Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
In The Lonely Man of Faith, Rabbi Soloveitchik drew our attention to the fact that there are two accounts of creation. The first is in Genesis 1, the second in Genesis 2-3, and they are significantly different.
In the first, G-d 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 subdue it.” In the second, the first human is placed in the garden “to serve it and preserve it.” In the first, humans are described as “in the image and likeness” of G-d. 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 experience existential loneliness, we seek covenant 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 different 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 second:
And the man called his wife Eve [Chava] because she was the mother of all life.
The differences between these two accounts are highly consequential.
- 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.
- Further, he emphasizes their similarities: she is “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” In the second, he emphasizes 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.
- 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, represents 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.
- 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 G-d made for the couple, “garments of skin” (or with an 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). G-d robed them with radiance.
Only after the man has given his wife a proper name do we find the Torah referring to G-d 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 G-d: G-d as law, G-d as power, G-d as justice. In other words, our relationship to G-d parallels our relationship to one another. Only when we respect and recognize the uniqueness of another person are we capable of respecting and recognizing the uniqueness of G-d Himself.
Now let us return to the two creation accounts, this time not looking at what they tell us about humanity (as in The Lonely Man of Faith), but simply at what they tell us about creation.
