Did Adam have a belly button?

[mountaingal]

mi a read dahjah post about adam age and mi stop braps at this paragraph:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The question of whether Adam had a navel may sound frivolous, but in medieval and renaissance times it was often the subject of intense debate. Artists who depicted Adam and Eve in the garden were faced with a theological dilemma: <span style="font-weight: bold">Should our first parents be portrayed with navels, or not? Not a few artists solved the problem by painting fig leaves large enough to extend above where the navel would be.</span> But in his famous painting that is the centerpiece of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, Michelangelo gave Adam an impressive belly-button. And <span style="font-weight: bold">he was fiercely criticized for it by some of the sterner theologians of his day</span>.</div></div>

so, mi get curious about paintings of adam. first mi look up the
the sistine chapel painting by michaelangelo (painted between 1508 and 1512) and does indeed show adam with an impressive belly button.

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

in fact, the vast majority of paintings from that showed adam with belly button... so which artist was conflicted about it?

here's an etching by the famous renaissance german artist, albrecht durer:

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

and here's another showing the belly button:

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

eventually, i found some that, like the paragraph said above, dodged the question of whether adam had a navel by artfully covering the spot where a navel would be.

by lucas cranach the elder, in 1509

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

from an old English bible - look pon di strategically placed leaf:

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

even michaelangelo himself, before he painted adam touching god's finger in the sistine chapel, hedged a bit on the question of the navel - see the all covering hand of the sleeping adam.

Creation of Eve, painted in 1508, four years before the sistine chapel:

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

i ended up finding only one piece that showed adam without belly button, an anonymous medieval etching called Adam is given the breath of life by God. I can see why artists never wanted to paint adam without navel - it looks awful

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

so, in the course of looking up these artworks, mi buckup pan the theological debate of whether in fact adam had a navel.

Mi see this from a children's site, and one thing mi love about children's websites is they break the issue down in simple language so kids - and everybody - can understand:

from Christian Answers
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Did Adam have a belly-button? <span style="font-weight: bold">I believe we can say, “No - Adam didn't. Neither did Eve.”</span>

Why? Because your belly-button (navel), or tummy-button as it's sometimes called, is a sign that you were once attached to your mother. You depended on that life-line—the umbilical cord—for your nourishment from her body as you developed inside her.

But our first parents, Adam and Eve, didn't develop that way. I<span style="font-weight: bold"> believe that God would not have planted on them a false indication that they had developed in a mother's womb.</span>

When God created Adam and Eve in mature form, the day they were created they might have appeared to be, say, 30 years old. But God wouldn't want or need to create the appearance of a false history, any more than the mature trees created by God would have had growth rings initially. Those are things which would develop in their offspring as a result of processes later on.

What's more, this would be a tremendous testimony to God's creativity. Ken Ham once put it this way: Lack of a belly-button on Adam and Eve would be one of the biggest tourist attractions in the pre-Flood world, as the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren would come up and say, “Why don't you have a belly-button?” And they could recount again and again, to generation after generation, how God had created them special by completed supernatural acts, and yet had designed them to multiply and fill the Earth in natural ways that are equally a part of God's continuing care for what He created.
</div></div>
the last argument about tourist attraction has me a bit confused.

[Compry]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

Nice thread MG. One thing I noticed though...the artists weren't very kind to Adam.

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

then i found this entertaining article by a Christian writer named Al Maxey. he basically scorns those Christians who believe that Adam had a belly button. He divides them into three camps:

<span style="font-weight: bold">Pre-umbilicism:</span> adam had a belly button because that was where he was connected to God before being cut loose to be his own self. which means that God had a belly button, because Adam was created in his image.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Mid-umbilicism:</span> adam never had navel at first, but the spot on adam body where God pulled out the rib to create eve is where the navel is now.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Post-umbilicism:</span> adam and eve belly buttons came after they sinned, this was the &quot;mark&quot; God referred to when him put it on Cain for murder.

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Compray</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Nice thread MG. One thing I noticed though...the artists weren't very kind to Adam. </div></div>
thanks, Comps. the awful thing is, those guys were probably reflecting the male standard of beauty at the time they were painted.

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

for those of u who want Al Maxey's three camps in his own words and not my simplistic paraprhasing, here's the full excerpt - it has some interesting extra info:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">• <span style="font-weight: bold">Pre-Umbilicism </span>--- This is the view that has already been presented above; the view that Adam and Eve were given navels at the moment of their creation by God. Some of these theorists get pretty bizarre in their speculations. Since man is created in the image of God (I would refer the reader to Reflections #51 -- Imago Dei: Created in the Image of God), and since they regard this to in some way refer to physical characteristics, they actually suggest Adam and Eve were in some manner connected to the Creator with a cosmic umbilical cord. They also suggest that since Adam and Eve had a navel, and since they are &quot;in the image of God,&quot; that God Himself must have a navel, which leads to some absolutely heretical conjectures. <span style="font-weight: bold">They perceive our God, prior to the creation of the universe, as being some giant fetus floating out there in nothingness, attached to some massive placenta-like blob.</span> The &quot;point of severing&quot; (an important term for them) was when this blob exploded (the &quot;Big Bang&quot and cut God loose. At some point He awoke, complete with a navel, to realize He was God, and then set out to create a universe out of the remnants of the mass that exploded. This is all so incredibly absurd that one wonders how a person could advocate it with a straight face!

