Women's Place - and Men's - In the Beginning

When Jesus was asked whether it was lawful to put away their wives (Matthew 19 and Mark 10), he first engages the legal question on the Pharisee's turf. He asks, what did Moses say? Then, he launches into a deeper discussion of causes. In the Beginning, Jesus said, he that created them made them male and female; for this cause the two become one flesh. I always wondered what that meant, and the remark is made in four different places. For what cause, exactly? and what does that mean, becoming one flesh? I think the answers to both of those questions lie in Genesis.

Near the end of the sixth day, God, elohim, the mighty ones, said to himself/themselves, "Let's make Adam in our image, after our likeness..." So He did, and Gen 1:27 states, "in the image of elohim he created him; male and female he created them." God also told them to be fruitful and multiply. How they were to accomplish this we don't know.

The language is confusing because, I think, both God and Adam were a single entity that had a plurality of persons, and Adam abstracted something of Elohim into the flesh by being male and female. Some years ago, I heard a funny radio commercial in which a guy was advised to become "at one" with himself. He replied, "Yeah, it would be really hard to be at two with myself." Adam was able to directly experience in his/their flesh the kind of multiple-personal intimacy of the godhead that leads us to talk about the trinity. God gives them dominion over the earth and the animals, and tells Adam so, then looks it all over, pronounces it very good, and takes the next day off. Perhaps one reason He hallowed the seventh day and wants us to remember it is because it was the only day off he ever got.

Okay, so on to Chapter 2. God forms Adam out of the dust of the ground ("adamah" in Hebrew) and breathes the spirit of life into him. God plants a garden in Eden and puts Adam there to take care of it. In this garden is every tree that is pleasant to the sight, every tree that is good for food, and two more trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. More on that later.

Things sound pretty smooth and peaceful, but immediately, God goes on to introduce the next artistic theme. It is not good that Adam should be alone. Say what? It had been very good on friday evening. Well, from that moment on, it wasn't. God - and starting with after the seventh day he is referred to as the LORD God, Yaweh Elohim, I Who Am the Mighty Ones - God alters the design and sets himself a creative challenge: make an appropriate companion for Adam. I've written about this before, so I will repeat that the LORD God makes an artistic counter-move and creates an instance of every beast and bird he's thought of, and brings each one to Adam to see what he would name them. And the name Adam gives them is the name they get. Naming things, symbolizing things, is in Adam's nature and is one important way he and his children can participate in Creation with God. Okay, so finally God puts Adam into a deep sleep and takes out a rib, from which he created a woman. When the LORD God brings her to Adam, he names her, not Adamita, to continue the naming convention that God had started, but ishsha, because as he said, she was taken out of ish. Thus Adam also renamed himself: he knew that he was missing more than a rib. And here the Holy Spirit interjects a bit of omniscient narration to say for the first time, "Therefore shall an ish leave father and mother and cleave to his ishsha, and they two shall become one flesh." Wherefore? Because only be recombining can they recreate the Adamic image of God. This is more than just having sex; they have to recreate the personal relationships. But it is thoroughly bound up in the flesh, so sexual combining is part and parcel of this achievement. God has revealed something about himself in this higher entropy that was not knowable before. That has to be behind Jesus' unusually hard line about divorce. And the only reason it seems like such a hard line is the hardness of our hearts.