Adam's Spare Ribs

Living in the Middle East—especially in a bedouin area—is an eye-opener in understanding the Bible. Semitic culture is Semitic culture, and much in the Bible becomes clearer in light of Arab customs.

For example, the riddle of wives for Adam and Eve’s sons. How did Cain or Seth find wives if there were no other people before their parents? Yet there would be no mystery here to a bedouin, and so I presume to an ancient Hebrew audience.

Today, as I generally do at least one a year, I had my Arab students drawing family trees, for practice in English words for relatives. Nobody has ever included a female relative in these charts. Not, by the way, out of discrimination against women, in my opinion. Because to speak of one’s female relatives is ungallant.

So there is no mystery that no daughters of Adam and Eve are mentioned in the Bible’s begats.

Nor would there be much surprise or horror at the thought that brothers might have married sisters. My class was surprised when, in showing family photos, I explained that I could not marry my first cousin. That is not just a common, but a preferred match in the Middle East. Keeps the bloodlines and the clan loyalties clear. Among Egyptian pharaohs, brothers usually married sisters.

To an Arab, and perhaps to an ancient Hebrew, the whole thing would go without saying.