Really good point linking the soil and the skin color of our first parents. I love that you mentioned imagination's role in reading the text. Thanks for another insightful episode!
Just listened to "What does the Bible say about women pastors preaching?" I thought it was going to be about women making sandwiches for there man. Instead it was a well thought out video. You then answered someones comment and I found your channel. I will be binge watching all night as your are a great speaker and know your stuff! Glad I found you!
I first heard this concept of Adam's skin being the same color of fertile soil back when I was in high school. My church choir was invited to sing at the 100th anniversary of the AME church in our town. That image always stuck with me. He also said Eve was bone colored since she was made from Adam's rib, but you've already addressed that point. 😊 But his argument/ joke was that's probably why their children turned out to be every shade imaginable because, "ain't no telling what color your child gonna be when you have a multiracial couple." 😅 -Eliza
Great video, thanks Carmen. It just hit while watching this that Adam was put to sleep when the woman was created and Abraham was sleeping when Yahweh made a covenant with him, I might be reading too much into this but. The salvation we receive through Christ happened whilst we were still sinners, dead in our transgressions or sleeping in a sense (in my culture the dead are sleeping and also transcended into spirits beings that can speak to god for us). Yahweh made an ezer for Adam in Eve, Yahweh is Abraham’s ezer in their covenant and Christ is our ezer in bringing us back into Yahweh’s presence. Just a thought.
Yes! I’ve done the same thing, specifically because I wanted to honor Eve’s name! Her name was so non-intuitive to me when I took their disobedience. Why would man give her a name that means life unless forgiveness and repentance had happened between them. She is now their hope for the curse to be broken through her seed.
Great video as always. Couple of questions, how did the rib interpretation become the popular notion in translating that passage? Also, was there a rabbinical tradition that said that when God wanted to create women from man, he literally turned one half of Adam’s body into a women, so there was literally a half man half women person for a hot second? Does that make sense?
Micah, that's a great question! I haven't taken the time to explore rabbinical traditions on this question or the history of interpretation, but those would be so interesting to see. Some interpreters see the first human as "androgynous" (both male and female) to account for the division into both sexes. I'm not entirely convinced of that view, but it's interesting food for thought. Given that the problem was the first human's loneliness and the presentation of woman to man, it seems more likely that the first human was a man. What do you think?
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD There's a lot of stuff about gender roles and what the bible says about it but I think its really cool that people interpreted the text in extraordinary ways, even if I don't agree with it.
Not completely on topic, but I have always wondered about why Adam was never mentioned in the Old Testament after his role in Genesis was described? He reappears in the New Testament. I think that's kind of interesting.....
It is VERY interesting. The "image of God" concept also all but drops away until the New Testament (after Gen 9). I suspect it's because the focus turns from all humanity to the covenant community. Then Jesus ties the two threads back together.
I have wondered the same thing, and not just with Gen 1-3 but with Gen 1-11 as well. Very little mention of those foundational stories in the scriptures
Dark brown or reddish brown? When I look at the mud it is dark brown and sometimes reddish brown. It seems as if the mixture of earth and water contains elements that give it a characteristic color. Iron oxide gives clay its reddish-brown color. And our blood carries the iron and oxygen we need.
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD It is a color close to reddish brown, the reddish tone of the mud is due to the iron oxide that gives it that tone, it is the closest thing to justify the iron that our blood contains. By the way; I am taking an iron supplement because my level is low and that would lead to anemia. Imagine how important the element iron is in our body.
Art beautifies and idealizes concepts. If Adam and Eve were the "perfect" humans, then the artist will try it's best to depict that perfection in his context and culture, in order to transmit that feature. If it's not a "scientific" endeavour, than art is allowed to represent Adam and Eve in any skin tone fits best the local imagination. You should see the Nativity scenes we have in Peru, with the Holy Family dressed up as Quechua or Shipibo natives, and their physical features. Should we just tell them Jesus was a semite and their rendering is somehow inappropriate? For a very long while the Christianity was almost exclusively the religion of the white Europeans. Their artistic interpretation of physical and moral features is valid in that context. Only when we start dealing with cross-cultural missions, we start to rethink and contextualize the representations.
Marcus, this is such a good point! Yes, I think it's appropriate to contextualize biblical art. I love seeing global art based on the Bible. However, if people begin to confuse contextualization with interpretation of the text, that is where we run into problems. The complication with white Bible characters is the cultural dominance of Europeans and North Americans. In this case, art begins to correspond with other forms of colonization. North Americans need to recover the middle-Eastern and African roots of our faith to guard against this misunderstanding.
