Cheryl Schatz

Mark,
You said:

I disagree Pinklight that Adam naming Eve didn’t give her some identity. The fact that ”isshah’, is th feminine form of ”ish’ is significant, since the poetry of the chapter says that he called her ‘woman’ BECAUSE she was made from ‘man’. The very reason Adam gives her that name is because of how she is made, namely his own rib.

The problem with this is that God had already identified this before Adam did. It is in the text and the verses have not changed position since I last looked at them. This is not a slip up of God’s. i.e. it is not God’s mistake that He identified how and what the woman was before He brought her to Adam. It was intentional as God always intended that woman would not be made from the dirt but from the man. She is to be the glory of the man.

Therefore the name ‘woman’ suggests immense identity (not saying that that wasn’t God’s plan though). It identifies how she was made and why she was made (not good for man to be alone and to make a one flesh union).

It is immense identity. But it is God’s identity and God’s plan not man’s. It was God who planned to create her from his body therefore the immense identity of the whole thing originates with God not with man. It was God who intended a one flesh union and that is why marriage is so important even today. Man didn’t originate the joining together with her. God did. And it is that God part that forbids man to break apart what God has joined.

To simply diminish the significance of naming the woman, reduces the very words of the passage and there significance.

Not true. For God to identify her by creating her from the man and then have her called woman even before He brought her to the man does not diminish the significance of her name. In fact it is a double significance because it is what God created and His plan and man’s complete acceptance of God’s plan. If you remove God’s part that was planned in advance and carried on without having man as part of the plan, it is of great significance that man admits that God’s sovereign will is the very best. And he even does it with poetry.

If she had not been made in this precise way, and named in this way she would have no identity of ‘woman’ since her identity is based around her creation from the ‘man’.

But you fail to see that it is creation from the man but not BY the man. Do you see the difference? God used the man as the basis of the woman, but man did not originate the idea or the plan or the way. It is only because it was in the mind of God that it was a perfect plan.

Where as man (‘adam’) finds it’s identity in the ground from which he was made (ha’adam) and to which he returns after the fall. These are important points that need to be addressed by egals not just rejected because of 2:22

No, my friend, Adam’s identity is not in the dirt. His identity is in the image of God. His return to the dirt is the result of the fall not the plan of God.