I think it may be worth noting here that, in the history of Christian exegesis of Genesis, the account of Eve being drawn forth from Adam's side as a 'suitable helper' has
not in fact served as any kind of prooftext for patriarchy
or female subordination.
Nor was this the meaning imputed in the original Hebraic context. In his commentary on Genesis, John Walton has this to say about the word “helper” (
ezer) in the Old Testament:
The word “helper” is common enough as a description of someone who comes to the aid of or provides a service for someone. It carries no implications regarding the relationship or relative status of the individuals involved. In fact, the noun form of the word found in this verse as used elsewhere refers almost exclusively to God as the One who helps his people. If we expand our investigation to verbal forms, we find a continuing predominance of God as the subject, though there are a handful of occurrences where people help people. In this latter category we find people helping their neighbors or relatives (Isa. 41:6), people helping in a political alliance or coalition (Ezra 10:15), and military reinforcements (Josh. 10:4; 2 Sam. 8:5). Nothing suggests a subservient status of the one helping; in fact, the opposite is more likely. Certainly “helper” cannot be understood as the opposite/complement of “leader.
The Hebrew word employed here,
"ezer", is even used to describe an aspect of YHWH's divine nature in relation to human beings in
Exodus 18:4, where it says that Moses named one of his sons Eliezer, which in Hebrew means “
My God is my helper” (
Eli = “my God”;
ezer = “helper”).
One could not, obviously, interpret this to mean that God - the sovereign creator deity of the Israelites - is somehow inferior to his creatures because He is their
ezer 'helper'. Rather, Elohim is portrayed as a source of vital and irreplaceable strength to those who worship Him and this is the sense in which Eve too is described as Adam's "ezer", his companion and vital source of strength/stability/security, so that he is not 'alone' in the world.
Ezer is a combination of two roots, meaning
“to rescue/to save” and “strength”, that is salvific strength
. So
what it's actually saying, is that adam (man) cannot live without eve (woman). To reinforce this, the Torah qualifies the word
ezer with another word,
kenegdo in both
Genesis 2:18 and
20. Kenegdo: “suitable for him,” which means that Eve was fashioned to be a corresponding and equal partner for Adam.
St. Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167), a Catholic Cistercian monk, thus relied upon this verse of Genesis as his justification for the belief that God infused the desire for companionate love and egalitarian friendship / partnership within human nature from the very beginning:
Spiritual Friendship 01
"A friend loves always. And as our Jerome says, “a friendship that can end was never true.”...
When God fashioned the man, to recommend society as a higher blessing, he said, “it is not good that the man should be alone; let us make him a helper like himself.”
Indeed, divine power fashioned this helper not from similar or even from the same material. But as a more specific motivation for charity and friendship, this power created a woman from the very substance of the man. In a beautiful way, then, from the side of the first human a second was produced, so that nature might teach that all are equal or, as it were, collateral, and that among human beings, and this is a property of friendship, there exists neither superior nor inferior.
So, from the very beginning nature impressed on human minds this attachment of charity and friendship, which an inner experience of love soon increased with a delightful sweetness
When scholars in antiquity or the medieval period looked to scripture to defend patriarchal social norms, they turned to the verses
following the 'fall' and the eating of the forbidden fruit, namely
Genesis 3:16: "
your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."
However, this is expressly shown in the narrative to be a 'deviation' from the original divine plan of mutuality and equality of status between the sexes, and for that reason not something '
ideal' or necessarily eternal (i.e. it does not arise from natural law).
By contrast, Aristotle infamously wrote: "
as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject". In Genesis, this ordering is deemed an aberration as a consequence of the fall.
In God's first plan, Eve is a companion (not a 'subject') and the account emphasizes the mutual dependence of the sexes produced from the very same substance. This seems to be where St. Paul derived his own belief in his authentic epistles, that husband and wife have equal authority over each others' bodies (whereas Graeco-Roman thought restricted authority to male over female, the
paterfamilias over his subordinate household):
"The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time" (1 Corinthians 7:4-5).
