Umbilicus is the Latin name for our navel. It derives from a Greek word, omphalos which means central knob, and could also refer to anything central, like the boss of a shield, and has some even deeper Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European etymology than that. Navel comes the Old English nafela, literally meaning little nafu, which was the nave or hub of a wheel.

Most people have one, although personally I have five. I jest, of course, and the myth of my ‘Navel Reserve’ has been a running joke in our family since our children were little, when they noticed their daddy’s extra belly buttons. These are actually old wound infection scars from an emergency laparoscopy performed in 1977, when a burst appendix and acute peritonitis tried to take me out at the age of 19.

But what is a belly button and did Adam have one? Traditionally, the answer to the second question has been ‘No‘. However, after due study and consideration, I believe that answer to be based on a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the first question and a failure to understand how God created man. So, in this article we will take another look at those two questions and see how they relate to what the Bible does reveal about Adam’s formation and what implications this has for us today. Read on and you may be surprised.

The reason many Bible-believing Christians suppose that Adam had no belly button is because of what a belly button is. There are two types of these: innies and outies, or concave and convex. Most are concave, but either way, our belly button or navel is generally understood as the shrivelled vestige of our umbilical cord which once connected us to our mother’s womb. However, that’s not quite true, but is rather like describing our neck as the structure that connects our head to our feet. It doesn’t, does it? At least no directly.

What our belly button actually is, is the stump of our shrivelled umbilical; cord which once connected us to our placenta. Does that surprise you? Read it again quickly and maybe not, but take a little more time and you will realise what I’ve just said. Our umbilical cord once connected us to our placenta.

Whoa! Don’t you mean it connected me to the placenta or my mother’s placenta?

Nope! That is flawed biology based on a skewed paradigm. And no wonder, when most of us have depersonalised our placenta by grammatically relegating it to the third person. When did you last hear anyone talk about their placenta? No, we tend to refer to this hugely important vital organ as the placenta, or afterbirth.

But isn’t ‘important vital organ’ a tautology in itself? Again no, because in physiology vital refers to an organ’s immediate role in sustaining life. Removing both eyes will disable a person but not kill them. Amputate a limb or even all of their limbs and they may still live, but remove their liver or both their kidneys and they are on borrowed time, although nowadays they can be sustained for years on dialysis. But stop their heart or disable their lungs and they will be dead in minutes. And that’s what makes our placenta a vital organ, because for nearly the first nine months of everyone’s life, we were wholly reliant on it for our survival. It was, in the most literal sense possible, our very lifeline.

For nine months we lived in a sac of fluid in which our lungs never opened and several other vital organs were in various stages of development. Yet in the meantime our foetal heart circulated oxygenated blood through our growing arteries and veins, our bodies grew and developed using nutrients supplied by our mother whose body also expelled our metabolic waste products for us. Nevertheless, in all that time, our foetal blood never mingled with that of our mother.

Our placenta was part of our foetal body, not hers. Indeed, one of the most vital functions our placenta performed was to secrete the chemicals necessary to ensure the continuation of our gestation. One was progesterone (which means gestation hormone) while other substances acted in an immunosuppressant capacity whose function was to inhibit our mother’s body from expelling us. This is because, contrary to the fanciful imaginings of the pro-abortion lobby, an unborn baby is not part of a woman‘s body. Every protective system in her body recognises the baby as other, not mother, and if our placenta had not sent out the right signals, our embryonic debut would have been accorded the same hospitality as any cancerous tumour or typhoid bacillus.

So, we’re agreed, a placenta is essential to every human being’s survival and we all had once had one. But did Adam? I think he did, and this is the reason why. Genesis 1:27 famously reads:

And Elohim created Adam in his image; in the image of Elohim he created him. He created them male and female.

And again, Genesis 2:7 tells us:

And Yahweh Elohim formed Adam of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and Adam became a living soul.

