The Rest of the Story
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” Genesis 2:18 NASB
Not good – Over many years we have examined the critical term ʿēzer kenĕgdô’ in this verse. In fact, I wrote a book about this term, and the manifold misinterpretations Christian history reveals concerning the role and status of women. But if we were really astute, we might not have needed all that work about the “suitable helper.” We would have already seen the clue in God’s assessment of Adam’s solitary state. Jonathan Sacks makes an observation on a much later verse that reveals what we should have realized:
Moses must learn to delegate and share the burden of leadership. Interestingly, the sentence “What you are doing is not good (lo tov)” is one of only two places in the Torah were the phrase “not good” occurs. The other (Genesis 2:18) is “It is not good for man to be alone.” We cannot lead alone; we cannot live alone. This is one of the axioms of biblical anthropology. The Hebrew word for life, ḥayim, is in the plural, as if to signify that life is essentially shared. Dean Inge once defined religion as “what an individual does with his own solitude.” That is not a Jewish view.[1]
Two things emerge. First, of course, is the application of what we learn in the Exodus passage to the prior text in Genesis. What this reveals is that God’s assessment isn’t simply about lack of companionship, nor is it about the necessity of a counter personality to the full understanding of what it means to be human. It’s even more than that. In the Hebraic world, man is essentially relational. Being human requires involvement with another. Anything less is “not good.” Therefore, as Sacks notes, life is plural. It does not occur in the solitary individualistic world of Greek thought. To be is to be related.
The second thing we learn from the use of the term in Exodus is that the ʿēzer kenĕgdô’ is not an extension of the man. She defines him. He exists as the shared life between them. She is by no means an external “helper,” as if the man could have functioned without her but her cooperation just makes things easier. No, that is not the case. The phrase lo tov tells us that he cannot accomplish his divinely designated task without her. She is not supplemental. She is absolutely essential. It is for this reason that when she is presented to Adam, he quite literally redefines himself as ish, not adam. His entire sense of being is altered because of her.
Interestingly, in the second occurrence in Exodus the term is directly associated with leadership. This is no accident, and it should remind us that the use in Genesis is also about leadership. The prime directive (be fruitful, multiply, and subdue) is a joint leadership task, affirmed by the fact that in the only other occurrence leadership is the issue. This is notfeminism. Rather, it is the status of the divine female. She is why “not good” no longer applies.
Topical Index: lo tov, not good, ʿēzer kenĕgdô’, leadership, Exodus 18:17, Genesis 2:18
[1] Jonathan Sacks Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Maggid, 2010), p. 128.
