It's always struck me that Genesis 2:18 is the first time in the Bible when God says that something "isn't good." The verse stands out all the more starkly because throughout Chapter 1, God kept saying things were good-- the sea and dry land (1:10), the sun, moon and stars (1:18), the sea creatures and birds (1:21), and the beasts of the field (1:25). But here, for the first time, something's explicitly and specifically not good.
And what a thing it is: the 'adam is alone! God forms a human creature, places him in the garden on the mission of imaging God to the world, and in 2:18 we find out that the male 'adam all on his own is not good, not complete, not able to accomplish God's purposes for him.
A couple of incidentals are worth mentioning here:
1) This explains why the story has God making the female 'adam out of the male 'adam's rib. It's not to suggest that the woman is in any sense inferior or subsequent to the man. It's so we could see the helpless (and according to 2:18 he is, quite literally, help-less) male all alone, and recognize with God how not-good that state of affairs is.
2) We have to read this in light of Gen 1:27, where it says that God made the 'adam in his own image, male and female, he created them. On his own the male 'adam can't image God; it takes male and female together to do that. Rather than being archaically patriarchal, this text actually underscores the man and woman's interdependence in radical ways. (Which is what Paul seems to be saying in 1 Corinthians 11:11-12. “Woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman”.)
These two thoughts lead us into the main thrust of this passage. The solution to this "not-good" situation is for God to give the male a helping hand; and what a helping hand he has in mind! The Hebrew phrase in 2:18 is etzer chenaged, and a lot of theological ink had been spilled on this one over the years. Literally it means something like "a help that is compatible/fitting/completing and/or equal to him." Often scholars point out that etzer (help) is the word the Bible uses when it wants to talk about how God is Israel's "help." In other words, the woman is not the man's "help" the way Robin is a "helper" to Batman; more in the way a search and rescue team is a "help" to the lost and stranded hiker.
This text speaks past marriage, actually, to the many godly ways in which men and women prove that they are, in fact, “help-less” without each other (though in a patriarchal context like the one into which God first spoke Genesis, underlining this for the male, in particular, was especially important). But it also speaks, of course, to marriage in particular. The story ends, after all, with the man leaving his natural ties to his mother and father, and cleaving instead to his wife. In this we see the ultimate proof that the flip-side of Genesis 2:18 is equally true, it is good for the man to be not alone.
The meaning of marriage that this passage points us to is profoundly counter cultural. We tend to think of marriage as an arrangement that serves, primarily, the felt-needs and personal interests of the married couple—fulfilment, satisfaction, sexual expression. If we’re thinking very broadly, we may widen this to include the well-being of their children, but culturally, it usually stops there. Without getting too political, let me suggest that our modern flexibility when it comes to marriage is evidence of this.
But biblically—at least the way I’m reading Genesis 1-2 here—the way marriage serves individuals is a secondary benefit to the real meaning of marriage. As a divine institution, marriage serves the Creator’s shalom-oriented purposes for the Creation, by reminding the whole human community of the profound, necessary, mysterious and inescapable interdependence of the sexes—that men and women are indeed helpless without each other. This serves the Creation, in particular, because according to Genesis 1:26 humans rightly “Imaging God” is necessary for the Creation to thrive and flourish the way God intends it to, and according to Genesis 1:27, man or woman alone cannot Image God. We can only do this together.
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