January 21 1913
ADAM and EVE WERE TWINS,
By Idah McGlone Gibson,
Never more, fellow women, need you suffer the humiliating charge of having been made from the rib of a man! You have been man's equal from the beginning. For your great ancestor Eve was an equal part of a double being that was cut in two to make the Adam and Eve of Holy Writ.
Prof. Olof A. Toffteen, Ph.D., the great Swedish-American biblical scholar and authority on ancient history, is authority for the statement that Adam and Eve were a sort of Siamese twins, who were separated by a divine surgical operation.
"The 'Adam' whom the Lord placed in the Garden of Eden," he explained to me, "was not a man, but a man-woman. The Lord caused this man-woman to fall into a hypnotic sleep, and then bisected or separated the two halves, or sides, one from the other, thus making a man and woman of equal physical and mental powers.
"Science is willing to admit that such a double being might exist. The Siamese twins we know, and modern science cannot deny successful surgical operations of this kind, and every document coming from the Greeks, the Persians, the Hindoos (sic), the Egyptians and the Teutons points to this theory of our common ancestors."
"Why have we held so long to the 'rib' story?" I asked him.
"Simply because of the wrong translation of the Hebrew word 'zela,' which means 'side,' but which Luter translated as 'rib.'
"You will find that in the Greek version 'zela' is rendered 'pleura,' and Saint Jerome chose 'cost' for it in his vulgate version. Both mean 'rib' but only in the secondary sense; both originally denote 'side,' like a side of an army.
"These references to the side or half taken from man and made or built into a woman carry us back to a wide spread idea among classical and oriental people that man once existed in duplex form. These beings were called 'androgynous,' or men-women,' and it is perfectly clear to my mind that Adam, who was of higher culture than most of the people at that time living, was that kind of a being."
"You don't mean to say," I interrupted, "that there were other people living at the time of Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden."
"There is no doubt, to the scholar," said Dr. Toffteen, "that there were people living on this earth before Adam.
"At least a thousand years had elapsed between the creation and the Garden of Eden story and the process of evolution had formed a race of beings not much better than the brute, with here and there a man of greater culture topping his fellows."