[Ed. Note: The Bible used in the preparation of The Woman's Bible is the 1888 edition of the Julie Smith translation of the Bible - a literal translation - one of FIVE translations by this brilliant woman. See the appendix for more information.]

THE BOOK OF GENESIS - CHAPTER I.

Genesis i; 26, 27, 28

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image. after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, andover the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

(The following commentary was written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It will be followed by commentaries by Ellen Batelelle Dietrick and Lillie Devereux Blake. Members of the revising committee wrote on whatever portions they wished or felt they had authority.)

HERE is the sacred historian's first account of the advent of woman; a simultaneous creation of both sexes, in the image of God. It is evident from the language that there was consultation in the Godhead, and that the masculine and feminine elements were equally represented. Scott in his commentaries says, "this consultation of the Gods is the origin of the doctrine of the trinity."
        But instead of three male personages, as generally represented, a Heavenly Father, Mother, and Son would seem more rational.
      The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position, as an equal factor in human progress, is the cultivation of the religious sentiment in regard to her dignity and equality, the recognition by the rising generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prayers should be addressed, as well as to a Father.

If language has any meaning, we have in these texts a plain declaration of the existence of the feminine element in the Godhead, equal in power and glory with the masculine. The Heavenly Mother and Father! "God created man in his own image, male and female."
        Thus Scripture, as well as science and philosophy, declares the eternity and equality of sex the philosophical fact, without which there could have been no perpetuation of creation, no growth or development in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms, no awakening nor progressing in the world of thought.
        The masculine and feminine elements, exactly equal and balancing each other, are as essential to the maintenance of the equilibrium of the universe as positive and negative electricity, the centripetal and centrifugal forces, the laws of attraction which bind together all we know of this planet whereon we dwell and of the system in which we revolve.

In the great work of creation the crowning glory was realized, when man and woman were evolved on the sixth day, the masculine and feminine forces in the image of God, that must have existed eternally, in all forms of matter and mind.
        All the persons in the Godhead are represented in the Elohim the divine plurality taking counsel in regard to this last and highest form of life. Who were the members of this high council, and were they a duality or a trinity? Verse 27 declares the image of God male and female. How then is it possible to make woman an afterthought? We find in verses 5-16 the pronoun "he" used.

Should it not in harmony with verse 26 be "they," a dual pronoun? We may attribute this to the same cause as the use of "his" in verse ii instead of "it." The fruit tree yielding fruit after " his" kind instead of after " its" kind. The paucity of a language may give rise to many misunderstandings.

The above texts plainly show the simultaneous creation of man and woman, and their equal importance in the development of the race. All those theories based on the assumption that man was prior in the creation, have no foundation in Scripture.

As to woman s subjection, on which both the canon and the civil law delight to dwell, it is important to note that equal dominion is given to woman over every living thing, but not one word is said giving man dominion over woman.

Here is the first title deed to this green earth giving alike to the sons and daughters of God. No lesson of woman's subjection can be fairly drawn from the first chapter of the Old Testament.

(A further comment by Ellen Batelelle Dietrick):

