the First Epistle of John which declares, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” The she-earth-darkness has been edged out.
It is not surprising that today we find ourselves struggling with a perpetual demonization of the darkness associated archetypes of the feminine, the person of dark skin color, and the earth herself. As our church steeples point away from where we stand, and the darkness remains absent from our images of the world-as-it-should-be, we will struggle to solve our deepest social and ecological problems.
Contrary to the pure-light transcendent philosophy of the Johannine Epistle, however, the six days of creating abound with beautiful tension between the singular and the dual, dark and light, earth and sky, and the feminine and the masculine in a manner utterly lost in our translations. This is one aspect that is purely impossible to translate.
Grammatical and metaphorical gender is something foreign to most English speakers but is deeply woven into the Ancient Hebrew language. The gendered polarity permeates the text with an air of masculinity and femininity to the ears of the ancients. In fact, the climax of creation reveals this gendered dualism of male and female as intrinsic to the Godhead.
So how can we read Her divine darkness back into our vocalization of text? What follows is a meditative midrash on the gendered cosmology of the opening of Genesis.
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image (m), according to our likeness (f) …”
male and female God created them. … God blessed them and called them Adam
The Quivering Womb
In the beginning… in the first verse… even the first word… we meet Her. The noun resheeth is the feminine form of the more common masculine “rosh” (as in Rosh Hashanah – the beginning of the year). She begins the Torah. The word torah, itself a feminine noun, is viewed by many as an indwelling and immanent presence of God in the world. Some ancient authors read this resheeth as identical to Lady Wisdom who personally reminds us in Proverbs 8:22, “Yahweh established me (Wisdom) as the beginning (resheeth) of his way.”1
This feminine opening is immediately followed by the clash of the singular and the dual. The second and third words of the Bible are the Hebrew phrase “bara Elohim.” Here a plural noun is subject to a singular verb. The translation “God created…” simply cannot capture this numerical mismatch, nor is it possible to translate this tension into English. Our English verbs tend to lack conjugation in person, gender, and number. “Created” is appropriate for he or she, you or I, y’all or us, as well as they or them. The mismatch is not at all normal, and this is no impious error right out of the gate.
We shall see that this tension between the singular and the dual is the basis of the forming of the cosmos into a once unified and now separated heavens and earth. In fact, one can read the narrative of the six days, and even through the Garden of Eden as a sequential story of separations; making dual out of what is singular. Scholar Ellen van Wolde has recently written a strong argument that the primary verb of God’s creation, bara (Heb: ברא), has the sense of separation, not the kind of “blinking into existence” that is often imagined in these familiar declarations of creation.2 According to her estimation, Genesis 1:1 reads, “In the beginning God separated the heavens and the earth.”
Now, before this gendered pairing of plural-he-heavens and singular-she-earth is constructed, the text provides us a description of the primordial cosmos in its undifferentiated state. In verse two, the darkness and the spirit are made parallel. The darkness was over the face of the deep… the spirit was over the face of the waters. But within this second verse, there is striking feminine action. The action of the spirit – moving or hovering – is the action of a mother eagle hovering over it’s brood in expectation of new life (see Deuteronomy 32:11).
In the Hebrew, the femininity of the pre-creative state is striking. The ear hears an action expected from a Deborah or Sarah, not an Abraham or Caleb. The feminine is the dark womb of creation, of course, and it is from her motion that the world is formed. This feminine participle, impossible to capture in English, is a quivering expectation of birth.
Yielding Light
What follows from this womb is the formation of the first day. The first words from Gods-who-are-one in Genesis, are “Let there be light.” Often read with commanding force, the verb used here instead takes the “jussive mood” which is the kind of acquiescence or yielding attributed to Mary from the Gospel of Luke’s first chapter and from Sir Paul McCartney’s soothing words of wisdom, “let it be.” The same form is used again in Genesis 30:34 when Laban yields to Jacob’s plan. Instead of an act of potent masculine willing out of nothing, there is a sense of feminine yielding to what pre-existed but was yet unacknowledged.
