Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.“
Genesis 2:21

The word for ‘of his ribs’ is tsela (tsay-law’). It is literally ‘of the body’, but can also figuratively be ‘of a door’ or a ‘leaf’ (not the plant matter). It can be an object, a floor or ceiling, a beam/board/chamber/corner/plank or side (as in side chamber). The male and female were SIDES of Adam (‘Adam’ meaning ‘human being’, not a name for a particular individual.) – structural to each other like walls of a building, needed for stability. When God was done, the male half wasn’t missing an individual rib bone, but the entire female half with all its talents and abilities which were particular and unique in her. Therefore they were REQUIRED to re-join and come together as an equal partnership and team in order to be able to accomplish what the human being (the whole) had been created to do- in order to be stable. It was NOT a relationship of domination. They were EQUAL and HELPMATES. It was NOT a relationship that required a chain of command – that was a result of the Fall, of Sin, and a consequence for their choices. It STILL did not include domination. Their relationship was NEVER DESIGNED to be a dictatorship. It was ALWAYS in EVERY SINGLE ITERATION meant to be a PARTNERSHIP – but after the Fall there had to be a senior/junior partner for reasons of accountability to God (more of that in Genesis 3).

The female was taken from the SIDE and not from the foot or the heel or the bottom. Male and female are heirs together of the life God breathed into them (1 Peter 3:7). Regardless of their positional relationship, the male is NOT to lord anything over the female and vice versa.

God put Adam to sleep – divine anaesthesia. Adam was unconscious and completely unaware of the process by which the female was removed from him and the area sealed up by God. There is a story the sages tell to explain the ‘why’ of this sleep (for God is surely able to perform painless surgery): ‘The Talmud illustrates the manner in which Rabban Gamliel’s daughter explained to the Roman Emperor who had claimed that G’d had stolen a rib from Adam, why it had been necessary to do this in a clandestine fashion. She invited the Emperor to watch her prepare a piece of raw meat and to observe every step before this piece of meat was fit to be served on the table. Having watched this, the Emperor lost his craving for the meat in question. Rabban Gamliel’s daughter told the Emperor to imagine what Adam would have felt like if he had had to watch how his mate was produced step by step.’

The sage Rashi writes: ‘AND HE SLEPT AND then HE TOOK in order that he should not see the piece of flesh out of which she was created, for she might be despised by him (Sanhedrin 39a).’

The sage Chizkuni writes: ‘until the creation of woman the letter ס had not appeared in the Torah… the appearance of the letter ס is to remind us that a wife is always close to her husband. Concerning the query raised in Bereshit Rabbah that the letter ס had already appeared in the word: הסובב in verse 11 of our chapter, we must answer that the subjects in that verse are two rivers, not a human being.