Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper [p]suitable for him.” Genesis 2:18 NASB Not good – God’s words, lōʾ ṭôb, are an amazing assessment of the human condition. According to the first chapter of Genesis, everything was good. In fact, more than good. Very good. Blessed. Exactly as intended. But less than 17 verses later, after…
The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s stall. Israel did not know, my people did not pay heed. Isaiah 1:3 Robert Alter Did not pay heed – Robert Alter’s translation captures the urgency of God’s warning. Most translations render bîn with the usual “understand” or “perceive,” but that isn’t strong enough. It’s…
And I put sleep into him and he fell asleep. And I took from him A rib, and created him a wife, that death should come to him by his wife, and I took his last word and called her name mother, that is to say, Eva (Eve). 1 Enoch 30:16 Death should come to…
Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken out of man.” Genesis 2:23 ESV Woman/ man – We already know that something quite unusual, and spectacular, is happening in this verse. The first occurrence of both ʾiššâ (woman) and…
Now the man named his wife [a]Eve, because she was the mother of all the living Genesis 3:20 NASB Because – What did we learn yesterday? We learned that Genesis 2:23 recounts that Adam projects the woman’s function with a name, a name that intimately connects her existence to his own, ʾiššâ and ʾšh. Subsequently, after the punishment…
Now the man named his wife [a]Eve, because she was the mother of all the living Genesis 3:20 NASB Eve – But of course he did not name her “Eve.” I’m sorry, but the footnote in the NASB (“Genesis 3:20 I.e., living; or life”) is absolutely no help whatsoever. “Eve” is not her name. That word comes from the…
But I do not allow a woman to teach, nor to exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. 1 Timothy 2:12 NASB Exercise Authority– You have got to be kidding me! That is probably the immediate contemporary reaction to the face-value interpretation of Paul’s remark. If what Paul says is really the biblical model for the…
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 – God looked at His own work and decided it wasn’t good enough. Don’t you find that a bit surprising? Doesn’t God create perfectly? But here we have evidence…
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1 NASB The Word – What a complicated text! The NASB’s heading for this part of John’s gospel is “The Deity of Jesus Christ,” but this is an editorial theological addition. The text itself does not make…
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…
