36 | OCTOBER 20 • 2022
I
n The Lonely Man of Faith, Rabbi
Soloveitchik drew our attention to the
fact that Bereishit contains two separate
accounts of creation. The first is in Genesis
1, the second in Genesis 2-3, and they are
significantly different.
In the first, God is called
Elokim, in the second,
Hashem Elokim. In the first,
man and woman are created
simultaneously: “male and
female He created them.
” In
the second, they are created
sequentially: first man, then
woman. In the first, humans
are commanded to “fill the earth and sub-
due it.
” In the second, the first human is
placed in the garden “to serve it and pre-
serve it.
” In the first, humans are described
as “in the image and likeness” of God. In
the second, man is created from “the dust
of the earth.
”
The explanation, says Rabbi Soloveitchik,
is that the Torah is describing two aspects
of our humanity that he calls respectively,
“Majestic man” and “Covenantal man.
” We
are majestic masters of creation: that is the
message of Genesis 1. But we also experi-
ence existential loneliness, we seek cove-
nant and connection: that is the message of
Genesis 2.
There is, though, another strange duality
— a story told in two quite different ways
— that has to do not with creation but with
human relationships. There are two differ-
ent accounts of the way the first man gives
a name to the first woman. This is the first:
“This time – bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman’ [ishah]
for she was taken from man [ish].
”
And this, many verses later, is the sec-
ond:
“
And the man called his wife Eve
[Chavah]
because she was the mother of all life.
”
The differences between these two
accounts are highly consequential:
1.) In the first, the man names, not a
person, but a class, a category. He uses not
a name but a noun. The other person is,
for him, simply “woman,
” a type, not an
individual. In the second, he gives his wife
a proper name. She has become, for him, a
person in her own right.
2.) In the first, he emphasizes their sim-
ilarities — she is “bone of my bones, and
flesh of my flesh.
” In the second, he empha-
sizes the difference. She can give birth;
he cannot. We can hear this in the very
sound of the names. Ish and Ishah sound
similar because they are similar. Adam and
Chavah do not sound similar at all.
3.) In the first, it is the woman who is
portrayed as dependent: “she was taken
from man.
” In the second, it is the other
way around. Adam, from Adamah, rep-
resents mortality: “By the sweat of your
brow you will eat your food until you
return to the ground (ha-adamah) since
from it you were taken.
” It is Chavah who
redeems man from mortality by bringing
new life into the world.
4.) The consequences of the two acts of
naming are completely different. After the
first comes the sin of eating the forbidden
fruit and the punishment: exile from Eden.
After the second, however, we read that
God made for the couple, “garments of
skin” (“or” is spelled here with the letter
ayin) and clothed them. This is a gesture of
protection and love. In the school of Rabbi
Meir, they read this phrase as “garments
of light” (“or” with an aleph). God robed
them with radiance.
Only after the man has given his wife a
proper name do we find the Torah refer-
ring to God Himself by His proper name
alone, namely Hashem (in Genesis 4).
Until then He has been described as either
Elokim or Hashem Elokim — Elokim being
the impersonal aspect of God: God as law,
God as power, God as justice. In other
words, our relationship to God parallels
our relationship to one another. Only when
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks
The
Genesis
of Love