At this point, the dark and the light are comingled as in the dusk and dawn. The light is collected and named Day (Heb: yom) and the darkness is collected and named Night (Heb: laylah). These names are capitalized in many translations as proper nouns of beings themselves and yes, the he-day is masculine and the she-night is feminine. 3
The author shares with us the strain under which he is placed. The Hebrew language must express a mixing of genders with a masculine label. The poet writes that there was dusk and dawn on the first day, but the phrase can also mean “one day” (a unity). One day consists of equal parts “night” and “day,” and, of course, the Jewish day begins in the liminality of evening. These two parts make one, named with a masculine name, but whose head is female and whose tail is male. And this is precisely how a masculine plural noun for God can contain both female and male faces while retaining a unity; just as the masculine day retains equal parts female and male, night and day.
Even this first temporal separation of the day is constructed in the image and likeness of God with the day’s own Eve-ning separated out of its body, as later with Eve from Adam, and reuniting twice a day in the divine marriage of the dawn and the dusk. It is in these liminal periods where, in Numbers 28:4, we are to find and celebrate God.4
If the masculine light is drawn out of the darkness, then the following two days draw out the feminine earth from within the masculine waters. The separation within time is the followed by two separations within space. First, symmetric separations of waters above and waters below yield the submarine universe of the early Hebrew cosmologists; creating a duality from what was a unity. But as we have seen with the day-night and with God, this too contains equal parts masculine and feminine.
It is on day three that another gendered dualism is formed in the drawing back of the he-waters to reveal the she-land. In fact, this spatial separation seems not to satisfy God until the dualism is revealed. Many readers are unaware that the daily declaration of goodness is conspicuously missing from the second day. It is withheld until the gendered separation on the third day. This goodness is so jarringly absent that the Greek translators added an extra statement of goodness to day two in the Alexandrian Septuagint.
It is also on day three that the only other actor in creation brings forth life. On day three, the earth brings forth the plants of the ground. She is the subject of the verb where all other creative statements are subjects of God. The formation of the plants on the third day are an act of nourishment out of the body of mother earth there to feed the originally vegan animals and humans. It isn’t until after the flood that the subsequently hardened humans are allowed the omnivorous habits we see today.
Image & Likeness: One Body, Two Faces
At the midpoint of creation, the stage has been set in both time and space. What then follows, through the creation of stars, seagulls, and sea serpents is a final step of creative separation. In the final step, the original human (Heb: adam) is formed. But as the early Genesis Rabbah5 interprets, there is a kind of dualism to this person. This is a half and half being that is simultaneously male and female; the androgyne. Just as the separated waters below or the original form of intermingled night and day, this human is equal parts male and female.
When the human (Heb: adam) is created, “he-she” is created in the image and likeness of God. The word for image, tselem, is masculine in gender while the word likeness, demuth, is feminine in gender. Interestingly, the author repeats the narrative of creation of humans here in chapter one, and again in the opening of Genesis chapter five. In the first chapter, the humans are made in the he-image of God, male & female. In the recounting of creation in the fifth chapter, the humans are made in the she-likeness of God, male & female, and they are called adam.
After the temporal separation of Laylah and Yom, and the spatial separation of she-Earth and he-Seas, the final step in creation is the cultural division of the humans into male and female in Eden. Yet again, however the ongoing male-alone interpretation of the text builds a diminutive interpretation into the narrative. Our translations miss that Adam was formed out of the adamah, the feminine earth, so when the woman is symmetrically made out of the body of the original Adam (as if all north poles contain a south), our translations read that God fashioned her from a mere rib; a single bone… a minor component.
It is, however, an ancient tradition to read this word as it is translated in every other instance in the biblical text. That is that “rib” (Heb: tsela) is instead the word for “side,” as in “side of beef.”6 Elsewhere, tsela is used to describe a side of the tabernacle (Exodus 26:20) or a side of the arc of the covenant (Exodus 25:12) or one side of a hill (2 Samuel 16:13). In fact, of the forty-one occurrences in the Hebrew text, the only translations of tsela as rib are here in Genesis 2. And of course, Adam says “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” not “look what you did with my bone!”
With this framing, perhaps we can now see an image of an entire cosmos formed in the image and likeness of God, not merely the human… the division of earth and waters and night and day and woman and man form a fundamental cosmological polarity for these early Hebrew authors across time, space, and culture.
The Dance of Dark & Bright Lovers
This is most apparent, second to Genesis, in the passionate poetry of the Song of Songs. Little is known about the authorship of this book of the canon, and even less is preached in pulpits, but it is the only book of the bible written from the perspective of a woman (though the author was likely male). Within the Song is a dance between man and woman. In the opening verses we read:
I am black and beautiful,
O daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar,
Do not gaze at me because I am dark,
because the sun has caught sight of me.
