Theology School

Genesis 2: ²³ 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.”

The rib is not metaphorical as some have suggested but actual. As to whether the rib refers to the side (as it does in other Scriptures) or a specific rib is open to debate. But “rib” seems correct here because the Scripture clearly states that God took “one of his ribs,” whereas one of his sides does not make sense. The language pictures a long, curved, glistening rib still moist with Adam’s fluids and warm with his marrow. And no, men do not have one less rib than women. When God closed Adam back up, he was missing a rib, but his children can “count them all.”

The significances of this are several and profound. Adam was not created ex nihilo (out of nothing) but out of the dust of the earth, and neither was Eve made ex nihilo. “The rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made [literally, “built”] into a woman” (v. 22a.). She was made of the same stuff as the man — the same bone, the same flesh, the same DNA. Her correspondence in form, her femaleness, her estrogens were shaped and constituted from the man. Eve was the first person to be created from a living being. Because she came from Adam, she perfectly shared the image of God. Their mutual flesh lies behind 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

The woman’s creation out of Adam is the basis for her equality. As Matthew Henry quaintly coined it: “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.”

So here it is: Eve was taken out of Adam so that he might embrace with great love a part of himself.