What Does Genesis 2:22 Mean?
And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from Adam, he built into a woman, and brought her to Adam.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.THE KEY
The Hebrew says God built the woman from the man’s side, so what English calls “made” carries the image of shaping a living structure from shared human substance.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks now of the woman arising from the man’s own side and being brought into relation with him. It holds shared origin and encounter together: difference appears within a common human substance.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that woman enters as an unrelated creation: she is built from the man’s own side.
THE ROOT
וַיִּבֶן
vayiven
GROWS FROM
בנה
banah
To build or establish.
The verb translated “made” is “built,” from the same root as words for building and structure. The woman is presented as a shaped form arising from the human’s own side.
ALSO GROWS
binyan: Building or structure.
בִּנְיָן
This branch makes the verse’s architectural sense audible: the woman is built.
mivneh: Structure or construction.
מִבְנֶה
It carries the same root into the idea of a formed structure, echoing the verse’s choice of verb.
צֵלָע
tsela
GROWS FROM
צלע
tsela
Side or flank; the noun can also mean a rib.
The noun tsela can name a rib or a side, and it also names the side of a structure. The body’s image carries architectural resonance: the woman is shaped from the human’s side.
ALSO GROWS
tsela: Rib or side of the body.
צֵלָע
This is the bodily meaning in the verse: the material from which the woman is built.
tselaot: Sides or side chambers of a structure.
צְלָעֹת
This related form shows the same word reaching from bodily anatomy into architecture.
THE PATTERN
Shared substance becomes the ground for recognition, union, and care.
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for out of man she was taken.Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.So husbands owe love to their wives, as to their own bodies. The one who loves his wife loves himself.THE THREAD
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs and shut the flesh in its place.The word translated “rib” in both verses is tsela, which can also mean “side.” The earlier verse names what is taken from the human’s side; this one shows that side being built into a woman, holding the bodily and architectural images together.
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