Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
HANS GOEDICKE: Anthropological Problems - Gynecological Questions
moisten the soil. I am not aware of any notions in Mesopotamia or in the Levant of a single water source welling up from beneath. It is, of course, the very picture the ancient Egyptians held, with Elephantine as the place where the Nile had its source. But our concern is the human rather than the world he lives in. With this we come to the second account about human fashioning, namely, that of Eve, the man's companion. Gen. 2: 21-22 tells that "the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man and he slept; and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib that He had taken from the man." There are few more remarkable statements in the Bible, just as there are few with a greater impact. The question, of course, is the significance of the "rib" I have been told that there are still people around who are convinced that the rib-cage of man and woman is made up of a differing number of ribs. The question has had a major impact on the need for anatomical study out of which the impetuses leading to modern medicine eventually grew. Let me remark here that I was assured by the leading anatomist of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School that the number of ribs is identical for both sexes - in case there are any doubters. This brings us back to the initial question, what is the significance of the"n7j"in the origin of Eve. Dutifully, one might turn first to the commentaries on Genesis, which are indeed numerous. The result is disappointing, because the question of the "rib" is passed by silently. My turn to anthropology for revelation did not help much either. No specific significance of the or a "rib" can be demonstrated. Being Viennese, Sigmund Freud might have seemed a source for information. He suffered indeed no great hesitation when it came to assigning sexual symbolism, but curiously enough, the "rib" is not among his favored things. So it seems there is an impass, and some mysterious information alluded to in Genesis has been lost. There is, however, what might be a curious coincidence or possibly the key to the riddle. The Egyptian word for "rib," is imw. There is also a homophon of this imw, which is the word for "clay." It is indeed most remarkable that we find in Egyptian one word imw, which can mean, "rib" and also "clay," the materials from which Eve was made according to Gen. 2: 21 f. Of course, nothing can be proven factually, but there are possibilities, which are best left to individual imagination. 1 H. Gocdicke, Adam's Rib, in: Biblical and Related Studies Presented to Samuel Iwry, Baltimore 1985, pp. 73-76.
