Cheryl Schatz

Mark,
You said:

I understand that essentially you are saying that because the narrative says “he made into a woman” (Gen 2:22), that this narrative is identifying her as ‘woman’ and thus God calls her woman before the man. But it’s just dancing around the obvious. Yes God created her, but the job of calling her something was given to the man.

Give me the proof that God gave the job to Adam? Also give me the proof that God identifying her as woman at her creation is unimportant and in essence is laid aside so that the man can name her?

2. The sentence structure is the same as with the other animals. …To get hung-up on the narrative description of what God has made misses the point. The emphasis of the passage is not on that, it is on the declaration of the man- this is what is being stressed, not the narrative.

Mark, you appear to be man-centered instead of God centered. To make God’s creation and identification as secondary to the man and then to insist that the purpose of God bringing her was to have Adam name her instead of a marriage joining the two by God makes the center of everything as man. Don’t you see the problem in making all of the text as man-centered?

I am not saying God is ignorant of what he has made, simply that we do not have a quote before the man’s declaration that says “God said “you are called woman”.

We don’t need a direct quote from God when the inspired text tells us what God made and how He made her. Her creation is the words of God spoken through the agency of a man, but no less the inspired words of God.

Therefore God allows the man to name the woman, the same way he allowed the man to name all the other animals.

God allows the man to identify the woman with himself, but God doesn’t need Adam to name her since He has already done that by His act of creation. Don’t you see that this is different from the way He dealt with the animals. He did not identify the animals as giraffe, dog, cat. Adam did that. But God did identify the woman. He is the source of her ultimate creation. She is in the image of God first and then image of man second.

This does not mean that i am saying God did not know what he created, nor that he knew what Adam would call her, simply it was Adams role to declare to both the woman and himself what her identification was.

Where does the text say that this was Adam’s “role”? Where does it say that it was “for this reason” that God brought her to Adam?

I will break this comment here and continue on the next comment.