How to Reconcile the Biblical Account of Man’s Creation With Modern Anthropology

In this paid post, I share an original approach written by my Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Chait, to reconciling Bereishis with human evolution, plus my own thoughts.

This week’s Torah content is sponsored by Naomi and Rabbi Judah Dardik, with gratitude to those who teach, lead, and strengthen Klal Yisrael, and with special appreciation for Rabbi Moskowitz zt"l.

A link to a printer-friendly version of the full article can be found at the very end, for paid subscribers only.

How to Reconcile the Biblical Account of Man’s Creation With Modern Anthropology

The Question

Earlier this year, one of my high school students posed the following question to his (frum) biology teacher:

“If Adam and Chava were the first human beings with a tzelem Elokim, and they lived only around six thousand years ago, and if all of humanity descended from them, how can that be reconciled with archaeological and anthropological evidence of advanced civilizations that existed thousands of years earlier?”

Presumably, he was referring to things like abstract cave paintings (e.g., Lubang Jeriji Saléh in Indonesia, dated to around 40,000 years ago), sophisticated architecture (e.g., Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, inhabited from 9,500 to at least 8,000 BCE), agriculture settlements (e.g., Jericho, from around 10,000 BCE), and other signs of activity that seem to express tzelem Elokim-type capacities. (Granted, one could challenge whether these do reflect tzelem Elokim, but let’s assume for now that they do. We’ll return to that question later.)

Thankfully, this teacher had enough grounding in science to recognize the question, and enough intellectual and pedagogical integrity to take it seriously. In addition to asking me what I thought, she told me she had reached out to several people with expertise in Torah and science. To my delight, one of them was Rabbi Pesach Chait, my Rosh Yeshiva (not to be confused with his father, Rabbi Yisroel Chait, the founder of our yeshiva).

At the time, I offered a few of my thoughts, not yet having heard Rabbi Chait’s response. A few days later, he told me his approach, and I was blown away by its elegance and originality. His answer and mine shared a common denominator, but whereas I only had a few scattered puzzle pieces, he laid out a full framework for rereading the opening chapters of Sefer Bereishis.

The following week, he sent me a write-up of his approach and asked if I had any feedback before passing it along to the teacher. That’s the approach I’d like to present here, along with an addendum of my own.

A Few Ground Rules

In Hilchos Teshuvah 5:4, Rambam prefaces his discussion of free will and divine omniscience with the following:

Know that the answer to this question is “longer than the expanse of the earth and wider than the seas” (Iyov 11:9), and many fundamental principles and lofty mountains depend upon it.

The same is true for the topic at hand. Central to this discussion is the question: What makes humans human? Or, more precisely: What exactly is the tzelem Elokim? Closely related are questions such as: In what respect does human intelligence differ from animal intelligence? Which human activities can rightly be attributed to the tzelem Elokim? What is the relationship between the non-physical tzelem Elokim and the physical brain? At what point does the tzelem Elokim develop? What gives the tzelem Elokim immortality? And so on.

Although Rabbi Chait has given shiurim on many of these questions, he does not address them head-on in his write-up. When he asked for my feedback and I pointed out sources that might be worth including, he thanked me but said, “I chose not to include those sources. It's simply not what I am trying to do.” I took that to mean his goal in this write-up was to offer a direct approach to answering the question that was asked – not to present a comprehensive treatment of the subject, and not to build a source-based argument in support of his view.

As much as I’d love to make this article available to anyone who’s interested, I’ve decided to keep it behind a paywall for three reasons. First, the chachmei ha’Mesorah (traditional Jewish thinkers) tend to err on the side of caution, withholding esoteric ideas from those who may not be ready to hear them. I believe this approach is warranted here. Second, these answers are still in development. That alone is reason enough to limit them to a small group of enfranchised readers rather than release them into the open waters of the internet. Lastly, Rabbi Chait gave me permission to share his write-up with a limited audience, and that’s exactly what a paywall provides. I didn’t get the impression he’d be unwilling to share it with someone genuinely interested, but I’m also not so bold as to assume he’d be fine with me broadcasting his ideas to people neither of us knows. If you’re not a paid subscriber and would like to read what he wrote, feel free to email him directly. I’m sure he’d be happy to share.

What follows is my Rosh Yeshiva’s write-up, lightly edited for grammar and diction, but unchanged in substance. (I even refrained from my usual practice of bolding the key points, since I didn’t want to editorialize.)