God Removes a Joist (Gen 2:21)

Into and Out of the Garden

²¹ YHWH God caused the earthling to fall into a trance, and he slept

 וַיַּפֵּל֩ יְ׳הוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֧ים ׀ תַּרְדֵּמָ֛ה עַל־הָאָדָ֖ם וַיִּישָׁ֑ן

There are three words in this verse that are occurring for the first time in the Bible, and two of them are words for “sleep.” This is the first time that anyone in the Bible has slept, and the sleep that the earthling is experiencing here is not a natural one.

It is a tardemah — the same strange, and in that case frightening, trance that will fall on Abram in Gen 15:12 when he experiences the “covenant between the pieces.” In that episode, Abram is promised descendants and the land of Canaan, but only after his descendants experience slavery in a land not their own.

The word occurs only five other times in the Bible: in 1 Sam 26:12 and Isa 29:10, where it is also explicitly caused by God; twice in Job, where God’s involvement seems to be implied; and once in Prov 19:15, the only place where it seems to indicate ordinary sleep. The verb רדם r-d-m too occurs seven times, and is defined by HALOT as “to lie in a drugged sleep.”

Once again, only in Proverbs (10:5) does this seem to be ordinary sleep, though it is used in Jonah (1:5–6) for a literary effect. In our verse, the “drugged sleep” is clearly something akin to anesthesiology, enabling the earthling to undergo surgery without pain or awareness. In English, one ordinarily “falls” asleep, and that is the case in Hebrew with tardemah as well (though not with regular sleep). In this particular case, YHWH “fells” the earthling into a trance.

David Kimhi (12^th–13^th-c. Provence) understands that this unnatural sleep was followed by a natural sleep that facilitated healing. He adds, “This may in fact have been the first sleep he ever got. According to our Sages, everything up to the birth of his children took place on the Friday of creation.” We’ll come back to that chronology when we reach Genesis 4. For now, I want us to keep in mind Radak’s idea that the earthling will not awake in pain, but refreshed and healed.

It’s hard to understand why this sleep, natural or trance-like, must happen at all. As we saw last time, Version 1 states clearly that male and female earthlings were created simultaneously, leaving us to imagine that the same was true for animals. In this version, as we’re about to see, the female is (as it were) “born” from the male, not naturally but surgically, as in a kind of Caesarian section. Why could YHWH not simply “mold” a female as he had molded the original earthling?

The answer to that question seems to lie in the body part that YHWH removed when he anesthetized the earthling.

He took one of his joists וַיִּקַּ֗ח אַחַת֙ מִצַּלְעֹתָ֔יו

I say “one of his joists” to defamiliarize the English translation we’re all used to here. I’m doing it with a clear conscience, because the Hebrew word צֵלָע tzéla does not mean “rib” — as we usually translate it — anywhere but here and in the next verse. Rashi, the 11^th-c. French commentator (in my Commentators’ Bible version, the same from which I took the Kimhi citation) quotes the NJPS translation and explains:

He took one of his ribs. Rather, “one of his sides,” as the word is used in “the other side wall of the Tabernacle” (Exod. 26:20/36:25). This is what the Sages meant when they said that man was originally created double, with two faces.

The rabbinic tradition Rashi cites (from Genesis Rabbah 8:1) has a parallel in a Greek myth we know from Plato’s Symposium (189e-190a). Aristophanes is speaking:

 the shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides [πλευρὰς] in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it from what I’ve told you. They walked upright, as we do now, whatever direction they wanted. And whenever they set out to run fast, they thrust out all their eight limbs, the ones they had then, and spun rapidly, the way gymnasts do cartwheels, by bringing their legs around straight.

If the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek is to be trusted, the Greek word πλευρά can similarly mean “side” or the “flank” or “rib” of an animal.

The Hebrew word, at least, is in fact a “joist” or some other such word that involves building. Of its 40 occurrences in the Bible, there is one (in 2 Sam 16:13) describing the “slope” of a hill; all the others besides these two in Genesis are describing various structural aspects of the Tabernacle (in Exodus) or Temple (in 1 Kings and Ezekiel).

This is, therefore, not really an anatomical rib but a construction element. We’ll see that emphasized in v. 22 when YHWH “builds” it into a woman. More than just a construction element, however, this seems to be another hint at the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm.

On Day Four of creation we saw Abarbanel point out (in his commentary on Exodus 25) that implicitly “the construction of the Tabernacle alludes to the form of the world,” and he explains how every element of it reflects something of the universe as a whole. If the Tabernacle/Temple is a world in miniature, it seems to me that the use of the Hebrew word צֵלָע tzéla in vv. 21–22 must be implying something similar about the human body as a similar sort of microcosm, a world in miniature.

The Jewish mystical concept of Adam Kadmon (“Primordial Man”) points in this same direction. It’s clear enough from the Bible itself that the construction of the Tabernacle — a home for God on earth — is framed as a new stage in the creation of the world as a whole. I’d like to think that the use of צלע to build the woman here is a direct allusion to the linkage between the creation of the Tabernacle and the creation of humanity (in God’s image), each as a home for God in the world.

and closed up the flesh in its place. וַיִּסְגֹּ֥ר בָּשָׂ֖ר תַּחְתֶּֽנָּה׃

We are not to imagine a scar, let alone a missing chunk, in the body of the (original) earthling — the necessary part has been removed while he’s unconscious, and when he wakes he will presumably not notice anything different about himself. (Can you tell how many ribs you have just by thinking about how you feel?)

When the earthling awakens, he will not be diminished. On the contrary, he will be more whole than he had previously been. Nahum Sarna, introducing his comment to this verse in the JPS Torah Commentary, writes, “God empathizes with man’s loneliness.” Nonetheless, as we said last time, there is no sign that the earthling is lonely. It is YHWH, not ha-adam, who senses something amiss, something לא טוב lo tov ‘not good’. Creation is not yet complete. In the next verse, it will be.