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