Thank you for these video's. I'm always looking forward to Tuesdays. I totally agree that our understanding of scripture is sometimes wrongly colored by our imagination. When I see pictures of Jesus with blond hair, white skin and blue eyes, I always think of the reconstruction picture the BBC once made on the basis of a skull of a first century Jew... But I have a question concerning the skin color of Adam. The Bibletranslation I use the most (Naardense Bijbel, a Dutch translation, but from what I've heard it's somewhat similar to Robert Alters translation of the Hebrew Bible) translates human als 'red human' and earth as 'red earth'. It has a note on why they chose to translate it like that: "In Hebrew there is a wordplay between 'adam' (human), 'adama' (ground, earth) and 'dam' (blood). This wordplay we try to honor by adding 'red' to the words human and ground/earth, so it becomes visible in the text that 'adam' and 'adama' were derived from 'dam'." What are your thoughts on this? I imagined Adam being made out of blood red earth and having a blood red skin, or at least having blood red hair.
Interesting connection, Wim! I'll have to think more about it. I think that might be pushing the similarity of language between ground and blood a bit too far. There is another way to say "red" in Hebrew (the wordplay we see in the story of Esau, who becomes the father of Edom, and is 'edom, or "red"). There is a definite wordplay in the Cain story of the "blood" crying out from the "ground" but I wouldn't conclude from that necessarily that the ground is red.
Genesis 2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh ( basar / sarka ) instead thereof; καὶ ἐπέβαλεν ὁ θεὸς ἔκστασιν ἐπὶ τὸν Ἀδάμ, καὶ ὕπνωσεν· καὶ ἔλαβεν μίαν τῶν πλευρῶν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀνεπλήρωσεν σάρκα ( sarka ) ἀντ᾽ αὐτῆς. The flesh, who was came from? ( sorry about my english ) In Bahasa ( Indonesia ), pertanyaannya adalah darisiapa daging itu?
The closest possibility in the sentence is Adam. God took Adam's side and shaped it into a woman. "His flesh" could mean God's flesh, but that is unlikely since the sentence doesn't introduce God as an object of his own action. And if it was God's side, then why did Adam need to be asleep?
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD Genesis 9:16 And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. ...between God and every living creature of all flesh... It shows there are 2 parties: 1. God 2. Every living creature of all flesh And each of these creatures has its own flesh. This means that the flesh that is placed comes from a living creature. Not God's flesh.
Using skin color to delineate people is one of satan's traps. God very specifically wanted humanity separated into separate nations distinguished by their languages, which he did in Genesis 11. His plan was to then bring people from all the nations back together in Christ, symbolized by the speaking in tongues to spread the gospel at the Pentecost. Now, believers in Christ are neither Jew nor Greek (black or white) and the system of color based identity belongs to the world. Satan is the one who weakened the nations (Isaiah 14:12) and there is no reason for believers to assist him. I think the reason that so much of the art from European middle ages features a white Jesus is because it was art from the European middle ages. God chose to use Europe to spread Christianity to the new world and the art is a product of that.
In my Torah Tuesday video on Acts 2 I note that when the Spirit is given at Pentecost, there is unity without uniformity. That is, God is honored by a diversity of cultures and languages. I agree with you that categorizing people by skin color is unhelpful and misleading. I'm simply suggesting that art has consequences and its time to rethink our "default."
Why anyone wants to determine the skin color of ancient people, including Adam & Eve or anyone else, is baffling to me. Why? What is the agenda? If we go with this mindset in this video, what color would Adam's bones be? What color would his blood be? What color would his liver and spleen and heart and eyes and teeth be?......so silly.......and so telling!
What I find silly is the modern imagination that pictures Adam and Eve as white or Jesus as blond with blue eyes. I'm simply trying to prompt us to take the biblical text seriously in its cultural and historical context.
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD Culture? Adam and Eve had a culture? You're speaking about apples and oranges. Yeshua was a typical middle eastern. He was not Ethiopian (in looks) and He was not Anglo Saxon. His ancestral father was described as "ruddy" and another one described as "polished ivory." Now this, we can or should agree but what difference does it make? These words in Tanak only serve to debunk many of the modern day claims. BUT no words, no culture, no hints at all of what Adam looked like nor should we even care. The dirt argument is just silly.
![Chris Langan - The Interview THEY Didn't Want You To See - CTMU [Full Version; Timestamps]](/img/1.gif)
Praise the lord sister
Glad for your service
Hearty thanks from India 🇮🇳
Excellent piece, especially for black history month!
Thanks! I wasn't thinking of black history month when I filmed it, but the release is good timing, isn't it?!
Just another great teaching by Carmen Imes 👍🏾
Glad you think so!
It´s very interesting how our conception of the world shape our interpretation of the biblical text! Thank you very much for this videos!
Thanks for watching!
I had never thought of OR been introduced to these truths prior to attending Biola; mainly due to my upbringing. I’m so thankful for your teaching!
So happy to have you learning along with me, Elizabeth!
Really good point linking the soil and the skin color of our first parents. I love that you mentioned imagination's role in reading the text. Thanks for another insightful episode!
