From Genesis to Proverbs to John (1)

The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. Genesis 2:22 NASB

Fashioned – The Bible is a giant connect-the-dots puzzle. Understanding a passage as a stand-alone text often does not capture the depth of the words or the context. We are required to be more imaginative, pulling together pieces of similar wording and stories in order to see the grand picture. With this in mind, let’s explore a possible set of connections that just might shed some light on particularly troublesome doctrines.

First, a note about the use of hokma.

Wisdom is an inexact term that is commonly used to refer to knowledge regarding life that God has built into the infrastructure of the natural and social worlds, the search for those understandings in everyday experience, and the transmission of the results of that search. God has created wisdom in the first place and continues to mediate God’s will and way in and through that reality; at the same time, wisdom functions as a creature allowed to be itself apart from specific divine management. As such a reality, the wisdom embedded in the world makes itself available to human beings; wisdom has a certain drawing power, but the process of human discovery and discernment is crucial for the proper shaping of human life. The gathering and transmission of wisdom is an intellectual exercise and accumulation of knowledge not simply for its own sake but to enable the best human life possible in God’s world, both individual and communal. The heart of wisdom is what is done with that knowledge in the daily round, the discernment of the appropriate relationship between what individuals have come to know and how they live.[1]

Fretheim begins connecting the dots by noting that “Life’s experiences are not objectified in wisdom or made into philosophical or abstract principles but have to do with life’s specific, concrete relationships and contingent events.”[2]   Hebrew reality is tangible reality. It is made up of descriptions of the way the world actually works, not explanations of the way a system of thought says that world should work. Therefore, when Hebrew describes the actual relationships of men and women in this world and their connection to God, the descriptions are not theological propositions but stories, legends and cultural assumptions. This means that the description of the formation of the woman in Genesis 2 can be elaborated by reading it from the perspective of the material in Proverbs 8. The personification of Wisdom as a woman elaborates what was intended in the relationship established by God in the formation of the human woman. Notice how Fretheim describes the role and relation of Wisdom.

“The fundamental characteristic of this creational reality is relatedness; it is foundational to the way in which the world works. . . . In other words, there is something basic about the very structures of creation—social as well as cosmic—that can be properly understood only in relational terms, indeed, in personal terms. In and through a discernment of the many and various interrelationships that God has built into the created order, one may be more closely attuned to God’s will for that world and act accordingly.”[3]

“Woman Wisdom, in effect, is the ‘glue’ that holds everything together in a stable and harmonious whole.”[4]

If we apply this articulation of the Genesis 2 account, we notice immediately that the woman is designed for a role that a man cannot play, that is, providing the fabric of relatedness that allows both male and female to become God’s image. Man may be tasked with the role of caretaker and developer in the divinely initiated creative process, but it is woman who makes this possible by bringing the priority of relationship to the foreground. It is through her that the deepest element of God’s creation is birthed, that is, the interconnectedness of things. Perhaps this is why the rabbis suggest that a woman is not obligated to pray while a man is obligated. A woman has a natural, God-given connectedness to spiritual matters and instinctively expresses prayer while a man must be disciplined to pray since it is not inherent in his makeup.

When the text uses the Hebrew verb bana (to build), it suggests conscious design as if the builder took time to deliberately plan and then execute the project. This is quite different than the description of the man in the earlier verses. The man is “formed” (yatsar) with an emphasis on shaping something (as with clay). As the divine potter, God shapes the man, but when it comes to the woman, a more deliberate and contemplative project is underway. The idea of building the woman connects us to the description of the intimate, innate relationship between God and Woman Wisdom. Perhaps the description in Proverbs 8 helps us fill in exactly what God was building when He created a physical representation of this spiritual relationship. Fretheim’s analysis of Woman Wisdom offers tantalizing views of what might lie behind the verb bana.

How would your view of the role of woman change if these connections were true?

Oh yes, and by the way, there is another interesting connection in John’s gospel, as we will see.

Topical Index: woman, bana, to build, wisdom, Proverbs 8, Genesis 2:22

[1] Terrence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation, p. 199.

[2] Ibid., p. 203.

[3] Terrence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation, p. 209.

[4] Ibid., p. 207.