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Genesis 2

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1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.

5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden: and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

11 The name of the first is Pison, which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx-stone.

13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same that compasseth the whole land of Cush.

14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: which floweth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it, and to keep it.

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest of it thou shalt surely die.

18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him a help meet for him.

19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was its name.

20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowls of the air, and to every beast of the field: but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him.

21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.

22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, he made woman, and brought her to the man.

23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.

24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

   

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Rib

  

The most famous rib in the Bible is, of course, the one taken from Man (or Adam) and formed into Woman (or Eve) in the Garden of Eden. This event illustrates a key moment in the spiritual history of humanity, one that still drives our lives today. The first Man formed in Genesis represents the earliest church on earth. The Lord raised early humans to a state in which they lived in love to the Lord and love for each other in communication with heaven, and knew from their affections what was true and good. They were also different from us in a couple of key ways. First, they had no sense that life was their own -- they felt all life, thought and emotion flowing to them from God. Second, they lacked the capacity to separate their hearts and their minds. They could not want one thing and use their minds to choose another; their minds followed their hearts. But in the Garden of Eden, the Man was lonely -- which represents the fact that people started to want their lives to be their own. So God gave them what they wanted by taking a rib from the man and forming it into Woman. The rib and the woman both represent the "proprium," which is sometimes translated as the "own" or the "as of self." It is a complex idea, but in a nutshell it is this: The proprium is the part of us that feels our life as our own, our thoughts as our own, our feelings as our own. This is ultimately false and evil and belongs in hell, because all life in fact comes from the Lord. But the Lord allows it so that we can be happy and can act in freedom. To create it for us, He had to take the lowest, least-alive aspects of us -- represented by a bone -- and build it into a part of us that does not feel the Lord but can still be kept alive. In particular, the rib represents the nearly-dead proprium, with barely any love or thought. The woman represents that proprium clothed with living flesh, or loves from the Lord felt as our own.