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Shuts and Failures

by Michael Maiello

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The Heretic's Bible - Genesis 2: Adam gets a "helper"

by Michael Wolraich 5/8/2009 - 7:59 pm   |

As I said, God took a day off. It’s not clear what he did on his day off, but we hope something fun and relaxing. But before he called it quits, God made a pretty garden for the first man, Adam. The garden had some nice trees, including the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is a long name for a tree. Before heading out, God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree with the long name for “the day you eat from it, you will definitely die.”

Commentary: No disrespect for His inscrutable ways, but if God didn’t want Adam to eat from the TKGE, why did He put it in the garden? He could have given it its own garden with a tall spiky fence and a fiery moat and perhaps some angry cherubs and a revolving sword to stand guard. Then Adam would never have gone near it. My theory: God put the TKGE in the garden just so that he could command Adam not to do something. I don’t even think that God gave a crap about the tree. He was just on some kind of power trip.1

Then God decided that Adam needed a helper, so He brought all the animals and birds to Adam to be interviewed. Adam gave them all names so that he could keep track of them, but he didn’t think that any of them were helper material. It seems that he just wanted a hot secretary.2 So God put Adam to sleep, then took out one of his ribs and turned it into a woman. Adam and the woman were both naked, but they didn’t care.

Commentary: First of all, why did Adam need a helper? He could get everything he wanted from the garden, so what could he possibly have needed help with? But even if he did need a helper, why a woman? Why not, say, a dwarf? No, God with all his omniscience knew exactly what he was doing. He made the woman so that Adam could get a little action, that’s obvious. And I have another question for God. Did He really have to take out the poor guy’s rib? Couldn’t He have made the woman from some dirt or even Adam’s hair? It just seems unnecessarily invasive. But what do I know?

1Power trip: Loose translation of the idiomatic Low Aramaic phrase, “infatuated by his own scepter.”

2Hot secretary: From the Low Aramaic idiom, “double-pointed quill,” a slave purchased ostensibly for clerical services but secretly used for sexual gratification.


The Heretic's Bible is a translation of a recently discovered commentary by a notorious first century heretic, Joseph the Latriner. The commentary is presented in italics with footnotes by the translator.

Previous: Genesis 1 - God's first week of work
Next: Genesis 3 - With helpers like this...

Professor Genghis: Let me commend the accuracy of your translation. It really bugs me when scholars whose Low Aramaic is shaky (to put it politely) refer to the fruit Adam was ordered to steer clear of as merely the Tree of Knowledge. Somehow justifying their own anti-scientific mindset. 

No, it's the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God didn't object to Adam exploring and understanding paradise; He had already assessed His handiwork and pronounced it good. What he didn't want was Adam deciding on his own that some parts of it were maybe not up to snuff. That's why God hurriedly set about distracting Adam by inventing sex -- getting him a "helper," in the euphemism of the day.

And we really dodged a bullet there, if I may say so. 'Cause the first thing God did was to parade all the animals (and birds, for God's sake) before Adam to see if any of them would do as "helpers." Thank God Adam hadn't had time to get really horny, or God knows what humankind would look like today.

Looking forward to your next installment. If Adam can just resist eating fruit from that one tree, I figure we're in the clear.

by acanuck 5/9/2009 - 12:04 am

Yes, God really knows how to do cliff hangers.

In what does the "knowledge of good and evil" consist? Tune in next time for some surprising revelations.

by Michael Wolraich 5/9/2009 - 1:53 pm (re: acanuck)

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