August 28, 2024 – Genesis 2:20-25
Consciousness and the marriage of man and woman.
God encourages Adam’s moral and intellectual agency by presenting him the collection of animals that He made for him, and watching what Adam would “name” them. “Naming” in the sense used here, is a procedure for Adam to adopt the animals into his earthly legacy, as if they were family members who would be sharing his birthright. Adam granting his spiritual legacy to other creatures requires an intimate familiarity and knowledge of them; a type of familiarity that is naturally easier with creatures of his own kind, but more abstract with creatures that are very distant in their likeness. God’s grace is the source of Adam’s deep abstract knowledge of the other creatures, and will be required for Adam to embellish God’s image in Eden by farming it. Adam’s elevation of the lower animals into his legacy using the familiarizing influence of God’s grace, foreshadows the elevation of man into the life of God by Christ’s incarnation as flesh.
While Adam’s generous adoption of the unlike creatures elevates them to share his legacy, it leaves him in solitude, which God has noticed is not good. This is the first light of Adam’s self-consciousness asserting itself in his understanding that he is unlike God’s other creatures. God then prepares to remove material substance from Adam’s side (mistranslated as “rib”) by casting him into a deeply senseless sleep, in order to conceal His agency. God takes the material and fashions it into a woman, who He then presents to Adam, for his help meet (“bride”). Immediately, Adam recognizes the woman’s likeness to him as bone of his bone, the second light of his self-consciousness dawns, and he names her woman (taken out of man). God’s intention for Adam to have a suitable partner requires that he cling to her in recognition of their shared likeness (humanity), and that they both affirm their mutual obedience to God’s will. The sequence of creation (Adam first, then woman) insures that Adam knows what solitude was like in the woman’s absence, and longs to be re-united with this part of himself that was taken to create the woman.
Adam’s perception that the woman was made from his flesh, is surprising, as he was deeply unconscious at the time. His reason observes her physical likeness to him, but his belief in her origin from his own body is both an assertion of faith in God’s action, and the emergence of self-awareness by loving and longing for, a like creature. Adam’s reason progresses to this faith assertion because his reason was ennobled by God’s grace. God’s love therefore brought Adam’s reason its self awareness through his perception of the woman as flesh of his flesh, which further prepared Adam for receiving more of God’s grace through this primordial marriage to the woman.
Adam then pronounces God’s ordinance that man and woman must leave their mother and father, and cling to one another as one flesh. Since Adam has no experience or knowledge of a mother in Eden, this pronouncement indicates that Adam is speaking a prophesy for later generations of men and women. The pure and holy relation of man and woman in marriage overseen by God’s loving intentions, is a three way community that reflects the structure of The Holy Trinity. At the inception of their union, where they are now referred to as “the man and his wife”, they are naked, one flesh, unashamed and unaware of any reason to cover themselves. This is because at this time they are not conscious of sin, which produces shame.