Formation of Eve

Something is called "not good" for the first time, and it is the man's solitude. A garden, a task and a clear boundary have all been established, and what is missing is another person.

God's response is indirect. The animals and birds are brought to the man to see what he will call them, and whatever he calls each creature becomes its name. Naming in the ancient Near East signalled authority and discernment, and the exercise does something else besides: working through every living creature demonstrates that none of them corresponds to him. Among all of them no suitable helper is found.

The phrase behind "suitable helper" (ezer kenegdo) repays attention in both halves. The first word means one who helps, and its commonest use elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures is of God helping Israel, so it carries no suggestion of lower standing. The second means corresponding to him, matching him, standing opposite him as a counterpart. Together they describe a match rather than an assistant.

The making itself takes one sentence. A deep sleep falls on the man and God takes something from his side (tsela). English versions usually render the word "rib", which is defensible, but it appears about forty times elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures and almost always means "side", including the sides of the tabernacle. The material is taken from the man rather than from the ground, and that is the point the scene makes next.

The man's response is the first recorded human speech in the Bible, and it is poetry rather than prose: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman', for she was taken out of man." The Hebrew for woman (ishshah) and man (ish) echo each other in a way the English happens to preserve. Then comes a comment addressed to the reader rather than to anyone in the story: that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. Marriage is presented here as older than any tribe, law code or nation that appears later.

The scene closes by noting that the man and the woman were both naked and felt no shame, a line that exists in order to be contradicted a few paragraphs later.

Three New Testament passages reach back to this account, and Christians have read them in markedly different ways for a very long time. Jesus quotes the "one flesh" line when asked whether divorce is permitted, using an account of origins to settle a question about present practice. Paul twice refers to the order in which the two were formed. The long-running disagreement among Christian interpreters is not about what happened in the garden but about what a statement of origin implies for how men and women should relate now, and it turns on whether the sequence of formation is being used as an argument or as an illustration. That argument is old, it is unresolved, and it is conducted between people who agree about what happened in the garden and disagree about what follows from it.