The Bible gives us only two chapters on the creation of the world before the fall. If we’re honest, most of us would like more information. Where exactly was the garden of Eden? What did it look like? What did it smell like? Were the days normal twenty-four-hour days? How old did Adam appear to be? How old did the trees appear to be? Were there mosquitoes? But of all the things we might want to know more clearly, it’s worth noting what God does tell us about in some detail. He tells us quite a bit about the man and the woman—how they are the same, how they are different, and how they were made for each other.
If we are to think rightly and feel rightly and embrace rightly what it means to be male and female, we need to appreciate that God doesn’t give arbitrary rules for men and women to follow. Whatever “rules” there are for men and women in the church are never mere rules; they reflect the sort of differentiated and complementary image bearers God designed us to be from the beginning. Once we understand the first chapters of Genesis, and how God has embedded sexual differentiation and sexual union (in marriage) in the natural order of the created world, everything else we see in the Bible about being a man or being a woman makes more sense. All good theology starts in Genesis, but it never stops there.
15 Truths on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
And how much do the opening chapters of Genesis really say about manhood and womanhood? I’ll limit myself to fifteen observations.
1. God created both the man and the woman in his image.
First, the man and the woman were both created in the image of God. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27 ESV). Men and women, as distinct from all else in creation, are image bearers. We are like statues or icons placed in creation to testify to the world that God has dominion over this place. As image bearers, not to mention coheirs of the grace of life (1 Peter 3:7), men and women possess equal worth and dignity. Eve was not a lesser creature. She was not an inferior being. Although God has revealed himself in masculine language (e.g., father, king, husband), he is neither male nor female. To be faithful to God’s revelation, we should speak of God only in the masculine terms he has given us, but to call God “Father” is not the same as saying God is a man (though he became a man in the incarnation). Maleness, therefore, is not a higher order of being than femaleness. Both men and women were made to represent God in the world.
2. Humanity has both singularity and plurality.
Second, man has both singularity and plurality.[1] Humanity can be named singularly as adam (“man” not “woman”), but humanity is at the same time male and female. There is a “him” and a “them” (Genesis 1:27 ESV). The way the creation account spells out sexual difference is so obvious that we can miss its importance. God does not mention the difference of, say, height or hair color or temperament or gifting. The one identity marker emphasized at the beginning is maleness and femaleness.
3. God called both the man and the woman to rule his creation.
Third, the man and the woman were given joint rule over creation. Together they were to fill the earth and subdue it. God blessed them, and God told them to have dominion over every living thing (Genesis 1:28).
4. The man and the woman were given different tasks by God.
Fourth, within this joint rule, the man and woman were given different tasks and created in different realms. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15 ESV). Adam was created outside of the garden and charged with cultivating it and protecting it, a protection under which the woman was meant to flourish. Eve was created within the garden, suggesting “a special relationship to the inner world of the Garden.”[2] The creation mandate—filling the earth and subduing it—applies to both sexes, but asymmetrically. The man, endowed with greater biological strength, is fitted especially for tilling the soil and taming the garden, while the woman, possessing within her the capacity to cultivate new life, is fitted especially for filling the earth and tending to the communal aspects of the garden.
5. God gave man the task of priest.
Fifth, man was given the priest-like task of maintaining the holiness of the garden. To the man alone God gave the command: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not” (Genesis 2:16–17 ESV). In working and keeping the garden (Genesis 2:15), the man was responsible for establishing God’s command on the earth and guarding God’s moral boundaries. His obedience to this task would mean blessing, while his disobedience would mean death.
6. God created the man before the woman.
Sixth, man was created before the woman. Famously, Paul grounded his prohibition against women teaching in the church based on this order. “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:12–13 ESV). The point is not “first equals best,” as if God was picking sides for his kickball team. After all, God made blue jays and beavers and salamanders before he made man. The order matters because it indicates Adam’s position in the creation narrative as priest and protector and Eve’s position as coming under the man’s protection, made from his side and for his support.
7. God gave the woman as a helper to the man.
Seventh, the woman was given as a helper to the man. Eve was created from man (Genesis 2:22)—equal in worth—and she was also created for man (Genesis 2:20)—different in function. The male leadership, which the text hints at in Genesis 1:27 by calling male and female “man,” is spoken plainly in chapter 2 when Eve is given to Adam as his “helper” (Genesis 2:18, 20 ESV). Being a helper carries no connotations of diminished worth or status; for God is sometimes called the helper of Israel (Exodus 18:4; Psalms 33:20; 146:5). Ezer (helper) is a functional term, not a demeaning one. Just as God at times comes alongside to help his people, so the role of the woman in relationship to her husband is that of a helper. “For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Corinthians 11:8 ESV).
