Collective Thoughts on Human Creation and Marriage - Marriage, Part 2

Collective Thoughts on Human Creation and Marriage

    contents from a Facebook post on March 11, 2025

Genesis 2:23-24 - "The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man (Adam) 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.'

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."

 

Married, single, divorced, or widowed? 

Male or female? 

Complementarian or Egalitarian? 

Believe the events behind this passage literally happened or they are legendary/ allegorical? 

We all bring our own presuppositions to how we interpret texts such as this. So what do you think? 

    About the idea that Woman was created out of Man? 

    The poetry Adam recited (maybe even sang)? 

    About man leaving his parents and cleaving to his wife? 

    About two becoming one flesh? 

(Here are some answers from various commentators, as well as my thoughts.)

 

From a MacArthur Study Bible (John MacArthur’s thoughts, or he at least signed-off on them): (v. 23) Adam’s poem focuses on naming the delight of his heart in this newly found companion. The man names her “woman” because she had her source in him. She truly was made of bone from his bones and flesh from his flesh. The English words man/woman sustain the same relationship as the Hebrew words, hinting at that original creation.

MacArthur Study Bible: (v. 24) The marital relationship was established as the first human institution. The responsibility to honor one’s parents does not cease with leaving and the union of husband with wife, but does represent the inauguration of a new and primary responsibility. “Hold fast” carries the sense of a permanent or indissoluble union, so that divorce was not considered. “One flesh” speaks of a complete unity of parts making a whole, e.g., one cluster, many grapes or one God in three persons; thus this marital union was complete and whole with two people. This also implies their sexual completeness. One man and one woman constitute the pair to reproduce. The “one flesh” is primarily seen in the child born of that union, the one perfect result of the union of two. Permanent monogamy was and continues to be God’s design for law and marriage.

 

Alan Ross (Creation and Blessing): At last [Adam] found the complementary partner, for the woman shared his nature. His joyful couplet stresses this relation with his “flesh of my flesh” and “bone of my bones,” and it culminates in the paronomasia between “woman” and “man”. The point of this jubilant cry is that the creation of humankind has reached its goal in the complementary partnership of man and woman. This emphasis on the meaning of woman is unique in ancient Near Eastern texts.

            The epilogue to the passage explains that this account provides the foundation of marriage. If God is the speaker then the verse must be in the future tense; but if the narrator, then it would be translated in the present tense: “This is why a man leaves.” The divine plan for marriage, then, is one man and one woman becoming one flesh and living together in their integrity. For the sake of the wife the man leaves the strong bond of his parents and unites with her.

 

John Calvin's commentary on Genesis: Among the offices pertaining to human society, this is the principal one and, as it were, the most sacred—that a man should cleave unto his wife. And Moses amplifies this by adding that the husband ought to prefer his wife to his father.

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My thoughts: Marriage is the first fully human, God-ordained institution in the world. With marriage came family à with generations of family came the covenants between God and His people, beginning with Noah, and continuing to Abraham and the generation that followed him. à Due to marriage being the first, I believe it to be the most important of all other human institutions.

·       Parenting is vitally important, but there’s a reason a man leaves his parents and clings to his wife!

·       The institution of the Church is also vitally important to believers, but it doesn’t supersede marriage (nor the parent-child relationship, in my opinion). Consider the similarity of the relationship between husband and wife as Christ has with the Church. The wife is to submit to her husband as the Church submits to Christ. The husband is the head of the wife and family as Christ is the head of His Church (Ephesians 5:22-24). Each husband must love his wife “as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25).

F    What about Marriage in relation to the Government? Is marriage more important or the government more important? Next time...

    In Christ Alone,

    Dan