Adam's rib

But perhaps the most interesting result of our comparative analysis is the explanation provided by the Sumerian poem for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story - the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, "the mother of all living" from the rib of Adam. Why a rib? Why did the Hebrew storyteller find it more fitting to choose a rib rather than any of the other organs of the body for the fashioning of the woman whose name, Eve, according to the Biblical notion, means approximately "she who makes live"?

The reason becomes clear if we assume that a Sumerian literary background, such as that represented by the Dilmun poem, underlies the Biblical paradise tale. In the Sumerian poem, one of Enki's sick organs is the rib. The Sumerian word for "rib" is ti (pronounced tee). The goddess created for the healing of Enki's rib is called Nin-ti, "the lady of the rib” But the Sumerian word ti also means "to make live". The name Nin-ti may therefore mean "the lady who makes live", as well as "the lady of the rib". In Sumerian literature, therefore, "the lady of the rib" came to be identified with "the lady who makes live" through what may be termed a play on words. It was this, one of the most ancient of literary puns, which was carried over and perpetuated in the Biblical paradise story, although here, of course, it loses its validity, since the Hebrew word for "rib" and that for "who makes live" have nothing in common.

I came upon this possible Sumerian background for the explanation of the Biblical "rib" story quite independently in 1945, but it had already been suggested thirty years earlier by the eminent French cuneiformist Pere Scheil, as the American Orientalist William Albright, who edited my publication, pointed out to me - which makes it all the more likely to be true.

Some people take the Bible as literal truth. They believe that Eve was actually taken from Adam's rib. In doing so they implicitly accept the second account of human creation as more valid than the first, and some therefore believe that a woman has more ribs than a man. Actually both men and women have twenty-four ribs.