We tend to psychologize Adam’s aloneness and interpret “helper” along the lines of comfort and companionship. This is one possible aspect of the term. Calvin said Eve was God’s gift to Adam “to assist him to live well.” But “helper” cannot be divorced from the broader concerns of the creation mandate. It was not good for man to be alone because by himself he could not “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28 ESV). Here again we see the ordered complementarity of male and female. Another man could have helped Adam till the soil. Another man could have provided relational respite and energy for Adam. God could have gifted Adam a plow or a team of oxen or a fraternity of manly friends—all of which would have been useful, even delightful. But none would have been a helper fit for the crucial task of producing and rearing children. If mankind is to have dominion on the earth, there must be a man to work the garden and a woman to be his helpmate.
8. God tasked the man with naming every living creature.
Eighth, the man was given the responsibility for naming every living creature. It is telling that Adam alone was given this exercise of dominion and that he was able to fulfill this responsibility prior to the creation of Eve. Twice Adam named the woman (Genesis 2:23; 3:20), indicating his leadership. In receiving their names from Adam, the rest of the living creatures, including the woman, benefit from the man’s creative cultivation and authority.
9. God created the man and the woman in different ways.
Ninth, the man and the woman were created in different ways. Genesis 1 describes the making of male and female as a generic act of creation (Genesis 1:27). In the zoom lens of Genesis 2, however, we see that God created each in its own way. The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground (Genesis 2:7), while the Lord God built the woman from the rib he had taken from the man. Not surprisingly, the man is tasked with tending to the health and vitality of the ground from which he came, while the woman is tasked with helping the man from whom she came. The way in which each was created suggests the special work they will do in the wider world—the man in the establishment of the external world of industry, and the woman in the nurture of the inner world of the family that will come from her as helpmate.
10. The man and the woman are interdependent.
Tenth, the names “man” and “woman” suggest interdependence. In Genesis 2:23, Adam exclaimed, “She shall be called Woman [ishah], because she was taken out of Man [ish]” (ESV). Providentially, our English words show the connection that is there in the Hebrew. We lose something deeply important in the awkward intersectional neologisms that turn woman into womxn and women into womyn. We lose all verbal recognition that the woman came from the man and that the man was irreversibly connected to the woman. “In the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman” (1 Corinthians 11:11–12 ESV).
11. The woman’s familial order takes precedence over the man’s.
Eleventh, in marriage, the man leaves his family and holds fast to his wife. Given everything we’ve seen up to this point, we expect that the wife would leave her family and cling to her husband. Wasn’t he created first? Isn’t he the keeper of the garden and protector of all therein? Didn’t he exercise authority in naming the woman? Surely the helper leaves her family to join her husband. But we are told the opposite, that the man shall leave his father and mother (Genesis 2:24). This makes sense when we realize that sexual differentiation is not about first place and second place, but about natural order and design. The inner world of the garden, radiating out from the family, is shaped by the help and nurture of the woman. Emotional intimacy and communion will be fostered and formed in a unique way by the woman. As such, in a relational sense (even if not in a geographic or legal sense), her familial order takes precedence over the man’s.
Don’t we see this reality even today? When a daughter gets married, you gain a son more than you lose a daughter. When a son gets married, you lose a son more than you gain a daughter. Not true across the board, of course. And yet even when both bride and groom come from healthy, loving families, the daughter almost always maintains her familial relationships better than the son. The Genesis account is not telling men to renounce their families of origin, but it is telling us something significant about the way relational bonds are typically formed and maintained through women.
12. God created the man and woman to compliment one another.
Twelfth, the two came from one flesh and became one flesh. Eve was bone of Adam’s bone and flesh of his flesh. Men and women are made of the same stuff and meant for each other, not so that one dissolves into the other, but that the two become one. Marriage must be, and can only be, between a man and a woman, because marriage is not just the union of two persons but the reunion of a complementary pair. As Calvin puts it, “Something was taken from Adam, in order that he might embrace, with greater benevolence, a part of himself.” Adam may have lost a rib, but he gained a far richer reward, “since he obtained a faithful associate of life; for he now saw himself, who had before been imperfect, rendered complete in his wife.”[3]
13. The man is designated the leader of the couple by God.
Thirteenth, Adam is reckoned as the head and representative of the couple. Adam is given the initial command regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16–17). And even though Eve, tempted by the serpent, commits the initial crime, Adam is addressed first (Genesis 3:9). The Lord called to the man and asked, “Where are you?” for Adam was the designated leader and representative. Romans 5 makes this indisputably clear: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12 ESV). In other words, Adam, not Eve, was the federal head.
