Helpmate and Adam's Rib
And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
-- Genesis 2: 18 (KJV)
A husband would be best advised not to call his wife a "helpmate" these days, but once upon a time the word was considered a high compliment. The term's prestige derived mostly from its origin in the book of Genesis, where the older form "help meet" is how God describes the mate he creates for Adam.
Actually, though, "help meet" is not an integral phrase in the King James translation, and despite the resemblance "meet" does not mean "mate," but rather "fitting." What God intends for Adam is a "help" (helper) "meet for him" -- in other words, "equal to and appropriate for him." (The oldest English translation, John Wyclif's 1382 version, gives "Make we to hym help like hym.")
The OED calls the word "help-meet" or "helpmeet" -- which first appeared in John Dryden's Marriage à la Mode (1673) -- a "compound absurdly formed by taking the two words help meet" in Genesis "as one word." Absurd or not, the word remained in common usage until the late nineteenth century. By 1715, though, the parallel and more logical term "helpmate" had appeared, and it (barely) survives to this day as an epithet for one's wife.
Now that that's straight, back to the story. If you recall, the Priestly Author "P" told us in Genesis 1 that God created man and woman in a single stroke. In the author J's version, however, Yahweh first creates Adam but then realizes he is not complete unto himself. God then tries providing various beasts and fowl for company, but among them "there was not found an help meet for him" (Genesis 2: 20).
So Yahweh casts a deep sleep over Adam, opens his flesh, and extracts a rib. From this rib God creates the first woman, who remains unnamed at first but whom Adam calls Eve (Havva -- "life" in Hebrew, close to the Sumerian for "rib") since, after the fall, she is to be mother of all mankind (Genesis 3: 20). From this story, obviously enough, comes the phrase "Adam's rib," also the title given to a film by George Cukor and to a ski resort in Colorado's White River National Forest.
Even though Eve was created after Adam and from one of his spare ribs, note that the Bible doesn't claim this makes her Adam's inferior. In fact, that's the whole point of the phrase "help meet for him," and of Adam's apostrophe, "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." Women are subjected to men only after Eve takes the lead in defying God -- see The Tree of Knowledge.
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books
on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling
Brush Up Your Shakespeare!
