A Partner for Adam: Genesis 2.18-25

We’re currently in the midst of a series of posts looking at the second creation story in the Bible, which goes from Genesis 2.4 to the end of chapter 3. In the most recent post, we saw how God formed Adam from the soil and created a garden for Adam to tend and inhabit. But, as we will see today, all is not well in the garden, and the primordial problem of the garden is one very relatable for us today: loneliness. Today we’ll look at the steps God takes to find a suitable partner and companion for Adam, and what the story does and does not tell us about the relationship between humanity and the animals, and between the sexes.

Text

[2.18] Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ [19] So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. [20] The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. [21] So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. [22] And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. [23] Then the man said,

‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.’

[24] Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. [25] And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed. (NRSV)

Experience

My experience reading this passage is very positive. As much as it still confounds me that the story portrays God as not understanding humanity’s basic needs, I love the lengths to which is shows God going to figure out what’s wrong. I also appreciate the fact that the basic problem that caused God to create community for Adam was not reproduction, but loneliness. That said, I also know there’s been a lot of contention over the past few decades about how to interpret the idea of the woman being created as a ‘helper’ to the man. So I’m intrigued by the details of her creation here, and the relationship it implies between the man and woman.

Encounter

In addition to Adam and the LORD God, here we are introduced to a third character, the (as of yet unnamed) woman. What’s interesting is that Adam doesn’t really get a personality until the woman is created. We don’t see him moping in his loneliness, nor do we see the parade of animals coming before him to see if they will work as companions for him. Humanity’s first recorded words occur only after Adam meets the woman. But we don’t meet the woman yet; she doesn’t enter the story as a real character until the next passage.

Explore

These reflections raise two related questions that will guide the rest of this post:

• What is meant by ‘helper’, and what does this say about Adam’s relationships with the animals and the woman respectively?
• What, if anything, does the passage tell us about how it understands the sexes?

A Helper for Adam

Our passage starts with an emphatic negative — “It is not good” — that offers a sharp contrast to God’s assessment towards the end of the first creation narrative that the whole of creation was “very good” (1.31). The problem is that Adam is lonely. Genesis 2 recognizes the basic human truth that we were made for community. And theologically speaking, we could add that it’s only in our diversity that we can accurately and fully bear the image of God in the world. As a Jewish commentary from late antiquity put it, a single human “reduces the representation of the divine image” (Genesis Rabbah, quoted in Sarna (1989) 21).

God’s solution to this problem is to find Adam a suitable “helper.” There’s been a significant history, especially in more casual reading of the story, to take this in a subservient sense, not unlike the pejorative description of servants as ‘the help’. But even a quick glance at how the Hebrew word here, `ezer, is used elsewhere in the Scriptures, shows that this is far from the intended meaning here. It is almost exclusively used to describe either a military ally leading the charge in battle or God (Sarna (1989) 21, Carr, Harper). Moreover, the `ezer here is qualified as needing to be “fitting,” or “suitable.” This is to say, this helper must fundamentally correspond to Adam (Carr). The importance of this correspondence is revealed in God’s first attempts at finding a helper for Adam in animals and birds, which in this story God creates specifically for this purpose. As part of this procession, Adam names the animals. As we’ve already seen in this series, naming in Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) culture was associated with authority over something and the ability to designate its purpose (Walton & Keener, Barton & Muddiman 44, Davids, Sarna (1989) 22). So, by the very act of naming the animals, Adam shows that (despite the protests of dog-lovers everywhere) none are a suitable partner that can adequately meet the needs of human connection.

The Woman

Seeing that the animals were not going work to solve Adam’s loneliness, God puts Adam into a deep sleep and creates another human being — a woman — from Adam’s own body. This is a curious part of the story, since God could just as easily created another human from the mud. So the fact that the woman is created from Adam serves a purpose here, namely to reinforce the sense of correspondence. She “at last” is a suitable companion, because, as Adam puts it, “she is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (2.23). The point of this detail is clearly that the woman is suitable as a helper for Adam because of their correspondence and similarity. Unfortunately, this has often been distorted and this text has been used to teach the male priority over the female — the man is the primordial original human, and the woman is nothing more than his rib.