14. The man and the woman experience the curse in different ways.
Fourteenth, the man and the woman experience the curse in different ways, each in their fundamental area of responsibility. In the fall—and subsequently as a result of the fall—the divinely designed complementarity of men and women is perverted. Eve, who was deceived into sin, did so acting independently of the man, while Adam abandoned his responsibilities as a leader (Genesis 3:6). He stood idly by while Eve sinned (Genesis 3:1–5), followed her into sin (Genesis 3:6), and then blamed God for giving him Eve in the first place (Genesis 3:12). Adam’s sin was not only in disobeying God’s command (Genesis 2:17), but also in throwing off his responsibility as familial head, playing the coward, and following his wife’s influence instead of God’s word.
So in the end, both are punished for their disobedience. For man, his unique domain—working the ground—is cursed (Genesis 3:17). From now on, he will have thorns and thistles to deal with (Genesis 3:18), and he will live by the sweat of his brow (Genesis 3:19). For woman, her unique domain—childbearing—will bear the effects of the curse (Genesis 3:16a). From now on, the miracle and gift of physical birth will be attended with pain and suffering. Technically, only the snake and the ground are cursed, not the man and the woman, but all of creation bears the effects of the fall. Men and women are subjected to frustration in their unique spheres of responsibility.
15. The curse ruptured the relational wholeness between the man and the woman.
Fifteenth, the relational wholeness between the man and the woman had been ruptured by the curse. God said to the woman, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16b NIV). The word desire there does not mean romantic desire, as if God cursed the woman by making her need a man. Rather, the desire is a desire for mastery. This is the same Hebrew word used in Genesis 4:7b (NIV): “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” That the meaning of desire in 3:16 is the same as the desire in 4:7 is clear from the obvious verbal parallel between the two verses:
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. w’el–ishek tishuqatek wehu yimshal–bak. (Genesis 3:16b NIV)
It desires to have you, but you must rule over it. w’elek teshuqatu w’atah timshal–bo. (Genesis 4:7b NIV)
Just as sin desired to have mastery over Cain, so the woman, tainted by sin, desires to have mastery over her husband. Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, God says to the man, you will get what you deserve, and she will try to master you (Genesis 3:17).
The sinful husband, for his part, seeks to rule over his wife. Female subordination itself is not God’s judgment on the woman. As Gordon Wenham notes, the fact “that woman was made from man to be his helper and is twice named by man (Genesis 2:23; 3:20) indicates his authority over her.” Consequently, Adam’s rule in verse 16 “represents harsh exploitative subjugation.”[4] Wherever husbands are domineering or abusive toward their wives, this is not a reflection of God’s design but a sinister perversion of it. The marriage relationship, which was supposed to be marked by mutually beneficial headship and helping, becomes a fight over sinful rebellion and ruling. God designed sexual difference for one another; sin takes sexual difference and makes it opposed to one another.
Summary
The importance of the first three chapters of Genesis for understanding what it means to be male and female cannot be overstated. To be clear, Genesis does not give men and women their marching orders. There aren’t a lot of explicit oughts laid down for manhood and womanhood. What we have instead are a host of divine patterns and assumptions. Think creational capacities for men and women, not ironclad constraints. The man’s primary vocation is “naming, taming, dividing, and ruling.” The women’s primary vocation involves “filling, glorifying, generating, establishing communion, and bringing forth new life.”[5] While it’s true that these callings find a unique and powerful expression in marriage, the lessons from Genesis 1–3 are not just for married couples. The opening chapters of the Bible establish the shape of sexual differentiation and complementarity that will be lived out, applied, and safeguarded in the rest of Scripture.
The phrase “biblical manhood and womanhood” has fallen on hard times, and perhaps some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. But at its best, biblical manhood and womanhood is about nothing less than the joyful appropriation of all that God meant for us to be in the garden, divinely fitted for working and helping, for protecting and flourishing, for leaving and cleaving, for filling the earth and subduing it. That’s what God saw at the close of the sixth day, and behold, it was very good.
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Sources
[1] This language comes from Alistair Roberts, “Man and Woman in Creation (Genesis 1 and 2),” in, Is Complementarianism in Trouble?: A Moment of Reckoning, 9Marks Journal (December 2019): 35.
[2] Roberts, “Man and Woman in Creation,” 37.
[3] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Genesis, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979), 133.
[4] Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, vol. 1, Word Biblical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1987), 81.
[5] Roberts, “Man and Woman in Creation,” 38.