The most important thing for a woman to note, in reading Genesis, is that that portion which is now divided into "the first three chapters" (there was no such division until about five centuries ago), contains two entirely separate, and very contradictory, stories of creation, written by two different, but equally anonymous, authors.
        No Christian theologian of to-day, with any pretensions to scholarship, claims that Genesis was written by Moses.
        As was long ago pointed out, the Bible itself declares that all the books the Jews originally possessed were burned in the destruction of Jerusalem, about 588 B. C., at the time the people were taken to Babylonia as slaves to the Assyrians, (see II Esdras, ch. xiv, v. 21, Apocrypha).
        Not until about 247 B. C. (some theologians say 226 and others 169 B.C.) is there any record of a collection of literature in the rebuilt Jerusalem, and, then, the anonymous writer of II Maccabees briefly mentions that some Nehemiah "gathered together the acts of the kings and the prophets and those of David" when "founding a library" for use in Jerusalem.
        But the earliest mention anywhere in the Bible of a book that might have corresponded to Genesis is made by an apocryphal writer, who says that Ezra wrote "all that hath been done in the world since the beginning," after the Jews returned from Babylon, under his leadership, about 450 B. C. (see II Esdras, ch. xiv, v. 22, of the Apocrypha).
        When it is remembered that the Jewish books were written on rolls of leather, without much attention to vowel points and with no division into verses or chapters, by uncritical copyists, who altered passages greatly, and did not always even pretend to understand what they were copying, then the reader of Genesis begins to put herself in position to understand how it can be contradictory.
        Great as were the liberties which the Jews took with Genesis, those of the English translators, however, greatly surpassed them.
        The first chapter of Genesis, for instance, in Hebrew, tells us, in verses one and two," As to origin, created the gods (Elohim) these skies (or air or clouds) and this earth... And a wind moved upon the face of the waters." Here we have the opening of a polytheistic fable of creation, but, so strongly convinced were the English translators that the ancient Hebrews must have been originally monotheistic that they rendered the above, as follows: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth... And the spirit of God (!) moved upon the face of the waters."
        It is now generally conceded that some one (nobody pretends to know who) at some time (nobody pretends to know exactly when), copied two creation myths on the same leather roll, one immediately following the other.

About one hundred years ago, it was discovered by Dr. Astruc, of France, that from Genesis ch. i, v. r to Genesis ch. ii, v. 4, is given one complete account of cretion, by an author who always used the term "the gods" (Eloitim), in speaking of the fashioning of the universe, mentioning it altogether thirty-four times, while, in Genesis ch.ii, v. 4, to the end of chapter iii, we have a totally different narrative, by an author of uximistakably different style, who uses the term "Iahveh of the gods" twenty times, but "Elohim" only three times.
        The first author, evidently, attributes creation to a council of gods, acting in concert, and seems never to have heard of Iahveh.
        The second attributes creation to Iahveh, a tribal god of ancient Israel, but represents Iahveh as one of two or more gods, conferring with them (in Genesis ch. xiii, v.22) as to the danger of man's acquiring immortality.

Modern theologians have, for convenience sake, entitled these two fables, respectively, the Elohistic and the lahoistic stories. They differ, not only in the point I have mentioned above, but in the order of the "creative acts" in regard to the mutual attitude of man and woman, and in regard to human freedom from prohibitions imposed by deity.
      In order to exhibit their striking contradictions, I will place them in parallel columns:

Now as it is manifest that both of these stories cannot be true; intelligent women, who feel bound to give the preference to either, may decide according to their own judgment of which is more worthy of an intelligent woman's acceptance.
        Paul's rule is a good one in this dilemma, "Prove all things: hold fast to that which is good." My own opinion is that the second story was manipulated by some Jew, in an endeavor to give "heavenly authority" for requiring a woman to obey the man she married.
        In a work which I am now completing, I give some facts concerning ancient Israelitish history, which will be of peculiar interest to those who wish to understand the origin of woman's subjection.

(A further comment by Lillie Devereux Blake):

Many orientalists and students of theology have maintamed that the consultation of the Gods here described is proof that the Hebrews were in early days polytheists Scott s supposition that this is the origin of the Trinity has no foundation in fact, as the beginning of that conception is to be found in the earliest of all known religious nature worship.
      The acknowledgment of the dual principal, masculine and feminine, is much more probably the explanation of the expressions here used.

In the detailed description of creation we find a gradually ascending series. Creepng things, "great sea monsters," (chap. I, v. 21, literal translation). "Every bird of wing," cattle and living things of the earth, the fish of the sea and tile "birds of the heavens," then man, and last and crowning glory of the whole, woman.

It cannot be maintained that woman was inferior to man even if, as asserted in chapter ii, she was created after him without at once admitting that man is inferior to the creeping things, because created after them.