Was Eve made from Adam’s rib?

What Genesis 2 says

The second account of creation begins with a man alone. He names every animal, but among them “there was not found a helper comparable to him” (Genesis 2:20). Then comes the surgery.

Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Yahweh God made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

Two details hide in the Hebrew. The deep sleep, tardemah, is the same heavy sleep that falls on Abram when God makes a covenant with him (Genesis 15:12): the sleeper sees nothing of what God does. And where English says “made,” the verb is banah, to build. God shaped the man like a potter. He builds the woman, like a house.

Rib or side?

The word tsela appears about forty times in the Hebrew Bible. Only in this chapter do translators make it a rib. Elsewhere it is a side, a side room or a plank:

• the two sides of the ark of the covenant, where its gold rings hang (Exodus 25:12)
• the north side of the tabernacle (Exodus 26:20)
• the side rooms built around Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:5)
• the hillside where Shimei walks along cursing David (2 Samuel 16:13)

The Greek translators chose pleura, which can mean a rib or the side of the body, and the Latin costa fixed “rib” in Western Bibles. Read as side, the scene changes: God takes one side of the human and builds the other side from it, and the man greets her as “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (2:23). Some rabbis pictured the first human with two faces, back to back, then split (Genesis Rabbah 8:1). In the Talmud two teachers argued over what the tsela was: one said a face, the other a tail (Berakhot 61a).

Why the rib? Old answers

Why that bone? A rabbi in Genesis Rabbah (18:2) imagined God weighing each part of the body: not the head, lest she be proud; not the eye, lest she pry; not the foot, lest she wander; but a hidden part. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, gave the answer that stuck: not from the man’s head, for she was not to rule him, nor from his feet, for she was not to be his slave, but from his side, as a companion (Summa Theologiae I, q. 92, a. 3). In the early 1700s the English commentator Matthew Henry added: under his arm, to be protected, and near his heart, to be loved.

The Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer pointed to a Sumerian myth, Enki and Ninhursag, in which a goddess named Ninti heals the god’s aching rib. In Sumerian ti means both rib and life, and Eve is “the mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20). Many scholars doubt Genesis borrowed the pun, but the echo is striking.

Do men have one rib fewer?

No. Men and women both have twelve pairs. The idea that men are missing one is a folk reading of Genesis; even taken literally, the story describes one man’s operation, not a trait passed to his sons.

How Paul used the story

Paul writes that woman came from man (1 Corinthians 11:8), and 1 Timothy 2:13 notes that Adam was formed first. Then Paul turns the order around.

Nevertheless, neither is the woman independent of the man, nor the man independent of the woman, in the Lord. For as woman came from man, so a man also comes through a woman; but all things are from God.

Readers still argue whether the rib teaches order or equality. For the woman some legends placed before Eve, see whether Lilith is in the Bible.