• <span style="font-weight: bold"> Mid-Umbilicism</span> --- This particular view suggests that Adam's navel was created when the Lord God took the rib from him and created the woman Eve. God chose to pull the rib from the center of Adam's blank abdomen, thus forming a puncture wound. Therefore, the navel on Adam, unlike all future navels, was not a visible sign that he had come from a woman, but actually a visible sign that woman had come from him. <span style="font-weight: bold">Eve, according to these Mid-Umbilicists, never did have a navel, as there was no need for her to have one.</span> There are even more bizarre theories connected with this -- for example, a few who embrace this theory believe the woman to have been an inferior creation, one not even blessed with the hope of everlasting life. They were created solely for service to man, and when they die and return to dust, they are just blown away with the wind. This is referred to as the &quot;Great Dusting Away.&quot; Only man was created in the image of God, and only man was destined to immortality. Woman was just his temporary slave.

• <span style="font-weight: bold">Post-Umbilicism</span> --- This last theory places the umbilicus on both Adam and Eve after their sin, and at the point of being driven from the garden. <span style="font-weight: bold">When Cain was later driven out because he had murdered his brother, we are told God &quot;set a mark on him&quot; (Gen. 4:15). The Mormons, of course, used to believe this mark was that God turned his skin black.</span> After much protest lodged against them, the President of this church conveniently had a new revelation and reversed this racist position. Anyway, the Post-Umbilicists similarly assume that a distinguishing mark was placed on Adam and Eve when they were driven from the garden (although Scripture never mentions any such mark being placed on them), and that this mark was the belly button. This &quot;scar&quot; in their midsection would forever be a reminder to this couple, and to all mankind, that they had, by their sin, been &quot;severed from&quot; their God, just as a baby is severed from its mother when the umbilical cord is cut, with the navel being a constant visible reminder of that previous connection now forever severed. </div></div>

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

another intersting excerpt from the Maxey article:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">In 1944, a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Military Committee (chaired by Congressman Durham of the state of North Carolina) <span style="font-weight: bold">refused to authorize </span>a little 30-page booklet titled &quot;Races of Man,&quot; that was to be handed out to our soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting in World War II, because this little booklet had a drawing that depicted Adam and Eve with belly buttons! <span style="font-weight: bold">The members of this subcommittee ruled that showing Adam and Eve with navels &quot;would be misleading to gullible American soldiers.&quot;</span></div></div>

i would have loved to see that booklet, because if it is using adam and eve as the starting point for a discussion on &quot;the races of man&quot;, i know is some serious racist business did eena it.

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

some last excerpts from Maxey. I found these interesting because they referred to a fundamentalist Christian who was also a scientist and an admirer of Darwin!!

this Christian scientist, named Philip Henry Gosse, believed that indeed Adam and Eve had belly buttons.



<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The man who is most often credited with being the primary promoter of this theory was the British naturalist and experimental zoologist, Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888). He was a strict biblical fundamentalist, but also an avid student of nature and a huge fan of Charles Darwin. Needless to say, he had some difficulty reconciling the two.

How does one make the vast testimony of nature (the geological and biological evidence) compatible with the testimony of Scripture (which he took very, very literally)? He formulated what has come to be known as <span style="font-style: italic">The Omphalos Argument</span> in which he advocated the view that <span style="font-weight: bold">God created the universe, including man (Adam and Eve), with the appearance of prior history</span>.

In other words, God created trees with rings already inside the trunks that testified to years of growth, including dry and wet climate periods, <span style="font-style: italic">all of which never actually happened</span>. Adam and Eve were given navels to present the appearance of natural childbirth, even though such never happened.

.......

It was Philip Henry Gosse himself, ironically, who carried this theory to its logical and ultimate conclusion, suggesting that <span style="font-weight: bold">if God could create the illusion, or appearance, of historical reality, then what would prevent Him from having created the entire universe last week with the appearance of age and history, and with the inhabitants of this world having had all of their memories of past experiences implanted?</span>

If indeed God can, and did, create such a universe just a few thousand years ago, He could just as easily have done the same last week ... or yesterday ... or five minutes ago! And who would be the wiser?!

Again, although few would deny God certainly could have done such a thing had He so desired (He is all powerful, after all), the far greater question is: Would He have done such a thing? And if so, WHY?! To what purpose?! The whole theory, in the opinion of most scholars, collapses under the weight of its own absurdities. </div></div>

[mountaingal]

Re: Did Adam have a belly button?

So Compry, do u believe Adam had a belly button?