Genesis 2:19-24
New Catholic Bible
19 The Lord God therefore formed every sort of wild animal and all the birds of the air, and he brought them before the man to see what he would name them.[a] Whatever the man called each living creature, that was the name that it would bear. 20 The man gave names to every type of animal, all the birds of the air and all the wild animals, but the man could not find anything that was like him.
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.[b]
She shall be called woman
because she was taken from man.”
24 This is why a man leaves his father and his mother[c] and joins with a wife, and the two become one flesh.
Read full chapterFootnotes
- Genesis 2:19 Name them: this was the man’s first act of dominion over the creatures around him.
- 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).
- Genesis 2:24 Leaves his father and his mother: instead of remaining under the protective custody of his parents, a man leaves them and, with his wife, establishes a new family unit. Joins . . . one flesh: the divine intention for husband and wife was monogamy. Together they were to form an inseparable union, of which “one flesh” is both a sign and an expression.
