Genesis 2 says that God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and so we are going to take a look at the deep sleep of Abraham in Genesis 15 and burial practices in the ancient world to find out the original context of this strange account.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Last week, we talked about the word toledot, which is translated as generations and this week we are going to talk about the two people who all the generations in the Bible go back to—Adam and Eve! I hope that you guys have been reading Genesis 2 and 3 because it makes all this so much easier. When I am going to listen to a teaching and I know the subject beforehand, I read the entire text first. Then I listen to the teaching. Then I read the text again. I do this to see if my understanding changed. I also do it to make sure that the teacher didn’t run the Bible through a blender and mangle it. Listening to people teach different things is good and it teaches us how to think critically but only if we always go back to the Bible and history. People who teach don’t always know their Bibles very well, so just be careful. I am sure you guys all know people who just like to talk about stuff but maybe don’t really know what they are talking about and you need to know that the Bible is just another thing that some people pretend to know a lot about. So, don’t be intimidated—which means, don’t be scared to disagree with someone just because they sound very convincing. And you know what? You can disagree with me too. My goal in teaching you isn’t to get you to agree with me. My goals are (1) to teach you about why you can trust God by teaching you who He is, (2) to teach you about who you are in God and how He sees you and how you should live to please Him, and (3) to teach you to be excited about studying the Bible for yourself and how to study it. But I am not always going to be right about everything, and that’s okay because only Jesus was right about everything. But what I tell you is never going to disrespect God, or Jesus or teach you to trust me instead of your Bibles and your parents. We’re just going to have fun learning how wonderful God is.
We’re going to read some verses in Genesis 2 today but not all of them because I like to teach by topic, and then we go back when we have learned a bunch of different things and read the whole thing together so we can all understand it together. When I teach grownups, I do everything verse by verse and for some things that is better but not for this.
7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed…15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” 18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
What did we see here? We see that God made the man, and we will call him Adam even though the Bible doesn’t definitely call him that yet, outside the Garden and then brought him in it to live in it. Now, there are things that the Bible wants us to know and things the Bible doesn’t care about us knowing. One, it doesn’t tell us how long it was after God created Adam that He put him in the Garden. It doesn’t say how long it took God to plant His Garden—did He do it with the snap of His fingers or did He do it the old-fashioned way? It doesn’t say and so it must not be very important, and the Garden isn’t mentioned as being created in Genesis 1. That means there is a different message God is trying to teach Moses when He told him this story because, remember, no one was there to see the Creation of the Heavens and the Earth so this information had to be told to someone by God, who was the only witness. Moses spent a lot of time in his tent in the wilderness with God and I believe God was telling him all of this personally. The Bible doesn’t say that but that’s my opinion. You might have a different opinion and that’s okay because it doesn’t change who God is or our relationship to God—all these maybes and what-ifs.
The Bible says that “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” And we all know what that says to us—it sounds like God took dust that was laying on the ground and made the shape of a human of the dust and breathed into it and Adam was like Pinocchio and came to life. But sometimes we forget what this would have sounded like to the people Moses was telling the story to in the wilderness. Let’s look at another Bible verse so we can see what they thought about dust. You probably already know that the story of Adam and Eve has a sad ending, but God says this to them when Adam receives his consequences for disobeying God, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Gen 3:19, ESV)
Now this next part is kinda gross and not what we do today. In the ancient world, when the Israelites buried their dead, they didn’t dig a hole in the ground and put the body in a coffin and leave it buried forever. They would put their dead loved ones in a cave, so really they didn’t “bury” them at all. They would wrap the body in cloth and place it on a stone bench that they would carve into the side of the cave. They would put a huge stone to block the surface so that animals couldn’t eat the body and would leave it there for a year and come back. When they came back there were only two things left—bones and dust. They would put the bones in a smaller box or move them to the side. So, the children of Israel knew that everyone ended up as dust sooner or later. For them, dust was a reminder that they were created mortal—dust means that everyone dies because we weren’t created to live forever. Not without eating something special, anyway, but we will talk about that next week.
