Help Me
And said YHWH Elohim, “It is not good being of the man alone; I will make for him an ‘ezer corresponding to him.” Genesis 2:18 (as literal as I can get)
‘ezer – This is going to take some time, so digest slowly. A great deal of misinformation has been foisted upon the believing community because we did not read this verse in its Hebrew context. Most of our thinking about the role of women and the status of the wife begins with Paul. We assume a New Testament orientation to these issues, forgetting that Paul is not a New Testament Christian believer. Paul is a rabbinic Messianic Jew. In fact, he probably never thought about calling himself a Christian. His orientation began in the Torah. His Scriptures were the Hebrew Bible. His thoughts were dominated by God’s revealed word to Moses, the prophets and the kings. If we want to know why Paul says those very disturbing things in Corinthians, Ephesians and Timothy, we have to start here, in Genesis. And we will have to proceed slowly, trying to grasp each nuance of the Hebrew text. After all, Paul could never have been a Pharisee of the Pharisees without a thorough and exhaustive understanding of passages just like this one.
God chose the word ‘ezer to describe the woman. It wasn’t Adam’s word. By the time Adam gets around to giving the woman a name, all kinds of drastic things have happened. The name Adam chooses is Havvah (which we have contorted into Eve). That name is a clue to her post-Fall identity. She is the mother of all living simply because after the Fall everyone will die. The propagation of all human beings will have to come through her pregnancy. Adam and Havvah are not going to live forever.
So, if this is God’s word for woman, that means that God tells us about her essential identity through this word. Just as the word ‘adam tells us about the essential identity of the man (made from dust), so ‘ezer tells us about the ontological and functional identity of the woman. After all, God didn’t just accidentally wave His magic wand for her to appear. The Hebrew text tells us that God crafted her according to a deliberate and specific plan. Adam was created. Havvah was built!
Why did God construct this person? The verse tells us that God saw that is was not good for the man to be alone. But wait a minute. Adam wasn’t alone. He enjoyed the very presence of God. He had the companionship of all the other creatures. What more could He have wanted or needed. Isn’t it enough to have a personal, face-to-face relationship with the Creator?
Apparently it’s not. Adam might not have realized that something was missing, but God did. It is God who recognizes that the situation is not good. This pronouncement stands in stark contrast to everything else in creation. God acknowledges that every other part of creation is good. He blesses many of His creatures. But when it comes to the last and best of His handiwork, He sees something incomplete. Man is alone, and this is not good.
Maybe we need to start with the Hebrew concept of good. The word is tov. It has basically the same umbrella of meanings that we find in English: good, well-pleasing, fruitful, morally correct, proper and convenient. You could substitute almost all of these synonyms in this verse and get some of the nuances. Why isn’t it good? Because it isn’t proper – man needs a partner like himself. It isn’t pleasing – there is a social aspect to humanity that requires gender interaction to reach true fulfillment. It isn’t fruitful – that is fairly obvious. It isn’t morally correct – a man by himself cannot discover, practice or enjoy the moral virtues of relationship, nor can he experience the necessity of mutual submission, deferred authority and dispersed honor. Yes, he can enjoy his relationship with his Creator, but God apparently created us for more than this singularity. It isn’t proper – it does not fit the exquisite balance of the rest of God’s creation. Finally, it isn’t convenient – it does not lend itself to all those actions and behaviors that supply us with the opportunity to be fully alive.
Of course, had we read the next few words, “to be alone,” we would have understood all this without the elaboration. The phrase is levado. The root is vad, but here it has an attached particle le. Vad has two meanings. They are distinguished by which particle is attached to the root. When min is attached, the meaning is “apart from” or “besides” (see Exodus 12:37). But with le, the meaning is “alone” or “by itself.” What God says here is that it is not good (in all those senses) for man to be by himself. Actually, the Hebrew text uses the verb hayah. In light of many other passages, we could translate this “it is not good for man to manifest himself alone.” In other words, the full sense of what it means to be human will not be revealed until this creature is manifest as both male and female. One without the other means something vital is missing. The rabbis say that a man without a woman “reduces the representation of the divine image on earth.”
Our world is obsessed with love relationships. Actually, we should not call it love since it usually doesn’t fit the biblical idea of love. We might call it lust. The world, as we know it, is saturated with lust. We have kicked away the restraints of love and substituted the passion of lust. We have usurped God’s engineered relationship design. As a result, we are in heavy pursuit of something to fill the void that we have purchased. We know, at the most fundamental level, that it is not good to be manifest alone. But we don’t know how to recover what we have lost. So we grope our way toward someone.
It’s time to recover the Creator’s design. You can start today by asking yourself if you are still alone, even if you have a partner. If you are, then God says something is wrong. You’ll need God’s perspective in order to find your way back to full manifestation of humanity, but it starts with soul-searching assessment.
Are you good?
Topical Index: tov, vad, ‘ezer, alone, not good
