“She shall be called woman”
Genesis 2:23
Foreign wordSettledAdam
This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for out of man she was taken. (Genesis 2:23 BSB)
* Hebrew: ishshah ('woman') puns on ish ('man'); the names echo each other, as if 'she-man' drawn from 'man,' marking the two as one kind.
What it sounds like today
A poetic naming, with the man-woman echo looking like coincidence.
The cultural key
The line is built on sound: ishshah ('woman') is drawn from ish ('man'), a deliberate near-rhyme lost in English. And 'bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh' is not romantic overflow but a fixed kinship-covenant formula used elsewhere to mean 'you are my own family, one of us' (Laban to Jacob in 29:14; Israel to David in 2 Samuel 5:1). Adam is recognizing a true kin where the animals had offered no counterpart.
Recovered meaning
The man's first words are a recognition of kinship: at last, one of my own kind. The matching names say it in sound itself, ish and ishshah, two of one flesh rather than owner and possession.
Parallels: Genesis 2:18; Genesis 29:14