2:21-23 — 21So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called`woman', for she was taken out of man."
[T - OL ]
Few passages of Scriptures are as memorable in its reading as this report of God's making of the woman. Matthew Henry, e.g., is famous for his comment on why the woman was made from Adam's rib: ". . . the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved."
The simple beauty of the recounting is simply amazing: Yahweh caused the man to fall asleep, took a rib out of him, closed up the wound, made the woman, and brought it to the man. While the NIV needs 56 words to do the job (and 26 for my single-claused summary above) the Hebrew accomplishes the task with all its elegance in just two dozen.
Why it was necessary to cause Adam to fall asleep is impossible to say. The word tardemah is usually reserved for the kind of deep sleep during which, e.g., Yahweh appeared to Abram and promised him the land of Canaan (Gen 15"13), or they were totally dead to the world as Yahweh caused to fall on Saul's men so that David could remove Saul's spear and water jug (1 Sam 26:12). This "anesthetic" sleep, however, underlines an important point: the man had no part in making the woman or deciding what she would be like or made of.1 Here may be the reason why men continue to complain that women are impossible to understand (and vice versa). The next time we do complain, however, let us remind ourselves that women, though not made of "sugar and spice, and all things nice" (as they wistfully like to think) they are made up of all that the great wisdom of God thought most useful and suitable that would complete us men. We would be extremely foolish to compete with what God has gifted us to complete us.
If we seldom recognize this, Adam did not. The moment Yahweh introduced the woman to him ("He brought her to the man," v22), he broke out in song (the first piece of formal poem in the OT and man's first recorded words). And packed full of true discernment. The training with the animals paid off. "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." Adam could, of course, be quite 'literal' about what he said. The rest of us will have to made so with a more figurative but no less true and genuine version when we do say this of and to our spouses.
The bone is, as every Christian can tell you, the rib. This English anatomical term occurs only once in almost all the English versions (except NKJ, where it appears again in Hos 13:8 but translating a different Hebrew word). The Hebrew word (tsela') appears elsewhere in the OT but is, except for 2 Sam 16:13 ("hillside"), always an architectural term, often for the sides of the tabernacle. Given these facts, we should be careful not to be dogmatic about the 'rib'—the emphasis is on significance (which Matthew Henry clearly understood), not anatomy. For those who would still insist that it was a rib, it should be said, integrity requires them to explain why it is that men and women still have the same even number of the bone.
Having discerned what she is—the exercise in naming all the animals Yahweh had brought before him having fulfilled its intended goal—Adam proceeds to name her: "she shall be called 'isshah for she was taken out of 'ish. 'isshah is simply the feminine counter part of the common noun for man, 'ish. He understood that she was everything that complemented and completed him. This exposition, however, robs it of its power and excitement. A preacher friend of mine suggested this: when the man saw the woman, he said," Wow, man!" As he said it again and again, the expression got shortened to "wo-man." Not quite exegetically packed down, perhaps, but I think he was onto something.
You may wish to read the following commentaries-expositions:
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2016