Thanks for watching, Steve!
Just listened to "What does the Bible say about women pastors preaching?" I thought it was going to be about women making sandwiches for there man. Instead it was a well thought out video. You then answered someones comment and I found your channel. I will be binge watching all night as your are a great speaker and know your stuff! Glad I found you!
Glad you found my channel. Hope it's helpful to you!
I first heard this concept of Adam's skin being the same color of fertile soil back when I was in high school. My church choir was invited to sing at the 100th anniversary of the AME church in our town. That image always stuck with me.
He also said Eve was bone colored since she was made from Adam's rib, but you've already addressed that point. 😊 But his argument/ joke was that's probably why their children turned out to be every shade imaginable because, "ain't no telling what color your child gonna be when you have a multiracial couple." 😅
-Eliza
Another good one, Carmen! I can see a similar conversation coming when you get to the Flood.
Thanks, Brian!
Great video, thanks Carmen. It just hit while watching this that Adam was put to sleep when the woman was created and Abraham was sleeping when Yahweh made a covenant with him, I might be reading too much into this but. The salvation we receive through Christ happened whilst we were still sinners, dead in our transgressions or sleeping in a sense (in my culture the dead are sleeping and also transcended into spirits beings that can speak to god for us). Yahweh made an ezer for Adam in Eve, Yahweh is Abraham’s ezer in their covenant and Christ is our ezer in bringing us back into Yahweh’s presence. Just a thought.
I love this insight! Thanks for sharing, Nqobile!
Yes! I’ve done the same thing, specifically because I wanted to honor Eve’s name! Her name was so non-intuitive to me when I took their disobedience. Why would man give her a name that means life unless forgiveness and repentance had happened between them. She is now their hope for the curse to be broken through her seed.
Nice insight, Mike!
And since then, Adam was eager to make that seed grow ASAP! And sons and daughters appeared. Common woman, where's that seed?! Maybe next time? LOL!
Awesome video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video as always. Couple of questions, how did the rib interpretation become the popular notion in translating that passage? Also, was there a rabbinical tradition that said that when God wanted to create women from man, he literally turned one half of Adam’s body into a women, so there was literally a half man half women person for a hot second? Does that make sense?
Micah, that's a great question! I haven't taken the time to explore rabbinical traditions on this question or the history of interpretation, but those would be so interesting to see. Some interpreters see the first human as "androgynous" (both male and female) to account for the division into both sexes. I'm not entirely convinced of that view, but it's interesting food for thought. Given that the problem was the first human's loneliness and the presentation of woman to man, it seems more likely that the first human was a man. What do you think?
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD There's a lot of stuff about gender roles and what the bible says about it but I think its really cool that people interpreted the text in extraordinary ways, even if I don't agree with it.
In God's Word to Women, Katharine Bushnell believes it was the side of the man made into a woman, so the first man was both male and female.
Not completely on topic, but I have always wondered about why Adam was never mentioned in the Old Testament after his role in Genesis was described? He reappears in the New Testament. I think that's kind of interesting.....
It is VERY interesting. The "image of God" concept also all but drops away until the New Testament (after Gen 9). I suspect it's because the focus turns from all humanity to the covenant community. Then Jesus ties the two threads back together.
I think Adam does get a mention in 1 Chronicles 1:1, but its in the genealogy
I have wondered the same thing, and not just with Gen 1-3 but with Gen 1-11 as well. Very little mention of those foundational stories in the scriptures
Dark brown or reddish brown? When I look at the mud it is dark brown and sometimes reddish brown. It seems as if the mixture of earth and water contains elements that give it a characteristic color.
Iron oxide gives clay its reddish-brown color. And our blood carries the iron and oxygen we need.
True, the soil in different regions has slightly different hues. But until now, I haven't seen any soil the color of my skin!
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD It is a color close to reddish brown, the reddish tone of the mud is due to the iron oxide that gives it that tone, it is the closest thing to justify the iron that our blood contains.
By the way; I am taking an iron supplement because my level is low and that would lead to anemia. Imagine how important the element iron is in our body.
Art beautifies and idealizes concepts. If Adam and Eve were the "perfect" humans, then the artist will try it's best to depict that perfection in his context and culture, in order to transmit that feature. If it's not a "scientific" endeavour, than art is allowed to represent Adam and Eve in any skin tone fits best the local imagination.
You should see the Nativity scenes we have in Peru, with the Holy Family dressed up as Quechua or Shipibo natives, and their physical features. Should we just tell them Jesus was a semite and their rendering is somehow inappropriate?
For a very long while the Christianity was almost exclusively the religion of the white Europeans. Their artistic interpretation of physical and moral features is valid in that context. Only when we start dealing with cross-cultural missions, we start to rethink and contextualize the representations.