The question of the male priority is a tricky one. On the one hand, ANE cultures were strongly patriarchal, and there’s little doubt that to an ancient reader, the ‘default human’ would likely have been understood to be male. And, Hebrew is a strongly gendered language, and the text refers to Adam using male nouns, pronouns, and verb forms. But, arguing anything meaningful from grammatical gender alone is very problematic. (After all, the German word for ‘girl’ is grammatically neuter!) And, there are a lot of good arguments to support the idea that the original human was androgynous, or as we might say today, nonbinary. Such an interpretation did not just arise in response to the challenge posed by contemporary feminist theologians, but is in fact quite old. The Genesis Rabbah, for example, states that “When [God] created the first human, he made it androgynous” (8.1, quoted in Greenberg 47). Some Medieval Jewish texts imagined the first human as carrying both the masculine and feminine within a singular body; others as a two-faced creature, with the masculine and feminine standing front-to-back. Primordial androgyny is further supported by the fact that the human is always called ‘adam ‘human being, ‘earth creature’’ until after the surgery that creates the woman. Only after her creation is Adam referred to as being male (‘ish). This is seen in the wordplay, “This one shall be called Woman (’ishah), for out of Man (’ish*) this one was taken”. It should be noted here that this is not an act of naming — Adam does not name the woman until after the incident with the serpent — but a recognition of their innate connection. An original androgyny may also be supported by the Hebrew word traditionally translated into English as ‘rib’, tsela`. This word is only rarely used to describe the ribs. Far more often it’s used to describe a whole side of an object, including the flank of an animal, or a wing of a palace. So, while the translation ‘rib’ may be justifiable (both Carr and Sarna accept this translation without comment), it could just as likely refer to one whole side of Adam. That this is a reasonable translation is demonstrated by the androgynous interpretations in the Talmud.

For me, interpretation has to come back to the aims of the story. And again, this story of the creation of woman — unique in the entirety of ANE literature! — emphasizes the similarities, not the differences, between the man and woman. She is suitable not because she’s different from or lesser than Adam, but because she is the same, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh (Harper, Carr, Bruggemann, Sarna (1966) 22). This is in harmony with both the teaching of Genesis 1 that both male and female bear the image and likeness of God, and (as we’ll see as the story goes on), the introduction of patriarchy and male domination of the female as a consequence of disobedience and sin (3.16). This correspondence between man and woman is further suggested in the comment that grounds marriage in this story: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (2.24). That is, a man leaves his parents in order to join to a wife, in recognition of the original unity of man and woman.

This relationship is marked not only by delight (Adam’s first words upon seeing the woman are “At last!”) and recognition of correspondence, but also dignity and vulnerability — they are naked and unashamed. There is therefore trust (or, ‘faith’) between them (Brueggemann, Sarna (1989) 23, Harper, Weisberg).

Challenge

While the above interpretation mitigates against the more misogynistic interpretations of Genesis 2, the text’s talk of the two sexes and the complementarity of man and woman still presents a serious challenge to queer identities and experiences. I’ve already discussed these issues at length in my series on queer theology, so rather than rehash all of this material, I’ll direct you to the following posts:

• The Two Sides of Adam (on sex and gender in Genesis 1-3)
• What’s Sex For Anyway? (on how the Bible talks about sex)
• Subverting Expectations, Explore the Edges & the challenge section of Speech & Separation (all of which talk about the problem inherent in holding too tightly to our concepts and distinctions, and how God loves the things that fall through the cracks)
• Where I Stand Now (my final thoughts from the series exploring queer themes in the Scriptures and tradition)

All I’ll say here is that these are not issues the text itself is concerned about. And while it certainly represents a challenge for queer folk of all stripes, it is not a prohibitive one. There are good, biblical reasons for interpreting the story in a more open and receptive way.

Expand

So, today we’ve seen how Adam’s loneliness mars the ‘very goodness’ of God’s creation. The only remedy is to be found in another human. The story goes to remarkable lengths to show that the woman is a suitable partner for Adam because of their similarity, ‘flesh of his own flesh’. This sets up a world where humanity is able to live out its vocation and freedom, within the limits of God’s instructions, together, in peace and harmony, and ‘without shame’.

But as we will see in the next post, this harmonious state does not last long.