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Genesis 2:21-23
New Catholic Bible
Genesis 2:21-23
New Catholic Bible
21 The Lord God therefore caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. He took one of his ribs and replaced it with flesh. 22 The Lord God then formed a woman out of the rib that he had taken from the man. He brought her before the man.
23 The man said,
“This one is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh.[a]
She shall be called woman
because she was taken from man.”
Footnotes
- Genesis 2:23 Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: a common Semitic way of expressing consanguinity (Gen 29:14) or membership in the same tribe or even simply in the same people (2 Sam 5:1; 19:13-14) or the same city (Jdg 9:2). Here it means that the woman has the same nature as the man; she alone can make possible the love that characterizes the matrimonial bond. The words she shall be called woman, etc., can be understood only in light of the assonance in the original text: Hebrew, isha, “woman,” seems to be the feminine form of ish, “man” in the sense of “male” (adam refers to man as including both man and woman, i.e., possessing the nature common to all human beings).