Marcus, this is such a good point! Yes, I think it's appropriate to contextualize biblical art. I love seeing global art based on the Bible. However, if people begin to confuse contextualization with interpretation of the text, that is where we run into problems. The complication with white Bible characters is the cultural dominance of Europeans and North Americans. In this case, art begins to correspond with other forms of colonization. North Americans need to recover the middle-Eastern and African roots of our faith to guard against this misunderstanding.
Thank you for these video's. I'm always looking forward to Tuesdays. I totally agree that our understanding of scripture is sometimes wrongly colored by our imagination. When I see pictures of Jesus with blond hair, white skin and blue eyes, I always think of the reconstruction picture the BBC once made on the basis of a skull of a first century Jew... But I have a question concerning the skin color of Adam. The Bibletranslation I use the most (Naardense Bijbel, a Dutch translation, but from what I've heard it's somewhat similar to Robert Alters translation of the Hebrew Bible) translates human als 'red human' and earth as 'red earth'. It has a note on why they chose to translate it like that: "In Hebrew there is a wordplay between 'adam' (human), 'adama' (ground, earth) and 'dam' (blood). This wordplay we try to honor by adding 'red' to the words human and ground/earth, so it becomes visible in the text that 'adam' and 'adama' were derived from 'dam'." What are your thoughts on this? I imagined Adam being made out of blood red earth and having a blood red skin, or at least having blood red hair.
Interesting connection, Wim! I'll have to think more about it. I think that might be pushing the similarity of language between ground and blood a bit too far. There is another way to say "red" in Hebrew (the wordplay we see in the story of Esau, who becomes the father of Edom, and is 'edom, or "red"). There is a definite wordplay in the Cain story of the "blood" crying out from the "ground" but I wouldn't conclude from that necessarily that the ground is red.
Genesis 2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh ( basar / sarka ) instead thereof;
καὶ ἐπέβαλεν ὁ θεὸς ἔκστασιν ἐπὶ τὸν Ἀδάμ, καὶ ὕπνωσεν· καὶ ἔλαβεν μίαν τῶν πλευρῶν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀνεπλήρωσεν σάρκα ( sarka ) ἀντ᾽ αὐτῆς.
The flesh, who was came from?
( sorry about my english )
In Bahasa ( Indonesia ), pertanyaannya adalah darisiapa daging itu?
The closest possibility in the sentence is Adam. God took Adam's side and shaped it into a woman.
"His flesh" could mean God's flesh, but that is unlikely since the sentence doesn't introduce God as an object of his own action. And if it was God's side, then why did Adam need to be asleep?
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD
Genesis 9:16 And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.
...between God and every living creature of all flesh...
It shows there are 2 parties:
1. God
2. Every living creature of all flesh
And each of these creatures has its own flesh.
This means that the flesh that is placed comes from a living creature. Not God's flesh.
I suppose that Yave anesthetized Adam in deep sleep because no one can be operated without anesthesia because it would cause pain.
Using skin color to delineate people is one of satan's traps. God very specifically wanted humanity separated into separate nations distinguished by their languages, which he did in Genesis 11. His plan was to then bring people from all the nations back together in Christ, symbolized by the speaking in tongues to spread the gospel at the Pentecost.
Now, believers in Christ are neither Jew nor Greek (black or white) and the system of color based identity belongs to the world. Satan is the one who weakened the nations (Isaiah 14:12) and there is no reason for believers to assist him.
I think the reason that so much of the art from European middle ages features a white Jesus is because it was art from the European middle ages. God chose to use Europe to spread Christianity to the new world and the art is a product of that.
In my Torah Tuesday video on Acts 2 I note that when the Spirit is given at Pentecost, there is unity without uniformity. That is, God is honored by a diversity of cultures and languages. I agree with you that categorizing people by skin color is unhelpful and misleading. I'm simply suggesting that art has consequences and its time to rethink our "default."
Why anyone wants to determine the skin color of ancient people, including Adam & Eve or anyone else, is baffling to me. Why? What is the agenda? If we go with this mindset in this video, what color would Adam's bones be? What color would his blood be? What color would his liver and spleen and heart and eyes and teeth be?......so silly.......and so telling!
What I find silly is the modern imagination that pictures Adam and Eve as white or Jesus as blond with blue eyes. I'm simply trying to prompt us to take the biblical text seriously in its cultural and historical context.
@@CarmenJoyImesPhD Culture? Adam and Eve had a culture? You're speaking about apples and oranges. Yeshua was a typical middle eastern. He was not Ethiopian (in looks) and He was not Anglo Saxon. His ancestral father was described as "ruddy" and another one described as "polished ivory." Now this, we can or should agree but what difference does it make? These words in Tanak only serve to debunk many of the modern day claims. BUT no words, no culture, no hints at all of what Adam looked like nor should we even care. The dirt argument is just silly.