A Lesson on the Old Testament

Crisis Magazine: Waiting for the New Jerusalem by Anthony Esolen

“This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh,” cries Man, when he sees Woman for the first time. “She shall be called woman [Hebrew ’ishah] because she was taken out of Man” [‘ish]. And that is why, says the sacred author, a man shall “leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:23-24). The key word is one, in Hebrew echad. After God created the light, and separated the light from the darkness, “there was evening and there was morning, one day” (Gen. 1:5; translation and emphasis mine). The divided nations of Israel and Judah, says the prophet, will be brought together again: “And David my servant shall be king over them; and they shall have one shepherd” (Ez. 37:24). “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord” (Dt. 6:4). In Hebrew, every one of these sentences ends with the key word one, echad. The oneness of the people, the oneness of man and woman in marriage, and the singularity of the light all derive their being from the one God. The story of the Tower of Babel shows what happens when man attempts to found His unity upon any other principle.

We know the invisible things of God, says Saint Paul, in part from the visible things of nature (Rom. 1:20), not, I might say, from our feelings about them or about ourselves, for, says God to Noah, as it were in exasperated mercy, “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21). But Noah at least was a righteous man, and so God had commanded him to preserve the birds and the beasts and their seed, not in gross, but in pairs, literally and delightfully “the husband and his wife” or “the man and his woman” (Gen. 7:2; Hebrew ’ish w’ishto). There are other Hebrew words for male and female, which the author has used to speak of the beasts generally that are to enter the ark (6:19). But when it comes to the specifics, the animals are Mister and Missus.