So, telling them the story this way, just told them that they were mortal in the beginning. They came from dust and someday they would return to dust. This is normal. God was just speaking their language. So, we have Adam, and Adam was a real person. And we know He was created outside of the Garden and he was mortal when he was created and that God put Adam in His garden at some point in his life—maybe right away or maybe later. Doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t say that Adam was the only human being. God might have created many humans but we don’t know because this only tells us the story of one man, the one He decided to put into the Garden. If there were other people, he sure got lucky! But let’s just assume that Adam is the only one and, if so, then this creation of Adam happened on the sixth day of Creation because that is when God created humans. And remember, you don’t have to agree with me. I am probably telling you things you have never heard before. I didn’t get them out of nowhere, or make them up, of course—this is what some scholars believe. Scholars are people who study the Bible as their job. All they want to do is understand God’s word. And when we are used to reading the Bible in a way that makes sense to us, sometimes we totally miss what would have made sense to the people who originally heard it. Scholars try and figure out how they would have understood this back when Moses was reading all this to them, and what God wanted them to understand about Himself and who they were created to be. My favorite scholar to learn about Genesis from is named John Walton and he has a lot of books. I like what he says, that in the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth, and then in Genesis 2 and 3 He created food and family. So, now we’re talking about food and family. Last week, we talked about the Garden and how it had every tree that was good for food. So, we have food and God has put Adam in the Garden to work it and keep it—that means that Adam is a gardener and he will work six days a week growing and expanding the Garden. But we don’t have family because the man is all alone right now. Is it good that the man is all alone?
18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
I guess it’s not good. Remember that everything in Genesis 1 was called good and very good. This is the first time we see that something is not good. Being all alone is not good. Adam needs a “helper fit for him.” In Hebrew that is ezer k’negdo—and it means a helper equal to him. Almost every time the word ezer is used in Scripture, it is talking about how God helps us. But God isn’t looking for a superior helper for Adam because Adam already has a superior helper in God. God knows that Adam needs a helper like himself. K’negdo means “like him” or, in modern Hebrew, equal to him. What Adam needs is another human being. But God is going to have to prove that to Adam first, and how He does that is really cool.
First of all, God had already created a ton of animals. And so, God paraded all the animals He had already made before Adam and God allowed Adam to rule over them by naming them. We’ll talk about that some other time but when someone gave someone else a name, it meant they were taking authority over that person and deciding what they would be. That’s why ancient names have meanings and sometimes our modern names don’t mean anything. But we aren’t going to talk about that this week. Adam saw each of the animals and gave it a name but he couldn’t find a single one that was a good companion for him the way he needed. Not even dogs or cats or horses or guinea pigs. They couldn’t help him the way we all need to be helped. They couldn’t talk with him and understand him. They couldn’t share his interests or his life. They weren’t smart enough to help him figure things out. They didn’t know when he was about to make a mistake so they couldn’t warn him. Adam needed someone who was like him. But sometimes we don’t know what we need until we figure out what we don’t need. Adam didn’t need a pet or transportation or a whole bunch of animals to rule over. And once he went through all the naming of the animals, I think he was probably feeling very lonely.
Now, here’s where it gets super interesting and where we need to know the story of Abraham. One time, God told Abraham to make a certain sacrifice and after he obeyed, God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Abraham. And Abraham saw a vision—a vision is like a movie God plays for us that isn’t really happening but we can see it and God uses that to give someone a special message. Because of that vision, Abraham knew that God would bless him with a son and told him the future about His descendants being slaves in Egypt. It was like a “good news/bad news” sort of deal. Well, that same word for deep sleep, tardemah, is what is used for what happened to Adam.
21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
Now, to us, it looks like God put Adam under anesthesia and took one of his ribs and sewed him back up again, and made a woman. But this is one of those places in the Bible where a word that actually means one thing is translated as another. And the reason why is because of tradition. A tradition is where everyone agrees to do certain things certain ways and everyone understands that this is just the way things are done even if they don’t know why. Why do we have turkey on Thanksgiving? Because it’s a tradition. I have zero ideas why that even got started. Why do Jewish people have roasted chicken for Sabbath dinner? Because it’s a tradition. Why do people from Mexico take a siesta, a nap, in the middle of the day? Because it’s too stinking hot to do anything else, that’s why—but it’s also a tradition. Why is high school football on Friday nights and NFL football on Sundays and Monday nights? Why do we watch fireworks and eat barbeque on the Fourth of July? Tradition! Some traditions are good and others are bad but because they are traditions we mostly do them without even stopping to think about it.
Why do Bible translators translate a word that means “side” into one tiny little rib? It’s a tradition. But it usually means like the side of a building or something. So, why don’t we do our “what if” and translate the words like they are translated in other places, with the same context and meaning. Let’s see what is happening to Adam now.
“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and while he was having a vision he saw the Lord God divide him into two parts. God healed him up and out of the other half of his body, God created a woman and showed her to Adam.”