Here we see the voice of the black and beautiful7 feminine and the brightness of her beloved. What follows in the “Song of the Spring” (Song 2:7-3:5) has the archetypal male bounding upon the mountains and transcending the city into wild nature during the light of day until the shadows flee and night falls. Then in Song 3:1 upon her bed at night, the woman moves about the immanence of the dwellings. In 2:10, his voice calls her, from the window, out into the wilderness. In 3:4, she finds him at the border of the dwellings and grasps him, drawing him inward.
The first century Rabbi Akiva, father of rabbinic Judaism, referred to the Song of Songs as “the holy of holies.”8 Though accurate to observations of distant radio signals, our modern cosmologies can sorely lack this grounding in the human experience and our desire for community. This tension of opposites in their draw towards primordial unity and their perpetual separation into plurality is a beautiful truth embedded in the logic of these ancient cosmologists. It is not the woman who is God, nor is it her beloved. Deuteronomy 4:16 warns against idols in the likeness of male or female. Instead, God is in their dance, their longing, and their union.
How Darkness Was Diminished
Unfortunately, shortly after the six days of Genesis 1 were written, the ground shifted underneath the ancient Hebrews. The darkness was diminished by association with the dualist philosophical system of the Persians as the Jews found themselves vassals to Cyrus and his Achaemenid empire. For the Zoroastrian, darkness is evil; the darkness we inherit today. Zarathustra’s creation story, beginning in all light, is the one touted in the apocalypse that bookends the Christian Bible. Perhaps opposition to this influence is captured most profoundly in Isaiah 45:7’s declaration (in the face of Cyrus) that Yahweh forms the light and creates the darkness.
More than two hundred years later, under Alexander’s Hellenism, the darkness was again distorted under the violence of Plato’s philosophy which painted the dark earth as the most corrupt of substances with a progressive purification ascending through the increasingly transparent substances up through the heavenly ether to the realm of ideals. The dark soil and the flesh were the deepest corruption of the forms (the common Christian drum beat today).
I sometimes wonder if the early Jesus movement was attempting to reclaim this yin and yang of the earlier Hebrew philosophy. The he-God, totally transcendent, was brought down in flesh. I think of the notion of Jesus as born out of the deepest she-darkness of the solstice at Christmas (of course not literally, but yes actually).
In fact, Jesus’ mother’s name, Mary, is rooted in the name for myrrh, the dark plant resin prized in the Ancient Near East. Myrrh’s pungent companion, frankincense (Heb: lebonah) means literally “white stuff.” In Song of Songs 3:6, it is the union of these two, dark and light, which raises up out of the wilderness like the Hebrew people. Perhaps the gifts of the magi in the Gospel of Matthew were the perpetual calling of God to ground, tenting in us.
I wonder if the Cross acted as a signpost to God at Passover, at the equinox where night and day are balanced perfectly. And perhaps this is what the Apostle Thomas intended when he recorded Jesus saying, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer, … and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one … then you will enter God’s presence.” 9
We face immanent existential dilemmas here upon the earth, yet our churches point away to the sky. It is then no surprise that we treat our mother earth and her vibrant daughters with disdain. How can we breathe new life into the divine darkness of the feminine when our churches meet at high noon on the day of the sun? How can we augment those church steeples, so they point down as well? Maybe the solution is there in the beginning where She never left.
Translation from: Blenkinsopp, Joseph. "The Cosmological and Protological Language of Deutero-lsaiah." The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2011): 493-510.
Van Wolde, Ellen. "Separation and Creation in Genesis 1 and Psalm 104, A Continuation of the Discussion of the Verb ברא." Vetus Testamentum 67, no. 4 (2017): 611-647.
My first Hebrew teacher made us mark out the masculine label in our lexicons here. לילה (Lilah), his daughter’s name, takes the endings typical of feminine plural nouns (though sometimes receives masculine pronouns).
See a wonderful recent exposition on the historical duality of gender in the divine name: Sameth, Mark. The Name: A History of the Dual-gendered Hebrew Name for God. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2020.
For example, see Genesis Rabbah 8
For a parallel, see Plato’s discourse on soulmates with Aristophanes in Symposium