It Is Not Good – Genesis 2:18-25

Saturday Night Live did a spoof on the Japanese reality show about toddlers being old enough to accomplish errands on their own, filming instead long-term boyfriends who are trying to carry out errands for their girlfriends on their own.  The boyfriends are basically incompetent and childish compared to their girlfriends.  Though this may reflect the reality of some or too many marriages, it is not the plan God instituted in the garden.  Marriage was a wedding of two people’s abilities so they could help each other accomplish the divine creation mandate of filling the earth and subduing it.

18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept 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; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.        

24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:18–25, ESV)

Though Yahweh has been finding His creation good on every day, and even very good on day six, there is something He finds that is not good.  Adam’s aloneness is not good. He cannot, like the rest of God’s creatures, be fruitful and multiply by himself, and he needs help, in the life God has given him, to complete the tasks God has set out before him.  He needs a helper suitable to him, one that corresponds to him, a mate, an equal.  God is our helper (Genesis 49:25; Exodus 18:4), we humans need human counterparts to help us, as well.  And God wants that good thing for us.

But God also wants Adam to understand his need for this human counterpart, so He puts Adam through a process of naming the beasts of the field and the birds.  How long would this have taken?  Adam is, in part, subduing the earth through this process and exercising his royal authority as God’s vice-regent over the earth.  But in the process Adam does not recognize a counterpart for himself among the animals.

So God does surgery, anesthetizing Adam and removing a rib from which he forms the true counterpart for Adam, the woman.  Adam recognizes her as such immediately and that she is derived from him (all subsequent humans will be derived from Adam and Eve), and names her.  We don’t know what language Adam spoke, but in Hebrew he says, “She shall be called isha, because she was taken out of ish.”

Moses then adds a divine commentary, declaring this the first marriage and describing all subsequent marriages as a man “leaving” his parents (if not literally, certainly in terms of his new responsibility) and clinging to his wife as they become a new family, kin or one flesh in a way they were not before.  The new family takes on a priority over the previous family with a healthy separation.

Then Moses notes that the man and woman were naked but not ashamed.  There was not felt need to hide their nakedness from each other.  They did not feel a threat from such openness.  Moses is preparing us for a change in that perspective.