23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
It’s like Adam said, “Aha! At last! Those animals were nothing like me but this one is just like me. We are both humans and we are part of each other.” And although Adam named all the animals, he only describes himself and Eve (who has no name yet). He is man and she is woman. In Hebrew that is ish and isha. Eve wasn’t an animal, so he wasn’t ruling over her and naming her. She wasn’t inferior to him. That’s really important because when we study other cultures in the world when the Bible was written, some of them wrote about women as though they weren’t much better than animals. In the ancient law codes of other cultures, the laws about men and women made it clear that women were lesser beings and poor people were inferior to, meaning not as good as, rich people. But in the beginning, God didn’t make people to rule over one another. In the Creation story, people were made to rule over nature and to subdue it, not to rule over one another. In fact, God’s people only ever had kings because they wanted to be like all the pagan nations. In the beginning, only God ruled over human beings and human beings were supposed to work together in love and harmony, in peace, to do the work of the Garden.
But you still might be asking yourself why God’s company wasn’t enough. Why did Adam need another human being for companionship and to help with the job of working and guarding the garden? You would think that we could live quite nicely in God’s Garden with Him, where we will see that He walks in the cool of the day. We would think that God is all we need and we can live our lives alone just so long as we have Him. That we don’t need anyone else. But the Bible says that being alone is “not good.” We need other human beings and we need to have a community. In fact, we can’t be Christians all alone. We can’t learn to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, self-controlled, humble, meek and generous when there is no one else in our lives. I mean, it’s easy to think we are good Christians when we are living alone on a deserted island surrounded by fruit trees. But we weren’t created to be alone. We were created to love and to be loved. To help and to be helped. To teach and be taught. We need to be useful and to make others useful too.
Why can’t we just be that way with God? Because God doesn’t need our, or anyone’s, help with anything. We aren’t equals or even opposites to Him. He is the Creator and we are the creations. He existed before us and created everything without help from us, thank you very much. And so, without other human beings, our lives would be half empty. God showed Adam in a vision that He was removing half of Adam and making a new person. He was only half a person if he was all alone in the world. God took that half and made Eve. In the same way, Eve is only half a person without having someone to need her. And without each other, there would be no other humans in the Garden ever. Imagine if God had made Adam a buddy to help him out, another guy. Life would have gotten pretty boring with nothing but gardening and snapping towels at each other. There would have been community between them, but it would have been incomplete with no children and no differences between them. Like Professor Walton said, in Genesis 2, God created food and family. God could have made a brother for Adam but He made a woman instead because a woman was what Adam needed.
Now that doesn’t mean that everyone will get married. Jesus wasn’t married and neither was Paul. We don’t see anything about Adam and Eve getting married in the Garden and we don’t see anything about children until after they have already been booted from the Garden. Not everyone will have children either. Abraham and Sarah didn’t have children until she was ninety years old! Isaac and Rebekah had no children for twenty years! Not being married and not having children is not a curse and it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love unmarried people or that their lives aren’t good. God wasn’t saying that. God was saying that we were not created to be all by ourselves. Not everyone can get married but everyone has people. Families and friends and even a new person in town can go to church or to the synagogue and get a new community. We have people we work with and neighbors and schoolmates and we can take up hobbies where we meet others. God created us to be social, with other thinking human beings who can challenge us and help us and whom we can help in return. God created us to love others and to be loved by others.
What about Jesus? He was perfect and was always hearing from His Father, our God. What does it say about Jesus—did He need people?
And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach. (Mark 3:14, ESV)
WOW! Jesus chose His twelve disciples so that they could be with Him! That’s amazing. What about when He was sad and upset? Like the night they were going to arrest Him. Didn’t He just want to be alone then?
Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” (Matt 26:38, ESV)
Jesus is the perfect reflection of our Father in Heaven and our Father said it is not good for man to be alone. So, Jesus wasn’t alone, He called others to be with Him and especially when He was just about at the saddest moment of His life. When Jesus sent them out to preach and heal people, He sent them out in groups of two and before He died, He told them that He wanted them to be united the way He and the Father are united. They weren’t supposed to go off and do it all alone. Elijah had Elisha with him to share in the work. Moses had Aaron. Paul had Barnabus. It is not good for people to be alone or to try and do everything alone. We were created to need people–not pets, not slaves, not employees. We need equals. We were never meant to rule over one another the way we do now. Jesus said that whoever would be the greatest in the Kingdom would serve everyone. And you can’t serve people when you are all by yourself. I pray that all of you will have at least one good friend in your life and that you will all be good friends. I pray that you will help people and that you will let people help you. Because we are here to be together.
I love you. I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you—people like me.