In English this all sounds pretty straightforward. God made man by forming him out of the dust of the earth and made them male and female. This is because Biblically Adam is man’s generic name, applying to both male and female. Theologically, we’re all man in this sense. Man in the male sense is ish, while woman is ishshah. But unlike man and woman, male and female share no similarity in Hebrew. Male is zakar while female is n’qebah, and the difference is quite profound.

Zakar derives from a root which means remembered, whereas n’qebah literally derives from a root that basically means ‘person with a vagina’. If that sounds a bit blunt in English, remember they are God’s choice of words. My belief in regard to this that the male (zakar) is so called because God considered him the basic template - the model from which all mankind would be made, and he wasn’t created without an appendix, or without eyes or with no spleen. Adam was created complete.

In fact, Adam was so complete that God was able to take one of his ribs and form a female from it. This would work the other way around because while the male contains both the male y and female x chromosomes, the female contains only the female x. In other words, you can engineer a woman from a man but not a man from a woman. God, it seems, knew what he was doing, even if we are only now catching up in our knowledge. So, if Adam was created as a complete model for all successive generations he would have had a placenta.

But couldn’t God have just encrypted the information into Adam’s DNA for later expression, as biologists might say?

Yes, he could, but there are other clues. One is the Hebrew for how God formed the man from the earth - yatsar, whereas the word used for God’s formation of woman from Adam’s rib is banah, the Hebrew word translated made when God fashioned Adam from the dust of the earth.

Yatsar, the creation of Adam from the ground, speaks of squeezing or moulding, akin to a potter working his clay. Banah connotes building or repair. So the woman would have had a navel to, for exactly the same reason as the man, irrespective of there being no womb to attach it to, because she was formed from the Adamic template.

But what are other clues mentioned? If we return to Genesis 2:7 we read:

And Yahweh Elohim formed Adam of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and Adam became a living soul.

Any clinician trained in CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) would instantly recognise this description as identical to the resuscitation of an small child. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is not given to infants, instead the adult places their mouth over the unconscious child’s mouth and nose.

Does that mean that Adam was created as a baby?

Maybe so. I don’t see why not. After all, the Bible tells us that God created the heavens and the earth on the First Day of creation and also that he stretched out the stars with his fingers, creating the vast expanse of the universe, possibly in moments but certainly very quickly indeed. This would explain two things:

First of all, how a universe of relatively little age could be observed to stretch across billions of light years without that light taking billions of years to cross it.

Secondly, it would explain the anomaly of the spectral red shift (a kind of electromagnetic Doppler effect) that astronomers observe in the universe and seems to exist as concentric spheres - a wholly predictable and consistent consequence of the cosmic creation process described in the Bible. Again, God seems to have known what he was doing, even if we’re only catching up with him with our understanding now.

In the New Testament, Jesus multiplied five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand men plus women and children, and seven loaves and a few fish to feed another four thousand or so. So, it is not unreasonable at all to surmise that God may have created Adam as a baby, breathed life into him, and then miraculously accelerated his growth. In case you hadn’t noticed, miracles were de rigueur that week.

So did Adam have a belly button? I believe so, and whether you agree with me or not, I trust you will agree that I have at least presented a credible argument for that belief consistent with the Word of God.

I believe that God intended from the beginning for these curious abdominal anachronisms to speak to us of a time before we were born when we were not self sufficient enough to even breathe for ourselves, which also points to a time before we were born again, when we lacked God’s Spirit within us. And it also reminds us that there was a time when we were not just protected within the womb but protected from it, because the unborn are independent creations made in the image and likeness of God and not mere appendages to be discarded at parental convenience.

Today, I don’t have a placenta; in fact, I don’t even have an appendix. But I once did, and I still have the scars to prove it. One of those scars, my real belly button, is a lifelong reminder that I was formed and didn’t just happen, and that from the outset, the me that was formed was separate from the she within whom I grew.

God designed it that way and wanted us to remember it so.