Friday
Friday
The Creation of Eve
The LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
Genesis 2:21–22
How literally we are intended to understand the divine surgery under a divine anaesthetic is not clear. But something profound and mysterious took place, which prompted Adam at the sight of Eve to break out into history’s first love poem:
This is now [“at last” (REB)] bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called “woman,”
for she was taken out of man.
verse 23
That she was taken out of his side has been seen by commentators to have symbolic significance. Peter Lombard, who became bishop of Paris in 1159, for example, wrote a year or two earlier in his famous summary of Christian doctrine entitled The Book of Sentences, “Eve was not taken from the feet of Adam to be his slave, nor from his head to be his lord, but from his side to be his partner.” And Matthew Henry, who began his biblical commentary in 1704, may have been elaborating Peter Lombard when he wrote that Eve was “not made out of his head to top him, not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.”
It is right, therefore, that in virtually all societies, marriage is a recognized and regulated institution. But it is not a human invention. Christian teaching on marriage begins with the joyful affirmation that it is God’s idea, not ours. As the Preface to the 1662 Marriage Service says, it was “instituted by God himself in the time of man’s innocency.”
For further reading: Song of Songs 2:14–17