battle of the sexes and creation

From the first creation story, in Genesis 1:

26 Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the ground.”

27 So God created humankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created it;
male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

Here we see the creation of man and women as co-regents, in the image of God and charged with God’s mandate to fill the earth. There is no hint here of any supremacy of one gender over the other, but both man and woman are charged equally to fulfill God’s mandate. I read a quote recently saying something to the effect of “God gave us the earth, but he gave it to us as raw material, largely unformed, and then sent us out with a mandate to form it.” I’m not sure how much of that is actually in the text versus how much of it fits the modernist dream of creating right society through reason and technology, but it seems that this idea is at least latent in the text given the imposition of will that is inherent in the verb “rule”. The key, though, is that man and woman are both created in God’s image -in fact, it is only in humanity as a whole, both male and female, that humanity is in God’s image- and it is humanity as a whole that is given the mandate from God to fill the earth (an idea that presumably means filling the earth with unfallen humans, who are by nature worshippers of God). Presumably, in this unfallen state, they would cooperatively rule the earth in a benevolent fashion serving as the legitimate and loyal extensions of God’s reign, working the earth as a worthy extension of God’s original act of creation.

Next, we have the second creation story:

Adam has been created first, shaped by the hand of God from the dust, and God has breathed his spirit into Adam to give him life. But God recognizes that Adam is incomplete by himself, and so is in need of a…. “helper” or “helpmeet” (Genesis 2:18).

“Helper” is, in fact, an extremely poor and shallow translation for the Hebrew ezer kenegdo. In fact, the noun ezer is a term that implies help from a superior (and is used many, many times in the Hebrew Bible to describe God, our help), and so God, in the text, supplies the modifier kenegdo to lessen the force of the help, making the helper equal with the helped. Robert Alter insists that a much better translation is “lifesaver.” I have also seen it rendered “the one who saves me and is the same as me.” So we have Adam, the first man, who is the beginning of a new race whose life is breathed into his nostrils by God – but even in this he is incomplete. In order to be who God would have him be, in order for the human race to be what God intends, a complementary person is needed to essentially save the life of the human race.

Interestingly, the Hebrew adam, which can either be “man” (though usually when referring to a male human Hebrew uses ish), “human being” of neutral gender, or the human race as a whole (plus also being the name Adam), is very closely related to the Hebrew adamah, which means ground. Adam was taken from adamah and given life by God (I can’t help but think that this connection with the earth could be connected with evolutionary biology, if one was inclined to get into such debates).

The same happens for the woman, though she is not taken from the ground- she is taken out of the man. By extension, of course, she is also from the ground, and God gives her life. Many people whose works I have read have tried to insist that because God created the man first he has some kind of special favor for male human beings or has declared that men should be the leaders of humanity. I do not see this in the text at all, instead I see only that men and women are designed by God to complement each other, not to attempt to rule each other, but instead they are to co-rule over God’s creation together. Woman is man’s lifesaver, because she completes everything God meant for the human race to be.

From Genesis 2:

23 The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’ (issah, “woman”, which is the word for “man” with a directive, so literally “from man”)
for she was taken out of man.” (ish, NOT adam)

24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

What I think most commentators who try and use woman coming from man as a ground for man’s superiority over woman do…. I think they forget about verse 24. Woman was taken out of man in the beginning…. but in the end it is man who returns to woman, and they become one flesh. Think about it- what happens during maritial intercourse? Is it not the man going back into the woman? And the union of the two is the example God will use later in the prophets and the New Testament to describe his relationship with his people, and it is the strongest indicator in this world of the union of a married couple. Not only that, but it is also the means by which a new human life is brought into the world. Woman came out of man to save his life, and to complete the race, and man goes back into woman to bring forth new life. Thus the two depend on each other, connected to the earth and to God and charged by God to fulfill his mandate to rule the earth and to fill it with worshippers of God.

Let us never forget, then, that all this business about a struggle for power between the genders begins at the curse, not at creation. As Christians, is it not our God-given duty and privelege to be always working so that in our community the curse is reversed? If, in Christ, the curse of death has no power over us, then so it should also be in our relationships, including the relationship between men and women.