The Genesis creation story describes God using Adam's rib to create Eve (Genesis 2:21-22), but one Biblical scholar doesn't think it was so simple. In a 2015 paper in Biblical Archeology Review, Ziony Zevit argues that God actually used Adam's penis bone. A 2001 paper in the American Journal of Medical Genetics brings up the same theory.
"But humans don't have penis bones," you might think to yourself, but that's the point: humans don't have them because God used them to make Eve— according to this logic, at least.
Many mammals and all non-human primates have a baculum which may have been advantageous during sexual intercourse for largely unknown reasons. In humans, though, the baculum disappeared (except for very, very unusual cases).
Zevit argues the Hebrew word for "rib" is pretty complicated and could also be translated as penis bone.
Of the 40 appearances of tsela' in the Bible, the Adam and Eve story is the only place where it is translated as "rib." Usually it means the side of something.
Biblical Archaeology Society
