Ketchum: I've never wondered if Adam had a belly button

News item, as reported in the Washington Post and the most recent issue of The Christian Century magazine: Did Adam have a belly button?

If he did, the Post reported, it probably gathered lint after he and Eve started wearing clothing after that unfortunate incident in the Garden of Eden with the apple and the snake.

The report goes on to say that belly-button lint mostly contains house dust, skin cells and sweat in addition to fibers from shirts. The microorganisms growing amongst all this accumulation of bodily junk apparently are mostly harmless.

In the 40 years of cranking out these observations on organized and disorganized religion, I have to admit the idea of whether Adam had a belly button never crossed my mind or any of the evolutionary electronic devices on which these columns were produced.

If you held a gun to my head (please don’t. I’m an old man trying to survive on Social Security and some savings) and demanded my opinion, that would be easy: Adam did not have a belly button.

Why? Belly buttons, if I remember my anatomy correctly, are where umbilical cords attach to the fetus in the mother’s womb. Since Adam was created by God, and not gestated in any mother’s womb, he would have had no need for a belly button. Case closed.

Neither would his wife/helpmate/purveyor-of-forbidden-fruit partner, Eve. According to the account in Genesis, Eve was created when God extracted a rib from Adam and built Eve around it.

Just think, without this account, we would never have had that 1949 classic Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comedy-drama “Adam’s Rib.” For younger readers, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were big Hollywood stars back in your grandparents’ day, or maybe your great-grandparents’ day.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but I don’t think “Adam’s Rib” had anything to do with the creation story. Besides, I wouldn’t want to see Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn naked.

Thus, since Eve was not born of woman, she would have had no more need for a belly button than Adam.

But you might ask, if Scripture is true, and God said, “let us make man in our image,” wouldn’t God have included a belly button? Except that would mean God has a belly button.

I don’t even want to go there.

This question, of course, leads to several others, including the fashioning of the first garments after the first apple fest. Scripture says they sewed garments together. Where did they find a needle and thread? I bet they didn’t have a Dollar General within a hundred miles.

I’ve never tried to sew a fig leaf, but I’ll bet cotton fabric works a lot better and doesn’t chafe.

Creationists would argue that God supplied everything they needed to produce the first garments. They might also argue that the First Couple could have ridden out of the Garden of Eden on a pair of thoroughbred dinosaurs. That’s because creationists argue the age of the Earth is only about 5,000 years, not the hundreds of millions of years most scientists believe.

OK, now I’m getting sassy. I’m still intrigued about why someone might speculate on the existence – or lack thereof – of Adam’s belly button. Mostly I’m surprised I didn’t think of it first.

There’s still a chance some Hollywood producer might want to make a movie sequel called “Adam’s Belly Button.”

Too bad Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are dead.

Jim Ketchum is a retired Times Herald copy editor and religion editor. Contact him at jeketchum1@comcast.net.

This article originally appeared on Port Huron Times Herald: Ketchum: I've never wondered if Adam had a belly button