Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
A helper suitable for him
Genesis 2:18-25
18 Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” · WEB
The first thing called not good is a man alone, and the remedy is made from him and brought to him.
It is not good for the man to be alone. After a chapter in which everything was pronounced good and the whole was very good, something is called not good — and it is a solitude, in a world with no sin in it yet. The lack is not moral and not a defect in the man. It is built into what he is: a creature made in the image of a God who says let us, and therefore not complete by himself.
The word translated helper has to be handled carefully, because English hears a junior assistant in it and the Hebrew does not. The term is used most often in the Old Testament of God himself helping his people Psalms 121:2. It describes the supplying of what is lacking, and carries nothing about rank. The qualifier is the interesting half: comparable to him renders a phrase meaning something like corresponding to him, his counterpart — like him and facing him, matching without duplicating.
What happens next looks like a detour and is the argument. God brings the animals to the man to be named, and the naming is real work — attentive, discriminating, an exercise of the dominion he was given. And the sentence that closes it is the point of the exercise: but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him. He had to look. The conclusion that no creature answered him is one he reached himself, by examination, rather than one he was told.
Only then is the woman made, and the manner of it is deliberate. Not from the ground, as he was, and not independently, but from him — so that the two are of one substance, and neither can claim a separate origin. The man's response is the first recorded human speech, and it is poetry: This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.
Then the narrator steps forward with a comment addressed to the reader rather than to anyone in the scene: Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh. Marriage is grounded in the way the two were made, before the fall, and the sentence is drawn from the account rather than legislated over it. It is this verse, not a later law, that Jesus goes back to when asked about divorce Matthew 19:4–6 — treating it as the arrangement from the beginning and as still binding.
The chapter ends with a line that will be undone in seven verses: The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed. Nothing was hidden between them and nothing needed to be. It is the last sentence of the world as it was made.
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