God Builds a Woman (Gen 2:22)

Into and Out of the Garden

²² YHWH God built the joist He had taken from the earthling into a woman

 וַיִּבֶן֩ יְ׳הוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֧ים ׀ אֶֽת־הַצֵּלָ֛ע אֲשֶׁר־לָקַ֥ח מִן־הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְאִשָּׁ֑ה

Robert Alter, in commenting on his translation of this verse, says this about the verb “built”:

Though this may seem an odd term for the creation of woman, it complements the potter’s term, “fashion,” used for the creation of first human, and is more appropriate because the LORD is now working with hard material, not soft clay. As Nahum Sarna has observed, the Hebrew for “rib,” tselaʿ, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.

In fact, as we mentioned last time, that word doesn’t really mean “rib” at all. It is not merely “used elsewhere” to designate an architectural element, it always designates an architectural element except for one other occurrence in the Bible.

With regard to building, Sarna (in his JPS Torah commentary) makes this observation:

For the frequent use of Akkadian banû in the sense of a deity creating mankind and individuals, see CAD, s.v. banû 3.1, pp. 87f. Similarly, in Ugaritic, an epithet of the god Il is bny bnwt, “creator (lit. “builder”) of creatures” (49.111.5, 11, etc.).

CAD is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the standard scholarly dictionary of Akkadian, the Babylonian cuneiform language that has given us so much knowledge of the ancient Near East with its religion, literature, and culture. Ugaritic, found on hundreds of tablets from the 1929 discoveries at Ras Shamra on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, is the ancient Semitic language most closely related to Hebrew. The dictionary entry noted by Sarna is a full column of references to gods creating human beings by “building” them, using the Akkadian cognate of Hebrew בנה b-n-h.

Moreover, we have more examples of “building” a family in the Bible. Here are three:

• Rachel tells Jacob to sleep with Bilhah. “Let her give birth on my knees so I too can be built through her” (Gen 30:3). In this case, אִבָּנֶ֥ה ibbaneh is also a literary pun: “let me be sonned, let me have a בן ben ‘son’.”

• The widow of a childless man whose brother refuses to father a child for him with her must pull off his sandal, spit in his face, and say “Thus shall be done to the man who will not build his brother’s house” (Deut 25:9).

• The people of Bethlehem offer congratulations to Boaz, wishing that his new wife, Ruth, may be “like Rachel and like Leah, the two of whom built the house of Israel” (Ruth 4:11).

And of course the very metaphor of a family or a dynasty (see 2 Samuel 7) being called a “house” that can be “built” exemplifies the same notion.

The woman is not literally being “built” out of whatever has been removed from the earthling, as the earthling himself actually was “molded” out of earth; God is not assembling various parts into a human. We really should think of her as growing out of the part that was removed. The biblical writer would not have pictured test tubes or white coats, but he is describing something very much like what we today might call a “lab-grown” woman, one who is brought into being in an almost natural way because she develops out of part of the original earthling.

Once again we have what seems to be a parallel to the Genesis 1 version of the story, where God makes or creates animals and plants (or has the earth bring them forth) and then arranges that in the future they can reproduce on their own. In this version, God must grow the woman himself; from now on, it is the woman who will produce the new creatures.

As we’ll see in the continuation of the verse, this woman was not “grown” on-site. In any case, there were no laboratory conditions for her creation. We should rather think of the imagery used in the story of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37:

⁵ Thus said the Lord YHWH to these bones: I am going to bring breath-spirit [רוח ru’aḥ] into you, and you shall live. ⁶ I will put sinews on you, raise up flesh upon you, swathe you with skin, and put breath-spirit into you.

We must imagine something similar happening to create this woman from the structural element — whatever it was — that was removed from the earthling.

… and brought her to the earthling. וַיְבִאֶ֖הָ אֶל־הָֽאָדָֽם׃

Here we have another example of a feature of Version 2 that I’m still mulling over: how much of it takes place offstage. We readers can see it happening, but from the perspective of the earthling God’s activity is done elsewhere and not in front of him:

• In v. 19, the animals are molded (somewhere) and brought to the earthling.

• In v. 22, the woman is “built” (somewhere) and brought to the earthling.

• In v. 8, the garden was planted; it could obviously not be brought to the earthling, but it was planted elsewhere and he was brought there and put into it.

One might say, assuming that we are picturing ourselves in the role of the earthling (as seems natural), that we too are being told of the garden, the animals, the woman rather than having their creation shown to us.

In this case, Nahum Sarna explains the image as that of a bride being given to her groom, [update] the same way that nowadays the woman’s father or parents may lead her down the aisle:

As noted in a midrash, the image may well be that of God playing the role of the attendant who leads the bride to the groom. Without doubt, the verse conveys the idea that the institution of marriage is established by God Himself.

But this does not explain the garden or the animals, where we see the same pattern. Abraham Ibn Ezra tries to solve the problem another way:

He brought her to the man. When Adam first woke, he thought she had been brought to him just as all the other animals had. “He brought her” describes the event from Adam’s perspective. The same thing happens in “the men pursued them in the direction of the Jordan” (Josh. 2:7)—they thought they were pursuing them, but really the people they were pursuing were hiding in Rahab’s house. In our verse, the alternative is that she was fashioned outside the garden, in which case she would actually have to have been “brought” to the man.

I wonder whether we are not supposed to think, as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Gen 2:7 says, that the original earthling was formed from earth at the future site of the Temple in Jerusalem, and that the animals and the woman were similarly created at that locality of great metaphysical power.

It is an interesting contrast. Eden, like the wilderness through which the Israelites wandered before entering Canaan, is a place of magic to which one cannot return after re-entering the world of reality. The sacred location in Jerusalem is quite accessible — look! it’s right over there → — but it has an aura that Eden and the wilderness somehow lack. For now, I’m going to accept that this is the implication of the creation of living things elsewhere than in front of the camera.

In the next post, we’ll have to spend some time talking about this word “woman,” occurring here for the first time in the Bible.